Edit: There is also a Smallville Pathways-style group character creation method that’s less crunchy, more playtested, and probably more fun at the table here.
I picked up the new Cortex-based Marvel RPG last week (review probably starting next week, after Savage Worlds concludes). One of the immediate oddities of the game that seems to have leaped out at everyone was the lack of a systematic character creation method. It comes down to “pick an existing Marvel character and give him or her whatever stats seem reasonable.” Maybe there’s a plan for a more in-depth system in a later book or maybe Marvel put its foot down that their last system got a lot of flack from people like me about how easy it was to minmax and break the system and that wasn’t to happen again. Either way, the lack is palpable for players (who make up the majority of players that I know) that want to make their own heroes.
The system below is a first tinkering on my part to retrofit points onto the system. Costs for things are largely based on how much system utility a given power or SFX seems to have: that is, if the power die or SFX could conceivably be used more often in dice pools, it’s priced more expensively. Even with the points, you’ll want to have a pretty in-depth discussion between GM and player about each hero and make sure elements are added because they’re thematic to the hero the player wants, not because the player has spare points and wants to pick up something useful. GMs are specifically encouraged to assess additional point cost to “unrelated collection of useful powers” characters and may even provide a few bonus points to characters that take situationally-useful but highly in-theme powers.
All that said, the points below do get within spitting distance of the existing datafiles that I priced. For reference:
- Local: Armor
- Regional: Colossus, Cyclops
- Regional +XP: Human Torch, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Ms. Marvel, Shadowcat, Thing
- Global: Beast, Black Widow, Invisible Woman, Mister Fantastic
- Global +XP: Captain America, Daredevil, Iron Man, Spider-Woman
- Cosmic: Emma Frost, Spider-Man, Storm, Wolverine
Power Level
Starting characters in this system are rated by power level. This is basically the frame of the game that the characters can play from the starting session. If you let experience persist across Events, characters will likely upgrade levels every few Events.
- Local characters are either just starting out or have profoundly limited powersets. They will most frequently deal with small-time criminals (“Street Heroes”) or be in training for higher-powered teams (e.g., X-Men trainees). Local characters start with 20 points to spend on Power Sets and 4 points to spend on Specialties.
- Regional characters are entry-level with a pretty good power range, have extensive pre-game training, or are experienced heroes with a limited power range. They will either handle problems all over a major city or may pursue specifically relevant stories all over the world (common for mutants). Regional characters start with 30 points to spend on Power Sets and 6 points to spend on Specialties.
- Global characters have had pretty extensive experiences before the start of play and commonly have a broad selection of powers to match. They deal with crises all over the world and may periodically go to other worlds or planes. Global characters start with 40 points to spend on Power Sets and 10 points to spend on Specialties.
- Cosmic characters have reams of backstory, extensive powers, and tons of training. They frequently have to spend substantial amounts of time off-planet to find threats significant enough for them and/or are solo heroes that often deal with threats that would stump whole teams of less experienced characters. Cosmic characters start with 50 points to spend on Power Sets and 16 points to spend on Specialties.
Affiliations and Distinctions
Characters of any power level arrange Affiliations and Distinctions normally (i.e., match d10, d8, and d6 to Solo, Buddy, and Team and then pick three Distinctions). At the group’s discretion, Local and Regional characters may start with fewer Distinctions and the intention of gaining more related to character development in play.
Power Sets
Characters start with one Power Set for free. If the character has a second Power Set, it costs 2 points extra per Power Trait in that set (e.g., a secondary power set with three Power Traits costs +6 points beyond the costs of its traits and SFX).
Each Power Trait has a cost that is multiplied by the die step (d6=2, d8=3, d10=4, and d12=5) to find the cost of adding that Trait. For example, a cost 2 Trait at d8 costs 6 points and a cost 3 trait at d12 costs 15 points.
Special Effects (SFX) have a flat cost to add to the Power Set.
Each Power Set must have at least one Limit. Additional Limits do not generally provide any kind of bonus (other than that the character now has an additional way to recover Plot Points or drain the Doom Pool). If both player and GM agree that a Limit is unusually restrictive or powerful (like Sentry’s “The Void”), the GM may choose to award a small number of bonus points. However, be wary of awarding one player bonus points for a limit that will provide problems for the whole team.
Power Traits
A Local character can only have one Trait at d8, and the rest must be d6. A Regional character can have one Trait at d10, the rest must be d8 or less. A Global character can have one Trait at d12, the rest must be d10 or less. A Cosmic character can have any number of traits at d12. At GM’s discretion, particularly compelling rationales may bypass this restriction.
