Ron Edwards Discusses Early Champions

[Lucius]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Edwards_(game_designer)

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Yeah, the palindromedary and I didn't know who he was either.

[Chris Goodwin]

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).

 

Did you ever play any of those "mutated offshoots", or even 3e Champions?

[Lucius]

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).

 

No. Copies of the old rulesets still exist - with viable DNA. We can clone them. We have the technobabble. You will know - Extinction is not forever! When you see games thought lost living and breathing again once I open - Justice Inc. Park!

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Palindromedary Enterprises DmBA Justice Inc. Park

[Greywind]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Edwards_(game_designer)

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Yeah, the palindromedary and I didn't know who he was either.

 

Point being, if I have to do research to find out who they are they have not impacted on my life.

[Lucius]

Point being, if I have to do research to find out who they are they have not impacted on my life.

I'm sure a great many people whose names you don't know have had an impact on your life.

 

But I certainly don't claim Ron Edwards is one of them.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary suggests Robert Kearns, who invented the intermittent windshield wiper, and Willis Carrier, who invented practical large scale air conditioning, have improved your life but you probably don't know who they are.

[DreadDomain]

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

Funnily enough, at the time the reason we moved our Golden Age Champions to GURPS Supers 2ed was to get more flavour from the system. No question HERO mixes any sfx and genre effortlessly using a single set of rules. We wanted to try GURPS and its sub-systems and we thought our campaign was well adapted for it. Our characters used super-powers and gadgeteering (Supers), psionics (Psionics), martial arts (Martial Arts) and spells (Magic and Grimoire). It worked surprisingly well. All the characters felt very different and our mentalist became truly terrifying. However, when we moved to a higher powered game, the balancing act became more difficult, required more work so we switched back to HERO.

[Tech priest support]

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

Respectfully I believe gurps and hero started out with two opposing design values and philosophies. Hero was meant to simulate the comic book genre and superhuman hero types. So it does this quite well but has to scale down to mundane levels.

 

Gurps was meant to be a more real world system that aimed at modeling reality which it does an acceptable job if but had to be scaled up to superhuman levels.

 

I think hero does a bit better job with points cost balance as in hero points are based on how effective a thing is in the game. So being immortal costs less than being a multimillionaire. Gurps has moved towards this ideal but didn't always follow it.

 

With the right players either system works. With bad players or a bad gm no system works.

 

One thing I'll say for hero is I don't hear a lot of people who've worked with the system say they felt like they got the dirty end of the stick from the company making it. I have heard several people say that about gurps.

[Greywind]

I'm sure a great many people whose names you don't know have had an impact on your life.

 

But I certainly don't claim Ron Edwards is one of them.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary suggests Robert Kearns, who invented the intermittent windshield wiper, and Willis Carrier, who invented practical large scale air conditioning, have improved your life but you probably don't know who they are.

 

Don't make assumptions. It won't end well.

[Brian Stanfield]

One thing I'll say for hero is I don't hear a lot of people who've worked with the system say they felt like they got the dirty end of the stick from the company making it. I have heard several people say that about gurps.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm curious about what people's long-term experiences are with GURPS. I'm part of a regular GURPS group, but I'm a HERO guy myself. I'd like to get them to try it out, but they seem content with what they've got with GURPS. I'm not totally sold on it, but can't quite put my finger on it.

[DreadDomain]

 

 

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

 

FantasyHero.jpg

I am curious to know what made that edition of Fantasy HERO so good?

[Christopher R Taylor]

I am curious to know what made that edition of Fantasy HERO so good? 

 

 

Well I'm sure he means more "fantasy hero in general" rather than the first book in specific, but here's what I really liked about it:

1) It gave us Hero games fantasy instead of the alternatives which were very lacking

2) I liked the feel of the game, it felt fantastic and magical down to renaming the powers more magic-specific rather than superhero or generic.  You had "Ward" instead of "Force Wall"  I liked that so much I keep wanting to do the same thing with my setting but keep backing off because of all the extra work and possible confusion.

3) The layout and font, everything felt more magical even if it wasn't as easy to read as more plain fonts.

