14th day: RRRRonin, Advanced FASERIP

 Another day, another character, two full week completed already! I'm happy I managed to populate this week with all different games and to celebrate, I decided to make a random character in Advanced FASERIP by Gurbintroll Games. It's a retroclone of the old TSR Marvel TTRPG, but it cleans up some part to make it more fun for those of us who didn't grow up with the original and thus doesn't have nostalgia for it. One cool change, that I wouldn't be surprised was a common house rule of the original, is that you don't have to either hoard Karma in the hope of ever improving or ending up every adventure with Karma debt if you want to succeed, now spending Karma on your rolls and power stunts is how you actually improve. I do enjoy system where using something makes you better at using that thing rather than bulk level up.

But enough about the system, let's talk character creation! The system is actually point-buy-ish, giving us a number of points to spend in different aspects of the character depending of the type of heroes we pick. Unlike something like Mutants&Masterminds where you adjust your starting points based on the power level, here we, or rather the GM, pick a campaign rank and everything is priced in relation to that rank. The game says the Default is World Class, so I'll follow that. While it's point buy, you have the option to roll at every step of the way so the game tells you how to spend your point, starting with the hero type. I rolled Birthright, making the character basically a X-Men style Mutant, but I already created a few mutants in the past, so I decided to reroll. It was frustrating too, as I rolled a 6, just over the 1-5 result of Artificial, I could have been a robot! Instead, I got a result of Trained, someone like Batman who relies on training rather than raw super-power! Indeed, it gives me the lowest point value for powers, but the second highest for Ability and the highest for Benefits!

 As you can see from the sheet, I ended up with two powers, one a Fantastic and one at Decent. Rolling further, I got that my powers were Super-Sense and a Blast. I set it aside for now, waiting to know more about the character before deciding the strength of each power and their details. The attributes were next, once again you can roll to determine how many attributes of how high a value you get, then there's a table to choose the attribute. I ended up swapping strength and agility, as I was starting to get an idea of who this character would be. Now we are rapidly approaching the end, distributing all those benefits point between Wealth, Fame, Contact and Specialities. Interestingly, there's no random table to decide how many point to distribute into each categories, so I put enough in Wealth to go to Upper Middle Class, no Fame as the character is a newcomer as a full-fledged super-heroes, 2 contact I'm going to determine later and 8 specialities I get to roll! 7 of those were pretty geared toward an ex-military kinda super-heroes, but the first one was Art! I decided the character is a Sculptor, probably working with metal and machinery to complement her Mechanic specialty. The game also tells me Art is based on Agility and Intuition, meaning they're a very good artist! I also get to choose which weapon to get good at, I could have double down with a ranged weapon that uses Agility, but I picked swords that uses Fighting, because they're cool. With Martial Art and Weapon, she's basically Fantastic at unarmed, sword and ranged combat, so that's pretty well balanced I think. For the contact, I picked an ex-mentor super-hero contact and an Agency contact, basically someone from SHIELD. I then decided to go Fantastic Blast and Decent Super Senses, picking four options of Super-Sense. I modified the Blast power by giving it a flaw that it can be disarmed or removed, but balancing it by giving it a Broad Edge. Essentially, instead of being a traditional super-power, it's an experimental blaster than can do lethal or blunt damage in a variety of type.

Art by Stepnoysa on ych.commish.com

 Now all that was left was putting it all together to create an actual character! I picked a Weakness of Secret Identity, the name Ira Gainsbourg popping in my head, no relation to the famous artist, but her dad is French and her mother Russian. I think the family was decently wealthy, but she still did a tour of duty with the military after high school. After that, she was picked up under the wing by a super-hero, a random super-hero name generator ultimately lands me on The Scarlet Horse. Actually, let's reverse that! I've given her a few super-sense, picking option that seemed actually possible for a extraordinary but mundane human to have, deciding her super-sense and Fantastic Intuition is actually innate to her! She has a perfect sense of time and direction, the ability to track and an uncommonly sensitive sense of smell. So, Tim Drake style, she was saved by The Scarlet Horse at some point as a teen and managed to sniff out his secret identity, convincing him to take her under his wings! She probably had a My Little Pony style name at that point too for her secret identity. She did her short stint in the military after that, going back home and starting to make fat stacks with her arts thanks to her parents being wealthy enough that she could focus on it. I think she started to chafe under The Scarlet Horse at that point and went to an old military buddy of her who's now a off-brand SHIELD agent to help emancipate her from her old master. She was given an experimental blaster, a cool sword and a serum that pushed her Agility and Endurance over normal human limits, assigning her to a squad of other Novice Super-Heroes. As she was now a free agent with no master, she renamed herself RRRRonin (said as if growling) like a turbo-dork and replaced the horsey trapping of her costume for a Catgirl vibe. And she probably made the costume sexier, the Scarlet Horse did not make her run around in a skimpy outfit. To complete the character, I gave her a earpiece for team communication and a motorcycle, then an extra weakness in the form of an Allergy to Strong Odor. Her sensitive nose is a great strength, but it can easily be turned against her!