Ron Edwards Discusses Early Champions

[Steve Long]

Thought this just-getting-started series might interest some of you. I'm not working on it with Ron, but no doubt I'll have my share of comments. 

 

https://adeptpress.wordpress.com/2017/07/16/exhumed-still-lovely-my-dear/

[zslane]

Sorry, I couldn't finish that article. I knew I had nothing in common with him the moment he expressed affection for GURPS Supers 1st edition. And when he tried to characterize 4e Champions as derivative of GURPS, I realized this guy lived in a very different reality than the one I experienced back then. Champions was a brilliant work of game design. GURPS Supers 1st edition was just a complete mess.

 

I remember being at the SJG panel at GenCon in 1990 and standing up and asking Lloyd Blankenship why GURPS Supers had a Flash Attack but no Flash Defense, and his reply was that he didn't believe every kind of attack needed to have a corresponding defense. That was the sort of design philosophy that went into that book, and it was indicative of the many design flaws littered throughout it. Moreover, GURPS Supers revealed just how inadequate the GURPS system was for something like superheroes.

 

So when this Ron Edwards guy talks about GURPS Supers as a game deserving of even being in the same conversation as Champions, I just know he is someone I can't take seriously.

[Hyper-Man]

It is a bit odd that he mentions that he chose to compare 1st editions of each while acknowledging that GURPS Supers came out the same year as Champions 4e.  And then he casually states they are similar in design philosophy but that the GURPS book is more elegant!? Why not do a comparison of those 2 books then? The logic seems flawed at best.

 

HM

[Beast]

My wondering is
HOW CAN GURPS SUPERS BE ELEGANT
when it can't mix with the other genre books
heck the other genre books cannot mix with each other EITHER

THAT ALONE MAKES HERO SYSTEM ELEGANT

[Beast]

AND ESPECIALLY 4TH ED HERO SYSTEM

[TheQuestionMan]

CHAMPIONS vs. GURPS: The gaming club at SFU played every Game System under the sun, but Champions ruled the Superhero fans, D&D and GURPS ruled the Fantasy fans.

We played other systems and mixed genres, but 27+ years we still play GURPS Fantasy with occassional breaks in other game systems and genres.

IMOHO Champions does Superheroes best and easiest to crossover.


QM

[zslane]

I played in a GURPS Fantasy campaign for a few years in the early 90s and the system did not feel any better suited to the genre than any other I'd played. It was less fun than AD&D, at least for me, despite having a more logical framework underneath it. I think it was the system's realism bias that turned me off the most. I would have preferred AD&D or Fantasy Hero over GURPS Fantasy, but our GM was a GURPS fanboy so the choice of system wasn't really up for debate.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I wasn't real impressed with GURPS fantasy, its a bit too arbitrary in its magic builds

[mrinku]

GURPS has its core basis in reality checking. I think it's often struggled doing the more fantastic aspects of some genres. I do generally rate it better than HERO for settings where powers (including spells) aren't in use.

 

I get what he's saying about not liking the move from 3e self contained books to following a GURPS style core-rules-and-setting-books one, but the truth is that there was a cordial back-and-forth between the two game design streams from the start. Champions clearly took some core concepts from Melee/Wizard/The Fantasy Trip (happened to be my original fantasy RPG, second RPG after Traveller), while GURPS overtly borrowed elements from Champions. 

 

I was there too during the 3e -> 4e period and it never much bothered me one way or the other. 

[Chris Goodwin]

I get what he's saying about not liking the move from 3e self contained books to following a GURPS style core-rules-and-setting-books one, but the truth is that there was a cordial back-and-forth between the two game design streams from the start. Champions clearly took some core concepts from Melee/Wizard/The Fantasy Trip (happened to be my original fantasy RPG, second RPG after Traveller), while GURPS overtly borrowed elements from Champions. 

 

I was there too during the 3e -> 4e period and it never much bothered me one way or the other. 

