Even before you set pen to paper to create your
Post-Apocalyptic Hero world, you should consider
the nature and power of the PCs. As the protago- nists of the campaign, the characters who occupy center stage all the time, the PCs have a greater effect on the game than any other factor.
The player characters’ level of power, and thus the type of characters you can expect play- ers to create, depends largely on how many Char- acter Points the players build them on. A game where you allow players to build 200- or 250- point characters provides you with a wider range of PC types and abilities than one with 100- or 150-point characters — but it’s also likely to increase any problems you may have challenging the PCs and maintaining game balance. When deciding how many points PCs can start with, you should consider the following issues:
SUBGENRE
First, what subgenre(s) does your campaign emulate? Low Post-Apocalyptic campaigns, includ- ing Road Wars and Zombie Apocalypse games, almost always feature lower-powered characters (ones built on no more than 150 Character Points total, and possibly much less), while High Post- Apocalyptic games and some cinematic Low PA campaigns use higher point totals so the PCs can afford mutant powers and other unusual abili- ties. These are just guidelines, though — there’s no reason you can’t have high-powered PCs in an oth- erwise “realistic” campaign.
HEROES VERSUS THE WORLD
How do you want the PCs to compare to the world around them? Low-powered heroes may have trouble dealing with biker gangs, cannibal mutants, and similar adversaries. On the opposite end of the spectrum, some powerful heroes may be able to affect the course of entire nations or regions. If the PCs can easily dispense with everyday oppo- sition, that colors their perception of the world and influences their role within it.
Think about the types of adventures you want to run and what you expect the PCs to do over the course of the campaign. That tells you a lot about the type of PCs that best fit your game. For example, if you plan for a mostly Road Wars-style campaign focusing on travel from one adventure location to another, vehicular combat, and some exploration of the ruins, you want your PCs to regard the average biker gang member as a threat — if the heroes are significantly more powerful than that, your scenarios won’t pose much of a challenge to them. While any one PC should be more powerful and skilled than any one typical ganger (they are the heroes of the story, after all!), two or three gangers should probably be a match for a PC. On the other hand, a campaign of more epic scope or fantastic adventure may require PCs of greater compe- tence and ability.
POWER LEVELS AND EFFECTIVENESS CEILINGS
You should decide whether you want to impose restrictions on the amount of power, CV, Skills, and the like that characters can have. Char- acters built on large numbers of points may not be nearly as powerful as those points imply if you limit what they can spend points on.
In a Post-Apocalyptic Hero context, point ceil- ings — restrictions on how many Active Points a power or ability can have — usually aren’t appropri- ate. While it’s possible to restrict the Active Points in weapons or characters’ skills, in most cases that’s neither necessary nor “realistic.” Powerful weapons may be available to most Post-Apocalyptic Hero PCs through scavenging, so imposing artificial restric- tions on the “power” of weapons usually harms the campaign’s “feel.” A better solution is to find plausible in-game reasons to restrict characters’ access to equipment, such as the apocalypse having destroyed it. Similarly, many mutant powers and like abilities, while powerful, also tend to be heavily Limited, making them less problematic than their Active Points might otherwise indicate.
Effectiveness ceilings — restrictions on characters’ CVs, DEXs, Skill rolls, Combat Skill Levels, DCs, or the like — are more common in Post-Apocalyptic Hero games than point ceil- ings. An effectiveness ceiling helps you control the PCs’ overall power, making it easy for you to know what can challenge them and what can’t. It also encourages characters to broaden and diver- sify their abilities, since the ceiling stops them from spending all their Experience Points on the same things game after game. But effectiveness ceilings can lead to problems of their own. First, they may restrict the types of weapons characters can use (since simulating some weapons properly requires a lot of DCs), and that may not make sense, “realistically.” Second, over the course of a long campaign, you may soon wind up with a lot of characters who look identical to each other, or who try to find ways around the effectiveness ceiling even when those ways make no sense given their character concepts. You may need to increase the ceiling slowly over the course of the campaign, at least in one or two areas for each character type (for example, maybe you allow road warriors to buy more DEX and SPD than other characters can, and gunslingers more Range Skill Levels).
