DC Heroes in the 2022 Character Creation Challenge

 On day 19 of the Character Creation Challenge I have a drink with the hobgoblins of foolish consistency!

At the end of the day I'm a V&V guy first, a Marvel Super Heroes guy second. While I've written professional articles for Silver Age Sentinels, the third place superhero game for me is going to be the original Greg Gordon designed DC Heroes rules, because they are so gleefully insane. Not all of them. Most of them work fine. But you have to wonder whether they were haunted by the consistency hobgoblin or if they just nailed their tongue to their cheek when writing the gadgetry rules (were all laser pistols have Heat Vision and all radios have Super Ventriloquism).

Everything in DC Heroes rated in Attribute Points, which are Geometric in nature – every point is twice as good as the one below it. Normal people have a STR of 3, Batman has a STR of 5, and is 4 times stronger. Superman has a STR of 25. There's a handy chart for this, and it's designed to scale across codes. So if you have a 20 STR and lift something weight 18 APs of weight you can throw it 2 AP of distance, which also equates to 2 AP of speed. 

DC Heroes has 9 characteristics, which are cleverly split into three groups – physical, mental, and spiritual – and three other groups – action, power, and resistance. So when you look at the grid its clear what everything means

DEX // STR // BODY
INT // WILL // MIND
INFL // AURA // SPIRIT
Your Aura is your spiritual Strength, for example. It's a clean system if a little cumbersome at points. 

There's an extensive list of powers that are derived from across all the heroes of the DC universe, and then a smaller list of skills that have some special rules to differentiate them from powers, but not much. The game does make the weird decision (much like early GURPS) to eschew the design of the supers universe and state that powers are explicitly internal, and if you need a device you have to build it using either the Gadget advantage in character creation or with the Gadgetry rules in play, and they have different point costs. So Batman doesn't have a Utility Belt power, he has an array of Gadgets, (Including Omni-Gadget, which he can define the moment he needs it). This makes device heroes more cumbersome to play, which is an odd choice given the DC universe. 

Characters are built on multiples of 450 points. For that you're supposed to be able to build a member of the Teen Titans. For three times that you're a member of mid 80's Justice League, more or less. For 5 times that you're roughly Superman. Weirdly, advantages and drawbacks (but presumably not the Gadget advantage) are supposed to scale with your multiple – so while High Connections with an organization costs 15 points at the Teen Titans level, it costs 45 points at the JLI level. Basically it costs 3% of your point total. This keeps x5 heroes from wildly abusing the rules, but for some builds of Batman or Nightwing it makes it nigh impossible to build them at all as they are so advantage heavy. 

Anyway, I'm going to be building a member of the Legion of Superheroes, the 30th century teens where most have a single super power, plus a flight ring and a transsuit to survive in space if need be, and who are hands down my favorite DC heroes. I have the stats on a Legion Flight Ring from the basic book as Booster Gold uses one, and one of the Legion supplements so I have an idea of what their average stats are. 

Bela Bree was a rocket jockey kid, doing intersystem drag races in souped up shuttles, when she had an engine blowout and crashed on an unoccupied dwarf planet. At least she thought it was unoccupied: there were gravitic ghosts of a dead race there who granted her the power to attract and repel matter, which she was able to use to summon help. Knowing she needed to do something more with this power she reached out to the Legion and was able to prove herself in battle. Now as Miss Motion she's a member in good standing, and also the chief grease monkey in their transport bay. 

Bela's basically normal-for-a-hero attributes – she's in exceptional shape with great reflexes and intelligence -  cost 248 points. Her skills with Vehicles and Gadgetry cost another 78, a reduced price because they are Linked to her DEX and INT, and if something drains those her skills drop. This is a cost saving tool for the high stat high skill no power PCs, but I'm using it here. (You can Link powers to characteristics as well, but that won't work for me). 

The average Legionnaire has one or two powers at 15-20 AP, which is insanely high, but generally they are unmatched in their area of expertise. I settled on a power – Attraction/Repulsion, which lets you push things away or pull them to you, but it distinct from Telekinesis, Gravity Decrease, or Magnetism – because no Legionnaire has it and because I've always had a fondness for the character it was added to the game rules to model, Yankee Poodle from Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew. No, really. 

