Scars of War - Build Points

The latest Scars of War blog update talks about breaking out of a mindset and how that changed the character system:

The fundamental change to character creation was the move to Build Points, a concept I ripped directly from Shadowrun, although I’m sure a number of other systems use the concept as well. The basic idea is that you have a number of points with which to build your character and a pool of character options to choose from. Each option costs points, and you can spend on these features until your points are depleted.

Sounds fairly familiar to normal stat buy systems, right? Not quite. The fundamental difference is that your build point pool is shared across ALL character creation options. In a standard point buy system you might have 10 points to distribute on attributes and 100 points to spend on skills. All characters within that system will have the same number of attribute points to spend, 10.

In a build point system you would have say 120 points, which you choose to distribute across attributes AND skills as you see fit. You can spend more on attributes if you want, but that in turn leaves less points left over to spend on skills. Characters aren’t guaranteed to have the same amount of distributed attribute points.