Champions at War!

[Alibear]

Champions at war?

If and when it all kicks off in the Gulf, how are you going to handle it in your campaign?

Are the lads (and lasses) going to enlist?
Will the powers that be make them enlist?
Will they fight terrorists at home?
Will you have them design a "Suicide Squad" to take the War to Saddam?
Will you just ignore it?

Well, what you gonna do?

[Syberdwarf2]

Originally posted by Alibear
Champions at war?

If and when it all kicks off in the Gulf, how are you going to handle it in your campaign?

Are the lads (and lasses) going to enlist?
Will the powers that be make them enlist?
Will they fight terrorists at home?
Will you have them design a "Suicide Squad" to take the War to Saddam?
Will you just ignore it?

Well, what you gonna do?

Whether or not the Our Heroes enlist is entirely p to the Players, I think. Certainly, the powers that be would contact them to get them to enlist, but the choice would almost always be theirs. Of course, there probably would be some rouge military/government type with an agenda to 'recruit' someone against their will. IMHO however, such an act would be pigeonholing the PCs into the story I WANT to tell, and not the story that THEY WANT to play in.

Although, it would be interesting to see superheroes arrested and detained for 'crimes of vigilantism' or declared 'persons of interest' and then given a choice. Serve a prison sentence, or serve a military tour.

[Monolith]

In my campaign the Afghanistan war is currently going on, but most of the heroes are busy fighting the terrorist group The Children of Islam who were sent by Osama to reak the havok in the US. TCoS is responsible for the toppeling of the Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon.

My campaign does use a new Ameriforce One group, and the heroes with contacts and KS: The Superhero World will hear something about what that team is doing in a Gulf War. But I really have no intention of getting the heroes involved in the war itself; they are too busy fighting groups like TCoS.

[Agent X]

Not gonna go there in my campaign. Too depressing.

[Supreme]

In the campaign I'm currently running, all the PCs are too young to serve. If they weren't I would probably ignore it, unless the players all told me they wanted to shift to a Persian Gulf campaign. In general, I have a hard time buying governments enlisting free-lance super-hero help. I tend to think that the government would view super-heroes as very powerful, but very loose cannons. They're always disobeying orders, having moral epiphanies, discovering that their deadliest enemy is actually their old flame from college, etc.

[Patriot]

In my campaign, real world stuffhappens, but the heroes stay at home, and fight to protect the US and earth from adversaries

That way nothing has the chance of being downplayed ,or becoming offensive.

9-11 happened in game, but the pcs were not allowed to intervene, due to the fact they might have had a chance to stop the attrocity.


It is not good ground to tread on.

[zakueins]

The PCs could start to get their powers DUE to 9/11....

(One of these days, that game WILL be run. By whom, nobody knows.)

Originally posted by Patriot
In my campaign, real world stuffhappens, but the heroes stay at home, and fight to protect the US and earth from adversaries

That way nothing has the chance of being downplayed ,or becoming offensive.

9-11 happened in game, but the pcs were not allowed to intervene, due to the fact they might have had a chance to stop the attrocity.


It is not good ground to tread on.

[Armitage]

Originally posted by Supreme
I tend to think that the government would view super-heroes as very powerful, but very loose cannons.

On the other hand...
Free-lance=Plausable deniability

[Chaosliege]

I'd ignore it. In our champions game, we go up against reality hopping viains, slaving aliens and ultra powerull supervilains. We wouldn't use it because our heros would have wiped out Osama's army without even breaking a sweat.

[Hermit]

I play the game in a large part, for escapism, thus it doesn't come up much. However I'm not above adapting a current real world event to a comic book kind of story. I'd probably use a fictional country instead of a 'real' one for instance. Another thing to take into account, is the universe some play in may not have the same problems. I maybe wrong, but I don't think the CU mentions 9/11, and it seems as if that may not even have happened in it. However, Detroit is gone in an event caused by Doctor Destroyer. This horror lead as inspiration to James Harmon IV taking up super heroing.

[Trebuchet]

Originally posted by Supreme
In general, I have a hard time buying governments enlisting free-lance super-hero help. I tend to think that the government would view super-heroes as very powerful, but very loose cannons. They're always disobeying orders, having moral epiphanies, discovering that their deadliest enemy is actually their old flame from college, etc.

While I quite agree with Supreme that many governments would hesitate to use free-lance superheroes, I also suspect that many nations (if not most) would have superheroes in their military forces. In some countries superheroes might be required to work for the government under penalty of law. For example, while I find it very unlikely that China or Syria would tolerate freelance heroes, America might well have superhero SEAL detachments and Powered Armor-clad Secret Service agents guarding the White House.

Now for a more philosophical question: If a character is seen as a hero in his country (Fights street crime, rescues kitties stuck in trees, supports local charities, etc.), but his country is seen as villainous by the rest of the world, is he considered a supervillain or a superhero? How would the rest of the world view Bagdad Bob, Saddam's personal superhero bodyguard? How would Hauptmann Hakenkreutz, the official hero of Nazi Germany, be viewed today?

[Klytus]

Originally posted by Trebuchet

Now for a more philosophical question: If a character is seen as a hero in his country (Fights street crime, rescues kitties stuck in trees, supports local charities, etc.), but his country is seen as villainous by the rest of the world, is he considered a supervillain or a superhero? How would the rest of the world view Bagdad Bob, Saddam's personal superhero bodyguard? How would Hauptmann Hakenkreutz, the official hero of Nazi Germany, be viewed today?

I think that heroes would be judged on their own accord. Rommell aka "The Desert Fox" was a hero of Germany during WWII, highly respected by other foreign nationals as well... and this was before anybody knew he was part of the conspiracy to kill Hitler.

[Mutant for Hire]

When you really get down to it, realistically the government wouldn't let most superheroes run around playing vigilante the way they do. And yes, the military would probably have a special recruiting program for many types of superheroes.

But if we're going to toss that out, I see Saddam in a supers universe hiring a lot of the mercenary supers and supers teams to go and cause havoc with the invading forces, maybe even to assassinate the generals running the invasion. This is going to force the armed forces to make some sort of effort to bring supers in to neutralize any native Iraqi supers as well as the mercenaries that Saddam has brought in.

[gewing]

I have often said that I feel many campaigns under-rate the effectiveness of military forced versus superheros. True, this matches most comics, but...

I thought this was an impressive video... 3 times the impact energy of a 120mm smootbore, guided...
http://www.strategypage.com/gallery/...t=20030213.htm

I don't think, however, that getting a superhero team involved in full scale war is usually a good thing. WWII level, sure. Alien invasion, sure. Run of the mill miliatry conflict, they would be more likely to try to head it off if possible.



Maybe they would go in on their own to find out whether he "really" has wmd, and take them out if they exist...

[Isaiah_26_4]

Chello!

Nope. But then, my game is set in the 80's.....

Now, if it was set in the 90's, the heroes would stay at home more than likely. Use something along the lines of Monolith's "Children of Islam" idea. Unless, of course, the players wanted to get involved. Then I'd activated them (most are Vets)....

Tony