Champions Unlimited

[Bloodshot]

I was going to call this posting "Pointless Champions" but I felt that was opening me up for WAY too many puns and jokes.

My current game has run out of steam due to a variety of things (we only meet once a month and illness and family obligations have stretched the time span out to almost 3 months now...) and I'm debating whether to continue or try something different. One of the players mentioned the idea of a high-powered game, so I immediately dug through my notes and found a Digital Hero article by Theron Bretz (hope I spelled it right), who has made contributions to Haymaker! as well like myself, about "pointless" Champions.

The idea strikes me as interesting because I'm not in a group of power gamers who would be likely to abuse the chance to build characters without worrying about balancing the points totally.

I would appreciate hearing other people's experience with this type of campaign. I've played with member's of Theron's group in a PBEM (and read their stuff in Haymaker! and Digital Hero), and they seem to be perfectly suited for such a campaign.

[Marcus]

Well, though weve never formalized it and designed our characters 'without point caps', the approach in our play group was always 'Figure out how you see the character, then get one of the Points Accounting Guru's to shoehorn it elegantly into the points available'. Its a mature group of players, and lets be honest.. some superhero concepts are just EXPENSIVE, even before you get to the kind of games you can have that integrate different stages in character maturation.

Weve had nothing but good expereinces. My advice to you... YOU know if your group can handle it. Trust your players.

[Killer Shrike]

Might as well play SAGA Marvel Superheroes instead.

Not only are there no points, theres not even any rolling involved.

[FTJoshua]

Our campaign splits it down the middle in a way. We do keep very accurate records on points, and expect that everyone's totals come out right. There's also a spoken rule that the three "old" characters -- the PC's who have been around for 15 years -- should never be able to be easily defeated by a "new" PC. Within those confines, we let points go here and there if it's not a major deal. But, then again, we're all notoriously honest, so we won't beg for that 1 last XP to allow us one more SPD or whatever; we'll wait till the next adventure.

In any event, I agree that if you trust the players and they trust you and each other, go for it.

[Enforcer84]

We did it and it was fun. It was also the second longest campaign.

[BlackCobra]

Well, we've never done the "use whatever points you need", but our group did a 500-pt campaign (in 4th Ed, which is the equivalent of 600 or 700 points in 5th). I ran it and I used the Nexus (the infinite city) as a campaign setting. It worked ok, and was fairly amusing, but I think setting it in that city was the wrong idea. When you get up the big big points, the best thing you can do is to have a detailed background and to have memorable NPCs. And challenges. A regular city-based campaign probably isn't the best place to go for challenges. Something on the Big Stage, like world-encompassing or galaxy-spanning is the best idea.