Character Creation

Here’s a summary of character creation (the details follow):

1. Come up with a character concept.
2. Pick a Background from the list or create your own. It gives you some of your Skills, a Trick, and how your character gets their material goods.
3. Pick an Origin. This might be a species, a culture, a socioeconomic class. It gives you two more Skills and one Complication. In some cases, you get an extra level of Wealth instead of a Skill.
4. Choose an additional Skill, Trick, and Complication representing your character’s personal capabilities, limitations, etc.
5. Choose your initial gear.
6. If we’re using Kits, pick a Kit.
7. If we’re using Relationships, choose your initial relationships.
8. Figure out your character’s motivation.
9. Now for tactical combat. Choose your Class. Your Class defines the main way you interact in combat and most of your powers.
10. Choose your Role. Your Role determines what your job is in combat: protecting teammates, healing and supporting, spread damage, single-target damage, controlling enemies.
11. Pick a Feat. Feats allow you to customize or personalize your character.

Background

A Background represents your character’s primary area of expertise. Here’s what it gives you mechanically:

1. A list of Skills that you have.
2. Any items it’s logical for you to have based on the Skills.
3. A starting Wealth score of 0, 1, or 2 (trading off against fewer skills.
4. A Trick: a special thing you can reliably do, without having to roll, by spending an Action Point.

You can either pick one of the pre-defined Backgrounds, or make up your own.

Creating your own Background

Keep in mind: don’t minmax, don’t just pick a bunch of skills that come up almost every session. Some of your skills should be more niche.

To create your own background, first come up with a brief background concept to describe what your character did mainly before they got into the adventure.

There’s a few examples of how it might go for a Goldsmith, a Lawyer, or an Alien World-scout on p. 24 of the book.

Once you have that, answer each of the following questions and write down the Skills/Wealth increases it says (Wealth starts at Penniless [0]):

1. How does your character acquire physical goods? If your answer to this is “with money”, increase your Wealth by one. Otherwise write down a Skill.
2. Who can your character call on when times are tough? If your answer is “they buy their way out of trouble” or “they fall back on the hired help”, increase your Wealth by one. Otherwise write down a Connections Skill (a skill about finding a particular person or somebody with a particular skillset).
3. What primary Skill do you need most to perform the tasks necessary to your background? Write it down.
4. What Skill supports your primary Skill? This Skill is often, but not always, a knowledge Skill. Write it down.
5. What social or business Skill do you need to get ahead? Write it down.
6. What other Skill do you have from your Background that hasn’t been mentioned yet? Write it down.

Finally, considering all the Skills you just picked, name one circumstance involving one of those Skills where you can always succeed. That’s your Trick.

Origin

Your Origin tells us where your character comes from. This might be a type of creature (“Troll”, “Protocol Droid”), a demographic (“Dwarven Peasantry”, “Middle-Class Suburbanite”), or the like. Discuss with the group and pick something in tone with the game.

Once you’ve named your origin, you pick two Skills and one Complication related to that Origin. If your Origin is wealthy, you can add one to your Wealth instead of taking one of the Skills.

Personalization

Choose an additional Skill, Trick, and Complication representing your character’s personal capabilities, limitations, etc.

Gear

Most things your character might have or encounter don’t have any direct mechanical effects, instead just having whatever narrative implications they have (having a keycard might let you thru the security doors, having a sword lets you roll your Swordmaster skill to fight people, etc.).

You start out with any tools your starting Skills require, and pick two more items to start out with, subject to group approval. Your character might have more stuff, but you’ll have to roll your Skills in play to find out.

In play, if you wish to acquire an item or declare that your character already has it, look to your Skills. If one of them is appropriate to the object, the GM will either accept that you have it, or ask you to make a Skill Roll to determine whether you have it.

In the course of play, you may also end up acquiring more remarkable items and items with mechanical effects. There’s a few pages discussing that stuff at pp. 28-30 of the book.

Kit

See p. 32 of the book.

Relationships

Each character has a list of relationships. Obviously these don’t have to be all the people your character knows, but these are the ones with a bit of mechanical weight.

The way you use them is: you spend an Action Point to have one of your relationships come in and change the situation. They might save you from immediate danger, give you a new lead when the trail’s cold, or just about anything else that changes in a big way what’s going on.

When you call on your relationships like this, roll a d6. On a 4-6 you get to choose which of your relationships arrives. On a 1-3 the GM chooses, and they have the option of adding a new one if they wanna introduce a new character. Regardless of who shows up, the GM plays them, as they always do the NPCs. Usually they should be mostly helpful if you get to choose who shows up; if the GM chose, they should usually also still be helpful, but with some darker intentions.

When you’re creating your character, choose one ally, one enemy, and one person that’s somewhere in between. In play, add characters to the list when they spark enough interest that you want them to be recurring.