So she has Attraction/Repulsion at 18 AP (enough to move 3,276 tons) and I added Force Shield at 15 with the limitation that it only works on objects, as it models her ability to parry incoming attacks on herself or others with a repulsion or attraction beam, at up to 64 miles. These two together cost 445 points, so she looks like she'll be a x2 character as she's at 761 points

She needs the advantage of Connections – High with the Legion, which at x2 costs her 30 points, but I'm also going to mark it at 3% of her total points in case that changes.

Now her devices, The Transsuit has Sealed Systems 10 to be able to survive in hostile environments for an hour, with the limitation that it doesn't provide a combat defense against gas or radiation. That ends up costing 23 points under the gadgetry rules, but has a 10% chance to just not work as I didn't mess with the Reliability number. 

I suspect reliability numbers for these things are honored more in the breech, as Booster Gold's flight ring doesn't have one. The flight ring does have Flight at 8 and Telepathy (only to control the flight ring at a distance) at 8, which takes her to 871 points spent. If I left it here she'd have 29 unspent hero points as a x2 character, which isn't bad.

Except…

The flight ring also has 64 AP of Super-Ventriloquism that only works to send an SOS to the Legion. Yes, that's right – it can throw its voice across the galaxy, but just for an SOS. This costs another <checks math> 448 points. The cost of an entire Teen Titan. 

So… she's really a x3 character with 17 unspent hero points. 

Am I being a little silly? Yes, but so is DC Heroes. 

Prince Valiant the Storytelling Game 2022 Character Creation Challenge

 On day 18 of the #CharacterCreationChallenge I go through my pockets for loose change 

Originally purchased because of the gorgeous, gorgeous artwork (this was before all the Hal Foster Prince Valiants had been complied in hardcover), it turns to out be a lovely stripped down version of Pendragon from the inimitable Greg Stafford. In order to make the game easier for new players, and to better fit the less extreme passions of the Prince Valiant world than the original Arthur sagas, Stafford reduced the game to its barest components and then decided to replace dice with coins. 

Mechanic is super simple: you toss a number of coins equal to your attribute + skill, and any heads means some level of success. You may need more than one head to get the success level you need for more complex actions. That's pretty well it. On top of that there are two attributes (Brawn and Presence) and a very short list of skills (9? 12? Somewhere in there) of which your PC has to have at least 6 at 1 coin, and if your PC is a knight you have to have Arms and Riding as two of those skills. You have 7 coins to split between Brawn and Presence, and 9 coins for skills. 

Sir Giles deBouc, one of the French knights who came over with Lancelot, is a capable swordsman and an accomplished warrior – better able to see though the chaos of battle than most, and skilled at both making alliances with knights and rallying the spirits of units of men. While the rest of Camelot longs for the glory of individual battle, he secretly wishes for the larger scale conflicts where his tactical and strategic insight can help foster his personal legend. 

In court he favors the company of other knights – or those he might find inside his peer group in the stables caring for horses, or in the archives studying the history of battles – over the intricacies of court. He speaks with honesty and from the heart, but the only of the courtly pleasures he has real skill in is jousting. Still, when he makes the fool of himself in more subtle affairs, he takes being the butt of his friends jokes well – there's little anger or pride in him for these events. He knows what he's good at. 

Brawn: 3      Presence 4

Arms: 2        Battle: 2    Fellowship: 1    Jousting: 1    Oratory: 1   Riding: 2 

Sword, lance, dagger, medium armor, ordinary Horse, 5 gold coins, fine clothes. 

His coat of arms is field vert with three goats passant guardant argent. (Green shield with three walking goats on it, the goats are looking at the viewer). 

Castle Falkenstein in the 2022 Character Creation Challenge

 On day 17 I do the work of 20 Bloggers in a single night!

Given the choice between Space 1889 and CFalk I'm gonna take CFalk every time. I'll probably steal the Etherflyers and Mars components as new developments, but I just unabashedly love the CFalk world and its amalgamation of history and fiction and sorcery and faerie and mad science. Since it's pretty easy to play the mad science and Victorian sorcerer angles elsewhere, for the 2022 #CharacterCreationChallenge I'm taking advantage of the Faerie Angle with my Brownie. My operating assumption is he lives in the house of one of the other PCs, who is of sufficient means to keep a small household and not mind a brownie helping out. 

