Friday, April 15, 2011

O is for: Obi-Wan Shinobi

Sometimes when playing around with a new system I like to try and create alternate versions of well-known characters, kind of like my Formshifters idea, but sometimes there's only one character involved. I wanted a katana-wielding hero in City of Heroes so I played around with the character creator and came up with this


I was going for sort of an Obi-Wan around Episode II look. Now I wasn't unhappy with this but one of my friends commented that it looked more like Luke with a beard than Obi. I knew I could do better, but it would take some time. In the meantime, we had this scene:


Nest thing said by both players - "It's YOU!" It was very funny. I tagged the guy but I never saw him again. Eventually I refined the costume into a Clone Wars look:


I think this one came out much better - people seem to recognize it, which is nice.

I find that Jedi powers fit right in to a supers game - super senses, super-fast reflexes, the ability to make super-leaps and run very fast, deflect shots, hold breath - sounds like a lot of common super powers, right? He's fought base criminals, aliens, robots... so it's a lot like what Jedi do anyway.


In the game I've written up as an amnesiac - he knows he's from somewhere else and that he fights to protect people there. The universe he has awoken in is a lot like his home in some ways, and totally different in others, so while he looks for a way back he fights the good fight here as well. The only detail he really recalls is that he was fighting an opponent with a red glowing sword so if he runs into one of those he has a ton of questions and sometimes a flashback that reveals a few more details of where he is from. He had an item on him that was labelled OB-1 so the people that found him dubbed him that and called him Shinobi due to his incredible skills. The name seems comfortable but not quite right, though he lives with it for now.




Obi-Wan Shinobi for ICONS:






Prowess: 7 (Incredible) He's a highly trained and experienced hand to hand fighter who's a step beyond normal human 
Coordination: 6 (Remarkable) They train to make this better and he's pretty good even among them. 
Strength: 4 (Good) When it comes to lifting things with his hands he's just like anyone else 
Intellect: 5 (Excellent) He's a fairly smart guy though he's not going to be inventing any gadgets 
Awareness: 7 (Incredible) He has a remarkable innate sensitivity to what's going on around him
Willpower: 7 (Incredible) He's strong-willed and has special training

Stamina: 11
Determination: 1

Origin: Birthright (1 extra power)

Specialties: Weapons - Blades, Leadership, Stealth

Powers:
Telekinesis - 6 (Remarkable) + Attack
Reflection - 7 (Incredible) must have sword
Leaping - 6 (Remarkable)
Mind Control - 5 (Excellent)
Super-Senses - 3 (Typical) - Sense Emotion, Sense Life, Sense Darksider

Qualities: 
"Honorable" - Shinobi is fine sneaking around, observing, misdirecting, and infiltrating but when it comes to combat he must confront an enemy openly. He will not back-stab or back shoot an opponent. He usually offers an enemy a chance to surrender before taking it to a lethal level.

"Hunter" - once he is on a case Shinobi will not easily turn aside and let it go. His combination of curiosity and determination mean that he is tenacious almost to a fault. 


Challenges:
"Lost" - Shinobi is not of this earth and a part of him really wants to get home, as much from his sense of duty as anything else. 

"Tech Disconnect" - Earth tech is lower than he is accustomed to and though he has grown familiar with most of it he is still occasionally confronted with tech he does not understand. 

"Melee Fighter" - Shinobi considers guns to be clumsy and random and will not use them. He is fine using his TK ability to knock opponents down or to blow apart a robot but he greatly prefers to resolve things with a hand to hand duel. 

Notes: 
At 63 points but with nothing higher than a 7 Obi is wide and fairly deep but not a Cosmic power. He has a pretty good set of tools for any situation but is not immortal and has no special defenses to speak of. He may work best as part of a team because of that, especially in a combat situation. I would put more limitations on his powers in a more granular game, particularly on the reflection (OAF katana) and the Mind Control (short commands only) and I might give him some other small powers like water breathing and minor audio illusions. In the hands of a serious fan and player I might just go ahead and make "force powers" a limited variable power pool and let the player go crazy.   I think he would be fun to play, in any case, and that's really the point. 



As a final note, I put this character together several years ago before I had ever read Jeff's Gameblog about his Encounter Critical character. Looking at the name in Google it comes back first from some guy's MySpace page and appears to be a pretty common riff so I guess I'm not as clever as I thought but I don't really care - I'm happy with it.


Obi teams up with the famous hero Gandhi

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