Space, The Final Frontier

As a GM, I dread character creation sessions. They are extremely useful for a group to go through together, brainstorm character ideas and create a functioning group cohesion but I always dread that the players will get bored of filling up a sheet with numbers or flip the table out of frustration from not being able to have as badass a character as they want.

As a player, I look forward to these sessions immensely. Although I had a good idea of what type of character I’d like to play, I thought I’ll try to do something different this time around. I’ve been chatting with a fellow club member over the past few weeks and mentioned that I thought it would be great if we could have our characters know each other before the events of the game.

They have no number

Usually, when players are making their characters, people lean on making their backstories in isolation to one another. I wanted to go the opposite route and connect my ex-soldier with the captain. I wanted to play a character whose main trait would be loyalty but I can’t create that without having a strong tie to the groups’ central character: the captain.

Fortunately, my friend agreed and I went into the session with the assumption they have both served together. At the beginning of the session I only had the idea of a soldier with expertise in firearms and a limited form of telekinesis. This all came from just hearing about the setting of Stars Without Number and the available character classes. Out of the three available: Warrior, Psychic and Expert, there was an option to take two as partial choices which meant you’d get limited benefits from the two classes. While I was originally going for a Warrior/Psychic, the GM informed us he’s going to use special heroic rules which allow for one full class and a partial one. That served my purposes perfectly.

The captain was also a partial Psychic. It was mentioned that on his home planet, psychics were looked down upon and marginalised. They were blamed for the destruction of inter-planetary society, they couldn’t hold official positions and most people didn’t want to have anything to do with them. When I heard this, I decided that my character had a difficult childhood, was abandoned, had to live on the street and joined the army while hiding his telekinetic skills. At some point during our service, the captain found out about his psychic abilities and helped him gain a better control over them. This played well with his loyalty towards the captain and served as the main reason why he left the military.

During our last military mission, the captain faced a difficult decision where he could use his psychic abilities to save his unit and many other combatants from certain death but risk being outed as a psychic in the process. The lives of his soldiers were more important than his own, he used his abilities and came back as a hero… but the higher ups now knew his secret. Due to his family being part of the planet’s nobility, he was honourably discharged and faced social exclusion. My character followed him and never looked back.

In contrast to this, we have a full Psychic from a planet that had a “wizards’” academy in our group. While the two of us have limited access to one psychic discipline (telekinesis and precognition, respectively), he’s got access to all disciplines. From what I gathered, telekinesis and biopsionics were mentioned but it was difficult focusing on other players’ choices as I was filling in my own sheet.

The other two characters in our group are an engineer who found a mech suit and a pilot with a criminal past. Both my character and the engineer are primarily ranged combatants but as I took Gunslinger as a Focus and he did Sniper, we complemented each other well. The system allows you two picks of what’s called a Focus which gives you additional capabilities. I had to pick two and while going through the list, Gunslinger was an obvious choice, I also took Alert on a whim. Gunslinger allows my character to instantly draw a ranged weapon without spending an action while Alert makes him immune to surprise attacks and allows me to roll for Initiative twice. I was very happy with my choices.

pew, pew, pew

As for Skills, I took the most obvious ones that worked with my character concept, Shoot and Notice, but I also had a free choice so I decided I’d like to be useful to the group as a whole and ask if anyone took any healing skills. Apparently not, so I took Heal as my third choice. It turned out that my action oriented character had some medical training under his belt, probably from going to the infirmary so many times. I love getting to know my character more through the character creation process. The advantage of having only a rough idea for a character means that all those stray choices you get to allow you to flesh out your character in a direction you didn’t even think of.

The system had the option to roll for your character’s Attributes and Skills but as I prefer building a character, I didn’t take any of those and assigned points according to my judgement. When it came to Health, I thought I’ll get dangerous and just roll for it. I rolled a 1 on a d6. Even with bonuses, that gave my character a Health of 4. There were snickers around the table but when told I won’t survive a combat encounter, I reminded them I don’t need to survive, I need to shoot first. I may have a low Health, which might go up significantly as we level up, but with how I assigned my points, while other characters had an Attack Modifier of +0 or +1, I’ve got a +5 on my main weapon.

The only other thing I rolled for during this character creation session was a name. I’m glad there were tables for that because I’m terrible when it comes to coming up with names. I can’t say I remember specific numbers but the result was that my character is called Ian White.