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.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness in the 2022 Character Creation Challenge

On the penultimate day of the challenge I tackle my biggest opponent yet: Palladium! 

I was a Fan of the TMNT way back – 3rd printing of the 1st issue, signed copies of some of the others from a Connecticut comic convention – and love that the TMNT roleplaying game embraces the aesthetic of the original comic, which was much more grounded than the TV show was. The game was designed with Palladium as its spine, but contains a lot of nifty features to capture the TMNT setting. One of those is that if you make up your PCs as part of a team with the other players you lose some flexibility (you don't all get to design your own animal) but you get a lot of benefits in terms of attributes and skills. To capture this, I corralled my teenage daughter into making a character with me. I also decided the characters would be set in the 1985 of when the game was published rather than try to update the technical skills, just as I did with James Bond 007. 

TMNT&OS has the standard 8 Palladium attributes: IQ, Mental Endurance, Mental Affinity, Physical Strength, Physical Prowess, Physical Endurance, Physical Beauty, and Speed. My dice rolls are mediocre at best, with the two Endurances at 13 and the rest at 11 or less, including a 7 Physical Strength and a 6 Physical Beauty. 

However, if any member of the team rolls a 1+, they get to roll and add another d6 to that attribute, and the share that with everyone on the team. The Kiddo rolls a 17 Physical Endurance and a 16 Physical Beauty, and the dice decree that we both get a +2 PE and +1 PB. Helps me out some. 

Being a second generation game design, once again character creation is meant to conform the characters to the world, so the dice come out to determine things. We end up being [62] mutated wild animals. What kind of wild animals? [87] Armadillos! I had had the image in my mind of replicating the classic 1980's B&W comics hero Eagle with an actual mutated psionic eagle but, um, no. Armadillos it is. We got this way because [87] of deliberate experimentation by a [44] private industry, and the people who did the experimentation [84] gave us extensive professional training along our natural aptitudes (5 Hig School skills, 15 Collegiate skills, 20 Secondary Skills) while treating us like slaves. Eventually we escaped with [10 for me, 14 for her] $240,000 worth of cash and equipment (that's over half a million in 2022 dollars). We're on the run from both our creators and law enforcement. 

OK then. We shelve all of that while we build our animals. TMNT&OS's best system is their animal mutation system which has dozens of animal types, all with a starting amount of Bio-E based on their size and starting physicality. You spend Bio-E to get bigger or gain it by becoming smaller. You also spend it to get bipedal nature, hands, speech, and human appearance, along with any special powers that your species of animal has. It's a slick, intuitive system that's fun to build characters in. We have 60 Bio-E for our size 5 armadillos. 

The kiddo and I opt for being just a little bit bigger, size 6, just large enough to not have any attribute penalties [5 pts]. We know we want full speech [10 pts] and full hands [10 pts] but want to look like armadillos because that's more fun – no human features [0 pts]. Bipedal nature is trickier, but we want the full suite of armadillo powers with Claws [5 pts], Digging [5 pts] and heavy natural armor [20 pts]. Since we only have 5 points left, we're only partially bipedal, sort of like bears. We could have had weaker armor, but we like the idea that the private industry was breeding us _for_ our super armor and were surprised when this sibling pair came out intelligent with hands. I look up what TV shows were popular in 1970 – since we're teenagers in 1985 - and I settle on Julie and Linc as our names: the researchers were watching the Mod Squad when we were born. We had another brother, Pete, but something happened to him. 

Looking over the skill set, the Kiddo and I brainstorm over what our PCs will be doing. She wants to take the Scrupulous alignment, which is a sort of neutral/chaotic good, and that's fine. We realize that we can't interact with normal humans, but since we sound totally normal, we can do all our communication over the phone. We have a quarter of a million 1985 dollars, we don't live in a sewer. The idea that after we were born the Company (after getting the DNA needed for our armor) trained us to be industrial saboteurs (able to dig our way into rival facilities, almost impossible t hurt or kill) brings us to the idea of being the Leverage crew, getting hired to help people who have been hosed by the system, only we're Armadillos. We've hired a blind woman to be our receptionist and 'face' to the world, and all the rest of our work is done over the phone. Nine-Band is a professional investigation and problem-solving firm. 

Skills, however, are where we run into an issue: the process is so frustrating that the kiddo gives up after 20 minutes and we're not even halfway done at that point. It takes another hour for me to get MY pc to a level I'll consider finished. 

The book is an ill organized nightmare, with things in the wrong place, or in the order of the main categories and then the skills, but there text is crammed together and blown out to the margins. A bunch of the physical skills all add points to your physical attributes, and many of them have sub skills that supplant regular skills or each other – acrobatics and gymnastics both give you the same skills at different percentages, but it's worth taking both because each gives bonuses to your physical stats, and both of them give you the Prowl skill at a certain level so there's no point in taking that. 

In the end, Linc's training in competitive swimming, general athletics, climbing, body building, running, acrobatics, gymnastics and boxing even up giving him +12 to Physical Strength, +5 to Physical Prowess, +5 more to Physical Endurance, and staggering +11 to Speed. He also gets another 35 points of Structural Damage Capacity on top of his 75 points from his armor, for 110 SDC. It's easy to imagine the brutal physical regimen that the 7 PS runt of the litter went through at the hands of their owners, so it's no surprise that Linc was the driving force of their escape. 

If you take a skill as a collegiate skill, it's at a 10% increase, plus we each get +15% on high school and collegiate skills, so it matters where you put things from our Scrooge McDuck Money Bin of skill choices. You want your Secondary skills to go to things that can either only be secondaries or don't have percentages attached to them. Any skill multiple members of the team make get a +1 level bonus for each character with it, so the TMNT stat with Ninjitsu at 4th level, but Donatello's (objectively the best Turtle) tech skills don't get a bonus because no one else has them. This all makes sense, but this skill system is so complicated it puts the Twilight 2000 and Spaceship Zero ones to shame. 

In the end, Linc is the team technician, engineer, and computer guru, fighting with a short sword if needed. Julie is the team's lawyer and doctor, and fights with a collapsible staff. Both of us were trained in Expert Hand to Hand used by army special forces, and boxing for good measure. 

The character concepts for this are enjoyable and sound, but the skill selection system and its spillover effects are nuts. Simulated complexity for the sake of simulated complexity. The endgame of creating this PC was just not fun. 

Timewatch in the 2022 Character Creation Challenge

On day 29 of the #CharactrerCreationChallenge I get all Jack Hawksmoor... IN SPAAAAAACE! and time.

This is likely the most recent game on my list for 2022, and it's one I just got for Christmas. And it's awesome. Timewatch is a game for running time travel in the sort of wild and wooly way that you see time travel in movies, and it makes use of strongly defined effects rather than causes for making the world work. In other words, your Unobtrusiveness and Burglary skills might be because you're a master thief from the streets of 500 AD Constantinople or because you're a hyper evolved brain in a jar from 3300 AD clouding men's minds, or because you're a liquid metal robot from the 22nd century. The cause doesn't matter, just the effect, and hence Timewatch sidesteps any need for complicated rules governing all this stuff. You can be anyone from anywhere, but the abilities on the sheet are the abilities on the sheet, they all play the same. 

This did present me a lot of paradox of choice because when you can have any origin you want (spoiler: you all end up as Timewatch agents, so that part's settled) it can be hard to come up with something. I knew I wanted to play with some form of Psionics and went through several ideas before realizing that back on day 8 of the challenge I had been a little bummed I'd missed the cutoff for having my Psi-World character have had space skills. If I wanted to play a Psionic PC, lets run with that. 

For some reason I decided the PC was going to be French Canadian in origin (M. Martin Rochard, last name taken from Cary Grant's character in I was a Male War Bride) but had ended up working as the police detective of an orbital habitat. His Psionic abilities are Psychometry and limited Precognition. That let me fill in most of his abilities: boost his Health and Chronal Stability to the recommended 8 minimum, give him 8 Athletics because he is in very good shape, and then 8 Preparedness and Shooting that are a combination of experience and limited precognition. His higher-than-normal Unobtrusiveness comes from a detective's skill of fading into the background, while his Vehicles comes from experience with jetpacks, space suits, shuttles, mini-rovers and so on. For everything else he has 2 points, so he's got a better than normal but not automatic chance of coming through in a clutch situation. 

