Whether it’s Curious, Compulsive Carousing or Impulsiveness, disadvantages with self-control numbers add colour to a character without crippling them (mostly! Looking at you, Berserk, Lecherousness and Gullibility!). However, most players take them at standard level or even at half cost. The end result is that they come up rarely and are often just taken to get some easy points. That’s because the standard probabilities of failures are

• 15: slightly less than 5%
• 12: slightly more than 25%
• 9: slightly more than 63%
• 6: slightly more than 90 %

The big discrepancy here are between 15, 12 and 9. Double points for six already seems pretty fair – you get a hefty chunk of points, but it will constantly be a problem. 15 would be a standard crit fail in D&D and seems far too good for anything but Berserk.

5-Minute Cooking Time: lower 15 to 14 and 12 to 11. The nice-looking progression in the numbers is ruined, but you get almost 10% failure chance for 15 and almost 38% for 12.

Season to Taste: If you can’t leave the progression alone, going 5, 8, 11, 14 doesn’t really ruin things either, but it makes 1.5 x cost pretty punishing at almost 75% failure chance. If you feel like shaking things up a bit, give from -3 to +3 depending on the severity of the temptation or repeated self-control rolls.