[zslane]

The powers in Fantasy Hero were basically just Champions powers renamed (and in some cases slightly tweaked or simplified). They got new generic names that were fantasy-ish, but they were still generic powers that were just cribbed from Champions (which made sense since Fantasy Hero was Champions adapted to a different genre). GMs were expected to make spells out of those building blocks and give them names (and secondary sfx) that gave them a sense of place and history unique to the campaign world. To my mind, renaming Force Wall "Ward" or Energy Blast "Blast" didn't really make the game feel like a fantasy game. Only the campaign world could do that, and like all HS genre books, Fantasy Hero did not provide one of those. At best, Fantasy Hero felt like a thinly re-skinned Champions, with fantasy art thrown in the margins to help sell the genre-based potential of the underlying system.

 

I feel that the greatest contribution the original Fantasy Hero book made to the system was demonstrating how the underlying system could be re-targeted to another genre with a minimum of fuss.

[assault]

FH had some excellent campaign world books: the "Campaign Classics" series.

 

Dual statted for Rolemaster of course, but full of atmosphere.

 

Converting other Iron Crown stuff was more effort, but the tools were provided.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah I want Pirates and Mythic Egypt.  Vikings would be okay too.  The Robin Hood book is excellent if a bit light on ADVENTURES

[Chris Goodwin]

I did in fact mean the original first edition Fantasy Hero book.  

 

The powers in Fantasy Hero were basically just Champions powers renamed (and in some cases slightly tweaked or simplified). They got new generic names that were fantasy-ish, but they were still generic powers that were just cribbed from Champions (which made sense since Fantasy Hero was Champions adapted to a different genre). GMs were expected to make spells out of those building blocks and give them names (and secondary sfx) that gave them a sense of place and history unique to the campaign world. To my mind, renaming Force Wall "Ward" or Energy Blast "Blast" didn't really make the game feel like a fantasy game. Only the campaign world could do that, and like all HS genre books, Fantasy Hero did not provide one of those. At best, Fantasy Hero felt like a thinly re-skinned Champions, with fantasy art thrown in the margins to help sell the genre-based potential of the underlying system.

 

 

I haven't checked wording lately, so I'm not going to argue on that.  

 

First edition Fantasy Hero spell effects were not general purpose Powers; the game assumed you were using them to build spells.  They defaulted to a required Magic Skill roll, a full Phase to activate, Concentration at half DCV, and full END cost which at the time was 1 END per 5 Active Points.  The system included Advantages to buy those off for the first three.  END cost was done the same way as it was in third edition Champions: it was a "Modifier" rather than an Advantage, applied against the full Active Points of the Power rather than the Base Cost, and every level halved the END cost; to get it to zero END you had to buy enough levels so that the END cost was 0.5 or below and you got the rounding down to zero.  Also, END cost applied to everything, even things like Adapt (Life Support) and Perceive (Enhanced Senses).

 

The game was built around the assumption that if you were buying spell-like abilities, you had to be a caster.  You had to start the game with Magic Skill in order to be a caster (you could buy "latent" magical ability, for 1 point in Familiarity with Magic Skill, if you wanted spells later, but you would then have to buy that up with XP and also find and learn the spells).  Monster abilities and magic items were built using that system, and this was where the "Independent" Limitation first showed up; if you wanted to start with a magic item, you had to build it with points, which were gone, and which meant you also had to have a Create spell for the item.  Standard equipment was not built using that system; weapons were given stats (damage, OCV, range mod if applicable, STR min, maybe one or two others), armor was given a DEF value and mass, and you could have fought through the spell system to build those, but there was no point.  

 

You could have built a character with powers built through the spell system -- the rules would have supported it, but it was entirely up to the GM whether to allow it, and the point of the game was that casters were the only ones with spells so most GMs would have likely said no.  

[Chris Goodwin]

I am curious to know what made that edition of Fantasy HERO so good?

 

It didn't try to be all things to all people.  It presented a set of rules and let the players and GM find the game they contained.  It made no pretense at being universal or generic in any way; if we had wanted it to be that, we could have imported what we needed from Champions or Danger International or Justice Inc., and in some cases we did.  In other cases we imported stuff whole cloth from other rule systems (the FGU Bushido RPG was one source) or made up what we needed (I independently invented END Reserve for a Myth Adventures-based FH 1e game long before 4e came out).  

 

The feel strongly changed even between FH1e and the Fantasy Hero genre book for 4e.  I think the same went for pulp and modern adventures and science fiction games.  4e made it all Universal, but in so doing also made it Generic.  

