Character Creation

Character creation follows the standard point values, with a few additions and clarifications. This is a summary -- refer to Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game for the default rules.

Assign Starting Points

• Attributes: 7/5/3
• Abilities: 9/7/4
• Backgrounds: 5
• Techniques: 8
• Styles: 5
• Special Maneuvers: 7
• Willpower and Chi: Determined by primary Style (highest level style, or select a primary if more than one style is tied)
• Freebie Points: 18

During this first stage of character creation, Abilities and Techniques cannot exceed a rating of 3 and Attributes cannot exceed a rating of 5.

Freebie Points
Characters begin with a few more freebie points than in the default rules. However, these points are also spent at a slightly different rate. One problem raised by the default core rules is that freebie point costs and XP costs are different. This creates breakpoints during character creation that can be mostly removed by unifying the costs.

The new XP costs will be described in a later post. At this point, it is sufficient to note that the freebie point costs listed below match up to the XP costs.

As in the core rules, you can exceed a rating of 3 in Abilities and Techniques using freebie points.

When spending freebie points, use the following point costs in place of the costs in the core book (p. 39).

• Attributes: 6 per dot (12 per dot past 5?)
  
• Abilities: 1 per dot, 2 per dot past 5
  
• Backgrounds: 1 per dot
  
• Techniques: 1 per level of the desired rating, paid for at each increase (e.g., one point for a new technique at 1, two points to raise a 1 to a 2, three points to raise a 2 to a 3, etc.)
  
• Styles: 2 per dot
  
• Power Points: 1 per dot
  
• Chi: 3 per dot
  
• Willpower: 3 per dot
  
• Health: 4 per dot
  

There are two important notes worth considering at this point. First, Backgrounds can only be bought during character creation. Second, a long-term decision about attribute totals needs to be made during character creation. Points added to attributes during character creation determine the maximum pool of attribute points the character can have in a particular category. The default is 15 (the equivalent of a 5/5/5 attribute outlay). Only if freebie points are spend to increase attributes during character creation can this maximum total be increased: a character who spends 6 freebie points to add 1 physical attribute during character creation can potentially reach a total of 16 attribute points, and so on.

This is a draft based on a discussion we had last night. I've made a couple changes after thinking about things a bit: first, we originally considered the "frontloading" of attributes to be sufficiently restrictive that raising them past 5 wouldn't need to cost more. After thinking about it a bit more, I'm not convinced that it's enough, so I've suggested an extra cost to go past 5. (I'm not sure what this cost should be, but I think it's preferable to keep attributes from jumping past 5 immediately, and increasing the cost should help here by making the jump more of a commitment.)