 

I was there in 3e-4e as well.  Here's what I think Ron is getting at: in the 1-3e period, and in the Champions II and III supplements, everything is about superheroes.  Every page, every bit of advice.  All of it comes from the standpoint of making a superhero game.  In the 3e corebook, you can go down the Powers list and pick out which ones were intended to go with which comic book characters.  Likewise in FH 1e, JI, DI, and Robot Warriors; they were all gleeful renditions of their respective genres, and you could see it in every page of those books as well.  The "Hero System" at the time was the house system for the various games published by Hero Games, and it showed.  The rules for Fantasy Hero were different from those of Danger International and Champions, because they were different games.  

 

The 4e focus was in unifying the system.  It did what it did quite well, but IMO, the games suffered some for the unification; the 4e basis was the HERO System Rulesbook, and the BBB sliced the Champions portions into a separate section.  Champions was no longer a game; it was a HERO System genre.  Same with the rest.  

 

By the time the BBB came out, GURPS was pushing into its own 3rd edition, and while it was generic and universal it wasn't quite unified, as you could see with all of its various books, but that's where the intent was.  I actually kind of liked GURPS Supers 1e, which didn't come out until around the same time as the BBB, but it did have its own issues and its second edition came out quite rapidly after.  To me, the GURPS Supers 1e -> 2e transition pretty closely resembles the Champions 3e -> HERO System 4e transition, in that the system level quirks were smoothed out.  Yes, GURPS Supers needed optional rules to handle things like Stun damage and knockback, but that's not too different from how bleeding, impairing and disabling, and knockback/knockdown became switchable options in the HERO System.  Even so, you still had Hero old timers who used the older games with 4e as if they were genre books, because genre books weren't quite yet a thing for Hero.  

 

Before Champions 4e, the Hero System games were damn near perfect for their genres.  They did every genre impeccably, because they were built to.  If you were playing Justice Inc., you used Justice Inc.'s psychic abilities and weird talents; you didn't try to build them with Champions Powers.  Similarly with Fantasy Hero spells; they worked differently and had different costs, because it was a different game with its own needs.   With the BBB, the notion that HERO was better for supers and GURPS better for everything else was cemented.  

 

Becoming generic and unified helped the HERO System commercially, but the game lost something.  

[Christopher R Taylor]

Even so, you still had Hero old timers who used the older games with 4e as if they were genre books, because genre books weren't quite yet a thing for Hero.  

 

 

Yeah, in Game Alliance of Salem, we'd run anything under Hero, long before 4th came out.  It was our universal system even if it wasn't quite universal in design yet.  I don't remember anyone doing a cross-genre game, but we'd run post-apocalyptic, just regular people in a terrible competition, Bushido, everything.  Even before 4th came out, folks just used Hero as a universal system but it wasn't officially and as easily done until 4th came out and made it official.

 

But I agree, Hero and GURPS were less competitors than siblings in their development.  Steve Jackson had his vision of how he wanted a system to be and the Hero guys had theirs, but there was a lot of inspiration and learning from each other.

[Chris Goodwin]

It is a bit odd that he mentions that he chose to compare 1st editions of each while acknowledging that GURPS Supers came out the same year as Champions 4e.  And then he casually states they are similar in design philosophy but that the GURPS book is more elegant!? Why not do a comparison of those 2 books then? The logic seems flawed at best.

 

HM

 

I think the comparison is that Champions 4e was Hero System Rulesbook plus Champions sourcebook, and GURPS was GURPS Basic Set plus GURPS Supers book, but Champions 3e was Champions, the Super Roleplaying Game.  

[Chris Goodwin]

Yeah, in Game Alliance of Salem, we'd run anything under Hero, long before 4th came out.  It was our universal system even if it wasn't quite universal in design yet.  I don't remember anyone doing a cross-genre game, but we'd run post-apocalyptic, just regular people in a terrible competition, Bushido, everything.  Even before 4th came out, folks just used Hero as a universal system but it wasn't officially and as easily done until 4th came out and made it official.