I like Brownies because they are Faeries who can do a lot of the bonus Faerie stuff (the glamour and etherealness) that let them fill in and around for stealth and espionage characters, but their actual Faerie Power is so specific and non-combat that it just becomes a thing the party can do. I know some players balk at having their special power become something assumed, but with Dewdrop I would aim to find a way to make that useful at least once a plot in as many surprising ways as I can. 

Journal: 

In this, the 4th year of the Second Compact I, Dewdrop of the Rue de Beaux Arts, take quill to parchment to record both my own thoughts in the service of Lord Auberon of Faerie. I, and the other residents of the household, have taken arms against the adversary. I am stalwart and loyal and true, if a bit stubborn and occasionally vulgar of tongue from having a homeowner who lived and swore as a sailor for many years. In this conflict I am sure my _Good Courage_ will prove sufficient. 

I am normal in appearance for my honorable breed, wearing stout clothing appropriated from the martial dolls of the prior householder's children, at a robust 1 foot in height. In that frame I pack the strength of a mortal of _Average Physique_, though my diminutive size relegates me to _Poor Fisticuffs_ against such a mortal. Still, such brute force is beneath me, as I have spent years with my elfshot, becoming a _Good Marksman_. Regardless of my size I can fell mortal man with elfshot between the eyes – why would I resort to fists?  

As with all of the Faerie I can shape this reality, but having never put much time into confounding mortals it I twist but an _Average Glamour_, and perhaps my sense of self is too great for me to express any but an _Average Etherealness_ - though many guest of this house has assumed me a Chomp Elysee, Or Toothy Cat for you English Speakers. Of course even in my own form I have _Good Stealth_ and similar _Good Atheltics_: few are the times I am seen without wishing it, and fewer still are the times I cannot reach where I wish to go. 

Still, I am proudest of my _Great Great Working_, the true gift of the Brownies. I can put my hands and back to task and accomplish what it would take 20 men to do from sunrise to sunset. The work is its own reward, and will I trust serve the Second Compact well. About my waist is a belt that holds my elfshot, sling, and a coin or two. A hand stitched peddlers pack holds such copper and wood tools as needed to peg, whittle, and hammer as needed. 

Space 1889 in the 2022 Character Creation Challenge

Day 16 of #charactercreationchallenge. In which I dedicate myself to tearing down the corrupt edifice of the British Empire while exploiting the hell out of a game loophole 

I've built a couple of Space 1889 characters and played in one short campaign, and I admit to a fondness for the genre between this and Castle Falkenstein. Still, every time to try to build a character I get caught in how this is a as much a simulationist character creation system as Jorune or Twilight 2000, just with fewer points, and that leaves be flummoxed because the game doesn't present itself as that. Coming out in 1988, with 6 attributes and skills under them, my brain keeps wanting to make it Star Wars d6. That's on me, but it always throws me. 

Space 1889 has 6 characteristics: Strength, Intelligence, Agility, Charisma, Endurance, and Social Level. Each are rated 1-6. There are also skills under each attribute, but only the first skill on each actually gets a direct benefit, being rated at the Attribute -1. The rest of them are free standing… except that during character creation when you spend your free skill points (either 6 if you took one career or 2 if you took a second career) skills cost half if your characteristic is a 5 or 6. So if you're high in an area it's easy to build up skills in it… at the start of play. No benefits once play begins. 

Careers are packages of skills, theoretically of equal value, but some careers have more stringent entry requirements in terms of Characteristics, and those careers give more points. If the career requires a 5 or 6 Characteristic on entry it makes some sense to reward higher levels in skills that fall under that characteristic as per above, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The main thing is that in a world simulation fashion there are careers separated by social class, physical skills, intellect, and gender (though there's a sidebar on how women can pretend to be men to enter the career); it's a fictional 1889, but in order to have it feel like 1889 at all there have to be a lot of restrictions. 