This set gives him three Boosters – his Hit Threshold goes up to 4, he gets Double-tap from knowing where targets will be, and he can do a flashback scene that is based on his precognitive visions. One of the team members from the 20th century has nicknamed him "Fiver", which he doesn't understand but accepts with good grace. 

For his Investigative Abilities I pictured my game group and knew he'd be part of a group of 4, so 18 build points. My idea for his Psychometry is that it works best big to small. He can touch a street and get a feel for the whole city (Streetwise), or touch a building and know everything about it (Architecture), so 2 points in each of those, plus his other detective skills can be chromed that way on a case by case basis. He's from the late 21st century so History (Future) and Science! seemed to fit but the latter can be dropped if someone else is leaning into that niche. Everything else is in service of his detective work, including NOT having High Society so he can be a fish out of water with his former employers. It was reading the description of Forgery that clicked the last part of the PC into place – that it can be used to forge crime scenes. 

Martin Rochard was the official detective of Orléans Station, employed nomically by the station administration to help dispense justice, but more accurately but the oligarchs to do that… but also make sure their own crimes were covered up. The Gagné patriarch knew of Martin's psionic powers, knew the threat they meant to Martin's life if they were revealed on the conservative station, and used that to keep hold of him. Martin's ability to feel the whole of the station made it easy to find crime scenes, locate hot spots and ferret out conspiracies. His expertise being primary in terms of detective work his ability to forge crime scenes made cover ups simple. 

Martin hated it, but every day he saw that his breaking ranks would lead to his death. And he knew the rest of the police structure was as compromised as he was. 

Then one day he just didn't care. 

Publicly revealing a final crime of the Gagné failson led to a rebellion against the administration, but Martin never learned how it ended: he was too busy running from Gagné goons on the habitat outskirts. He turned a corner, got a moment's breathing room, and was met by a Timewatch agent who gave him an offer it would be stupid to refuse. Apparently, she had already arranged for a fake pod launch to cover his disappearance and they were gone to the Citadel. Perhaps hunted. Perhaps presumed dead. He hasn't been on the job long enough to go back and find out. 

Martin 's drive is to start cleaning up his clean ups: to stop other people from disrupting the lives of others, from getting away with crimes. Yes, he's still sometimes called on to make it look like he'd never been there, but he's not covering up someone's depravities any longer. He just as a lot of cleaning up to do. 

Damn. Now I want to play Timewatch. 

Rune in the 2022 Character Creation Challenge

For day 28 I down some mead and put on a horned helmet for the #CharacterCreationChallenge!

This obscure gem of a game came out in 2001; just as the rest of the world was leaning hard into D&D, Atlas games was commissioned by Humanhead Studios to build a TTRPG based on their video game RUNE. The result was a glorious love letter to pure kick-in-the-door-and-kill-orcs role playing that also acknowledged that the GM tends to get bored with that style of play before the players do, so the game is designed to pass the GMing duties around the table. Everyone is tasked with coming up with snippets of the dungeon and adventure – for which they have point budgets commensurate to the PCs power level – and once the GM is done with what they have prepped play hands over to the next player to become GM. 

Yes, it shifts the burden of world and adventure building evenly around the table. And yes, I'm OK with that because the lazy shiftless players should pick up the slack sometimes! 

Character creation is pretty simple in concept, a little more complicated when you're pre-calculating your various combat attacks in advance, and it's nicely crunchy in the base combat focus with real effects from choosing weapon, armor, and shield types. It's a nice balance of complexity and avoiding getting stuck in the optimization weeds.

Characters have 8 attributes – Strength, Stamina, Dexterity, Quickness, Intelligence, Perception, Presence, and Communication – and knowing a game about dungeon crawling Vikings are going to prioritize some things the last four attributes cost half as much as the first four. 

