On the template, but you don't want it?

I finally got around to reading Doug's post about his half-ogre knight, who isn't Felltower compatible since half-ogre isn't on the race & template list.

One thing jumped out at me:

"What do I maybe NOT need that’s on the template?

Born War-Leader is on the template. Based on how we have been playing … only Tactics really gets frequent use. And it’s got Born War-Leader 2 on the template. I feel like I might be able to use 5 or 10 of those points elsewhere, and more efficiently. Like Striking ST 2."

He might be right. People use Tactics, sometimes, and not much of anything else it adds to.

So why take it?

In Felltower, there are three reasons:

1) It's on the template, and required template buys are required template buys in Felltower. You can customize disads quite a bit, but with rare exceptions (Thief, mostly) you must buy what is on the template and cannot buy what is not on the initial template listing in DF1 or DFRPG. You can't pull off things you don't want, or don't intend to use. Or, for that matter, add power-ups beyond quirk-level ones or add lenses.

(And yes, someone is considering making a guy for Vic's Felltower side game, apparantly, who is starting with a lens. It's not a character that is going to port seamlessly to Felltower because it's violating a hard-and-fast rule I instituted to avoid munchkinning and rules mastery builds.)

2) Only some things get used, but it's on the player to use what the PC has. The GM has a role to play here in making skills useful and eliminating those that are not. But if something has potential use, and the players don't use it - by preference or ignorance - it's still in the game. A template that requires it still requires it. A potentially general-use skill needs to have some player intent to use it. Otherwise, the points are wasted by player decision.

3) Once you start allowing people to remove traits from templates, you end up with templates that are much looser. Once they loosen up, it's a short step to "total customization" and weirdness about what Power-Ups you can take. If it's any, then we're away from the rigid DF constraints that have fostered a lot of interesting approachings to chargen and personality of characters, and just plain GURPS. That's very cool but it's not DF Felltower.

So although 10 points in BWL might be less useful to this knight or that knight, you're stuck with it . . . and have to find a way to make it useful.