Character Creation: Contenders

I coulda been, etc. 

The Game: Contenders
The Publisher: Prince of Darkness Games
Degree of Familiarity: None. Just read the pdf.
Books Required: Just the pdf.

This game is about boxing, as opposed to The Squared Circle or Piledrivers and Powerbombs, which are about wrestling. Contenders bills itself as a gain about hope, pain and sweat and blood. The emulation here seems to be boxing films, which is interesting, as those don't lend themselves well to group play, I'd think. Would this be a one-on-one game, like Beast Hunters? Hard to say without reading further, so I'll do that real quick (the game's only about 45 pages long).

OK, so, the game has shades of Fiasco and other scene-based games like Blowback and Ganakagok. You make your Contender, and then you can do training scenes, connection scenes, promotion scenes. Resolution system is based on cards, not dice (of which I approve, of course). So it looks like a goodly amount of this is buildup to the fight, which is fine, since that's very much in genre.

So let's make my fighter. Fighters have to start poor. My fighter was a kid who was pretty smart when he was a boy, and then he was in a car accident when he was 10. He suffered a traumatic brain injury, and while he's make a good recovery, he's lost much of his functionality as far as book-smarts goes. He was, like, a merit scholar before and just boxed for a hobby. Now his folks are divorced and his mother won't do more than exchanged frosty phone calls with him. He's trying to go the distance with this boxing thing. His name is Isaiah "Ice" Colon (that's /kəlon/, by the way).

Good start. Now I do a Connection. Isaiah's mother doesn't speak to him much, but his dad, Diego Colon, is in it for the long haul. Diego acts as Ice's manager and promoter, helps him train, and so on. But Diego smoked heavily from age 13, and his lungs are getting bad. My Hope for Diego is that I make enough money to get him some quality medical care. My Fear is that he'll die before we can reconcile with Mom.

I get one point each in Hope, Pain, Cash and Rep, and I get 2 more points to throw around. I'll put one point into Cash (it represents time and energy as well as actual money) and one into Hope.

Now I get 6 points to split between my In-Ring stats, which are Cover, Power, Technique and Conditioning.

Well, I see Isaiah as a smart fighter, and I figure he works himself to death because he wants to make up for his dad's ill health somehow. So I'll put three into Conditioning, two into Technique, one into Cover and leave Power where it is.

Wow. And...that's it. This is actually pretty cool. I'd considering running this with a group that was into it.