I've kind of got my long-winded head on, today. Sorry. The following Post has various non-essential information that you can safely skip if you do not really have the time. If you have nothing better to do, however, read on.
Right, so, a few basic notes;
I've decided that at some point before the (first?) Proper session, the team will have had to appoint an official Leader. I'm going to leave it entirely up to you four, however, as to who is elected as such. You have two options, really. Either, when we work out which characters you each are going for, you look at their abilities and so on, and out-of-character decide which character would function most effectively as the nominal commander of the 'squad'.
Or, the other route is to, after having chosen and finalised characters, you are given the chance to thrash that out purely in-character. This could result in a less technically able character being effectively voted Leader, but would be a good opportunity to play around with the types of people your characters are.
As far as the group goes, you don't necessarily have to follow your Glorious Leader's orders, or anything, but it will be mandatory to at least name a 'token leader'. If the character who is voted in charge is lacking slightly in power compared to how his player imagines him, I'd be willing to accept the position as an additional Challenge, provided the character would take such duties seriously, for anywhere from 1 to 5 extra stones to use at character creation (or to be held back for use after the first session, to tweak the character, perhaps).
Second note -
I've been musing over the idea of sidekicks, and have this idea to offer as an option, should anyone be interested;
If someone is interested in playing an actual sidekick type character (for the comic potential, or whatever reason), and they can talk another player to have their character take the 'sidekick' on, I'll offer an extra 10 points to the character who agrees to take on the sidekick (NOT the sidekick himself) as a bribe, in exchange for the character actually taking his responsibilities to said sidekick, at least a little seriously.
Really, I blame the vintage Batman series, and my growing realisation that in it, Robin actually comes across as often the more intelligent of the two.
Needless to say,
I am more than happy for a little sillyness to creep in to your characters. tongue in cheek stuff is perfectly fine. As long as it's within reason, and doesn't break the fourth wall, I'm pretty open to any character idea.
Lastly, speaking of character ideas, a few caveats;
Robots and/or Battle Armour - I will allow a player to use Battle-Armour (as Iron Man, Dr Doom etc) despite the early setting, as long as either that player, or another in the group, is of suitably Genius-level intallect to have made it themselves. Likewise with Sentient Robot character ideas, if another player is happy to play a super genius/inventor, you can play their creation. (In MURPG, the rules for creating battle-armour and for Robots are almost totally identical, actually).
For Robots, I'd also consider allowing Extra-Terrestrial Robots and Robots-from-an-alternate-future, as long as they come with a good enough backstory. I reserve the right to modify any alternate-future's for Plot related effect, of course.
Mythical or pseudo mythical entities are also fine. One day, I will get around to reading the old marvel comics 'Thor' line, after all! Gods are not off-limit at all, and even Thor himself is quite simple to realise in the MURPG system. (Though, clearly, he has more stones than you guys!
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Mutants are also fine, but remember they will be rare enough as to be essentially unknown at this stage in time. (Following the implied Marvel timeline, though they have existed for hundreds of years, they were only very, very rare up until recent decades, gradually becoming more common until around the 1960s when the world in general will become aware of their existence.
You can use any origin you like, and practically any type of character. Worth baring in mind, however, is that there are implied physical limits for the activities of the normal human being. Whereas mental stats, (Intelligence, anyway) does have much more leeway, if you wish to play an un-enhanced human, your ability scores will be mostly capping off at about 4 (with 10 being the absolute maximum score at character generation, and expensive at that!). You could have scores higher, and still consider yourself a normal human, but the chances are, such a character if written in the 1940's would have probably since had a different origin ret-conned by now, anyway.
(Ie, Namor the sub-mariner has abilities vastly outstripping either his human or atlantean heritage, and is generally held up semi-officially as marvel's first mutant, as he was active, as far as I recall, during the golden age.)
Ideally,
by the time I'm ready to start setting dates, I'd like you to have at least two or three roughly fleshed out character ideas to discuss with myself and your other players, when we set the day for character-creation and so on, (as per Andy's suggestion, possibly role-playing through the drafting and formation of the Super Team, in an informal way.) If you've only really got one idea for a character, don't worry, it will just mean you have more time to flesh him/her out ahead of time.
