Detailed point-buy character creation no longer considered harmful
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| Me hating on point-buy and character builds after only playing D&D 4e |
I'm going to play a few sessions of Champions Now with Vivit, Jon, and Riku. In that game, players make a detailed character before play, using some extremely cumbersome point-buy interfaces and byzantine rules.
Thus I made a Champions Now character, and learned some of the rules to the game. This was a bit like pulling teeth at first, but now I am wholly on board.
Let's start with a brief review of Eero's article on the pitfalls of point-buy design, to wit:
- Optimization is encouraged but not taught
- Random access interface chokes up
- Point-pricing is arbitrary
- Flaws are externally motivated
- Most point-buys are dull
His discussion of these flaws leads into the "royal conundrum": why are we using point-buy at all?
In this blog post, I won't be able to answer all these questions fully, but I'll give them a go and talk about what I like about the game after making a character for it.
Briefly: my history with point-buy
I started roleplay with D&D 4e, which features point-buy stat distribution plus character builds through the choice of skills and abilities. ("Choose one from a list" is sort of the limit case of point buy, where everything costs the same and you only have enough currency for one item.) I didn't enjoy making characters, and I first bought, and then pirated, WotC's automated character builder.
I tried playing Eclipse Phase as a child. Character creation was so overwhelming difficult for us that we gave it up and just described our characters.
I played Sorcerer, and quite liked the point-buy there. Stats and demons are point-buy, but the list of options in each case is so short, and the ramifications are so obvious, that it's not cumbersome.
I read, but couldn't bring myself to play, Ars Magica, based on its cumbersome character creation rules involving lifepaths and point-buy.
I'm currently playing Melee on and off again with Vivit. Point-buy in that game is boring but satisfying; you have just a few decisions to make, and you can chart their effects with a spreadsheet.
I have intentionally shied away from any point-buy game more complex than Sorcerer -- until now anyway.
Champions Now chargen
Champions Now is a superhero game by Ron Edwards, in the Champions family of games, published in 2020 by Hero Games. It's a sort of anti-retroclone; Edwards has taken the things he liked about early editions of Champions and remade the game to focus on those features, adding, subtracting, tweaking, and changing just about everything along the way.
The pitch
Every game starts with a pitch by the GM: one sentence about powers, one sentence about real-world problems, and a location for play. You don't discuss the pitch, clarify it, or negotiate it. You take the pitch as it strikes you and use it as a jumping-off point to make your character.
This way, everybody makes characters with a subtle thematic unity to them. They may be very similar or very different; in either case, we're in classic superhero territory, and we're set up to author powerful themes in the game.
In my upcoming game, Jon's pitch is:
When I run my own game, my pitch is going to be:
- Powers are freedom, authority, and sovereignty -- power.
- The whole world is watching!
- Columbus, OH.
Think about either of these two sets of statements for a little while and I'm sure some four-color hero, new or invented, will come to mind.
Later in this post, or maybe a later post if I don't write quickly enough, I'm going to write up some villains using my pitch. (Villains use the exact same rules as heroes! There is no formal difference.)
The triangle
When you make up your character, you should picture a triangle. Its corners are labelled "person", "powers", and "problems". You can start with any corner but you should bounce back and forth between all of them until you've got a solid idea of your character.
All this is done prior to engage with the formal point-buy interface. Though you will probably move back and forth between your triangle and the interface as you dial-in the character's formal writeup.
Ok, what's good about this? -- You get a genuine character, not just a clobbering machine. By the rules, you have to. And you've got a good idea of what your character can do, so you aren't going to be totally at sea, dazed by the massive list of options, when you move to the point-buy interface. Thus you don't have a problem with the random-access interface mentioned by Eero above. Instead, you should move purposefully through the interface, looking for the powers that will fill out your character concept. If you're not doing that, you're not playing by the rules.
