Guide: Making Your Character
Your character is the person you are playing in Striker. This person is represented in Striker with a set of statistics, some listed personality traits and role-playing hooks, and whatever your imagination provides. To make a character, you follow some steps, including choosing a sophont (somewhat like a race), and a profession (such as engineer, soldier, or investigator). Then you invent a back story, and work out appearance and personality, with the aid of some suggested backgrounds and vocations.
The main thing to decide is what kind of science-fiction adventurer you want to play. You may go for one of the classic archetypes, such as the skilled pilot, the technical genius, the cyber-hacker, the wiseguy investigator, the war veteran, the lethal martial artist, or the secret agent. Alternatively, you may go for a combination, or go for something truly unusual. Its also possible that you haven’t quite decided yet.
The professions, vocations and backgrounds help you decide the kind of adventurer you want to play, while the sophonts give you differing physical characteristics and cultural flavour. One way of looking at this is: a sophont is what you are, and a profession is what you do.
This guide will take you through the creation of a Striker Character. For this we will use the standard template character sheet. Various excerpts will be shown from this throughout the guide. Also the featured characer, Jazz Randyboy is also written up on the Google Sheet Online Character Builder, and can be found here.
Step 1: Choose Your Sophont
The definition of sophont that we will use is: an intelligent (sapient) humanoid of some sort. You may belong to a species, such as human, cephene, clavian, freen, ronite or thot, or you may belong to a genetic modification such as a blink dog, canth, gly, mog, or xanji, or you may be an android or cyborg version of one of these.
The sophont establishes your appearance, culture and ancestry and in most cases, your background. Some of your physical traits are likewise determined.
Sophonts are summerised in the SRD, but more properly detailed in Chapter 2 of the Core Rulebook.
For the guide we will be building the freen known as Jazz Randyboy.
The "choose your Sophont step is therefore just to write "Freen" into the Sophont Box at the top as you can see here.
What you can also see are numbers in a whole lot of other boxes. So while this step is quick, we'll use this opportunity to explain a bit about what the rest of the numbers mean.
Experience & Levels
Experience points (XP) are gained by your character as they go on adventures, risking life and limb, and using their wits to get out of nasty scapes. Once they get enough experience points, they can advance in level, representing an advancement in their capability from this experience. At the start of the game you are on character level (CL) 1, and you have 0 XP, and need 300 XP to get to level 2.
You are awarded 5 ranks to distribute into your skills and 5 ranks to distribute into your techniques for each level that you gain. Awarding skill and technique ranks is the only purpose for levels.
Age, Personality & Alignment
Freen starting age is 15. Although we haven't filled anything in here (and there's no reason you actually have to), you can find Personality traits in Chapter 4 of the Core Rulebook. Personality traits are optional tags that you can add to your character to flesh out what they’re like as people. You can also use this area to decide your moral alignment (optional), which is described in the same chapter.
Striker has no layer of overarching capability that are often variously called abilities, stats, or attributes. This is why have stepped straight into the skills (I didn't forget)
Skills
Striker has 19 skills that every character has (the only ones that might not truly be common are the Cbt skills, Cbt-Melee and Cbt-Ranged, but Striker is an adventure RPG, so realistically, every character is probably going to have to resort to them sooner or later). The 19 skills go down the left hand column of the sheet. You can also see space for eight more skills: these are in case your characteer needs one or more from Cbt-Tactical, up to 9 Eng skills, and up to 5 Psi skills.
What's important to focus on here are the columns of scores shown in the excerpt:
The columns are:
- The start. The start is set by your sophont. This is the modifier on the skill when you have not added any ranks to it.
- Talent. When you roll up your character, you can choose 10 of the 19 skills to pick as your talents. You just tick the box and this means that you get +1 to that skill. So if you ticked the box in the first row, corresponding to the Health skill, you would get +1 to Health.
- R (ranks). You put the ranks you assign to the skill under the R column.
- M (modifier). The 4th column is the total modifier or just M. M is equal to the total of
- the number in the start column
- +1 if the box in the Talent column is ticked
- the number in the ranks column
- Resource Factors. The numbers following HX, EX and FX are your resource factors, which come from your sophont. These influence the following two columns.
- Resource Points. Your resource points are your health points (hp), energy points (ep) and focus points (fp), which are explained under the Resources heading below.
- Recovery Rates. These are the rates at which you recover lost resource points.
The modifier (M) is generally what you need for any skill checks or saves that your doing with your d20.
Resources
To the right of the skills Health,Energy,Focus are the three traits of Health Points (hp), Energy Points (ep) and Focus Points (fp).
The numbers in the boxes come from the modifiers in the skills above and from the three corresponding factors, such that:
hp = HX • (1 + M(Health))
ep = EX • (1 + M(Energy))
fp = FX • (1 + M(Focus))
Since freens begin the game with 3(HX), 2(EX) and 2(FX) and M(Health), M(Energy), M(Focus) are all 0, we end up with the scores 3, 2 and 2.
The recovery rates are given in terms of points per rest. A rest is nearly always completed by sleeping overnight. The recovery rates for hp is usually half of the rate of ep and fp. All three are given by:
hp/r = ½ • HX + M(Health)
ep/r = EX + M(Energy)
hp/r = FX + M(Focus)
Half of HX = 3 is 1 (when rounded down), which is why the rates are 1 hp per rest, 2 ep per rest and 2 fp per rest.
Step 2: Choose Your Profession
Every character has at least one profession. The profession is centred around an activity like combat, diplomacy, survival or engineering. The profession is really a pattern for choosing a sensible set of skills to put ranks in. Since everything is a skill in Striker, this helps you build a viable character, navigating you through all the choices.
As you choose a profession, you also choose a vocation. These are like your character’s main hobby, but as adventurers are a bit more determined than most, their hobbies are taken pretty seriously as well. Vocations represent a way to either add skills you think you need, or reinforce some skills that you have.
At every level, your profession grants 4 ranks to distribute to its pool of skills and 4 ranks to distribute to its pool of techniques. Your vocation similarly grants you ranks, but in this case it’s 1 rank for its skills and 1 rank for it’s techniques. On any level, you will have one profession and one vocation, but at each level you can change both (though most don’t).
Jazz Randyboy is to become a forensic scientist, so this means picking the Investigator (Analyst) profession and to back that up we'll give them the Hacker (gene) vocation.
This is a good time to set their talents, so we'll tick the following 10 boxes: Health, Focus, Perception, Resolve, Insight, Stealth, Science, Investigate, Persuade, and Society.