For a few years back in the '90s I ran a recurring convention scenario for Villains & Vigilantes called "The World Championships of Crime," featuring a team of super-criminals from each continent. By the time I'd stopped doing it, I had a nice little stable of super-powered characters, many of whom could be converted from villains to heroes with very little effort. So when I cracked open Tiny Supers for this project, I thought I'd dip into that reserve and convert one of those characters.
One of my favorites is a super-speedster who steals for thrills under the codename Zap!* Her signature powers are supersonic flight and photon blasts. Pretty simple, and should be easy to convert to another system.
The Tiny Supers character generation process is very similar to that of other Tiny d6 games: choose an Archtype to organize your powers around, select a number of Power Traits (or mundane Traits, which have the same in-game weight) to match the game's power level, adopt a Belief and select a proficient weapon group (which can include your attack powers), figure out your hit points (or Stress Capacity, in this game's terms). In addition, your Super will also have a Power Origin (which is kind of like a Background) and a Weakness.
Zap's V&V charaacter sheet
Some of the Archetypes are more reminiscent of the class roles in D&D 4e than they are of the analogous feature in other Tiny d6 systems; they actually include Striker, Defender, and Controller as well as the moral-example Paragon, techie Gadgeteer, mostly-mundane-yet-highly-skilled Expert, and minion-managing Mastermind. Zap!'s schtick is zooming around, well, zapping people--that's sounds like a Striker to me. The associated Trait is Powerful Blows! which exempts your attacks from damage reduction effects.
The number of Power and/or mundane Traits you can take depends on the power level of your game. Tne default is three, for what the designers call a "mid-level" supers feel. Reduce the number for a more street-level feel (and note that the Expert archetype can take extra mundane Traits if they take one or fewer Power traits), or raise it for something more high-powered (5 for Avengers- or Justice League-caliber save-the-world play, 8 if you want to go full Cosmic Power and save the universe). Furthermore, certain Power Traits can be purchased in installments (or Tiers) depending on how much oomph you want for them; both Flight and Light Control fall into this category. Fully supersonic Flight is a Tier 3 Power (and it imposes Disadvantage on attacks against you when you're moving at full speed), so it looks like we're going to want to ratchet the power level up to 5 if we want those energy beams. Light powers are a variety of Energy Control; at Tier 1 you can temporarily blind your target, but at Tier 2 you can actually deal hit point damage, as it gains the qualities of the Tier 1 Blast power. (Tier effects are cumulative for most powers, including this one). That's five slots right there, so we're done with Traits.
Power Origin is next on the checklist, and it's something I never bothered with for a character that was designed for a one-shot slugfest. The game offers seven types of Origin, and the character will get to take Advantage on any non-combat Tests related to the Origin you select. (Not just the type of Origin, I believe, but related to the actual circumstances that granted the Powers.) So if Zap! had found an alien device that changed her physical makeup to enable supersonic flight and light blasts, she would get Advantage on Tests related to that alien culture's technology (and perhaps other aspects of their society as well). That works for me as an Origin: found an extraterrestrial machine at a crash site, played with it, was bathed in weird energies, and came out able to zoom around and fling photons. Power Origin: Alien.
I may have to depart from the original concept for Zap's Weakness. V&V has multiple types of disadvantage, from fears abd phobias to powerful enemies to adverse substance reactions and so forth. Orignal Zap! was vulnerable to sonic attacks. In Tiny Supers the Weakness can take a wide variety of forms, but its effect is always the same when any character encouters theirs: Disadvantage on all rolls until the source of Weakness is removed. Works great to model kryptonite or a phobia, not so great in this case. Sample characters in the text have a variety of Weaknesses, the in-game effects of which are not always clear from the text. So let's just declare that Zap is vulnerable to sonic attacks, that characters using them gain Advantage on their attack rolls, and if she gets hit she suffers Disadvantage on rolls during her next turn.
Now the Weapon Group thing. Zap's weapon of choice is her light blasts, so we can call her proficiency group Ranged (or Ranged Powers) and her mastered weapon Light Blasts.
Finally we give our (anti?)heroine a credo or Belief. I think we can still lean on thrill-seeking as her primary motivation and phrase it as Adrenaline is my drug of choice.
As a teenager, Rosemary Ann Ferraro was a wild child straight out of a movie--drag racing, bridge jumping, recreational sex and drugs, petty vandalism and shoplifting, the whole package of risky behaviors. Then one of her similarly-inclined friends dared her to investigate what seemed like a plane crash nearby. It turned out to be some kind of spacecraft, and no one but Rosemary was willing to enter. A few button-pushes later, she found herself bathed in a blast of bluish-green light and fell unconsious. Her comrades fled from the glow, and she woke up a few hours later with a splitting headache and feeling like her whole skin was trying to vibrate off her body. Running away from the wreck, she tripped over a root and, instead of falling, took flight.
Rosemary quickly learned to manage flying and in the process discoered that she could emit light beams from her hands. A brief career as a super-criminal ended when the local super-team lured the impetuous Zap! into a trap. In super-prison (with some guidance) she decided that she could get just as big a charge out of stopping crimes as she did when committing them, and upon her (supervised) release she became a probationary member of Excessive Force, protectors of San Cataclysmo, California.
And now for her statblock:
Name: Rosemary Ann Ferraro
Archetype: Striker (Powerful Blows!)
*which may be influenced by Scott McCloud's Zot!, but to be honest I don't remember anymore.
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