The point-buy interface
Your starting character is worth 200 points, 100 of which will be "earned" by taking Situations (formerly Weaknesses). You distribute these points between attributes, skills, and powers. I'm not sure where I heard this, but I've been told most characters should spend 100 points on attributes and 100 points on powers, unless you are doing something fancy and you know what it is. (The premade characters in the book, heroes and villains, obey this principle.)
Everything costs a different number of points. Presumably the costs aren't arbitrary, but who's to say, and who cares. You can lower the point cost of some things by taking disadvantages, and increase their cost by taking advantages. You can only take so many disadvantages though. (More on that later.)
As far as I can tell, you've got a limited number of starting points for two reasons: so you can start weak and get stronger, and so you have to get mechanically creative about how you express your character's diverse powers. (We'll see if I still agree with that after playing.)
Situations
Lots of games talk about weaknesses/disadvantages "paying for" or "balancing" advantages and extra points. In such a game you want to take the disadvantages that will least affect your character while earning you the most points, obviously. But not here. You take Situations because they're fun, grist for the mill, they're stuff you're excited about playing through. If you don't find yourself using one of your Situations, or you somehow resolve it in play, you should get a new one, or you won't have a real character to play!
That's a fantastic, refreshing view. I'm not trying to balance a spreadsheet -- well, I am, but only by tweaking things after the fact -- I'm signalling the kinds of problems I think I will enjoy facing. (Remember, one of the character triangles is labelled "problems"!)
So that solves another of Eero's problems; flaws are no longer externally motivated.
Powers and point rewards in play
The list of powers in the book is pretty long, though not nearly as long as in, say, Marvel Super Heroes. Each power is written in the most generic way possible, to cover as much ground as possible. So you don't have "ice blast", "psi blast", "fire blast", etc, all sitting next to each other; you just have "blast". (And if you want, that blast can be a melee attack too!)
These powers all cost different amounts, and their application can be really strange and limited. You will have to put serious time into statting up any hero more complex than 1938 Superman, who is strong, fast, durable, and can jump far. You're going to want to optimize your character -- I know I did -- but you can't, it's just not possible, there are too many variables. That's intentional.
As you play, you'll get a few more points every session, and you can freely restat your character between session. So you'll be getting stronger and more focused as you play. You'll figure out exactly how powerful you want to make your heat ray, and see if you care about maintaining that fiery aura as a formal effect or if you just want to look cool.
I haven't played yet, so I don't know if the following is true. In theory, the variety of builds is so wide, and starting point values are so low, that you can never make an unstoppable killing machine in session 0. You'll have to develop into one, and by the time you have the points, you will probably have bigger ambitions. You will probably want to play an actual character, rather than a simple machine.
Advantages, disadvantages, and the ratio
When you buy a power, you pay for it with points -- say, 5 points per 1d6 Blast, or 20 points for Awareness. You can buy formal advantages and disadvantages, which will change the price in a complicated way.
First, to be clear, you never need to buy dis/advantages; you should buy them if their related effects are so important to your vision of a power that you can't imagine it working without them. So for example if you think of your laser beam as something super destructive, but very simple, you probably want to make it a big Blast with no dis/ads. If you're in a one-off situation where you want to pierce through a wall, you can just say, "And my lasers crumble the bricks like feta!". You only need a special destructive advantage if you want to constantly crumble bricks every time you use the laser.
Each dis/ad has a point modifier associated with it. So for instance "No endurance cost" is an advantage with a modifier of 1; "Skill-based" (which means you have to make a successful skill roll to use the power) is a disadvantage with a modifier of 0.25.
Once you've bought up your characteristics, skills, and powers, you multiply their initial cost by 1 + sum of advantage modifiers. Write that down and label it "active cost". Then you divide that second value by 1 + sum of disadvantage modifiers, and write that down, and label it "character points". It's that final value, character points that you need to keep under 200 points. (If you use frameworks, points get complicated; you'll need to calculate active cost in two or three steps. Not more on this later.)
Oh, and after doing all that you have to divide your character points by your active cost, and the resulting ratio has to be less than 1.2. In other words, you can't take too many disadvantages.
