Monday, January 31, 2022

Marvel Super Heroes in the 2022 Character Creation Challenge

 We finish this year's #CharacterCreationChallenge with a tribute to the great George Perez. 

After the nightmare slog that was skills purchasing in TMNT&OS, I decided my last day should be a palate cleanser with the classic Marvel Super-Heroes. Since I'm a firm believer (and True Believer! Face Front!) that if you're playing MSH you should be using an established Marvel hero, and because I find the Marvel Ultimate Powers Book to be a weak comparator to Villains & Vigilantes, I'm going to model a character who post dates the MSH rules: Triathlon, aka Delroy Garrett Jr. the contemporary successor to the 1950's 3-D Man.

Triathlon has triple human peak physical abilities – that's his power. So, lets take Captain America's stats as a baseline, then add some powers to finish it off.

Captain America has Incredible Agility, Excellent Strength, and Remarkable Endurance, and it makes sense to boost each of those a rank. Cap also has Amazing fighting, but Delroy's not in that league – while he was an Olympic athlete who is now cross the board superhuman he's never been formally trained in fighting. Remarkable, tied with Spider Man, sounds about right to capture his advantages.

Reason wise, Delroy has no formal technical training, so Typical is fine. He does have triple human senses, so an Incredible Intuition makes sense – that matches Cap, who has waaaaaay more experience than Triathlon, so that feels right. Psyche is hard to judge, as he's someone who made a major mistake once that cost him his career, and is absolutely part of a cult that he can't acknowledge is a cult, but at the same time his certainty in that cult gives him a strong sense of self. I'm going to go with Good, which is as good as Captain America (again)and Daredevil.

Now, some powers: Lighting Speed is first, as one panel of Triathlon's run of avengers talks about him hitting nearly 100 MPH. Actual human max sprinting speed is about 20mph, so he should cap out at good, but let's say it’s Excellent (75 mph) and with a Red result on pushing his power he can get to Remarkable (90 mph). That means he's covering 5 areas a round. The full rules for this let him accelerate and decelerate in a single round, and Triathlon displays a few of stunts with this including extra attacks, faster than the eye can see, and disarming, that I'm going to put in the character.

Is second and final power is Enhanced Senses: he specifically calls out triple human hearing at one point so let's state his hearing is Amazing. This also makes his Initiative Amazing, as for some reason the rules specifically call out hearing as the initiative sense. He has triple human ability to hear soft sounds, hear things at a distance and triangulate on where sounds are coming from. Interestingly there's a power stunt from the original 3D man that he can get letting him see Skrulls regardless of their form, which I want to add because it's a nod to the original character.

For Talents, he's clearly displayed Tumbling, but I don't know that there's formal training on any of the others and adding Acrobatics on top of his Amazing agility feels like guilding the lily. He's been both a professional athlete and a professional spokesperson for Triune Understanding, but neither of those relate to talents in the game, so we just know they're there.

Contacts: he has two – Triune Understanding and the Avengers. If he were on his own his Resources would be Typical, but receiving either pay from the Triunes or an Avengers stipend I'm going to set it at good. His starting populating is 20.

And that's it. I've always loved this character, so it's nice to end the challenge with him.


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