Character Design Summary 

Adding A Character in an Ongoing Game

One of the persistent problems gamemasters need to deal with is players who can only participate sporadically.  In level based system when they play, their characters must either be advanced multiple levels and brought up to the level of the other players or else they and the others in the party are forced to deal with a character greatly underpowered for the adventure.  In this non-level based system occasional players are not that much of a problem.  Typically a character as he becomes more experienced will choose higher levels of expertise in his core concept skills and gain a broader based set of skills at a very low level.  An occasional player or a beginning player will have skills at a comparable level to more experienced players in all but those experienced player’s core skills.  The beginning character will have a similar number of body points as the experienced player, so this is another problem present  in level based games that  is not applicable to Knarf2.  In fact given the variety of skills and concepts available to the players, a beginning character may have the highest skill level in a particular skill of everyone in the party.  There is always an option to give a new or sporadic player large chunks of skill points to keep him on par with the rest of the party, but in this system I do not believe this  is necessary.  A new character who joins the game shortly after the campaign begins should start with the base number of points - 20.  One that joins the game after a significant period of play can make an acceptable character with 30 skill points.