Cortex Plus Design Diary 01: Looking Under The Hood (Character Creation)

One of the regular weekly posts that I intend to start making is going to be a RPG Design Diary. The intent is to look at various RPGs, analyze them, talk about my own RPG projects, and the like. Hopefully I'll create a least a couple of different completed projects out of all this, as well as providing insight into various game systems from my point of view.

The first topic I'm going to tackle is analyzing Cortex Plus, by Margaret Weis Productions, in an attempt to both better understand it myself and to help move myself towards a place where I can hack together a, for lack of a better term, “setting-less” version of the game that I can adapt to use in various different games in the future, in all sorts of settings.

I'm going to look at all the current applications of the Cortex Plus system that exist: Smallville, Leverage, Marvel, and the Dragon Brigade Quick start. Fair warning, the Dragon Brigade one is a short one short quick start product, so there isn't much meat to work with there. Also, I have not played either Smallville or Leverage; so my knowledge of them will be purely book knowledge, not applied knowledge.

The above links are mostly to RPGGeek.com pages for the games, because the current MWP website doesn't have much content on it, and what is there is basically for Marvel.  About the only content on the site for other games are the forums and a downloads page.

I'm going to start off at the place that most people start when they are looking at a RPG: Character Creation. Let's take a look at how each system handles creating characters, and then I might talk about what I want character creation in my version to look like.

Dragon Brigade – The quick start uses pre-made characters. Nothing really to say there about the process of creating characters. The actual Dragon Brigade game is not out yet; just the one PDF(which you can get ahold of here). I'll analyze the various traits and things that make up the character sheets in each game in a later post; so I'll have more to say then.

Marvel – This one does not really have any sort of organized or codified character creation system in the book. Margaret Weis Productions basically provides you with all the various pieces of characters in the GM section of the book. They basically say, decide in your mind what you think a character and his power level would be like, then assign dice and powers to fit that, and just don't be a jackass about min-maxing.  Oh and MWP's download page has a PDF of a random character generator if you want to just roll random dice to make your hero.

Leverage – To create your Crew member in Leverage you are basically picking various items from lists or groups and assigning them at each of seven distinct steps. The first thing you do is detail your Background. This is open ended, you basically write down various bits of info about your past, personality, experience, and the like. Then you pick your Primary and Secondary roles from the list of crew member types; and assign a d10 and a d8 to them respectively.

Next you take a pool of die types to each of your Attributes, which are things like Agility, Strength, and Willpower. After that you come up with a Distinction, which is a short phrase that describes your character. Then you play through and introductory session called the Recruitment Job. In this you end up assigning the rest of the character traits, like Specialties, which are kinda like extra bonuses in focused skill areas and Talents, which are kinda like powers/feats.

There is also an option for skipping the Recruitment Job and just assigning all that as well. I do like the idea of the Recruitment Job, it plays in to another RPG concept that I'm working on. This also really feels as close to old school RPGs as any of the Cortex Plus games; in that you do a step by step process and pick from lists and the like.

Smallville – I'm just going to go ahead and say that this is one of my favorite character creation systems.....EVER! It is really cool, tons of fun, and makes great, interconnected characters. The system is dubbed Pathways. You use a big sheet of butcher paper, or a white board, or a battle mat or something like that and end up drawing out this big diagram that shows how the PCs, NPCs, locations, etc. are all connected. It is a lot of fun to do and makes a very useful tool both for characters to connect to each other and the GM to build future plots.

You start off by making a few decisions. Where is your setting, at least initially for the character creation? What time period are you in? How far along the Pathways are you going to go when making characters? The last one is a kinda Rookies vs. Veterans feel determiner for the game.

You then consult a chart that is basically a 5x5 table (or 5x9 if you go all the way to the Identity lifepath stage by going for more of the Veteran feel). Each row represents a different stage of development that you characters (called Lead in Smallville) goes through. The first five that you will always go through are Origin, Youth, Focus, Road, Life Changing Event. The remaining four that are optional at this point are Priority, Modus Operandi, Motivation, and Identity. The columns represent different groupings of backgrounds, priorities, and social stratum that your character will be in and move through. For instance the options on Origin are Rich, Ordinary, Gifted, Strange, Alien.

Moving through the Pathways chart is a fairly easy to understand method. You go down one row and can choose to slide left or right one column if you desire to do so. This has both positives and negatives in my opinion. The positives are that you have easy guidelines to follow, your choices will fit thematically together fairly well, and you won't be jumping into something that will give you random bonuses that you don't need. But it can also come across as limiting; where you literally may find it impossible to choose 2 or 3 of the options at the next step below you. (Side note: The book does say that you can jump to any column if your group decides that's how they want to do things; but they suggest doing it the normal way)

Looking ahead to wherever you have determined your stopping point to be and planning backwards before you build forwards can definitely be a big help if there is a specific goal you are shooting for. Also, the names of the different stages you will pick are usually quite descriptive; but not all encompassing. Sure according to the chart you can't go from Rich to Outsider mechanically; but that doesn't mean you can't work those themes into your roleplay.

At each of these stages you will also be doing two things. One is drawing and making connections on the Pathway Map, which was that big diagram you draw on the butcher paper. The second is adding and increasing mechanical stats and abilities on your character sheet. An example of adding to the Pathway Map is that at the Origin step everyone draws a square and puts their Lead's name in it. Then all the squares are connected to all the other squares with arrowed lines. Then each player connects their Lead square to a new Circle with a line; the Circle represents an NPC. You'll keep doing this at each step; adding in new NPCs, Locations, and Assets; connecting them all to each other, and defining the nature of the connecting relationships.

You also increase the various traits on your character sheet at each step. For instance the Geek lifepath step lets you add in a new Distinction, step up a Distinction, and step up a Relationships, Asset, or Resource. Stepping up means raising the die type associated with it, i.e. from a d4 to a d6. Don't worry that you don't know what any of these different types of traits and things in game terms means, I'll be analyzing what is on each of the character sheets for each game next; and then going into talking about my ideas for a setting-less character creation system that uses the best of all of them.

Till next time, thanks for reading and happy gaming.

Design Diary 02:  Components of Character, Part 1