Normal Characteristic Maxima
Intertwined with the concept of effective- ness ceilings are the Normal Characteristic Maxima rules, which impose a sort of ceiling on how many points characters can spend on Char- acteristics. Typically Post-Apocalyptic Hero games feature NCM as a campaign default, for no Char- acter Points, but the GM might choose not to use that rule in some High Post-Apocalyptic games. See the Characteristics section of Chapter Two for more information on using Normal Charac- teristic Maxima.
64 ■ Adventure Among The Devistation: Gamemastering Post-Apocalyptic Hero System 5th Edition Revised
The Arms Race
Weapons and fighting skills are a prominent part of the Post-Apocalyptic Hero genre. It’s not uncommon for an “arms race” to develop in the campaign sooner or later. The players start trying to get more and bigger weapons for their characters, and they cry foul when the GM doesn’t reward them with “treasure” in the form of salvaged assault weapons, APCs, grenades, or maybe even laser rifles. Some of them even spend a lot of Charac- ter Points on Skills related to building, finding, or repairing weapons just to ensure they’ve got as much access as possible to the maximum firepower.
There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this — after all, finding “toys” amidst the ruins is one of the fun aspects of the Post-Apocalyptic Hero genre. But the arms race becomes a problem if the PCs acquire so much military hardware that they have little difficulty defeating their opposition. All good stories involve a challenge of some kind that the main characters have to overcome. If your Post-
Apocalyptic Hero PCs can cut through legions of
mutant creatures and vicious biker gangs without breaking a sweat because they’ve got a minor arse- nal’s worth of weaponry, there’s no challenge for them, and therefore everyone has less fun. Dealing with this conflict — wanting to give the characters more “toys,” but not so many that they wreck the game — is one of the hardest things for Post-Apoca-
lyptic Hero GMs to do.
Some suggestions to help you reduce or elimi- nate this problem:
■ Give the characters “toys” with limited uses: Giving
the characters an unlimited supply of grenades can easily unbalance a campaign. Giving them half a dozen grenades that they have to save for only the most crucial situations is fun. Fortunately, it’s usu- ally easy to restrict Post-Apocalyptic characters’ access to such weapons, since they can only have whatever they’re lucky enough to salvage or steal.
■ Give them “toys,” but don’t let them use them for very long: Just because the heroes find weap-
ons doesn’t mean they get to use them forever. They may have a limited supply of ammunition (a common occurrence in the Post-Apocalyptic genre), or the weapon may be on the verge of breaking down after just a few shots. And of course an enemy can always steal the PCs’ gear.
■ Substitute equipment damage for character damage: When a character takes major damage
from an enemy’s attack, have that attack damage or destroy a weapon or other piece of equipment, rather than the character. You might even give the player a choice between character damage and equipment damage — a player who doesn’t want to give up his character’s gear can always opt to have his character take the actual damage. Similarly, you can have NPC attackers target the PCs’ weapons.
And don’t forget — the bad guys can have power- ful “toys,” too. Anything the PCs use against their ene- mies, their enemies can use against them (though this also gives the PCs an opportunity to get those weapons by defeating their foes). Pointing this out to the PCs may cause them to rein themselves in voluntarily.
Post-Apocalyptic Hero ■ Chapter Three 65
EXPERIENCE POINTS AND CHARACTER GROWTH
You should also consider how, and how fast, you want the characters to grow in competence and power. If you’re planning a long-term campaign with frequent game sessions and generous Experi- ence Point awards, building PCs with a relatively small amount of Character Points doesn’t cause as many problems, since the players know their char- acters will become more powerful at a fairly steady pace. On the other hand, if you can’t run game sessions on a regular basis, or you prefer to control character growth by minimizing the number of Experience Points you award, it may work better if the PCs start out fairly powerful. Otherwise they’re likely to become aggravated when they constantly run up against situations their characters should be able to cope with, but can’t because they don’t yet have the points to buy all the Knowledge Skills, Talents, and abilities they should have based on character conception.
Generally speaking, a Post-Apocalyptic Hero character built on, say, 150 Character Points plus 150 Experience Points tends to be better developed than a starting character built on 300 Character Points. The latter character probably has a larger attack, or more attacks, but the experienced charac- ter is more well-rounded as a person. The gradual acquisition of Experience Points leads to different spending patterns than giving a player a large lump of Character Points to spend all at once. Starting at relatively lower power levels, but building over the course of the campaign, may be the best approach for many Post-Apocalyptic Hero games.