 

True; Danger International was sold as a modern action adventure game, but it had hooks for SF and post-apoc and weird conspiracy, and those were how we got Battletech and Twilight: 2000 and western games out of it.  Our GMs were also really good about writing up all kinds of stuff about the world background and which rules would and wouldn't be in effect, and I know Kam wrote up all kinds of additional rules for the Bushido game: rolling your character's beginning social class on a percentile table and adding Ki and On as stats, among other things.  It wasn't that we were treating it as a universal system, necessarily, but that the various games lent themselves to being stretched in those ways.  If that makes sense.  

[zslane]

The games coming out of Hero Games were always of the System + Genre architecture. This was not copied from GURPS, and it most certainly did not start with 4e. Champions 1st edition was essentially a game system with the superhero genre material combined under one cover. This was true for all the Hero System "games" from the 2e/3e era. Nearly half of each game book was comprised of an almost word-for-word reprint of the same system rules from Champions, followed by (and interlaced with) advice for running the new genre, along with a handful of example NPCs, villains, and bits of gear (maybe even a suggestion for an adventure). They weren't really fully realized games because they lacked concrete settings (apart from that which you got for free if the genre was based in the real/modern world). Champions had the semblance of a full game because it had lots of villain books and adventure modules to flesh out, in a rather disorganized sort of way, the so-called "Champions Universe". But in truth, by the time of 3e Champions was the Hero System with genre material hung off it, just like all the others.
 
By the end of the 3e era it was recognized that reprinting the same system rules (with only some point cost differences and minor mechanical differences) in every book was both inelegant and wasteful. Formally separating the system rules into its own volume, and selling genre material as a separate product was the next logical step, and I believe it would have happened anyway, had GURPS never existed. It made sense purely from a production stand point. The fact that they took that opportunity to "unify" the underlying system was just good planning. I believe they would have done that even if they had not chosen to organize their products in the so-called "GURPS manner", it's just that you would have literally seen the exact same rules in every game book, with the genre distinctions emerging through the examples.
 
I think the only thing GURPS did was demonstrate the marketplace viability of separating system rules from genre material. It didn't invent the notion.

[Chris Goodwin]

The games coming out of Hero Games were always of the System + Genre architecture. This was not copied from GURPS, and it most certainly did not start with 4e. Champions 1st edition was essentially a game system with the superhero genre material combined under one cover. This was true for all the Hero System "games" from the 2e/3e era. Nearly half of each game book was comprised of an almost word-for-word reprint of the same system rules from Champions, followed by (and interlaced with) advice for running the new genre, along with a handful of example NPCs, villains, and bits of gear (maybe even a suggestion for an adventure).

No, they most certainly were not "comprised of an almost word-for-word reprint of the same system rules from Champions".  The non-Champions games were primarily skill-based, and designed for Normal Characteristic Maxima games.  DI and JI were firearms heavy, and the combat there focused strongly on firearms, with lots of firearm specific stuff that didn't exist in Champions.  There were areas where some of the verbiage was recapped -- descriptions of Characteristics, discussions of the generalities of combat, movement, Perception.  The Champions 1e, 2e, and 3e corebooks were absolutely focused on superhero gaming.  Every paragraph included things like "This is how it's done here, because that's how they do it in superhero comics."  The Champions II and Champions III supplements expanded on the corebooks, and went even further toward superhero comics stories.  

 

With the exception of about a single page of material for building gadgets, Danger International, Justice Inc., and Robot Warriors made no reference at all to building Powers, and those single-pages referred you to the Champions books.  They also specified that they used them differently.  

 

Fantasy Hero 1e's spell building system was based on the Champions power system, but it had a different set of assumptions.  They were almost all given different names (Adapt, Dazzle, Dominate, Shield, Ward), and many of them had odd differences in how they worked between Champions and Fantasy Hero -- based on the differences in genre between superheroes and fantasy.  Many of the base effects had a greater cost than their Champions equivalents (Adapt).  Many abilities didn't make it into Fantasy Hero at all (Clinging, Missile Deflection, Swinging, Tunnelling).  Some new ones (Aid, Dispel, Summon) were added that had never appeared in Champions.  Some things were monster-only (Incorporeal, Size Decrease, Size Increase).  Everything had an END cost by default.  Everything took a half-Phase to activate by default.  Everything put you at half DCV by default.  Everything took a Magic Roll by default.  If you wanted to make a Fantasy Hero spell that worked just like a Champions power, you could do it, but it was a pain, it was expensive, and you had to get GM permission.  

