Character Creation

[Narrator]

Character Creation
This post is intended to help you as you're creating a character to join into the XU game. It's not possible to cover every topic, so feel free to PM a moderator if you have some specific question that isn't covered here.



Power:
Putting together a character's mutant power is probably the trickiest part of the overall character creation process. Coming up with a unique power is difficult enough, and then you must decide how accomplished the character is with the power in question. Below you'll find some quick tips to help you with both problems.


Creating a Power: They say there are no new ideas left in stories, just old ones with new window dressing. This often seems true with powers in the superhero genre, decades of superhero stories have covered just about every circumstance imaginable. Don't feel that you have to create a totally unique, never before seen power for your character. Instead, focus on making the way your character manifests or puts to use the power different enough to stand out. Both the moderators and players will always be happy to help someone come up with a power, so don't be afraid to toss some ideas around in the OCC forum.

Some of the 'standard' mutant powers are things like, Telepathy, Telekinesis, Flight, Energy Projection, and Shapeshifting. Each of these powers may seem generic, but it's easy to give them a twist. For instance, imagine a Telepath who makes thoughts appear around her as visual or audio phenomena. Or a Flying character who actually can just step on the air as if it were solid. A Telekinetic character might have powerful lines of visible force connecting him to the object he's moving, or a Shapeshifter might have a body that is a colony of symbiotic organisms. It's a good bet that with some time looking at the powers of published mutants and other superheros, that some interesting and more importantly fun idea will come to you. And sometimes a “plain” power is perfectly fine. Not every power has to be super complicated.

Also considering making the ability more of a condition than a power. Perhaps a Psychic character becomes an entity of pure thought when using the power, or is always existing simultaneously in the physical and astral universes. A telekinetic might project an image of herself to the object being manipulated, and Energy Projectors have a long history of being elementals, that is, being made of the energy they project. Tweak your concept, have some fun with it, and you'll find you've got something that sets you apart.
These lists can also be helpful for inspiration: List of Superpowers and a whole Superpower Wiki


Power Control and Strength: The college aged characters generally have put behind them the awkward early days of learning how to use their power. Unless a power is designed to never be fully under control, it should be easy and natural for the character to invoke and use in normal situations. Powers may still go awry in stress situations or when some strange occurrence messes with a character's abilities, but by and large a character's power is a talent they have a high degree of control over. That doesn't mean that the characters can do anything with their power, there can still be room to grow as far as discovering new ways to use or manifest the power, if that's something you're interested in. As far as raw strength, XU characters should be low-tier X-Men level. The XU student characters are just now coming into the maturity of their powers.
The high school ages XI characters fall more into the category of trying to get their powers under control and stop breaking things with their telekinesis or setting their desk on fire accidentally. They don’t have to be entirely helpless and learning a certain measure of control will probably be the very first thing they do, but they should be a bit more clueless than college aged characters and more prone to accidents.



Background and Personality:
This next post should not be taken as any kind of hard and fast guideline, but rather simply some hints to help you create a character that will be a lot of fun to play.


Personality: Playing a game via forum is a different experience than many tabletop games. Combat does not take a central role, even within an action scene. Much of the game is played out via dialogue. For that reason, consider making a character that will want to engage with others, either positively or negatively. Characters that stand alone on the sidelines are likely to give you less chances to play. If you do make a character who is a bit of a jerk, or otherwise interacts with others negatively, make sure you differentiate between antagonizing the other characters, and antagonizing the other players. The former makes for interesting interactions, the latter makes the game less fun.


Biography: Try to create a character who is neither perfect nor horribly flawed. Too many terrible events in a character's past can make for a weird caricature of an abuse victim. Such characters are hard to take seriously, and you'll find that few people will play as if they really appreciate the character's bad situation, as it's too over the top to really respond to properly. By the same token, a character that had a perfect, happy, privileged existence may seem a bit boring. Everyone's life has a few bumps, and your characters should be no exception.

If you're going to make a character who's had a traumatic past, try to stick to one big trauma, this will be easier for the other players to remember and respond to in their interactions with your character. Also, try to have your character either dealing with the trauma, or able to push it aside and not let it completely cripple them. Playing a character whose trauma has rendered them non-functional may be fun and interesting for a short while, but in the long term it'll feel like a straight jacket.

Finally, give your character a reason to have come to XU. Being that the school is a university, and a special one at that, some students will have as their reason that they need the facilities of the school to be safe, or that their parents insisted. But you may find that you have more fun, and more to do if your character has some specific goal, such as joining an X-Team, completing a normal major, or getting a technical education in the amazing science and technology that X-Corp has available. Think of this goal as a plot hook that will help you get things moving when you're not sure what your character should be doing or who they would want to talk to. Such goals are an excellent reason to have your student character make a friend of one of the faculty, after all, it's quite common to bond with a faculty member as an advisor and mentor in college.
For high school aged students this might not necessarily be as big a deal since they’re a bit more railroaded in life and to them Xaviers is a bit like a boarding school that they’re send to. But that still leaves some room as to whether they want to be there or not and if so why.

In general, create a biography that describes the past of a person you would like to play. But with each bit of information you create, ask yourself if that will make the game more or less fun for you, and try to tweak things so that you're creating a character that will be as much fun as possible. Don't go crazy with biographies that involve multiple alien abductions, but don't worry too much about realism. It is after all a cinematic, comic-book universe, there is a lot more wiggle room when it comes to strange or coincidental events.