In any point-based system, it's ultimately up to the GM to decide what to allow and what not to allow. Another limiting factor is the number of points you have, but less so.

If you see your character having a Ranking of 6 in all of his Characteristics, then by all means you should raise your Characteristics to those levels. If, however, you don't see your character being smarter (Wit) or being more attuned to mystic energies (Essence) than the average Zoic, then there is no need to raise the Rankings of those Characteristics beyond what you bought in the Animal Template.

Ultimately, if the GM approves of your character, you should build her however you'd like.

But yes, during Character Creation, it is cheaper to buy up your Characteristic than to buy up each individual Skill. You should buy up the Characteristics whose Ranking will impact a large number of your Skills. As you pointed out, it's cheaper to do that and makes more sense.

And that is certainly something GMs are encouraged to do. The rules are just guidelines. GMs should change or alter whatever rule they wish to better suit their campaigns.

If you feel Characteristics are too cheap, then by all means increase their cost. But realize that players will often buy their Attributes to the maximum allowed by the rules. It's really up to the GM to make sure the players create characters that fit the campaign, and that sometimes means telling players: "No, you can't do that."

Even mechanically, though, the cost of increasing all of your stats to their maximum for the campaign's power level adds up. I think it's unlikely that a player would literally up all their stats to their max - very, very few characters are actually going to utilize skills attached to every single Characteristic. Yes, it's nice to have a 6 (for example) in everything, but if you aren't a spellcaster, wouldn't the points you dumped into Essence be better spent elsewhere? If you primarily fight in melee combat, might the points you've dumped into Dexterity be a bit wasted (unless you are going for a roguish character, I suppose).

It definitely makes mechanical sense to max out the Characteristics which are most relevant to your character's role in the party, and if that doesn't fit with what you want from your campaign, by all means, make these increases more expensive.

That said, though, having recently started a Shard campaign myself, I can say that it is not a system that is really built to be played "by numbers." I like systems that step back and leave room for story and such, so it's up my alley, but one of my players - a hardcore D&D diehard who doesn't like a game if he can't munchkin his way through the whole campaign - was both way too effective in combat and bored most all of the time. His loss, in my opinion, but that's the way it goes.

We totally understand what you are getting at though Redstone,...and "munchkin-ing" is always going to be something that happens, even in the most restrictive of rules systems...

One of the attempts we made to put a slight damper on that was to insure that many of the Characteristic Maximums on several of the Animal Templates actually place some severe limits at the extreme ends of the size/speed/strength spectrum (meaning that as much as a player might want to "munchkin-out" her stats, she would be limited by certain aspects of the Animal Templates). But, of course, the lower the Power Level you start with, the less these built-in limits will seem relevant and meaningful...

Another of the limiting factors (at least according to my players) was the fact that if you DO decide to try to max-out all your characteristics, you'll then find that you have fewer points to add all the cool little Talent, Advantage, and Skill details that really help bring a character to life within the context of a "culture rich" campaign setting like SHARD...

My players learned pretty quickly that it was wise to consider all the little (and often-neglected, in most games) Skills for their characters that might apply to culture-based interests and professions, simply because they knew that it might actually come in handy to know several languages, be able to sing, know ancient history, and perhaps be able to create pottery from scratch...

If they spent all their points maxing out their Characteristics, they knew that they'd suffer later for having a powerful, yet bland and boring character that had few cultural merits and even fewer story-hooks that would normally allow me to create cool scenes for them in the game...

Scottie

You are absolutely correct. It is far cheaper and makes more sense to raise a Characteristic than to raise all of the Linked Skills. It is that way by design. If a player were playing a warrior and was gonna buy a whole bunch of Combat Skills that were Linked to Agility and the campaign Power Level was 6, it would make sense for the player to buy his character's Agility up to 6.

This is not munchkining on the part of the player. It's the way it should work. Now if you, as the GM, don't want it to be this way you should change it. You've already talked about ways to do that: raise the cost of certain Characteristics, limit the number of points a player can spend on Characteristics (like, say, 40% of a player's total points), or simply tell a player he can't buy up his Characteristics to the Power Level limit. It's totally up to you.

Yes we totally encourage GMs to make the game their own by altering or ignoring any rule that they feel doesn't fit their gaming style or the style of their players. Many of the "optional" rules we included as part of the Basic Compendium are there because Aaron and I favored one way or the other as part of our own styles, and chose to offer both for consideration by our customers.

Altering the various constraints of the Power Level table to suit your group's particular tastes and needs is a great way to tweak the system early on. And, of course, if you find such changes don't quite work, it's easy to readjust! Believe me, we experimented quite a bit before we settled on what tended to work for us.

For my players, it worked great to let them feel they were getting a "break" with buying up their Characteristics early on, if for no other reason than it was gratifying to them to essentially hit the ground running as capably-heroic folks (as compared to standard NPCs) even at lower power levels...

Scottie.