Classic character creation is setting each of the six characteristics at numbers 1 to 6. That is to say your stat spread is always 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Or you can split up 21 points, or you can roll 3d6. The curve is VERY tight in that a 3.5 is still average, but a 6 Strength makes the sample character one of the strongest men in Europe. So 6 Int is a Sherlock Holmes level genius, 3 is slightly below average. Anyway, I decided to go with the third method, which is randomly rolling 1d6 for each characteristic and play them where they lay. I fired up Anydice and asked for a 6 1d6 distribution. 

6 STR, 6 INT , 5 AGI, 4 Charisma, 3 Endurance, 6 Social Level. GREAT GOOGLY-MOOGLY! He's a veritable Superman! Looking over the options I realized I hadn't built a shady character in a while and one of the secondary careers for players is Master Criminal, but you need a 6 INT to enter it. Sold! I decided on Foreign Officer as his first career and ongoing cover, stationing him in various places around the British Empire where he can form nodes of his burgeoning criminal empire.

A quick roll of 3d6*100 indicates starting wealth (1400) but being a Master Criminal increases that by x50 (!), so 70,000 pounds. Since he's social level 5+, he has that as an annual income. I'm not sure the game designer really anticipated this combination!

With a 6 Social Level he's of the aristocracy, so I did some quick research and discovered the strange affairs of the 5th Viscount of Bolingbroke – which included having some illegitimate children under an assumed identity who he tried to get into the peerage to before he died. I decided that my PC, Roland St. John, was one of those kids. He joined the Foreign Office as it was a posting his father could get him while waiting for his peerage to come through. When it never did (and he was passed over for his half-brother whose servant mother had married his father in Bath just a couple years before father's death) he saw the whole hideous edifice of the British Empire – the colonialism, the Opium Wars, the inbred idiots being in charge – and started his master plan to bring the whole thing down. Thus, was born Doctor White, the scaped palimpsest of the future world. 

In a campaign maybe the other PCs are his agents, working with him on his master plan. Or they are people he knows in his cover identity as a foreign office agent wherever the campaign is set who he is "helping" for reasons of his own. 

High as his starting characteristics are, his starting skills are a little diffuse, so he's balanced against other more focused player characters, despite his herculean physique, Holmesian intellect, peerage, and limitless money. OK, Maybe not. 

Top Secret/SI in the 2022 character creation challenge

 Your Mission, if you choose to accept it, is to figure out this game's core activity. And why its fonts are so big. 

A little chronology: the original Top Secret was written in 1980, when we were in full Cold War mode, and the PCs worked for an unnamed intelligence agency in Assassination, Confiscation or Research. I never really got a chance to play this, but did build a character for it back in the day. It sounded very gritty and grounded based on the modules I saw for it. While the agency you worked for didn't have an identifying tags, the game made it clear what you were supposed to be doing.  

Then comes Top Secret/SI, which by 1987 the cold war tenor had changed, glasnost was in force, and TSR tried to re-enter the espionage market with a complete revamp of the game. It's a super rules-light system – 7 characteristics of 20-79 can get modified up by skills, halved or quartered by difficulty, all rolls are d100 – but the Players Guide gives absolutely no framework for who the characters are or what they are meant to be doing. There are some samples with WEB and Orion, but no definition of them. The player is left with nothing to hang their hat on. 

This is because the Administrator's Guide is selling the game as being able to do anything. Yes, there are some pages in the back detailing the WEB vs. Orion secret espionage agencies subverting or defending "human freedom" but the GM is also told hey, you want to do Police Officers? Journalists? Private Investigators? Be contemporary? Or in the 20's? or Victorian? Or in space? And they can be hired already? Or all be normally people who get pulled into some sort of problem? Sure, this can do ANYTHING! And yes, the engine is so low frills and chrome free that you could. But the box isn't selling a generic game, and the GM books is full of advice on how to do research and set up campaigns of any sort. When when I say there's 40 pages of it, don't think that's a lot because the entire book has a 1.5" header, wide gutters between columns and 14 point type. There's not a lot of meat in this space. 

Back to character creation, which again, is done kind of blind without a GM with specific ideas. You have 5 rolled characteristics (with an innovative 1d60+10 for each, giving a range from 20-79) and two secondary characteristics that are averages of two of the five top line ones. Everything in the game is rolled as d% against these scores, or skills that add to these scores. Purchasing a skill gives you your full characteristic as a roll, while levels 1-5 each give 5% bumps, and specializing gives a 10% bump by narrowing the skill. The GM can apply difficulty by halving or quartering your skill base. 

