CHARACTER CREATION CHALLENGE 2023: Everyday Heroes (3 of 6)

THE GAME: Everyday Heroes (2022)

Our next M.A.S.K. agent is Gloria Baker, race driver, archaeologist, and martial artist educated in Athens, Greece.

A HERO IN SIX STEPS

1. Concept the Character

2. Background

3. Profession

4. Ability Scores

5. Archetype and Class

6. Finishing Touches

Step 1: Concept

OK, so Gloria is, like Hondo, a character with both academic and combat skills. Unlike Hondo, her skills aren’t necessarily tactical and military, but more martial arts in nature. With race driving being a focus as well, I can see Gloria trending toward being a high-DEX style character, in this game, an Agile Hero.

Step 2: Background

We’re going to assume Gloria began practicing the martial arts at a young age, and was therefore a Student Athlete. Gloria gets +1 DEX, proficiency in Athletics, and a special ability that allows her to roll with advantage on any Athletics or Acrobatics check when playing a sport. Oh, and a letter jacket.

Step 3: Profession

Gloria’s conundrum is her particular mix of skills. Academia would work for her focus in archaeology and anthropology, reflected in Everyday Heroes as Social Sciences, but that leaves her without the Vehicles skill that is a trademark. Transportation would give her Vehicles, but would leave out the education. Everyday Heroes gives us the guidelines to create our own Profession, but I’d rather try to use what we have here. Oh! The Scoundrel Class can pick up Vehicles, and is has some other facets that would work well for a martial arts, driver, espionage archaeologist. So we’ll go with Academia (again) followed by Scoundrel.

Gloria bumps up INT, DEX, and CHA. She chooses one additional language, and grabs Greek, since she went to school in Athens. She picks up Persuasion and Social Sciences, a Wealth of 3, and the same basic gear Hondo got- a laptop, laser pointer, and school ID card. She also gets the Debate ability, allowing her to use INT rather than CHA to persuade in an academic argument. Now, looking ahead to possible characters we might do like Alex Sector, Julio Lopez, and Bruce Sato, I can see that it will be tempting to use Academia a lot. But then, the M.A.S.K. team seemed to have an almost Buckaroo Banzai-like assembly of warrior-scientist-spies.

Step 4: Ability Scores

Gloria’s abilities are heavily based on DEX and INT, with a side dish of CHA, as she is the race driver, archaeologist, martial-art spy. Let’s see what we can do with that:

• STR: 10

• DEX: 16

• CON: 12

• INT: 14

• WIS: 12

• CHA: 14

Step 5: Archetype and Class

As a Scoundrel, a class under the Agile Hero Archetype, Gloria gets proficiency in DEX and CHA saves, picks up Deception, Security, and Vehicles, and proficiency in Basic and Advanced Equipment. She takes Expertise in Security - Vehicles would have fit better, but it’s not offered. Actually, as a GM if a player came to me with this character concept, I’d totally allow it. So we switch that expertise over to Vehicles. Since Everyday Heroes is designed to cover action films, I’d cite The Fast and The Furious franchise as a reason to allow Scoundrels to grab vehicles expertise. Gloria also picks up Vital Strike, giving her 1d6 “sneak attack” style damage when she has advantage over a foe or has an ally within 5ft of a target.

Step 6: Finishing Touches

Gloria moves 30ft per round. Starting Proficiency Bonus is +2. We fill in Passive Perception, and the skill totals. As an academic, she has a Wealth of 3.

Working off three-decade-old memory and the shallow characterization of many 80s cartoons, here’s what we come up with for Gloria.

• Motivations: Friendship, and I’m going to say Curiosity. Gloria is a daredevil driver, an archaeologist, and adventurer- like many of the M.A.S.K. team.

• Attachments: M.A.S.K. Team

• Biography: We assume Gloria showed a penchant for taking risks at an early age. She became a martial artist, competitive driver, and voracious learner always trying to push whatever envelope she’s working in.

• Beliefs: That I recall, the show doesn’t really go into Gloria’s personal beliefs, but she is generally good-aligned, like the rest of the M.A.S.K. team.

• Role: As I recall, the show often used Gloria as the token female character. Which meant often, she ended up facing off against V.E.N.O.M.’s Vanessa Warfield. They even both had aquatic vehicles so they’d run into each other more often. What is it with giving the ladies the waterborne powers? They did that in Visionaries, too, with Galadria and Virulena. That said, as an archaeologist and martial artist, Gloria would be an asset to many of M.A.S.K.’s missions as V.E.N.O.M seemed very interested in artifacts and ancient sources of story fodder. The M.A.S.K. Wiki points out that Gloria showed up the 4th most often in the TV series, behind Matt Trakker, Bruce Sato, and Alex Sector, so her role on the team was quite important indeed.

• Appearance: Gloria is often seen in a ponytail and yellow and green hooded shirt. She has the typical slight build of a female animated character of the 80s, with green eyes and brunette hair.

• Virtues: Gloria is brave to a fault if we accept the flaw I speculate below. She’s also shown to be compassionate and resourceful.

• Flaws: While the show doesn’t specifically reference this that I can recall, I’d give Gloria a certain recklessness in that she is extremely confident (rightly so) in her driving abilities.

• Quirks: I’m not recalling any real quirks of Gloria’s from the show.

REPEATED NOTE: I can totally see that to do this better, I would need to pound down some of the episodes of the show I haven’t seen in decades. I remember a general sense of most of the characters, but I have a feeling that a general sense is all we got of a number of them.