BCZ Retrospective V: New Anomaly Traits.

Anomaly Traits are BCZ's take on character flaws in the vein of design flaws that mecha get. They're not quite the same, since they have a positive side, but pure negative flaws are supposed to be Banes. You know, from Genre Themes? Yeah. The logic is that a real drawback, something that actually affects the character's life, is best roleplayed rather than given a mechanical representation. If your character simply has a penalty to social scenes, they will just avoid those instead of bumbling their way through them. But if they get a reward for doing so, they will actually roleplay it out. People requested character flaws with mechanical downsides every now and then, but I wasn't sure how they could be implemented in a way that didn't undermine Banes.

At some point I had a conversation with a friend about the "outsider" type characters in anime. By "outsiders" I mean characters that feel inhuman or alien in some way among the cast, usually because they're robots or actual aliens. Those characters usually have some kind of weird plot power (like being able to talk to monsters or being able to use the mcguffin or something like that), which made me think of the Enhanced Human Trait and its original form: Mysterious Origin. You can probably see where that went... Although, ironically, Enhanced Human isn't compatible with them because I was worried it would be too imbalanced. I had an Eureka moment and realized there was a way to add character flaws (sort of) via anomalies. They are more like Anomalies/Features than Design Flaws, yes, but the benefit they give is clearly just a CP bonus and you can buy them out anyway, so they're almost pure flaws.

Augmented Creature
Hey, have you ever wanted to play a psychic cat piloting a giant robot? Well do I have the Trait for you then! Sure, you already could do that with just BCG alone, but it wasn't backed up by mechanics! Intellect is arguably the strongest Attribute in the game and that's why it is linked to what are possibly the two strongest Miracles in the game that don't use Intellect. Because linking a free Intellect Skill with a penalty to Intellect would be a dick move, you see. Probing and Sight are also the most generic psychic abilities (telepathy and clairvoyance) outside of Force (representing telekinesis), which makes enough sense to give to an animal with an upgraded brain.

Financially Incompetent
The idea to have one Anomaly for each Attribute meant that I'd have to come up with a way to represent a Resources Disadvantage. The flavor here is one of cultural differences making a PC consistently commit mistakes, which is more interesting to roleplay than simply being perpetually broke. Resources is the closest thing the game has to a dump stat that nearly anyone can reasonably ignore, but becomes very powerful when you put everything into it. Because this might as well be free points for a bunch of different characters, it gives Phasing and Portals, which are very good but not amazing by themselves and either use Fitness or work best with Fitness builds, which are relatively underpowered. Unfortunately, neither Miracle being connected to Resources.

Hivemind Drone
How do you represent a lack of willpower? With a suicidal lack of fear. What kind of benefit could a PC get from that? Being better at working with others. Fortune and Life were chosen partly because they're the two 'Support' Miracles that can be used to represent someone who will give their life for others or someone who is friends with all the important people. This led me to the concept of a character with a mindset like that of eusocial insects. Mechanically speaking, both Miracles are very different from each other. Fortune is a buildaround that enables a specific gimmick build and Life is the logical end point of a build designed around two different Attributes. This is one of my favorite Anomalies.

Mismatched Body
Phantasm and Temperature don't make much sense with the flavor of being an alien but at least they don't get in the way of the Fitness penalty inflicted by this Trait. The idea is that you're alien enough you can breathe fire or create illusions just because, well, you're a weird alien that can do those things while in a human body, I guess. In all honesty, both Skills are very good while Fitness is kind of weak, making this a mechanical as well as conceptual failure. I do like the flavor of getting a Fitness penalty from using a body that isn't yours and enjoyed writing the description but this is a very weak design all around.

Offbeat Senses
Matter and Electricity aren't related to this Trait's flavor at all. That would be because they were chosen simply because I believe them to be the two strongest Miracles in the game, and so they're tied to the strongest Attribute that doesn't use them, which is Awareness. Coming up with a proper justification for an Awareness penalty was difficult and the flavor I ended up using is... Not the best. I wanted to elaborate more on it to try and justify it but it was going to take half a page just to have it make sense and there wasn't enough space to do that. This is mechanically solid but terrible flavorfully, so I guess that makes it better than Mismatched Body at least.

Wrong Language Data
We end on a high note with this one. Sight and Somatics work very well for a physical powerhouse that is socially incompetent, which is a trope many androids or aliens pretending to be regular people in fiction usually work with. Zany speech quirks are an anime staple and the description gives you a handful of ridiculous ideas to represent your mannerisms of choice. I really like how this one turned out in both mechanics and flavor.

With three hits and three misses among six abilities, it certainly could have been better. I suppose the lesson here is to not try and force a whole cycle of six abilities to happen if you only have good ideas for three of them. In hindsight, the other three Anomalies could have used different upsides and the six of them could have been compatible with Enhanced Human - it probably would have been fine.

Next: New Genre Powers.

Gimmick Out.