BCZ Retrospective III: New General Traits.

One of BCZ's goals was to fix imbalance, build variety and concept representation problems in BCG, not just for the robots but also at the character scale. All 10 General Traits in the expansion address one or more of those issues. Let's have a look at them.

Adaptable Eyes
The character creation rules are written for human PCs. If you wanted to use BCG to portray alien species, fantasy races and intelligent animals you had to get by with aggressive reskinning. This Trait is one of many abilities in the expansion made to enable PCs and NPCs of inhuman origins, which are more common in stories that take place in fantasy settings or beyond our solar system. Conveniently, Adaptable Eyes works best in games revolving around exploration and horror, which are both genres that vanilla BCG struggles with. The expansion makes this easier by adding fear and insanity rules for the horror games and assists the exploration games with fantasy and attrition rules. It is not a particularly strong Trait, but it does what it is supposed to do.

Better Lucky than Good, Plan B and Practice Makes Perfect
I'm addressing all three of these at once because they have the same purpose: Making Skill-intensive builds stronger. In vanilla BCG it is more effective to raise your stats very high and buy a few Skills than to buy many Skills and raise your stats to above average. This is particularly true for the Attributes that have too many Skills, such as Intellect. These three Traits give you strong benefits to taking not just one but many Skills, balancing things back towards the middle again. If you're building to reliably hit a result of 15+ in your Skill Tests, Practice Makes Perfect helps immensely. If you want to make use of the Expanded Miracles in chapter 2, you pretty much need Plan B. Of all three, Better Lucky than Good is, well, the most random of the three, but at 5 points it is a very good deal and works very well with the Advantage system (each additional die rolled is twice as likely to be a 10). These three are excellent and probably my favorites (in no particular order) of this section.

Team Player
This one is a little like the three Traits above in that it encourages people to train Skills but I'm giving it a separate entry because it serves a different purpose. It is not the flashiest of Traits, but Help Tests are deceptively powerful. For the majority of Tests, which have DNs of 10 or 15, this is overkill and you might have been better off spending these points in something else, yes. Where it really shines is when you're aiming to let one person get a result of 20+, with multiple Team Player PCs and one PC with Leadership making it possible to hit the legendary DN 30 required for the strongest Expanded Miracles. Teamwork gets things done, people!

Ace in the Hole
I was already buffing Skill-intensive builds, so I figured I would buff Trait-intensive builds as well. That's it, there's not much more to say about this Trait. It gets the job done and, er, I like the trickster flavor, I guess? Next!

Enhanced Human (Specialist)
This is the first of the many abilities in the expansion that were commissioned during the Kickstarter to make BCZ happen. The original was an Anomaly called 'Mysterious Origin' and gave an advantage to all Tests of a specific attribute but had social repercussions, like being hunted by shady organizations or caused roleplaying issues with people who saw you. The first problem with this kind of ability is that, if your drawback is having plot relevance and requiring the GM to write specifically around you... Then it is not a drawback! Getting that kind of focus is a good thing, not a bad thing. The second problem is that roleplaying issues happen with the majority of Anomalies already and they don't suffer a mechanical penalty for it, except some which take a flat Charm Disadvantage. The Trait seemed to want to be all upside and no downside in mechanics so, after a little emailing back and forth, it became a General Trait with a temporary effect. As Enhanced Human, it lets you benefit from a specific Anomaly temporarily, using its benefit only when necessary, and avoiding its drawback until then. Depending on the chosen Anomaly, this can be as close to a direct upgrade as it gets.

Assassin, Deceptive Fighter, The Meat Shield
One of the many problems with BCG's on-foot combat rules is that most games either avoid it like the plague or have so much combat that all PCs build around it and become same-y in the process. These three Traits add a few ways to diversify Intermission combat roles by giving Charm specialists something only they can do. They also give an extra edge to those that raise both Fitness and Awareness instead of just one. In hindsight, more Traits like Deceptive Fighter (but using other Attributes) would have been preferable to Yet More Ways To Abuse Awareness, it is not like Fitness and Awareness don't already get plenty of use during combat.

And that's all for now. Mechanically speaking, I'd say The Meat Shield is the weakest of the General Traits in Z. It is only relevant for a specific kind of game and doesn't do much to make those games more interesting or varied. All the others are mechanically sound and make the game a lot better with their inclusion. The 2nd and 3rd place spots would go to Adaptable Eyes (which has at least another purpose) and Assassin (which flavorfully helps PCs survive the onslaught of BCG Intermission combat) so I still like them both.

Next: New Equipment.

Gimmick Out.