Episode 17: Champions!
This time we explore the depth’s of Nate’s superhero fantasies with a journey deep into Champions, the Hero System superhero RPG that allows for free-form creation of any kind of superhero. We go over the history of the game system and Nate’s experiences with it, and briefly cover an unusual early 80s crossover product between Champions and Car Wars.
Champions gaming
Champions Comic books
Wikipedia is grand
The Tick does Wikipedia
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BAM! CRACK! KERPOW! 3 cheers for a new roll2d6 podcast!
Glad you’re back guys…and a great podcast as always. I completely forgot just how wacky the Marvel RPG was. Unfortunately, I was never able to fully comprehend their “Universal Table” back then, where Excellent was a little better than Good, but not as great as Remarkable, which was just below Incredible. Take a Good and add it to Incredible and you have Amazing. Who’s brilliant idea was it to rate abilities using adjectives?!?
You know, I think that somewhere down in my dusty old boxes I still have my beat-up, musty copy of Autoduel Champions.
Nice show, guys! It’s good to know I’m not the only one left making characters without people to play in a game.
You may be interested to know the latest version of Fantasy Hero — and generally all the non-supers games that use HERO 5E — doesn’t require players to pay character points for their normal equipment. It’s all handled through GM fiat, a la D&D.
Tyler’s right, guys, none of the “heroic-level” versions of HERO System ever required PCs to pay points for mundane, commonly-available equipment, and magic items that characters come across or buy are similarly not charged to the character’s points.
Only magic items created by the character cost points.
I used to run Danger International and Fantasy Hero in the 80s, and the weapons charts didn’t even list character points.
As far as characters with wide arrays of powers, HERO System has the Variable Power Pool.
Even Spider-Man could be said to have a Variable Power Pool to handle all the wacky things he can do with his webbing, or chemicals he might temporarily add to the webbing to defeat a specific foe.
Also, HERO System allows for “Power Stunts,” by which a character can work out a mechanical effect from a special effect on a temporary basis, something that nicely simulates the ability heroes often have in the comics to adapt their powers to new situations.
Now, as far as not having anyone to play the system with, that breaks my heart, hearing that, since during the 80s all my friends and I ever did was play Champions and its off-shoots. We were positively nuts for it. We had campaigns that went on for months and even years.
These days, yep, still playing it, got a game going on this Saturday night.
A further note on equipment in non-superheroic games using the Hero System: Hero actually provides more than one way to do this. One is just using GM Fiat or money, etc. to determine what a character has, as Jim and Tyler have mentioned. Then, just as with any other system, the onus is on the GM to be careful when leaving stuff lying around that the PCs might pick up so that they don’t escalate in power too quickly (unless that’s what the GM wants.)
Another option the Hero System provides is something called a Resource Pool. This assumes the character has access to an arsenal of equipment of some sort, but there are point-based limits on how much of his kit he carries at any given time. It was first developed for action heroes, and dark superheroes like the Punisher, but can be equally applied to any game where a character accumulates more equipment than he can reasonably cart around, but can swap out what he’s carrying at any given time. And of course the more character points you spend on Resource Pool, the more of your kit you can carry at once. This allows you to pick up stuff you come across and seamlessly use it in play, but not have it constantly showing up from that point on unless it becomes part of that character’s standard loadout.
I’ll also second Jim’s points about the Variable Power Pool being available if you want to model truly flexible characters. A character like Spiderman might start out with a Multipower of web tricks at the start of his career, and over time as he learns more and more tricks and adds more and more slots to his multipower, eventually there might come a point where he simply converts his Multipower to a Variable Power Pool — this allows him to build any kind of web trick he wants and use it on the fly. If that’s too cumbersome for use during play, he can simply make up as big a list of tricks as he wants when the game’s not on, and have the GM approve them before play begins. With the inclusion of Variable Power Pool in the system, you can model any cosmic scale character you find in the comics. In fact, I’ve played games in many different genres using the Hero System, and while there are some characters or powers that are a bit cumbersome to model, or very expensive, there are very few if any character concepts that are outright impossible to model.
As far as character and player resources go, these days you don’t need to hunt down old usenet forums to get access to character lists; there are lots of web pages out there that are great resources for character sources and writeups. There are also a number of websites out there which support play-by-email or play-by-post gaming, for those times when you can’t get together with your friends for a face-to-face game (or they’d rather play something else.) A good example of the latter is Hero Central. There’s also a player finder forum on the Hero Games boards if one is more interested in looking for face-to-face players in their area.
Just a few comments on your Champions podcast.
1) Champions and The Hero System is not limited to four color superheroes. While it excels at that subgenre and the standard Champions Universe is more or less a four color world (at least as much as the standard Marvel and DC universes are four color these days), the system can easily handle any superpowered universe. For example, you could easily do the TV show Heroes using Champions.
2) The company that published Champions: The New Millennium was R. Talsorian not L. Talsorian.
3) The superpowers book that you were describing is the UNTIL Superowers Database. In a similar vein, there is the UNTIL Superpowers Database II with even more powers and Gadgets and Gears which does the same thing with common gadgets used by superheroes.
4) Others have already discussed your mistakes about equipment in heroic level (non-superhero) games like Fantasy Hero and your seeming ignorance of Variable Power Pools and the Power Skill. The latter is forgiveable, in that it was new in the 5th Edition, but the former has been around since the Champions III supplement (usable with any of the first three editions of Champions).
5) Overall, while the podcast was fun, I felt it could have been better researched, in particular where it concerned the current edition of the game.
For those interested in picking up and running Champions, check out the brilliant Java program HERO Designer, which takes a whole lot of the drudgery out of character creation.
A neat thing, too, is that “character packs” for HERO Designer are available for purchase, most relatively cheap, and these contain enormous amounts of pre-entered data for use in character creation and in running the game.
The website for the program is http://www.herodesigner.com.
Even though I am not completely interested in the subject it is as always a joy and great fun to listen to you guys.
Me and my buddies have been talking about playing a super-hero game (four colour no less)
You’ve definitely convinced me to give Hero a go
Kudos. As usual… bring on the next one!!!
Good job guys – Your sales pitch for Heros systems (all vars) has worked on me. I’m going to hastle my weekly group to play.
Yes… join us… don’t be afraid… it’s only 800 pages…
Seriously, though, if you start playing HERO System and you run into problems, just post on the message boards at herogames.com with your questions. Make sure you say right up front that you’re a brand new player so the veterans will know to go easy on you.
Now me, I get the crap beat outta me in there ’cause they know I’ve been playing since 1982 and don’t have any excuses.
You guys never drop the ball. Another great podcast about another often over-looked game.
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I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting