Those of you who have never seen the Dexter TV series (on ShowTime in the US, on its second season; on FX in the UK) or read the Dexter books (Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Dearly Devoted Dexter, and Dexter in the Dark) should.

Dexter is a sociopath serial killer. He doesn't understand human emotions. He cannot empathize with people. He kills because it is the only thing that makes him feel alive. His adopted father, Harry, a police officer, noticed Dexter's psychopathy at a young age when he was still at the torturing and killing small animals stage. Most parents would atempt to get their children psychiatric help. Knowing from experience that therapy would be fruitless Harry instead taught Dexter how to put up a facade of normalcy, which Dexter maintains just well enough to have a naive charm, how to read people and understand them, to see past their facades well enough to emulate empathy and to identify those who harbor deadly secrets of their own, and how to kill without leaving any evidence.

The first person Dexter murders is a nurse. He does so at the request of Harry who was under her care. She was a self-styled angel of death, possibly with some sort of Münchhausen-by-proxy. She murdered otherwise healthy patients and deluded herself into believing that she was putting them out of their misery. Harry would have been her victim if not for Dexter's murderous intervention.

So Dexter follows the code he was taught, never taking any unnecessary risks, protecting his secret at all costs, and only killing though who were, themselves, murders. He doesn't do it because of any sense of justice. He doesn't do it because he is outraged by their crimes or because he feels anything for their victims. He simply enjoys killing, his loyalty to Harry won't let him break the code, and even if he could break the code his victim choice has become far too ritualized to change.

To facilitate his love-hate relationship with blood and death, he works as a blood splatter analyst for the Miami PD. He is the sort of charming and disarming guy that everyone would love to work with, to the point where viewers can completely turn off their morality filters and find themselves agreeing with him as he narrates his brutal bloody dismemberment of his victims. He's the kind of serial killer people can identify with and root for, something which is horribly lacking in most modern police dramas.


Dexter
Human

Strength 4
Body 4
Agility 4
Reaction 3
Logic 5
Intuition 2
Charisma 5
Willpower 3

Edge 4
Essence 6

Active Skills
Stealth Group 4
Unarmed Combat 3 (Subdual +2)
Blades 2 (hypodermic needles +2)
Clubs 3
Exotic Weapon: Garottes 3
Medicine 4 (Vivisection +2)
Perception 5
Con 5
Etiquette 3
Instruction 2
Leadership 1 (persuasion +2)
Pilot Ground Vehicle 2
Pilot Watercraft 2

Knowledge Skills
Metahuman Anatomy 6
Investigation 4
Froensic Science 3 (Bloodsplatter analysis +2)
Police Procedure 2 (Forensic Procedure +2)
Killing 3 (Slowly +2)
The Best Brands of Plastic Wrap to use to protect walls, floors, and and furniture from blood stains while murdering someone in a brutal and messy way 6
The Last Words of People Who He Has Murdered 4
Chopping Corpses Up Into Convenient ravel-sized pieces 3
Body Dumping Locations 3 (Aquatic +2)

Equipment
1000 rolls of Plastic Warp
Medkit Rating 6
Dissection Kit 6
Forsenics Kit 6
Powered Knife (Treat as regular knife but double DV against barriers and corpses)
Maglock Passkey 4
Miniwelder
Autopicker
Pocketknife
Etorphine [Treat as Narcojet] (20 doses)
20 Hypodermic needles
Mercury Comet
Samuvanni Otter
Minivan* (None currently exist in canon, unfortunately)
Box full of microscope slides containing drops of blood ritually collected from his victims.
Medium Lifestyle


Contacts

Debra Morgan [Loyalty 6 Connections 2]
Dexter's adopted sister. She is a homicide detective who works with Dexter.
If it were possible for Dexter to feel love, he would love her like a sibling.

Brian [Loyalty 5 Connections 2]
Dexter's long-lost biological brother and an ingenious serial killer. He would never harm Dexter, but he might kill Dexter's friends and family if it believed it would bring him closer to his brother.

Rita [Loyalty 4 Connections 1]
Dexter's Girlfriend. She began as a cover, a beard to help maintain his facade or normalcy, but he has grown fond of her like a pet.

Cody & Astor [Loyalty 4 Connections 1]
Rita's children from an abusive former marriage. They're budding serial killers in their own right and are eager to learn from Dexter.

The Dark Passenger [Loyalty * Connections *]
The Dark Passenger is the very source of Dexter's drive to kill. It whispers to him, feeling him with a need that can only be quenched by the death of a human being. Dexter believes that it is just a fragment of his tortured psyche, a purely psychological phenomenon. An ancient murder cult believes that it is the offspring of the bull-headed god Ba'al Moloch, a possession spirit with an absurd level of aura masking and an insatiable bloodlust. Both theories are plausible.

Looks cool and yes I watch the show good write up only one problem

Interesting character..

Needs something for planning/strategy, else all his activity would be spur-of-the-moment.

Also, I think Police Procedure would be higher - because he has to be better at working within the system than a normal policeman.


Personally, in a SR universe, I think that having him as a Spirit possessed person would be much more entertaining..
..Or even have him as a Horror..

I've read the first 2 books and seen a few of the shows. I need to get the rest of the shows and the third book. I really like them. He reminds me of me, except a little too sentimental.

Chris

Best show on tv, imo, great books and that's a good write up of him. I'd go
Charisma 4 (some people can see through him)
Intuition 5 (He spots other murders easily and gets a lot of accurate "gut feelings" (pun intended))
Willpower 2 (He has a lot of trouble blowing off his urges, though he is better now than as a kid)

And he clearly has an addiction, and a fairly strong one. The NA meetings are cracking me up!


< Dex's happy face

*nods Critias* I thought the same thing when I read it. Though there were other meaner words in my head.

Chris

yeah, here in Europe we are still in the middle of season 1....hopefully ill forget what i saw. lalala...


But, i really like this writeup. I also agree...i might switch the Intuition and Willpower, and jack Intuition a point...he DOES have excellent hunches and the like. Otherwise the attributes and skills(love the knowledge skills) look well spot on. The Charisma as 4 or 5 could work..only a few people see through him, and that might just be ''they made a really good hunch roll themselves'' kind of thing.

But yeah, comes on again Thursday, i shall have fun watching it.

Hm, seems like I always had a wrong impression of good ol' Dexter (SCNR)

Dexter is a fantastic show. I'm really hooked on it and I think I'll have to pick up the books soon.

I should point out that this build mixes book and show continuity, which are completely different.

As a brief aside, what is the allure of creating a character that someone else invented? Isn't the fun of character creation being original and making your character?

I ask because I a have a friend who only does conversions like this. He's playing a mage based on Harry Dresden and his last character was a pistol adept based on Equilibrium. I simply don't get it.

Showtime.com has the first two episodes of season two available to watch for free. You might need a password, but I'm not sure. Of course, there's always BitTorrent.

...I'll wait until the DVD collection is released. WiFi can be so spotty it wold be annoying to watch online.

First season's already out on DVD.

Ok so sorry for not useing a spoiler tag.

First off I didn't know how to do one now I do.

Second off it was late and I have been sick for the past week and a half so in my drug induced haze I didn't even think about how it might have been unknown to some.

Third the first thing I do when I see a spoiler tag is click it to see what is so special don't you?