Building an effective and Successful PC

[Thunder King]

Building an Effective and Successful PC

 

Disclaimer: Before you go on, remember this; play what you want. Build a PC you enjoy playing as, or think you will enjoy playing as, and run with it. Doesn't matter what other people have, it matters what you want. This advice is for turning your idea into a PC that people want to be in threads with. Not for telling you what to play.

 

What does it mean to be effective? That's an interesting question, really. In a certain sense, it means to be good at what you want to be good at. It means that if it's your job to hit things, you hit them hard. If it's your job to figure things out, you can do that. Whatever your job is, you should be good at it. Since this game is point based and your PC should be meeting caps, effective is only relative to what you're trying to do, not what you can do.

 

So, what about being successful? Getting into threads seems a fair measure of success. In general, the more successful PCs (the ones with lots of threads), are the ones who end up in group threads, and the ones that end up in group threads have something to contribute to that group.

 

First, I'm going to talk about character sub-genre. Think about your favorite comic book super heroes. They all swim in circles with other heroes. You have your street level heroes, who focus on investigation, gangsters and drugs, for example.

 

Which of the following character sets would you expect your PC to fight alongside?

 

Daredevil/Moon Knight/Green Arrow

Spider-Man/Luke Cage/Iron Fist

Superman/Thor/Wonder Woman

Blade/Ghost Rider/Morbius/Blue Devil/Etrigan/Dr. Strange/Dr Fate

Silver Surfer/Nova/Green Lantern

 

There's another way of looking at it. Which of the following is your character most likely to go after?

 

A non-powered or low-powered mafia boss who rules the streets(Kingpin/Penguin/Tombstone)

A villain who'd be tough to stop without any powers. (Green Goblin/Killer Croc/Captain Cold)

A high level threat that threatens the entire world (General Zod/Loki/Ares)

A magical villain or monster (Vampires, Demons, Eldritch Horrors)

A threat from space that could destroy huge swathes of the galaxy/universe (Thanos/Darkseid/Galactus)

 

The differences here are simple. The first category are street level. They rarely fight powered super-villains, and if they do, they're almost as dangerous without their powers. The second category dip in to the first category and the third, handling both street crime and the bigger stuff. The third category consists of the heavy-weight heroes. The ones who step up to global threats to the common populace. The fourth category handle magical or horror themed threats, and the fifth category deal with threats in space.

 

Think about those heroes, and what sort of allies they could use against the villains in question. You need to occupy a certain sub-genre in order to 'fit in' naturally with those characters. No one wants to read stories about a hero who easily stomps all of his villains, or a hero who can't even touch a villain.

 

If your PC fits in a sub-genre (street level, cosmic, horror, magic), odds are good people in that niche will eventually want to be in threads with your PC.

 

So I guess what I'm trying to say is this; Take your idea. Whatever that idea is. Find a type of situation you want that character to fit naturally in, and build your PC with that idea in mind. You can take many different archetypes and ideas and fit them into several sub-genres of superheroes if you try.