Building Characters

My redlining tasks this week have been mostly concerned with comparing sample characters to make sure there isn't too much conceptual overlap. I did something similar with conspiracies a couple of weeks ago - making sure we don't have three different conspiracies with Curiosity as an Anchor (it's funny, because at one point there were four conspiracies with Curiosity as their Virtue or Vice). In this case, I'm currently looking at Variations and Scars.

I won't pretend that zero overlap is a goal, much less an achievable one. Some Variations are just bread-and-butter powers. Carapace is an easy way to round out the power set of a high-Standing Devoted, as are Brachiation, Anomalous Biology, and Hyper-Competence. And Lash, Sacred Flesh, and Cursed Flesh offer countless options, so quite a few characters will have those. I likewise won't pretend that every Variation will see representation. But I want to show off a wide variety fun combinations (and associated Techniques!), so multiple characters with a combination of Body Snatcher and Memory Thief probably means I need to change one of them - unless there's a way to make their particular spin on that combination unique.

Counting dots of Attributes/Skills/Merits/Magnitude and checking entanglement enters into it, too. I experimented with exchanging some Magnitude for other traits but have ultimately decided to go a different way, so those need revision. And sometimes we writers miscount something (especially when we have 31 Magnitude of Variations to assign).

But at this point, I'm kinda nitpicking and probably can't hold these drafts in redlines much longer. Some of it will have to wait until second drafts (for my stuff) and development (for my stuff and everyone else's). Things are coming along, but there's a point (and it's rapidly approaching) when I have to put down my proverbial pencil and call the work complete.