 

Justice Inc.'s psychic powers were their own thing.  You paid a number of points for a base EGO roll.  They typically didn't work on demand; you had to take a huge penalty to your roll to use them at will.  They were intended more for the GM to pass the players information at their own pace than they were for characters to be mentalists.  Weird Talents from JI were different from psychic powers and were different from DI's Talents.  The martial arts rules were different between Champions and JI/DI; JI only had Boxing, while DI had modern martial art forms.  Champions had Martial Arts, consisting of Martial Punch, Martial Kick, Martial Block, Martial Dodge, and Martial Throw, and you paid points equal to your STR for it.  

 

Fourth edition Champions made one set of rules out of all of that, with one set of assumptions, and while they kept the various games' extra combat rules as switchable options, everything was assumed to start with that one ruleset.  Fourth edition Champions games strongly resembled third edition Champions games, but fourth edition Fantasy Hero games strongly also resembled fourth edition Champions games.  

[Christopher R Taylor]

There was some duplication.  The combat system was pretty much straight out of Champions, the Characteristics, skill system, disadvantages, all almost word-for-word from the Champions books.  There were some changes (hunted was added to Danger International, some weren't listed like vulnerability, and the skill charts had different or added skills, for example) but it was very close to the same thing.  Fantasy Hero had the biggest changes, with a powers system using almost entirely re-named powers, new powers not in Champions like Create, and new modifiers.

 

But it was all based on the same structure. Each one compatible, just as now.  You could play a Fantasy Hero wizard in the Justice Incorporated or Champions game.  Some dials would be shifted based on the setting (bleeding, etc) but for the most part, unchanged.  It just didn't have "universal system" stamped on the front.

 

If I put out Conan Hero and renamed the skills to fit the time period, that's still gonna work in champions, its just going to take some remembering that Sneak is the same thing as Stealth.

[Greywind]

[DreadDomain]

I played in a GURPS Fantasy campaign for a few years in the early 90s and the system did not feel any better suited to the genre than any other I'd played. It was less fun than AD&D, at least for me, despite having a more logical framework underneath it. I think it was the system's realism bias that turned me off the most. I would have preferred AD&D or Fantasy Hero over GURPS Fantasy, but our GM was a GURPS fanboy so the choice of system wasn't really up for debate.

I'm the total opposite. Over the years I've played The Dark Eye, Pendragon, RuneQuest, Stormbringer, Talislanta, Fantasy HERO, Warhammer, Rolemaster/MERP, AD&D, Harnmaster and probably others I have forgotten, but the system I have enjoyed the most for Fantasy (both as player and GM) is GURPS. We've had grim and gritty campaigns where combat was deliciously visceral and dangerous and others high powered, cinematic epics.

[DreadDomain]

And when he tried to characterize 4e Champions as derivative of GURPS, I realized this guy lived in a very different reality than the one I experienced back then.

A strange statement indeed. I would say GURPS 4th moved far closer to HERO than the other way around.

 

Champions was a brilliant work of game design. GURPS Supers 1st edition was just a complete mess.

I don't believe I ever played GURPS Super 1st edition but it so happened that, years ago, we moved our Golden Age campaign from HERO 4th to GURPS Super 2nd edition (we wanted to try something different). Surprisingly, of all the other superhero games I tried, it was the second most satisfying after HERO.

 

Mind you, if GURPS has one design flaw is that it doesn't scale nearly as well as HERO does so when we played our modern, more high powered campaign once our Golden Age campaign was over, we ended up after a while, moving the game from GURPS to HERO.