- Attack Powers: 1, 2 for a particularly unresisted energy type
- Durability: 2, 3 with no major weakness
- Elemental Control: 3, 4 for powerful elements (e.g., Cosmic) at GM’s discretion
- Intangibility: 1
- Invisibility: 2
- Mimic: 2
- Movement: 1, 2 for flight
- Psychic Powers: 1 for animal and plant control, 2 for mind control and telepathy
- Reflexes: 2
- Resistance: 1
- Senses: 2
- Shapeshifting: 2
- Size-Changing: 1
- Sorcery: 3
- Stamina: 2
- Strength: 1
- Stretching: 1
- Teleport: 2
- Transmutation: 2
Special Effects
- Absorption: 2, 3 for extremely broad (GM’s discretion)
- Afflict: 2
- Area Attack: 3
- Berserk: 1
- Boost: 1
- Burst: 2
- Constructs: 2
- Counterattack: 2
- Dangerous: 2
- Focus: 1
- Healing: 1
- Immunity: 1-3 depending on broadness (GM’s discretion)
- Invulnerable: 2, 3 if weakness is rare
- Multipower: 2
- Second Chance: 1
- Second Wind: 3
- Unleashed: 2
- Versatile: 2
Specialties
Any remainder of points for Powers can be halved and applied as additional points for Specialties. Any remainder of points for Specialties can be spent on Powers directly (but are not multiplied).
A d6 Specialty costs 1 point, a d8 costs 2, and a d10 costs 4. Characters above Local level aren’t encouraged to have d6 Specialties.
A character cannot have more d10 Specialties than d8 Specialties (e.g., if a character wants two d10 Specialties, he must have at least two d8 Specialties as well).
Milestones
GM and player should work together to come up with relevant milestones. In general, all PCs should have milestones that are likely to happen with the same level of frequency (e.g., one character should not have a 1 XP milestone that can easily happen over and over while another has a 1 XP milestone that can happen only once).
An updated way to do this with pathways-style creation is here.
Cam Banks
Feb 27, 2012 @ 16:06:59
MHR doesn’t include a point-buy system because character balance and power level aren’t regulated by character creation but by actual play and the mechanics themselves. In fact, given you can easily have the Sentry and Daredevil in the same group, and neither suffers from the disparity between their apparent power level, this translates similarly to a lack of a point-buy structure.
The game DOES provide guidelines for creating heroes in the exact same way that I use to create the ones in the book: assigning traits and coming up with Distinctions and Milestones as appropriate for the character concept. I even go through the process of creating Captain America this way.
It’s my belief that point-buy or budget-based character creation is not a requirement of RPGs. When it’s needed or appropriate, it’s great; when it isn’t, it can either force the outcome and poorly reflect the genre, or it can result in unpredictable or unnecessary write-ups.
We have a random hero datafile creator in the works right now, for a bit of fun; you could take that and meddle with it, too, choosing outcomes rather than roll them. This would then complete the original TSR Marvel Super Heroes triumvirate of player hero choices: existing character, modeled character, or random character.
samhaine
Feb 27, 2012 @ 16:37:45
Sorry if my initial paragraph comes off flip about the character creation with established Marvel characters. The example in the book is fine if you have an established character to base it off of. And the system does a really good job of trending toward more powerful characters getting more options, but still being potentially threatened by less powerful characters in a good position for their specialties, which I’ll go into more in the review.
But the first reaction of most of my friends was “why is there no guidance for making my own heroes [that don’t have an established comics profile],” and the conclusion of my playtest group for the review was that they’d feel more comfortable endorsing the system if they got to make their own characters instead of canon ones. This post was meant to address those concerns.
And I will note that (though I forgot to mention him for some reason) the Sentry does come out at a similar point value to Daredevil under the above system, as both have a lot of options for rolling lots of d8s and d10s and cool SFX. I think if you tried something like Armor and Beast, for example, where she has a few neat tricks that he doesn’t, but otherwise his dice pools will often be similar to or better than hers in combat and better than hers at all other actions, the player of Armor might feel the discrepancy. That’s fine for a scenario where both players have agreed to “one of us is a new member of the team, and the other is one of its founding members.” But if both players had made original characters that they expected to be about the same power level, the player of the lower-powered one (at least among my groups) is going to be unhappy.
McCoy's Geeky Emporium of Thought » Marvel Superheroes Role Playing Game
Feb 27, 2012 @ 20:16:32
Phil Kalata (@Kalaphi)
Feb 27, 2012 @ 21:01:27
Why is this even necessary? The game doesn’t constrain character creation based on points or levels. And that’s a good thing. This means everyone can play the superheroes with the superpowers they have always wanted to play. Right away. Game 1. Together. Everyone discusses their character ideas, talk about how the heroes work together and then make the characters. You don’t have to quibble about how Billy wound up with two more d10s than Randy or how Joey always spends more character points than the rest of the group. You make the hero you want to make.
All of the guidelines for making a character are right there in the Operations Manual. Pages 110-113 cover all the steps needed to make your own hero. The 50 pages before that details all of the nitty gritty info on the character sheet. Throughout the “Understanding Datafiles” chapter, the crux is, “Imagine a hero. Here are the steps and tools to make that hero.”
You could have Hawkeye adventuring alongside Gladiator. Why not?
samhaine
Feb 27, 2012 @ 21:25:23
Most of my friends expressed limited interest in the game due to lack of systematic character creation. By providing this, I can give them, and players like them, a tool to weigh the system on its own merits rather than the perceived problem of being locked into established comic characters. While it’s not your style, some people prefer the concept of making characters within mechanical guidelines, and that includes all of the people I’d be likely to play this game with.
Hopefully you’ll stick around for the review series, where I’ll probably unpack things like the power balance between characters in more detail.
Jeremiah McCoy
Feb 28, 2012 @ 00:50:09
@Phil
Let me expound a bit here. Making a character is a series of choices. A well designed character creation system constrains those choices, by putting them in an understandable framework. It gives guidance based on mechanism and restriction. While there is indeed a few pages to address, in the broadest of terms, how make your own character, neither rules nor the text, really gives you any guidance in how to make your character. It gives you a rough notion of how to make one of marvels other characters, into a character for the game, and that is nice, but that is not the same as a system for designing your own character. I like the fact Hawkeye and gladiator can adventure along side one another, but have a system to describe how to build a character from scratch would not hurt that.
I like Stephens system, here. It could maybe have a little more depth, but the system is pretty light, so I am not overly worried. Having the system is only part of the issue, however. See, role playing games have almost always featured as a core part of how they work, the ability to make your own character. You were, in fact, encouraged to make your own character and make it part of the world you were playing in. None of the Star Wars games that came out over the years, encouraged you to stick only to the canon characters, but make your own in that world. The various Detective Comics RPG’s all featured their rules for making your own hero, not as a kit bash or a 3 page note, but featured part of the game. Marvel Superheroes, the original RPG, was kind of infamous for it’s character creation system which was random and deeply unbalanced. Imagine trying to play D&D but you were strongly encouraged to only play one of the characters from a Forgotten Realms novel? It would never happen.
I get that they are trying some new things here, and I encourage that. The majority of the game is great. Where it fails is not just in the lack of depth in their character creation rules, but also in the text actually attempts to steer you away from one of the most basic RPG elements. They do everything but say, “Hey, don’t make up your own characters. Just use the ones from the existing Marvel canon.” That combined with the very, very light character creation(and I should say adaption) rules, makes the game less appealing to a number of people, myself included. As i said in my post, I will likely ask around to see if any of my friends would be interested despite my reservations, but honestly I don’t expect they will.
Rob Hodgson
Feb 28, 2012 @ 16:08:36
For what it’s worth, I agree that a character creation system (crunchy, fluffy, point-buy, or otherwise) isn’t necessary for a game system to work, and even work well.
That being said, as a player, I would have liked a heftier character creation system here. I tend to enjoy the crunchy aspects of character creation. They are fun for me, and I worry less that I could be making a poorly rounded character when I have access to them. Thanks for the mod, Samhaine, I appreciate the effort.
Ronin
Mar 11, 2012 @ 22:04:31
I really wanted to like this game. But this is not what I look for in a Supers game. The system would be fun for action packed game where every one is human. What is the fun of playing the strong guy who is shoulder to shoulder with the next guy.
Barking Alien
Mar 20, 2012 @ 20:22:33
I love the system for play but two things initially had me feeling very differently.
One was the rules are jargon heavy and poorly organized. I can live with one or the other but both is hard. Still, after actually playing it I understood it and now can’t wait to run it myself.
The second was, you guessed it, character creation or the apparent lack there of. I have been gaming since 1977′, with much of that time devoted to Superhero RPGs. I’ve played and run pretty much every Supers game ever made. Character creation in Supers is different from character creation in other genres. It’s really about all those little details that make it exactly the hero you want to play. I love running in the established universes of published comic companies but my many players and I agree, we want to be OUR GUY exploring said universes.
Therefore, I endorse the system above, at least in principle. I would have to go through it a few times to see how it works. I might do a thing when you can downgrade your points (start as a Regional when everyone else is Global for example) in exchange for an extra Plot Point or something.
Even in Champions, the ultimate point buy Supers system, one guy can start as Capt. America or Batman and another as an Iron Man or Superman type. The difference is, Batman’s points went to skills and gear not powers. So yes, man with Human strength is shoulder to shoulder with man who throws cars and it was achieved used a more definitively, defined system.
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ishmadrad
May 19, 2012 @ 22:59:05
Thanks. It’s nice to have an extra tool!
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turnagealfonsojermaine
Sep 21, 2014 @ 14:57:38
Reblogged this on Alfonso Jermaine Turnage's Creative Writing Journal and commented:
I like this system for aiding in the process of creating “Original” RPG Characters for Marvel Heroics RPG.