You can make changes on the form, and when you flip over to the text tab it will be updated with any changes, so the program can also be used to make new characters, who can then be easily copy-and-pasted into Word or your editing application of choice. There’s a tab that displays the hero in a form for easy editing, and another tab that displays the hero as rich text. There’s still some randomness involved, though, so sometimes you’ll still get wacky results – just hopefully not as much! The data is pulled from an xml file, so you can mess around with that if you want to tweak the settings, or add new powers, or what have you. The idea is that instead of getting a random grab-bag of powers that make little sense together, the random character would have a core suite of powers and abilities that fit the character’s overall theme. The right button – “Generate Themed Hero” – generates a new hero using a blend of MWP’s rules and a system that I came up with myself, which is based around power themes. The left button – “Generate Random Hero” – generates a new hero using MWP’s random tables. To add insult to injury, the application only runs on Windows! It’s fairly basic – there are two tabs and two buttons. MWP lost the Marvel license years ago and had to pull all of their offerings, so this program is definitely a niche product. Well, I finally went back and finished that project, and I am making it available to anyone who is interested. And so I had spent some time working out how to design a better random chargen for a superhero RPG, before ultimately forgetting about it. Much like the random chargen for the old TSR Marvel Superheroes RPG, the rules resulted in characters that were far too random. The system already had a set of random generation rules, but I thought they were not so great. In the comments on my post about wanting too much from an RPG, I remembered that I had started working on a more sensible (to me) random character generator for Margaret Weis Productions’ Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game some time ago.
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