The other week I reviewed Greater Than Game’s Sentinel Comics RPG Core Rulebook and was really only able to touch briefly on the character creation rules. Like many games, the section for character creation rules dominate the largest portion of the book, but unlike other games where many decisions are locked into selections like ancestry and class choice, superhero games tend to be different, especially when you consider the myriad of different ways that characters within this genre can come by their powers and function within a group.
Sentinel Comics offers what is actually a fairly straightforward approach, where you choose a Background, a Power Source, an Archetype, and a Personality to determine what kinds of powers your character has and how they can wield them. But after going through the process several times, it provides an incredible amount of depth and flexibility within the process.
Before we go too much further, I feel it’s important to take a quick sidebar and talk about Powers and Qualities as they’ll be coming up quite a bit in the following sections. These are general powers or skills that fall under a certain umbrella. Athletic powers, for example, contain Agility, Speed, Strength and Vitality. Elemental/Energy powers comprise certain types of energy like Cold, Fire, or Nuclear power. Social qualities include things like Banter and Leadership while Information qualities include certain knowledges like History, Magical Lore, and Medicine. In total, there are 53 powers and 24 qualities. This doesn’t sound like a lot at a glance- but that’s by design so as to not paralyze a player with hundreds of different choices. As you’ll see later, it matters less about what Powers and Qualities you have and more about how you choose to express them through the fiction of the game.
There are a couple of different ways that you can approach character creation. If you have a firm vision of your character in mind and have a good grasp on how character creation works, you can simply pick your options in order to make your character come to life. The other method is what they call the “Guided Method” and is useful if you don’t have a clear picture of what you want your character to look like. Each step in the process ends with you rolling a certain number of dice. In several of the steps, these dice are used to assign new Powers and Qualities, but they also serve a bigger purpose in this Guided Method of character creation. Every section of character creation has 20 different options on it and you can use any combination of the dice you roll to help you figure out what you’re going to choose from that next section. So if you roll a 3, a 7, and 4 on three dice, you could choose from options 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, or 14 in the next section. I really enjoy this because it cuts down on the sheer amount of options present to you, but still provides you some freedom of choice within that more limited menu. This can help spark some new and interesting options. I’ve rolled up a number of characters using this method completely and have managed to come up with some ideas that I likely wouldn’t have on my own by letting the dice help define the character.
The first step is to determine your Background. This is all about who your character was before they became a superhero. Were they part of the upper class of society? Or were they in law enforcement or serve in the military? Maybe they’re the latest in a dynasty of super heroes and are expected to take on the mantle of their ancestors. Or maybe you are a robot or cyborg and were thusly created for your purpose. This section provides you with several Qualities to generate a feel for how your character solves problems and also lets them choose their first Principle.
Principles are aspects that are core to your character’s identity and provide roleplaying hooks and potential twists that you and the GM can use in the course of play. They fall into one of five different categories – Esoteric, Expertise, Ideals, Identity, and Responsibility and your choice of Background will instruct you to pick one from one of those categories. These run the gamut from things like the Principle of Peace or the Principle of Science to the Principle of the Mask or the Principle of the Time Traveler. And if you can’t find something on the list that fits your character, some guidance exists on how to create your own.
The second step in character creation is to determine their Power Source. As the name suggests, this is how the character comes by their super powers. Maybe they use a powered suit or technological upgrades. Maybe their powers are alien or supernatural in origin or maybe they were born with some kind of genetic abnormality that manifested itself as superpowers. Maybe they just trained harder than anyone else and achieved peak human capability. This section provides you the bulk of your Powers which you choose from a short list. This section also provides you with a number of abilities.
Abilities provide ways that you can use your Powers and Qualities to break the standard rules and are written in such a way that they mechanically function the same between two characters. But within the fiction they provide wildly different effects based on how the player defines that ability. An ability is either an Action, a Reaction, or an Inherent thing about the character, and they tend to let you use one or two (but sometimes more) of the basic actions in different ways and often require you to assign a certain Power or Quality to it that cannot be changed outside of character advancement.
Take, for example, the ability called Offensive Strike that lets you attack with a Power or Quality and use the Max die for the result. Someone who assigns the Strength power may call the power Smash! and describe it as an attack with a disregard for collateral damage. Someone who assigns it to their ability to control fire may call it Inferno and describe it as them manipulating the energy so that the target is exposed to the hottest part of the flame. Someone who assigns it their Ranged Combat Quality to it may call it Bullseye! and describe it as their attack hitting a particularly vulnerable part of the target.
After Power Source comes Archetype which helps show how your character manifests their powers. These Archetypes are going to be familiar to fans of superheroes and include things like physical powerhouse, blaster, flyer, and gadgeteer. This section gives you additional Power and Quality dice as well as several more abilities. Finally, it gives you your second Principle.
The last major section is your character’s Personality. Are they generally pretty cheerful? Naive? Jaded? This section determines both your character’s status dice as well as the ability your character can still perform if they’re ever taken out of a scene. This section also lets you determine a unique quality about your character based on their backstory to make them stand out – if you’re familiar with Fate, consider this the “High Concept” for your character and is a good place for something that makes your character stand out – they offer things like “Wealthy CEO” or “Veteran” for some of their characters, but I think that this is a great place for more ineffable qualities to be expressed as well; Captain America’s “Man Out of Time” or Spider-Man’s “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility” or even Tony Stark’s “I am Iron Man.”
This section is also where you choose your final two abilities. Everything that you’ve chosen through the Power Source and Archetype step are Green and Yellow abilities. These two selections are your Red abilities (see my previous article for more detail on the GYRO system) which are tied to the Power and Quality umbrellas that were discussed above. These are generally your most powerful (or at least your most dangerous) abilities that you can only bring out when the chips are down and things are looking grim.
There’s a few final steps including a chance to change or update some decisions that you made in previous steps (appropriately called Retcon), figuring out your Health and filling out the specifics of what your character looks like, but you’ve gone through the majority of the character creation process at this point.
Ben Erickson
