Professor Proton

Thursday night’s Gamma World game run by Fred was the first time I’ve gotten to generate my own GW character. When I played way back in January, we just had pre-gens since the rules hadn’t quite stabilized yet, and since the game came out, I’ve just been in the GM’s chair.

• Zap McGee, an Electrokinetic Video Game tester.
• Davids, a Doppelganger Mind-breaker, who liked to argue and implant copies of himself in other creatures’ brains.
• Brick, a “rat” swarm gravity controller, a group of Lego minifigs that acquired sentience and the power to influence gravity.
• 363, a radioactive rat swarm, a rat revolutionary who has attracted a following.
• Andre, a short-lived Empath giant who was replaced by Artie, a pyrokinetic plant.
• And of course, there was me, Professor Proton. Here’s how he came to be.

I rolled Gravity Controller and Electrokinetic. I was discussing earlier in the day with Bartoneus about how some of the origins are less character defining then others… so of course, I rolled two together that I didn’t find inspiring. But I started to brainstorm what I thought of with these two things. I could control electricity and gravity. Those feel like two fundamental forces that I could command with my mind. Who else had that schtick? Ah, Doctor Manhattan of course.

So I was set to go with “Enlightened Scientist.” Only… hey, my character sheet says that my Int is 8, and I have no training in Science. Clearly, though, this is a scientific character. That’s when I had the inspiration for the main thrust of the character: he’s from a parallel universe where physics works differently. He’s a smart guy who knows a lot… about the universe he came from. Here, in Gamma Terra post-Big Mistake, none of that knowledge is applicable.

He was involved some kind of transdimensional experiment and ended up here, his body now a strange green color, and his space suit fused to his body. (That part of it, which came directly from the miniature and the rules encouraging me to wear heavy armor, ended up being worked into the story when we encountered some clothes-eating Yexils.)

The name took a while. I wanted to riff on Doctor Manhattan. Mister Long Island was in my head for a while, but I thought having Professor in the title with my character’s stats was great, and Proton felt appropriately sciencey while forming alliteration. (Of course, in HIS universe, Protons are something else entirely.)

I finished it off with a Moonenite voice, and the character, whose origins I wasn’t into at all, suddenly turned into one I wanted to play. Even my rolls on the Ancient Junk table reinforced my backstory: a DVD of a sci-fi serial and my electric toothbrush both were artifacts of my old universe that had come with me on a crazy experiment.

One final note: I did end up using my own custom deck for Alpha mutations. Much like the Davids, I didn’t feel like a lot of the bio mutations really worked well with my character. Both my origins were Dark, and many of those mutations fit with my “controls the cosmos” vibe anyway, so that made sense to pull in, along with a few Psi options. The first card I drew ended up being killer: my finger was a battery (which fits with the Doc Manhattan reference too, though for an entirely different purpose..) that I used to jump start a car and re-power my heavy lift harness. The second card, on the other hand, was a telekinetic Psi power that fit with the character but whose attack roll was based on Intelligence. Oops.

After that, I’m much more into the idea of custom Alpha decks, though custom Omega decks seem wonky. Also, the “roll a die to draw from your own deck” rule is super fiddly. Too easy to get mixed up. When I run my campaign, I might ask players if they’d be willing to contribute a pack or two towards a master deck, then I’d let them customize their deck with, say, 10 cards from the larger pool, then I’d deal them 10 random cards from the leftovers. Shuffle that, and just draw from it.