This smells a lot like the phony "balance" concept point buy loves but for which I don't care a whit. So what gives, what's the point of all this math? Why did I have to use a spreadsheet to make my guy? (I found the basic template for this online but I souped it up so it could handle elemental control and multiform frameworks.)
Here again I'm just guessing at the answer based on my time building a character and reading comics. But I think it's a pretty good guess. Here goes.
In a superhero fight, limitations draw attention. A power that does anything and works without restriction is boring. In general, the more restricted the power is, the more interesting it is, and the more time we spend on it.
- I care a lot more about Spider-Man's web shooting when he's actively looking for a place to attach a web, and worrying about running out of fluid, than when the artist and writer don't pay attention to anchors or fluid capacity.
- I care a lot more about Rogue's deathly touch, which she cannot turn off and which appears as an active disability in her life, than I do about Parasite's.
- It's flat more visually interesting to watch somebody fight while maneuvering with effort through physics-inspired contortions and terrain, than when they brush aside obstacles like paper and instantly change direction mid-air. (I'm thinking of the final battle in Man of Steel for instance. Snoozeville! It may as well have taken place in a vacuum.)
But you can't make every single thing a character does limited, or else the character will not be very interesting, and will hog screentime. (I'm thinking of the first season or two of My Hero Academia, where Deku's power comes with such a drawback that you can't pay attention to anything else while he's using it. Fights in that cartoon (and probably the comic book, but I haven't read it) are much shorter than fights in most American superhero comic books.) Spider-Man can throw a punch without a problem. Rogue isn't the only character in the X-Men.
So I think there's a limit to your disadvantages, not so that you're game-mechanically balanced, but so that you are balanced in the attention economy of play.
The Golden God, Chevy Rogers
Here's the spreadsheet I made for my character:
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| The Golden God! Sorry it's hard to read |
You can read my initial conception of him here. It changed a lot while I was statting him up -- it got way more precise.
For instance, when I was coming up with his situations, I thought more about autistic masking, and decided that, when he's The Golden God, he's masking. So when he's a normal human, he's got a very flat affect and difficulty understanding social cues, but when he's transformed, he's magnetic, effusive, charismatic, etc. Of course he's also on an ego-trip the whole time! (Yeah, this is based on me.)
(While writing this I realized I had fucked up my situations; you can't have more than 50 points in a single category, and I had 55 points in Psych. I refactored to Physical, aka disability, lessened the points on ego trip, and added Chevy's wife, Rebecca, as a DNPC.)
I figured out what the different stats are for, and decided I didn't need a high strength if I had a powerful blast and a high body and defense. My robot is a little twinky, visually closer to Iron Man than Iron Monger, so he doesn't have to be swoll or lift heavy objects. He floats around serenely, majestically.
I softened some of my initial ideas for his powers into special effects -- for instance, the burst of golden light when he transforms is now just a special effect, it doesn't always blind everybody around him.
I hardened other ideas into advantages and disadvantages. For instance, when I was picturing his golden rays, I kept playing the line from Watchmen in my head: the light is taking me to pieces.
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| Poor bastard exploded! -- A panel from Watchmen |
I knew I wanted this power to have that horrible deadly cosmic power. I wanted to ignore (almost) all defenses. I wanted to take people to pieces. So I added the severe and piercing advantages. And just now writing this I realized I could afford destructive, literally take chunks out of people, if I lower my defense by 1 and add a no knockback disadvantage. Fine by me!
I'm not happy with 30 points for life support. That's a really big chunk of change and I'm not sure it's that important to his character. If I figure out that turning into the Golden God is unsustainable, in other words, costs endurance, then I could make life support Linked to it and bring the cost down some. But I'm not concerned about that right now.
Anyway, that's my guy. I think he's pretty cool, and I can't wait to play him. I've also statted up 5 villains for my future Champions Now game in the meantime. Maybe we'll talk about them later.
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