Character Templates, by Genre

[brother_dour]

One of the Kickstarter stretch goals I'm working on right now are character templates.  Since Sin Nombre has no classes, these templates will just serve to help people who do not want to go off the grid to build certain common, iconic characters.  You know, kind of a , "Want to build a (character class)? Then look at these skills!" sort of thing

Comments

[blackpaladin]

Despite the fact that a lot of people didn't like the system, D&D4e's concept of "Roles" and "Power Sources" can be a great boon here.

For those not familiar with the concept, a character's "Role" is their basic function on a combat team. The roles listed in 4e are Controller, Defender, Leader and Striker. Controllers inflict negative status effects on your enemies and inflict AoE damage, Defenders are built to absorb damage, Leaders (arguably the least well-named; I would have gone with "Support" or something similar) heal and grant positive status effects on your teammates, and Strikers are built to inflict large amounts of damage, usually to one enemy. (If you want to get more detailed, you can split the Striker up into Melee-focused ("Scrapper") and Ranged-focused ("Blaster").) These are pretty independent of genre, and if you expand the utility outside of strictly combat (which is where I think a lot of people, including me, felt that 4e fell down), you can add more: "Face" and "Sneak" come immediately to mind, though that in and of itself could be a whole other discussion.

A character's "Power Source" is the flavor of their abilities. In 4e, the power sources were Martial, Divine, Arcane, Primal and Psionic (each of those should be relatively self-explanatory). Power Sources are going to be a lot more genre-specific, e.g., in a comic-book universe you might have Natural, Magic, Mutant, Science and Tech/Gadgets. (Can anyone here tell that I used to play City of Heroes? ;-) ), while a super-spy genre might depend more on the Bureau in which the character was trained. That's where your setting flavor is really going to shine through.

Obviously, neither of these are meant to be all-encompassing, or completely granular. (Batman, for example, is a Natural character who also uses a lot of Gadgets.) But they're good starting places. So when trying to think of essential character archetypes, try thinking in terms of Role and Power Source (or Origin, or whatever term you want to use for it). Not only will you find that you'll come across templates that you originally missed, but you'll also find that you can eliminate certain templates and list them as variations of others (to make your list more efficient).

[brother_dour]

Interesting. I think I'm on the right track, then, because my RPG kind of glosses over the origins of abilities. That seemed the best way to make it universal. So you could have two characters with the ability to cast flames from their hand, but the differences are in the world details: the guy from the steampunk campaign would be a gadgeteer who built an awesome little flamethrower into a glove, but his swords and sorcery counterpart is using magic, of course. They would have the same power on their character sheet, though. But I think there is room for the Support and Face-type characters in several of the genres.

(As an aside, I played CoH for awhile, too. I had a tanker with fire powers named Daisy Cutter :D )

[blackpaladin]

> the guy from the steampunk campaign would be a gadgeteer who built an awesome little flamethrower into a glove, but his swords and sorcery counterpart is using magic, of course. They would have the same power on their character sheet, though.

The Mutants and Masterminds system (specifically 2nd and 3rd Editions) do a great job of making superpowers simply a list of effects, and the "flavor" is whatever you want, some of which can be advantages or flaws, such as a flamethrower glove that can be taken away or might malfunction, some of which are simply flavor (whether it shoots from your hands or your eyes, etc.). If you're trying to build a system that concentrates almost wholely on "what the ability does" rather than "how it does it or what it looks like," I'd definitely suggest looking to that system for inspiration. M&M3e is also the system that's being used in the current iteration of the DC Heroes RPG.

[brother_dour]

Now that you mention that game, I remember the professions from D20 Modern. I probably need to dig out my copy of that as well...