Originally posted by Cha0s
Practical reason: If there were no points, people would be able to make unstoppable characters straight from character creation,
Not true. Every choice increases one stat (or some stats) and decreases other(s). You have limited number of choices, so You can\'t make a character with
all stats maxed out. It is also not so easy to make character strong in two scopes.
The only place, where You can make several \"equivalent\" choices is \"Life events\" screen, where:
as they\'d have access to all the good events. 
So it should work in the following way: list of remaining available events should be narrowed after each choice, by removing some \"good\" events and/or contradictory events. As a matter of fact the game engine already can handle such features, try to start local server with cvs database loaded, then on \"life events\" page you can choose only one \"married to...\" event, after which alternatives disappear and another new event appears (after choosing \"married to miner\"
). Conclusion - points are obsolete, all balancing can be done by proper control of choices.
Role-play reason: If there were no points, people would do the above and then they\'d all have a bunch of contradictory birth/childhood events.
You can choose only one mother, one father, one birth event, one kind of childhood activity, one house, and multiple life events. Number of points do not prevent from choosing contradictory life events, some choices take negative amount of points. Currently character can have several political views without exceeding maximum CP. See above, how it could/should be solved (and it will be done, I\'m sure).