How often should the "Family Ties" Drawback be invoked?

[theonesin]

I'm making a character for an upcoming Pathfinder game, and I was looking into the "Family Ties" drawback. Compared to other drawbacks, it's hard for me to tell how frequently the drawback's situation will come up. Is it a rare thing? Whenever the DM wants to use it to send me on a quest? Constant errands?

Is there any general consensus on its use? If it's used extremely frequently, it would become a burden to deal with while also going out on normal adventures.

Thanks.

[Snow-blind]

I'm making a character for an upcoming Pathfinder game, and I was looking into the "Family Ties" drawback. Compared to other drawbacks, it's hard for me to tell how frequently the drawback's situation will come up. Is it a rare thing? Whenever the DM wants to use it to send me on a quest? Constant errands?

It will come up whenever a family member makes a request, which is as often as the GM feels like. It is a very RP dependent drawback.


Is there any general consensus on its use? If it's used extremely frequently, it would become a burden to deal with while also going out on normal adventures.

You probably aren't going to find an existing consensus because it is an uncommonly taken drawback. However, it isn't really that burdening for many characters - outside of social skills and perception, the drawback does very little. So long as you aren't the party's perception or social specialist, you aren't likely to suffer much.

[SangoProduction]

answer: Whenever it makes for convenient roleplay, or adventure hooks. But I personally wouldn't allow that as a drawback, as I don't really care who my quest givers are, and I don't want my players hating the quest givers because they are a "drawback". Afterall, I actually want them to be involved.

So you can just have them show up at embarrassing moments. "Maaaaam. Why are you shopping at the magic store?" "Oh, to see how you've grown up to be such a big-strong man."

[Fizban]

Dunno if/where I may or may not have read it, but 1/adventure seems like a reasonable starting point, with a limit of 1/level if you're doing shorter adventures. Anything less and the "drawback" just isn't coming up enough to seem like more than something that happened once a long time ago. On the reverse, levels can come up pretty quickly and running into the same problem over and over before the standard checkpoint of a level up is gonna be annoying.

[Extra Anchovies]

So you can just have them show up at embarrassing moments. "Maaaaam. Why are you shopping at the magic store?" "Oh, to see how you've grown up to be such a big-strong man."

This is the best direction to take with it, IMO. Traits and drawbacks should provide for interesting roleplaying opportunities, but the requests shouldn't be so large as to constitute entire quests.