Advantages & Disadvatnages – more than just a simple Edge

Advantages: More than just a simple edge

Advantages are where characters start to stand out. They provide access magic and psychic powers, increase or decrease a characters attributes, make them react faster, grant them immunity to the supernatural, and even access to ancient bloodlines.

 

Advantages are bought with Creation Points (cp’s). A level 1 character starts with 3 cp’s, and gains extra points by acquiring disadvantages that range from reducing a characteristic, adding flavor to a character through deep sleep or clumsiness, or adding back story to one through debts or powerful enemies that constantly hunt him.

Originally advantages can only be bought with the cp’s that are acquired at level 1 and after that they are no longer available. However there is an optional rule that allows players to trade their ability to increase a stat by +1 every even level for an extra creation point. However, even with the optional rule there are certain advantages that can only acquired when creating the character and are no longer available after that such as the ability to use magic or psychic abilities.

Bellow are 2 lists, the first is a list of all Advantages and Disadvantages and the second is for those that can be acquired after character creation and the general criteria required to obtain them.

Complete list of Advantages and Disadvantages  (Complete)
Criteria for post creation advantages

Now that we have seen the complete list of advantages let’s go back to our example of Misaka Mikoto.

In order to know what advantages we’ll need we need to analyze her abilities and decide how to get them:

Lvl 5 Esper – In the anime she is one of the most powerful espers, her power is ranked 5/6, so to represent that we’ll also make a lvl 5 character wich makes her more powerful than most people but not so powerful that she has nothing to fear.  In anima espers are called psychics so she’ll need access to psychic powers, but how many schools and what powers? lets take a look

Railgun – Her signature move.  This power and it’s school were added into the game in the Arcana Exxet, so that’s one school we need access to and a lvl 3 psychic power which will require a lvl 1 & 2 power from the same school.  It’s also a very difficult power to use, requiring a minimum phsychic potential of 240 as shown in the chart bellow.  While it may look like a daunting task we can improve our potential with this specific power by up to 100 by using our CV’s so nothing to worry about.

Create Electricity – As seen at the very beginning of episode 1, she is capable of creating electricity strong enough to knock out simple thugs.  Lucky us, this is a lvl 1 power in the same school as the Railgun, so that’s one thing out of the way.  It’s also easy to use and won’t require us to invest any extra CV’s  into it.

Electromagnetic defence – As we can see in the gif bellow she pulls herself out of danger by dragging herself around using electromagnetism.  This will need 2 powers Electromagnetic Shield and Magnetic Manipulation.  They are Lvl 1 & 2 powers of the same school as the railgun so we’ll pick these up as well on our way to it.  However the shield requires a psychic potential of 240 in order to deflect attacks from non-metal sources so we’ll make a note to invest some CV’s to empower it. Magnetic manipulation requires a high potential in order to lift her into the air but were grabbing it to help move us around and launch small metal objects so we won’t invest CV’s into it. She also uses it to make a sword from the iron located in the earth so that’s another use for it.

True Electric Attack – A simpler and easier to use power so that we are not reliant on the railgun which is very destructive and a bit risky on the off-chance that we fail the psychic potential.  It has a pretty low potential requirement and decent damage so investing a couple of CV’s will be more than enough.

Physical Abilities – She’s no warrior but she’s no simple human either so we will be aiming to get 5-6 on her physical stats.

Intelligence – She’s smart enough to control her power in such a way to allow her to extract the iron from the earth around her and create a make-shift sword from it.  She also has consistently high grades warranting a 6-7 on her intelligence.

Perception – There is nothing special about so we’ll keep it between 5 and 6, if only to get a bonus to our notice and search skills.

Agility and Dexterity – While she’s no acrobat she has enough to be able to tumble out of danger using her powers and land on her feet so a 6 will probably suffice.  She has slightly above normal Dexterity illustrated by her being able to quickly grab a coin from her pocket for use with her railgun attack so a 7 will be good.

Willpower – This is the stat that determines her innate psychic potential so we want this as high as possible

Power – She has little use for this stat so we can leave it at the bottom of the list

With all of this in mind lets start reducing the stats we rolled back in step 1 with disadvantages:

Con: 8->6       Str: 9->5

With this we have used up all 3 of our disadvantages and gained 3 for a total of 6 at lvl 1.  Now to buy our advantages:
Access to 1 psychic discipline -1 as we discussed above to have access to the powers we want
Psychic Inbalance -2 This will make it easier to reach the psychic potential needed to use the railgun and her shield reliably.

This leaves us with 3 CP’s to increase our Willpower by a total of +5, +3 from our leftover CP’s and another 2 from our ability to increase a stat by +1 at lvl’s 2 and 4.

Our final Attributes and advantages look like this:

Aqi: 6  Con: 6    Dex: 7   Str: 5

Int: 7   Per: 7    Pow: 4  Will: 14

Access to 1 psychic discipline – Electromagnetism

Psychic imbalance – Electromagnetism

Now that were done with that we can move onto the more complicated part of character creation, Distribution of Development Points.
(Link coming soon)