There's 30 some odd skills in the game, divided into Combat, Exploration, and Social (with an outlier in Divine Awareness), and the writer (Robin Laws… did I mention Robin Laws wrote this?) handily calls out the 8 non-combat skills that see the most use in play, and remind you in the rulebook that there are considerable penalties for not knowing a skill, so it's better to spread points out. Secondary Skills cost half as much as Primary skills, with the distinction being made on how useful the skill is for kicking in doors and killing orcs. 

Both skills and attributes are bought with the same pool of 60 points, so it helps to have looked over both lists a bit. I decided to design Vifgus the Fat, a large fellow with surprising dexterity, above average for a Viking social stats, with a skill for spatial awareness and mapmaking. (the Mapmaking skill is a great dungeon crawl addition; you roll against it to find your way back out of the dungeon, and possibly to sell your finished maps for money to other Vikings; no need for the player to make actual maps!) 

STR +1, Sta +2, Dex +2, Qik +1, Int +1, Per +1, Pre +2, Com +1

He's a big, voluable fellow who fills up space and leaves an impression. It's possible to purchase negative attributes, but the rulebook advises against taking any negatives for the first fours and no lower than -1 on the others. I decided to keep everything positive, even if that means not maxing anything out at +3. Tis is the equivalent of a lot of 12-15 scores in D&D 3E, which feels right. This costs 34 points so I have 26 left for skills

I put at least 1 into all the recommended skills (except Divine Awareness), as well as 2 into Demeanor (he knows how to best present himself, 1 into Carouse, and 3 into Mapmaking. That leaves 8 for weapon skills and being a sword and shield guy, I take Single-handed Weapons (which includes shield proficiency) at maximum +3 and Throwing Weapons at +1. 

Hit Points and Wound Threshold come from comparing attributes to a couple of tables and I come in middle of the road for a Viking adventurer. Last up is selecting equipment. I get some free gear for my Mapmaking and Traps skills, 3 common weapons, 1 common armor, and one common shield if I want it. As a Single Weapon fighter I don't have a ton of options for common weapons, but snag Viking Broadsword and Short spear, as well as a Throwing Axe if I need it. I add Studded Leather armor and a Round Shield and that brings my load to 5.5, out of a 6 maximum to be unencumbered at +1 STR. Perfect. 

Figuring out the combat stats for my attacks – which factor in attribute, skill, weapon, and armor for initiative, attack, defense and damage – takes a few minutes but it's the sort of logical implementation of the weapon speed and reach tables from AD&D that it makes you weep that it wasn't included there back in the day. And we're done! 

Does this seem a little minimalist? Yes, but RUNE is deliberate that all your special ability crunchy bits be purchased with victory points earned in play. These are gifts from the gods and they're not going to bestow them on just any horn helmed warrior. YOU MUST PROVE YOURSELF TO THE GODS! So things will get more complicated in play. 

Traveller in the 2022 Character Creation Challenge

 On day 27 of the #CharacterCreationChallenge I take to the spaceways of 1977! 

I've been noodling with Traveller a lot lately as it's what my play group has voted upon for 2023 when we finish our Mutant City Blues game, but I've seldom made a character myself. So lets rectify that. Like some of the older games I've been looking at this month, Traveller uses the character creation not just as a mini-game (and a harsher mini-game than most, since you can die in character creation as a counterweight risk against pushing the system as far as you can) but as a simulationist tool. 

Once you roll your PCs stats you have to select service to join, but joining requires a die roll, with the chance of access being specific to each branch, with bonuses based on whether you meet the branches preferred criteria. (if you miss your first choice you're randomly assigned to one as a 'draft', which may put you back in your first choice. Once you're in, you serve a series of 4 year terms, with each term having a chance of your dying in action, getting a commission, getting a promotion once you're commissioned, and being able to reenlist. Getting a commission in the Navy is notoriously difficult but much easier if you're from a high social class, and promotions are slow. Getting a commission in the Army is much easier, improved with Endurance, and promotions are quick. The rules of the universe are played out in PC creation; this is all very old school, and reinforces the rules of the setting over designing your exact hero.  

Since your characters starting skills and resources (aka mustering out benefits) are dependent on how long you serve, there's a pressure to keep going, but there's always the risk of death, and older PCs start to see reduced stats. Traveller is the game of middle-aged heroes starting their second career. In my case we're looking at Zann McClintock, Solomani citizen of the empire. 

