Six Tips for Helping Your Players Create a Superhero PC

Hello heroes! Today we are talking about something near and dear to my heart: superhero RPGs and the player characters who populate them! Like most roleplaying games, a good superhero campaign relies on an interesting cast of heroes to follow and root for as they vanquish the forces of evil. However, such larger than life characters can be daunting to create. A lot of superhero games have incredibly customizable character creation systems and tend to eschew things like classes. This is an amazing opportunity for people to flex their creativity but this lack of cookie cutter options can lead to analysis paralysis if not handled with care. I’m here to help you help your players when this comes up!

1. Finding a Mold

The easiest way to help someone come up with a superhero concept is to ask them who their favorite superhero is or what superhero they would have in the real world if it were available. One of the reasons superheroes are so iconic is because they are larger than life figures who we can aspire to be and that aspirational element lends itself well to copying. This simple question also gives us a place to begin character creation that is slightly less wide-open than, “You can be whatever you want.” Ask your player what they like about this hero or power set. What do they think is their best quality? What are some of their opportunities for improvement? Do you like their personality but not necessarily their power set? I created Crucible from our City of Destiny stream using this line of questioning. I knew the adventure was going to feature regular people suddenly getting their powers so I looked at some of my favorite every man heroes and settled on Peter Parker. I wanted to emulate his attitude and how he is his own worst enemy a lot of the time, but I wanted to combine this personality with a power set I’ve always wanted in M&M: ferokinesis. Magneto has always been a favorite of mine and I just think the power is endlessly fascinating. So I mixed them up and came up with Emerald City’s favorite idiot.

2. Origins

Another way to develop a superhero PC is by focusing on a specific power source as a place for inspiration. This is sort of a macro level bit of creativity on the players part. Let them know where powers come from in your setting. Are there aliens? Are their mutants? High tech or magic? Knowing the big picture can help them think of how their character fits into the wider cosmology of your universe. It also helps if you leave room in these categories for player inspiration. If you have aliens in your setting, feel free to share some types of aliens with the player but ask if they have an idea for a unique sort of group. The DC Universe has Thanagarian bird people, Kryptonians, and little blue men. Each is an alien technically but they are so varied that any character concept can fit.

3. Secret Identity

If your player is having trouble with coming up with a power set for their character, leave that step behind and start figuring out who that character is as a person. What do they do? What are their hobbies? What’s their personality like? The human element can inform the power set. Maybe the character is a hot-headed stunt driver with a heart of gold. Their brash nature lends itself well to fire powers or if you want to be ironic give them ice powers. A paramedic might develop healing powers or become a dangerous vampire that needs to feed on the blood of her patients to survive. Look for connections to their job, their personality, or even their loved ones.

4. Team Building

If one or more of your players are having trouble coming up with a concept, you can ask them if they want to have a team-based group of heroes who all fit into a theme. Think of how the Fantastic Four all represent one of the four elements while still feeling very distinct from one another. You can really get abstract with this concept. Perhaps the heroes are all representations of characters from Alice in Wonderland or characters from Penny Dreadful novels. They could be a collection of metals who all have different abilities. Maybe they fell into a radioactive game of Candyland and now they’re really strange candy creatures. Tie them together and let the players collaborate on their ideas.

5. Secret Powers

One fun thing I’ve done to help players get through the power selection process is to just come up with a power set for them and not tell them what it is until they get their powers in the first session. We’ll go through creating their backstory up until the moment they get their abilities which I’ll do as our first session in the campaign. This does put a lot of the onus on you to make fair and exciting choices for your players and I would recommend only offering it to people you’ve played with before because it does require an element of player-GM trust, but it leads to some really cool roleplaying moments when it works out!

6. Mad Libs

The final tip I have to help you create a superhero character is to offer your player a sort of mad lib style exercise where you ask them for a list of colors, adjectives, and a list of nouns that they can mix and match to see if a concept leaps out at them. Ask them for 12 colors, 6 animals, 3 professions, and 3 verbs, write them down into columns and start drawing lines between combinations that sound promising. Even if they don’t like any of the combinations, the act of creating names and doing something imaginative will kickstart their creativity and they will find something they latch onto. A variation of this trick is to keep a notepad (physical or in your phone) and write down anything you hear or think of that sounds like a good superhero name and use that list as a jumping on point for your creativity.

There you have it! There are endless ways to create a superhero, but these six tips will help you narrow down the vast array of options or just get your imagination into gear. Please let me know any tips you have in the comments below!