You have 30 points to buy skills, but you need to pick from (or design your own) packages, such as Military, Professional, Mechanical, or Entertainer. Nothing in this really hooks for "here's how you were trained as a spy", but from a comment in the Entertainer description something clicked: Entertainer exists to have Robert Culp's agent in I-Spy having a cover as a Tennis Pro, or the Impossible Missions force being made up of otherwise civilians. So I started building the game in my head around that type of setting. 

This part of character creation is incredibly easy: roll the 1d60+10 5 times for Strength, Reflexes, Intelligence, Will and Constitution. If your total is under 255, you get the difference as bonus points you can distribute as you will. Average Strength and Reflexes for Movement, Reflexes and Intelligence for Dexterity. 

I rolled Str 45, Ref 32, Int 41, Wil 75, Con 72. He's physically below average – well below so in Reflexes – but indomitable and can soak damage. This comes to 245 points, so I have 10 more, which I haven't decided on yet. 

My first thought is the classic PI who solves cases now with genius but by being able to soak up beatings while not stopping the investigation until someone lets something slip. Looking over the skills list almost nothing ties to the characteristics I'm actually good at – WIL and CON – until I get to Hypnotism. Then everything clicked. 

Raymond Golubev aka Rasputin Grey, the Man with the Million Dollar Brain, aging stage mentalist. Drop the 10 points to get Int to a more respectable 51, and his age explains his low Reflexes and Strength. Looking over the Advantages and Disadvantages system there's a simple way (pick one of each) vs. the realistic one (each has a cost, take a matching cost up to 6 points). I went for Simple and then abused it, taking the 6 point Photographic Memory vs. the 2 point Deep Sleeper (I seriously considered taking Memorable Feature with "crazy eyes", and then a 2 point addition as his maintenance drugs, but decided against both for something more simple). 

The Entertainer career means 4 points in Mechanical skills, 2 points in Combat, 0 in Specialist, 4 in Education, 10 in General and 4 in Language. I have 8 floating points I can distribute as I like. 

Starting with Mechanical, I spend 1 point for Basic Tool Use 0, gives me a whopping 38% chance of using any tools, but it's a prerequisite) and 3 for Carpentry 1 – I buy this higher than baseline because you need to be at least level 1 to specialize, which I do in Magical Equipment. This gives him a 53% chance to build wooden magical gear. 

Combat, I spend 2 points for one level in Knife Throwing (he used to be a lot better at this, but these days it's 43%) and Basic Melee 0, just to have any chance at all. 23% chance. Wheee! 

Specialist gets 2 of my free points to buy Concealment 0, which works for both himself and objects, likely to be hidden in his magic boxes or other props. 51%

Education I need to spend 4, and that goes to Basic Liberal Arts, Anthropology/Sociology/Psychology and Literature all at 0, all at 51%

Language I pick Russian for my second language, and mark down the 5 levels in English. 

That leaves General. Slight of Hand and Stage Magician (the one the prereq for the other) would soak all my points, so I'm just declaring he used to know this but his hands aren't up for it now. Instead 8 points gets me Hypnosis 1 (80%), 2 more for Acting 0 (51%) and 1 for Social Chameleon (51%) 

Finally his Pysche Profile, which is a very quick and dirty sort of alignment system. A devoted skeptic and atheist, he has Low Cruelty and Piety, Total Sanity, a High passion for projects and Loyalty to the organization, and a Mild greed. 

Once a popular staple of the late night talk show and cabaret set, Raymond Golubev, AKA Rasputin Grey, aka the Man with the Million Dollar Brain, is a mentalist and entertainer. His heyday was in the 1980s, but even today in his 70's he still cuts a formidable figure with his wild hair and crazy eyes. He's had to retire a lot of the stage magic (hand tremors make close up magic impossible, and it's no longer quite safe to play at knife throwing) but his photographic memory, hypnosis skills, and long history still get him international bookings, which are great cover for his recent espionage work for ORION

I can easily see him being pulled into an MI team, or used as a cover for a more athletic spy, or any of the other general ideas of this sort. Assuming that's what the game is supposed to do, which is still up in the air….