Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Sci-Fi Wednesday! - Character Creation

Eye candy brought to you by "Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe".


Races

I'm not going to knock the Sci-Fi Companion. It's a very detailed book full of a lot of good information. However, I don't want to cherry pick rules from it and DTotSL. I need to keep this down to the Core Book and one supplement.

DTotSL handles aliens as either starting with a free attribute bump instead of a free edge, or using the rules and races in the SWDEX (perhaps with some name changes). 

So what kind of races will I use? Well let's look at the common trope aliens of 80's sci-fi. You'll probably recognize many of these as the better races to come out of Star Trek.
Humans
Space Elves (Anybody seen my Vulcan?)
Lizard-men (Oh my Gorn!)
The Vermin-Men (I luvs me some Jawas)
Cat-Men (I should say "beast-men" since I don't want to go through the entire animal kingdom and make obvious human-earth animal hybrids)
Squid-Men
The Big Strong Brutes (the Sc-Fi Companion has the Yeti which is brilliant, so I'll have to go a different direction)
The sexy Aliens (Twi'leks meet Orions and have a wet T-shirt contest)
The Bugs
The Greys (or something that would equate to definitely not a human/animal hybrid)
And Robot-men. Players won't be playing combat models unless they purchase upgrades, basically an arcane background where powers represent system upgrades.


Hindrances

Any physical Hindrances cannot be fixed with cybernetics. Doubting Thomas will have to go since the supernatural isn't a big enough part of my setting. Which reminds me of that episode of Buck Rogers where there was a space vampire. That episode hurt my feel-bads.


Edges

Champion, Holy/Unholy Warrior, and Wizard just don't fit the setting. I don't see the need to create any Professional Edges since many of the character tropes can already fit into reskinned edges. Deep space scouts would use a reskinned Woodsmen edge, etc.


Arcane Backgrounds 

I see using three different types of ABs: AB Psionics, AB Cybernetics, and AB Upgrades (Robots).

The Psionics AB would operate the way it is stated in DTotSL. One of the key features I like is that your Psionics skill can't be increased after character creation. It represents your maximum Psi-Potential (like a P12 in Babylon 5). The available powers will be Beast Friend, Blast, Blind, Bolt, Boost/Lower Trait, Burst, Confusion, Detect/Conceal Arcana for free, Dispel (Psionics), Farsight, Fear, Fly, Havoc, Healing, Mind Reading, Pummel, Puppet, Slumber, Stun, Succor, and Telekinesis.

AB Cybernetics and Upgrades would essential operate the same way. Both would be based off of AB Magic and would use power points, but in this case the power points represent their internal battery system that is tapped to energize these upgrades. It would use the Weird Science mishap chart. The available powers will be Armor, Blast, Bolt, Boost Trait (Strength or Agility, self only), Burst, Damage Field, Darksight, Entangle, Environmental Protection, Farsight, Fly, Invisibility, Light, Smite (self only, unarmed damage), Speed, and Wall Walker.

Next week will either be a Planetary One Sheet, or maybe some eye candy.