Gregor Hutton’s Best Friends RPG is an amazing little game (which is no great shock, Gregor’s stuff is all amazing) with a petty, malicious, brilliant little chargen technique which is trivially ported to FAE.

Best Friends has a list of stats like tough, pretty, rich and so on, all of which are effectively the approaches that matter to a high school group of frenemies. As with Leverage, it’s a list that’s pretty easy to map directly to approaches, but that’s tangential to the appeal.

What’s most marvelous is that for each stat (or for our purposes, approach), you write down which character your character hates because they’re better than you. Literally. “I hate Betty because she’s prettier than me”. GM gathers those up, and the value of the stat (approach) is equal to the number of people who hate you for it.

There are a few rules to make sure that everyone is reasonably equally represented, but that’s an easy bit of math based on the number of approaches and the number of players. Slightly trickier is making sure the total number of plusses comes up to a competent total. If need be, you might start everyone at +1 everything, and layer the additional points on top of it, but only if you really feel the need.

Anyway, it’s a wonderful trick, and so trivially easy to port to FAE that I had to share.