Alpha goes with the time-honoured tradition of characterisation which supposes that, once you’ve described your heroic persona in story terms, you will need to define him or her in statistical terms. The basic elements of this numeric definition are Attributes and Skills.
Attributes
These are the core abilities of your character. Alpha uses six of them:
- Strength: a general indication of the character’s physical power and also his ability to employ it effectively.
- Agility: a measure of speed, dexterity and coordination.
- Fitness: representing mental and physical toughness and stamina.
- Intellect: very roughly representing IQ, learning ability and the capacity for a character to reason things out.
- Wits: your imagination, common sense, and ability to think on your feet.
- Anima: the character’s connection to the social and meta-physical environment.
Skills
In addition to Attributes, characters will also be given a range of Skills, each rated by the “Skill Level”. As a general rule, skill level equates to a level of professional experience and certification. A higher skill level will often command more professional respect, seniority and pay than the same skill at a lower level.
Skills range widely in their application, so we’ll save details for a later date. Suffice to say that each is broad enough to be useful in a range of situations, yet specific enough to give flavour to your hero.
I don’t know about you, but personally, as a roleplayer, I like to add a good bit of history to my characters, to help the other players know why my character’s there, why he is like he is, and what he’s done to get to this point. However, my preference is strictly personal. Of all the other roleplayers, I believe only Duncan and Oliver have also bothered with character histories.
I tend to agree – the article on the character stats is really focused on the rules-bit of the game. For me, it goes without saying that players should build character backgrounds and characterise their hero in detail, in addition to the rules stuff.
While writing the game rulebook, how do you think I should approach encouraging this characterisation?
Hmm… I would imagine that encouraging players to add an in depth character history by letting them know that it would add more humanity to the character, and make him seem more ‘real’ rather than just a set of writing on a sheet of paper. Or so a friend once told me. For instance, in Pathfinder, I detail that Carangal has lost all of his memory prior to joining the temple, and hopes that his good deeds will help him regain them. That’s just an example however. I always believe that a character will never be more than writing on a sheet of paper until you add a backstory.
In the past, my character history has ended up covering 6 pages, and taken weeks to write up!
If you are saying that you write up the hero with such descriptions of amazing dexterity, and a weak bladder, and then turn that into hard stats for gaming, I find that a little difficult to set up. Most players would find it hard to create a write up of a hero with negatives, or average abilities, and then turn that into a number of stats to run in the game.
I think the rolling of stats, or the selection of a set group of pre-existing stats is the easier way to go. THat way the hero can be quickly created stat wise, and then the backgroud written in to match the rolls – or the results of the rolls slotted in to match what a background says.
The Marvel Super heroes game used to have stats described as ‘Amazing’, average, etc, but the stats were rolled to create them in a character building process, from which you helped build the type of ability the hero would have. It was different having stats called amazing, and great, but seems a little unweildy when trying to sort out stat rolls.
Ian
Well, I’m opting for a dice-rolling process for creating Attributes. My feeling is that we don’t pick our genetics, and heroes are all the more heroic when they are not perfect. I also think that, combining the character creation with Life Paths, players can build a pretty cool character background story along the way.