The Stat rolls were Str 4, Dex 6, End 7, Int 7, Edu 7, Soc Status 2. Weaker than average, not terribly coordinated, average otherwise and born into the lowest possible social strata. I'm picturing him having been born in the tent cities of a refugee camp of some ecologically devastated world suffering a civil war inside the Empire. 

Looking at his stats an the tables, I decided on Army as my first choice, not least because with a 7 End he makes I in with a roll of 3+. When the imperial army stepped in to end the conflict and rescue the survivors Zann saw his future, and joined as soon as he was old enough. 

The first set of rolls saw him survive his first 4 year term, get a commission and a promotion – he ends is first term at age 22 as a Lieutenant – and makes it through on reenlistment. This term gives him 4 stall checks, as well as an Rifle +1 and SMG +1 for being in the army and being a lieutenant, but with an EDU of 7 he can't access the 4th Advance training table. I put 2 of those on table 1 to get a boost to EDU, but instead get +1 Strength and Gambling. The other two rolls go on the service skills and advance training, and get Gun Combat+1 and Electronics+1. The Gun Combat needs a specialization, and even Zann's low Dexterity hits their minimum level, but I settle on SMG, so I have Rifle +1, SMG +2, Gambling +1 and Electronics +1 at the end of his first term. Is low Social Status didn't matter in the field, clearly, with the quick promotion to Lieutenant and training in electronics, but he did learn some of the more poncy members of the army never really learned to play cards or dice. 

The second set of rolls shows Zann nearly not making it through: target for Army Survival is 5+, and I roll a 3… but his 7 Edu gives a +2 on the roll. Whew! He does not manage a promotion this year with a second roll of 3, but he easily reenlists. His one skill this year gives him my desired +1 EDU. I imagine this as Lt. McClintock barely surviving a horrible conflict and spending much of this term in recovery, taking classes to improve his education during this time and set him up for future success. He's now 26 years old.

His third term he survives, receives a promotion easily (roll of 11, +1 for his EDU), and reenlists (roll of 11). Quickly becoming Captain McClintock, his two skill rolls on the now accessible second Advanced Skills tables produced Tactics twice. Returning to the field Zann serves under a commanding officer who takes him under her wing, pouring tactical knowledge and expertise into his head and giving him plenty of chances to practice it in the field. He's now 30

His 4th term shows him easily surviving and making another promotion to Major. I was going back and forth as to whether to have the 30-34 period to be his last, but I decided to roll for it, and missed it. His two skills in this term were spent on the Personal Development table to try to bring up that DEX, but it instead netted another +1 STR. A roll on the Advanced education gave another +1 Electronics. (I nearly went with the second advanced table again which would have given him +3 Tactics total, but I'm happy to be a little more diversified). At age 34 he's out of the army, due to the retirement of his mentor and the intervention of another senior officer who still saw McClintock as his social inferior (and who had lost a lot of money to him gambling). 

Now to the mustering out benefits. He gets one for each term, and another +2 for his rank. These can be on the benefits or cash table, and with his Gambling skill the cash table rolls are at +1. He ends up with another +2 EDU (which I see as his last 2 years in his last term being spent in officer training programs, which means his failure to reenlist came as a great shock), and a pair of passage vouchers to get him around the galaxy – these he's pocketing, with the Low Passage one being his way out if he ever finds himself again at rock bottom. The 3 remaining rolls on the cash table are very much in his favor, and he leaves the service with 70,000 credits in his accounts. Enough to make a start. 

Major McClintock is a skilled army officer, exceptionally good at large scale combats and electronics, who can hold his own briefly in a firefight. He's clawed himself up from the humblest beginnings and is always prepared for finding himself back in that circumstance. I've given the GM a potential benefactor in his last commanding officer and a potential rival in the officer who blocked his reenlistment. Despite his lower-than-average stats he's a worthy addition to any Traveller team. 

The character sheet for this one comes from the website Polyhedral Nonsense, who listed it as a work in progress, but I loved it so much I used its unfinished state for Zann's sheet. You can check out the site here