Motivation

Just gonna quote the book itself:

Why is your character driven to do interesting things alongside the other characters? This step doesn’t have any mechanical weight, but it is not optional! You must have some reason for your character to be involved and interested and not just along for the ride. In Strike!, you must be prepared to take the initiative. Until you can answer that question, you are not done making your character!

Tactical Combat Details

Now there’s the tactical combat bits: your Class, your Role, and your initial Feat.

Before you get to that, you should know that reskinning of tactical combat mechanics is extremely encouraged. Your Class, Role, and Feats are like the skelton of your character, but the skin on top of those, the way you narrate them, can be anything that feels appropriate.

Outside of combat, things like Origins and Backgrounds are easy to create your own, so you’re expected to do so (or change existing ones). Classes are a lot more complicated, so instead of trying to create your own Class, you should just pick the best fit from the ones provided and reskin them to match your character. It’s not a lot of work, you just describe what your character is doing, maybe rename some of your powers.

For example, the Martial Artist might be a martial artist switching between different styles, a medieval knight using different weapons for different situations, a shapeshifter constantly switching from one form to another, or even a gang of Smurfs whose attacks differ depending on which one is taking the lead.

Obviously, your reskinning should fit the tone and setting of the game. A shapeshifter won’t fit in a realistic modern or historical game; a gang of Smurfs won’t work well in a serious game.

Class

Your class gives you all of your non-basic Attack Actions and most of your powers overall. It’ll be the most impactful choice for how you interact with the combat system.

As mentioned above, you can and often should reskin them, using the defined mechanics but describing your actions differently to better fit your character concept. Some classes do strongly lean toward either melee or ranged attacks.

Here’s the list of classes (parenthetical indicates the page number they start on and whether they’re melee, ranged, or either):

• The Necromancer (p. 101, M/R), who really comes online when enemies start getting Taken Out of the fight, bringing them back as undead minions, terrifying surviving foes, or regenerating HP when enemies are defeated. This class especially often warrants reskinning.
• The Duelist (p. 104, M), who picks one target, and sticks with it, hurting, harrying, and eventually destroying it. Then they pick a new target.
• The Archer (p. 106, R), a ranged attack specialist. They especially excel at soft area control: not preventing or controlling enemy actions, but punishing them with damage if they do what you don’t want them to. They can also choose to focus on superhero archer style trick arrows of various sorts.
• The Martial Artist (p. 108, M), whose gameplay focuses on switching between a variety of different stances that improve their melee basic attacks and give other passive benefits.
• The Warlord (p. 111, M/R), is the class for the person who wants to play a pure support character. They’re all about buffing and supporting their allies. Many of their attacks don’t do damage, instead letting an ally make an attack in addition to their other effects.
• The Magician (p. 113, R) is a wizard. They’re all about the big flashy encounter spells. There are three different types that have different thematically very cool variations limiting which of their spells they can use when.
• The Bombardier (p. 116, R) is all about AoE. They lay down a variety zones of hurt or help that don’t differentiate friends from foe.
• The Shapechanger (p. 119, M) has a variety of different animal forms. Most of them are good at moving around the fight and/or moving enemies around the fight. They are most appropriate to the kind of shapeshifter that picks a form appropriate to the fight and sticks with it. If you want to switch forms constantly, see the Martial Artist.
• The Summoner (p. 122, R, though some summons are M) is about summoning things. It has a lot of options (both in choice of which powers to learn and which to use), and is one of the more complex classes.
• The Buddies (p. 127, M and R) are about controlling two closely tied characters in combat and working together between your two characters. Out of combat you might choose to represent them with 2 kind of half characters or with a single set of abilities (one of them could even be a friendly NPC out of combat).

Role

Your Role defines your place on the team and your goals in combat. You pick it separately from your Class. Not every Class works great with every Role, but most Class/Role combinations do make sense, if they’re what you wanna go for.

There are five Roles:

• The Blaster (p. 131) spreads damage and effects across the battlefield.
• The Controller (p. 133) makes it hard for enemies to attack effectively.
• The Defender (p. 134) takes the heat for the rest of the group.
• The Leader (p. 135) helps keep everyone in fighting shape.
• The Striker (p. 136) focuses on bringing down a single target.

Team compositions aren’t really something to worry about: there’s no essential Roles, and doubling up on a Role won’t make the group less effective (and, if they’ve got different classes they’ll still play quite differently). The one big thing is that Blasters and Strikers speed up combat, while Leaders and Controllers slow it down (Defenders do both so it kinda balances out). So, the Roles people pick can affect how much time our fights take, but either way can still be fun.

Feats

Feats are a la carte bonuses that further customize your individual character’s combat abilities and can change your playstyle. You get 1 at character creation, and get another at each odd level (3, 5, 7, 9). They give a wide range of bonuses.

See pages 137-139 of the rulebook for your options.