[Joe Walsh]

I'm the total opposite. Over the years I've played The Dark Eye, Pendragon, RuneQuest, Stormbringer, Talislanta, Fantasy HERO, Warhammer, Rolemaster/MERP, AD&D, Harnmaster and probably others I have forgotten, but the system I have enjoyed the most for Fantasy (both as player and GM) is GURPS. We've had grim and gritty campaigns where combat was deliciously visceral and dangerous and others high powered, cinematic epics.

 

My experience is similar. When it comes to fantasy, there are lots of choices. I've tried quite a lot of them over the decades. There are reasons to use this one or that for specific instances, but in my experience the best fantasy RPG all-around is GURPS. And that's been even more true since GURPS 4e.

[Chris Goodwin]

Unifying the HERO System as a single “generic” rules system eliminated both of those problems. But it also meant that the two design strains described above had to merge, which in turn meant that one or both strains had to change or disappear. Since the more freewheeling approach of early Champions simply wouldn’t work for the “Heroic” genres, 4th Edition Champions/HERO System hewed toward a more, well, GURPS-y, approach: a generic, multi-genre system that defined an explicit point-cost for every imaginable skill, ability, and power. I’m not saying this is bad! It’s a real difference between lines of work within the same company, that’s all. Acknowledging this helps to identify how and why this approach became central after Iron Crown took over the production and distribution of Hero Games books.

The above is from a previous post on Ron Edwards' blog from about two years ago. This is, I think, what he's getting at.

 

 

My experience is similar. When it comes to fantasy, there are lots of choices. I've tried quite a lot of them over the decades. There are reasons to use this one or that for specific instances, but in my experience the best fantasy RPG all-around is GURPS. And that's been even more true since GURPS 4e.

The best fantasy RPG I've ever played is this one right here:

 

[Joe Walsh]

The best fantasy RPG I've ever played is this one right here:

 

FantasyHero.jpg

 

That one is very good indeed. Initially, my post listed my top fantasy RPGs and what I like about each of them and concluded with the GURPS comment, then I decided to just cut to the chase. Briefly, though, Fantasy HERO 1e is on my 'top fantasy RPGs' list, too (along with RuneQuest 2, 70s/80s D&D, and the aforementioned GURPS).

[Chris Goodwin]

That one is very good indeed. Initially, my post listed my top fantasy RPGs and what I like about each of them and concluded with the GURPS comment, then I decided to just cut to the chase. Briefly, though, Fantasy HERO 1e is on my 'top fantasy RPGs' list, too (along with RuneQuest 2, 70s/80s D&D, and the aforementioned GURPS).

 

For me, Champions was first, then GURPS.  But I got started with GURPS with the Man to Man booklet and Roleplayer #1.   Stayed with it as one of my systems, until their 4e came out shortly after HERO 5e... I figured I didn't need to buy into another expensive hardcover edition for a game that, for the most part, does everything HERO does.  It's certainly not a bad game, and I respect it as much as I ever did, but I didn't need to keep following it. 

[Joe Walsh]

For me, Champions was first, then GURPS.  But I got started with GURPS with the Man to Man booklet and Roleplayer #1.   Stayed with it as one of my systems, until their 4e came out shortly after HERO 5e... I figured I didn't need to buy into another expensive hardcover edition for a game that, for the most part, does everything HERO does.  It's certainly not a bad game, and I respect it as much as I ever did, but I didn't need to keep following it. 

 

Makes sense. You have to draw the line somewhere! If I were still following all the games I've loved over the years, I'd have no room left to game in.

[zslane]

I still don't really see 4e as a "merging" of anything. It was, if anything, a streamlining of the original reference system (Champions) so that it could handle any genre, making the mutated 2e/3e offshoots (Justice Inc., Danger Intl., Robot Warriors, Fantasy Hero, etc.) unnecessary and obsolete. In effect, 4e is what Champions would have been had Steve and George known in 1980 that it would be used for arbitrary genres. We might as well think of Champions as the One True System, and all those other 2e/3e games as evolutionary dead-ends, doomed to extinction once Champions/Hero System reached its full potential (4e).