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2023 Character Creation Challenge Day 21: Strike! Tactical Combat and Heedless Adventure

So I picked up Strike! Tactical Combat and Heedless Adventure from the same source that I picked up John Carter of Mars and US Marshals, by trading my Judge Dredd RPG books. So I will be creating a character for this system for the 2023 Character Creation Challenge.

I had never heard of this game before the trade proposal. The book is 207 pages long and was published by Jim McGarva in 2015. It appears this was financed through a KickStarter campaign. This appears to be a generic system like the D6 System or GURPS.

So since I’m creating both a character and a setting, we are going with a modern setting. The character will be Craig “T-Bone” Miller, a freelance gun-smuggler. If you have the money, he can delver most any type of weapon. He grew up in the southeastern portion of the United States and realized after a stint in the military that he had no desire to let anyone be his boss again. So when his term was up, he went independent on the advice of some buddies who were also smugglers.

There is a two page character sheet. The “Creating Your Character” listing is on page 16. It states that once you have a character concept, then come up with a background and origin (done, see above). From these two items I get to select reasonable skills that T-Bone would know. Looking at the list, the veteran is probably the closest. I wrote these skills down.

Next was selecting gear or picking a kit. There wasn’t really a list of gear since this was a generic game. So I could just say the character has certain items. I think. As for the kit, there was a limited number listed and I selected wayfarer (aka world traveler). But there wasn’t anything for me to write down because the items listed didn’t come into effect until I entered that part of the world and made certain successes or costs while there. This is confusing.

Next the book had me jump to the second part of the character creation on page 98 in what they called the tactical part of the book. I believe this is where the second page of the character sheet comes in. This really looks videogamish. Now I’m choosing a class? None of the classes listed even came close to what I was thinking. Now, I’m thinking that I’m just done. Usually by the end of the character creation process, I have a good idea how the game will be run. I don’t know if I accomplished that with this game. Here is what I have for the character sheet. I never added anything to the second page.

Afterthoughts:

The page numbers listed in the create your character were incorrect and off by a few pages. This resulted in my having to hunt around to find the information needed.

The descriptions were really, really basic. If I were to run a game with this system, I’d probably end up writing half to 2/3rd of the items that my players would need to run the world it was set in. Other generic systems are a little bit more fleshed out, so I’d probably defer to one of those games.

I can see why this book was traded away. I’ll probably put it in the trade pile myself. I think this game wanted to be more of a tactical game and added a little bit of RPG to it to try to pull in that audience.

I liked the use of the color codes on the character sheet. So there’s something positive about this publication.

Additional Notes:

A member of the RPG.net message board reached out to me to let me know about another message board that had a very active Character Creation Challenge thread. On the RPG Pub message boards there was a thread that was already up to 11 pages. I have joined this message board to add my characters there and added the link to the 2023 challenge page. Thank you for letting me know.

Coming Up Next:

Barebones Fantasy by DwD Studios

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.

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