First time HERO GM

For no reason in particular I decided to detail this player and the character creation involved.

My brother, for reasons I haven't psycho-analyzed, has a tendency to make a martial arts type character whenever super hero games are rumored to exist. As I noted last entry, I don't always agree with my brother on what is cool. That is to be expected. When some mentions a super hero RPG I think of things like Spider-man, Superman, the Flash, Iron Man, and Captain America. Aparently he thinks of ninjas.

Luckily for me as the GM, he was very proactive in constructing his character background. As a GM I had laid out some ground rules for characters so that no one would come in with a character that didn't fit with the rest of the concepts. We are playing a Super Heroic game (note the emphasis). I said everyone would have a secret ID and a Code vs Killing. It was going to be a start out campaign in which everyone wouldn't be very well established in their hero roles. Daniel knew this and came up with some great stuff.

He wanted his character to be from a ninja clan that was well known for its assassins. Huh??? you might ask. Ah, but he played to genre strengths beautifully when he said he wanted to have received the training but then realize that he didn't want to be such. His character's reason for patrolling the city and saving lives instead of taking them was to try to change the negative image of his clan. The premise was brilliant, I thought. Of course, it wasn't without the hiccups.

He wanted to base it off of something he had seen on some anime. Anime in my opinion doesn't mix well with my idea of american comic bookiness. Here was the first significant hurdle to the game. I resolved to let him do as he pleased as I didn't want to legislate anyone out of being able to have fun. Instinctively, I wanted to tell him to get a new avatar for his concept and it took a bit of self control to let him carry on with it.

I wanna take a little side trip here to sing the praises of the Hero system. The creation process is one of the few that encourages one to have a complete character by the time the process is over, not just a bunch of numbers on a sheet of paper. Walking through each of the three character builds I did, I found it singularly impressive how hard it was to make a character without having a good idea of where they had been and what they were like. Disadvantages are an ingenious aspect of Hero!

As my brother talked with me about his ninja man, we were able to narrow and hone some of the ideas he had conjured. His character, Tristan, was incredibly gifted. The elders saw that he had advanced training and could master difficult techniques far easier than the run of the mill candidates. He was the next Great One. This naturally earned him the enmity of his older brother, Haku who felt he had rights being of a higher birth order.

As his training advanced, he was permitted to accompany squads as they under took contract missions for the clan. One such mission was overseen by his father. Things did not go well and they returned unsuccessful due to incompetence among the squad. His father's life was forfeit. This began to color Tristan's thinking regarding his vocation.

Eventually he had enough and made up his mind to escape. He finally had the lead on one assignment to execute a wealthy american businessman who was visiting Japan. As the squad was accomplishing their goal, Tristan doled out the assignments for after the hit and then went to ensure his pointman had eveything under control. Our hero in waiting arrived just as the killing blow was about to be delivered, which he interrupted, knocking out his own man. He then made an offer to his target, "Get me out of the country and I will be able to spare your life."

With that, my brother landed his character at odds with his former clan and in the campaign city. Everything in his background seemed pretty seamless (except some of the powers he wanted to emulate from the anime. He ended up changing things a bit after some sessions of play anyway.) The character palys ninja-like being very aloof and distant, usually only meeting up with the others in the group when duty calls. He is also pleasing from a GM standpoint because he has hunteds and rivals which make for great idea fodder. Tristan is pretty logical and a good detective so he is a goo done to dump clues on and see where he takes them. Every once in a while the old powergaming cockiness creeps back in and there is some smack talking and overconfidence, which GMs will never complain about. Definitely a good one to have in the game.