Ooh, I so wanted to say something in all this but really, Scott and Aaron said it all. So I'll make a comment as a long-time game-master myself....
I will let a player build the most ludicrous, apesh*t, min-max, munchkin mega-juggernaut they can possibly conceive of after weeks of poring over every stat and by-rule of a system and if it gets too out of hand I will still pwn them in an instant with a villain I made-up while taking a dump during a brief break from the gaming-table. My players know that if you get too stupid, I will MAKE you fear me with adversaries so horrendous they should be relegated to the Cthulhu Mythos and yet STILL be totally rules-legal. I can out-min-max any player on Earth and there is always, ALWAYS somebody out there tougher than your heroes. It gives them someone to hate.
Doksikoor, Malatya, Adhitumus, there were many turbo-ninjas in our old play-test games and oh yes, we hated them, but we respected their AWESOME power and acted right when they were around lest we get swatted like naughty children. My opinion is, your players want to be heroes. Let them be all they can be. Let them make the most infallible, Jubei Kibagami, Conan-style slayers to ever trod the dust of forgotten empires beneath their sandalled feet.
The point is for them to win all the time anyway!
Let em explore with wonder and awe at their own sheer grandeur. Just every once in a while smack 'em around a little with a Master of Assassins, or worse yet, Aryah's personal Sir'hibas and you'll see them straighten up.

That's my philosophy on it anyhow. But as the gamemaster, it is YOU who is always right. And If I'm in your game, I can just pipe the f*ck down and play my role, dammit!

Well,...ignore our use of the word "munchkining" then, if that word doesn't work for you, or doesn't seem to apply here...

Sarkakit used it initially, I think, because that's how he views the idea of automatically raising one's Characteristics to the highest they can possibly be before seeing if there are other places that one's points might be better spent (such as purchasing additional Talents and Advantages that add to the storyline of the game and perhaps even more interesting and obscure Skills for one's character)... I used the word too in reference to Sarkakit's comment...as did Ghorüm, no doubt...

The truth is, some characters will choose to do that,...and some won't,...and some GMs will encourage that, and some won't (and may even choose to adapt the rules to suit their own preferences, as it seems you might do)... Again,...that's certainly encouraged...

To address your particular goals:
1. Am I reading the rules correctly?

Yes you are, just as Aaron and I both said...

2. If I am correct, then I wanted to let the developers know that in my opinion I see this as a minor flaw in the character creation process.

Opinion noted...and thanks! We may not necessarily share that opinion, as I'm sure you may have come to understand from our explanations of why we chose to do it that way specifically. And we continue to maintain that setting it up that way as part of our basic rules has seemed to work well for us so far, as evidenced by the fact that it hasn't caused any major problems, imbalances, or issues in any of our playtests...

But as we have said, we'd like nothing better than to know that good GMs out there have made changes to the rules as they saw fit to make their own game "play" better for them personally, even if it means changing some key aspects of Character Creation for their own group... Hearing about "house rules" adapted and created by other folks out there to make things cooler or easier for them would be a great thread here on the forums! Anyone should feel free to offer such input, as long as they understand that not everyone will agree that their suggestion is actually a "better" way for everybody to run their games, it's just a way that THEY found more effective or enjoyable... Likewise I hope that folks who read others' ideas and suggestions don't assume that such ideas are wrong or flawed if they don't happen to work well for them... What works for one group may not work for another... And if it works for you,...go for it!

As for our rules set, we wanted as much freedom for the players when creating their characters as possible, within certain limits... The limits we chose to employ were:

• chosen Power Level limits as noted on that table
  
• limits imposed in the Animal Templates
  
• a limited number of Character Points to spend
  

Feel free to add any additional limits you'd like if you feel the ones we employ are not sufficient to make the Character Creation process flow as you wish it to flow, or if you are concerned that your players will create characters that either they won't enjoy playing, or you won't enjoy running, due to the possibility that they may all choose to max-out their stats to the edge of what our system's built-in limits already allow...

Some of my players did just that, and some didn't... In the end, we've had great gaming experiences regardless...

Hopefully you will as well!

Scottie

Another way of looking at it (or at least the way that I see it) is that it seems to encourage "classes" of characters. For example, if you were to build a warrior, you would take a high strength and agility, so that any of your warrior-like skills would benefit. Other things, like dancing or playing a musical instrument, would be outside of the "standard" warrior skill set and would be bought up separately.

In real life, it's easier to excel in 1 broad category than in 6 or 7 specific things. For example, a "Computer Guy" in an IT department probably knows (or at least has a basic understanding of) programming, networking, system administration, etc. The different skills are related, and knowing one helps with the others. On the other hand, trying to be good at baseball, cooking, fishing, and carpentry would be more difficult, because the skills don't really relate to eachother. I can't speak for anyone else, but I know more of the first type than the second.

My group has played a few point-based systems, and this seems to come up fairly often. What we've found is that the characters with the best stats are very powerful for 80% of the situations the party encounters. For that last 20% (when it all comes down to a bunch of skills they don't have.), they are completely dead in the water. That's when the character with poor stats but a good-sized skill list breezes through it.

Another thing that we noticed when our group was building characters is that stats are MUCH more expensive to raise once the campaign starts. So, I think that over time it would balance itself out (of course, we're starting at low power with only 100 points, so it'll have a very long time to work out in our case).