So the flaw for the kid is that he can't any trait more than 1 point higher than the rest for that type (core/study/playground) yet his starting study traits book learning 2nd grade and the rest "-" ??? there's already a 2 grade level gap from the start? Anyone catch something I didn't?

I think they have Book Learning 2nd because that's the average for a kid (you don't study too much but you know your  basic lessons). Giving the Normal Kid the 1st grade in Book Learning would have make him not average, which is the idea of the archetype.

I hink what Laughmask is trying to say is that it seems a little unfair for the Normal Kid to have virtually no grades on most of his Study Traits. If he wanted to increase his grade in say 4-H, he would have to spend quite alot of points into ALL his study traits (bring them all to 2nd grade first) just to up 4-H.

I encountered this problem today in fact when my player tried to create a Normal Kid. We suppose to combat the problem was to invest all the starting points into the study traits, but that still made him a rather weak character in terms of abilities (Very generic, but weak). We suppose he would start becoming more powerful later on, just hope we're right.

I understand the purpose of the rule was to make the Normal Kid generic, which it succeeds at, but isn't the normal kid supposed to a black-slate to construct whatever character you want? I certainly feel the latter is definitely being too restricted for my liking.

Hi, I'm the normal kid in Coheed's game. The need for averaging out the normal kids traits is being rather killer atm as Coheed has mentioned. Another problem that's bothering me atm is the bonus talent special ability. With talents costing too much in prereqs (and with the averaging traits) was unable to choose any talents from the general talents list, so I used my archetype abilities instead.

I believe I cannot use those in my starting talent line up, but really I had no choice other than to keep the talents until I've upped some of the traits and then splash the talents around. What do you think was the correct action for starting the normal kid? Maybe instead of trying to play catch up on the study skills, rather focus on core and playground, and try to get those two talents for used up.

Upon searching the talents list the only two potentials are fleet-footed for scamper 3rd and hawk-eyed for seek 3rd, thus using 4 initial credits, then maybe using 3 for one core trait upgrade of your choice and then 1 credit for a study trait (other than book-study). This unfortunately locks the normal kid into having to take those traits in order to use the talents. I thought the Normal kid was meant to be the blank slate where you can specialise as you see fit.

So I guess my final questions are, can you save talent points for later (with the special rules applying to even-grade/odd-grade talent choices) and can you use archetype abilities as starting talents for the intial talent generation (disobeys even-grade talent rules as you are grade 3)?

Thanks.

I wondered personally if it only meant Core and Playground traits and not Study traits because of that exact discrepancy, but I'm not sure if there's anything in the rules to support that.

 Well, we finally made the decision to restrict the rule to Core traits only.

In other words, my Normal Kid could pump points across his Playground and Study traits however he wished, but had to keep his Core traits in check. Just hope it works out okay when we start graduating a bit more.

 In my last group, we decided that the rule only applied to core and playground based of the starting traits. Since those two  categories are all 2 from the start, we figured that was because they wanted you to evolve from there. With that in mind, the normal kid didn't have too much of a problem getting talents. I think she had David and Goliath and Animal Friend. Although she did come in at grade 4....