[zslane]

I guess I am confused as to how you are using the terms generic and universal. I mean, a book that applies basic mechanics to a specific genre (like superheroes or medieval fantasy) can't be genre-less (i.e., generic) can it? Unless you are using the term generic as a synonym for bland. In which case I would argue that there has never been a Hero System "genre book" (including Champions) that wasn't little more than a bland demonstration of how to use the system mechanics to build a campaign for that particular genre.

[Chris Goodwin]

I guess I am confused as to how you are using the terms generic and universal. I mean, a book that applies basic mechanics to a specific genre (like superheroes or medieval fantasy) can't be genre-less (i.e., generic) can it? Unless you are using the term generic as a synonym for bland. In which case I would argue that there has never been a Hero System "genre book" (including Champions) that wasn't little more than a bland demonstration of how to use the system mechanics to build a campaign for that particular genre.

 

I am using it as a synonym for bland, yes.  And I would agree with you about the latter, from HERO System/Champions fourth edition onward.  

[zslane]

I guess I just don't see enough of a difference between any of the editions of the genre books to make a convincing claim that any of them are more or less generic/bland than any of the others.

[mrinku]

Personally I would have preferred them to have kept with the genre books. It allowed them to tailor stuff to better suit the setting (Robot HERO is a particularly good example, though Justice Inc was something special). I DID appreciate 4e bringing together the ramshackle expansions of Champions II and Champions III, which actually crossed editions and could be awkward, as well as rules that started out in Golden Age of Champions and other source books (I think even old Autoduel Champions contributed towards that). And stuff out of Adventurer's Club.

 

But you can also see the bloat starting to set in, too.

 

Or maybe I'm still bitter that the Shockwave maneuver was dropped for "make that stuff with powers, son."?

[Hugh Neilson]

To me, 3e and prior, Hero published games, not genre books. The rules were tweaked to achieve the desired game. Fantasy Hero had spells with required limitations, minimum points purchased in the spell school, etc. that the player did not get to vary (e.g. you could not buy spells that did not require a skill roll, or lacked Side Effects - that was a feature of the magic system in the game).

 

4e and onwards published genre books - advice for building your own game, with plenty of options but no actual game, just advice on how to use the overall System to build a game in a specific genre.

 

Turakian Age and similar books could more reasonably be considered "games". No frameworks, but divide the real cost by three, just because that is how we want magic to work here, modified the rules to create a specific game.

[Chris Goodwin]

FH1e is a complete game.  It includes character creation (including spell creation rules), combat and adventuring, genre advice (how to create and run Fantasy Hero worlds and adventures), sourcebook (sample spells, magic items, monsters, PC templates (priest, rogue, warrior, wizard; elf, dwarf, halfling)), sample adventures (small but usable) including NPC writeups, sample setting info (minimal but not non-existent), and three characters (suitable for NPC use or PC pregens).  

 

Danger International is a complete game.  It includes character creation, combat and adventuring, genre advice (how to run adventures in espionage, law enforcement, modern military, conspiracy, modern horror, low post-apocalyptic, near future hard SF), sourcebook (info on gadgets, drugs, poisons, firearms, vehicles), setting (detail on the world as it existed as of the date of publication, including info on world governments), sample adventures (slightly larger than the ones in FH), NPC writeups, and at least one sample PC.

 

Justice Inc. is a complete game, as are Robot Warriors and Star Hero 1e.  They're not genre books; they didn't require the use of Champions in order to play.  DI, JI, and RW all included optional notes on building gadgets using Champions Powers, with a separate -1 "Gadget" Limitation, and some additional notes for tweaking them to include stats Champions didn't use (namely Size).  DI and JI suggested importing Champions Powers for NPC monsters, aliens, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, etc. and gave some sample writeups using them.  Star Hero 1e had its own subsets of Powers, one for alien abilities and one for technological gadgets, and included extensive rules on building those and vehicles as well.  

 

The self-contained games were all built to the assumption that characters would be approximately talented normals, with 100-125 total points.  DI did not include any powers rules at all!  JI had its own rules for psychic abilities, that did not touch the Champions Powers rules.  RW had its own rules for building giant robots and SF weaponry.  FH and SH had their own separate subsystems for spells and powers respectively, that modified the base assumptions of the Powers rules.

 

The group that Christopher Taylor and I were in, when those were new, had multiple long running campaigns using each of those games.  Sometimes we pulled things from one book or another (usually Skills), Danger International and Robot Warriors kind of blurred into one another; before RW came out, we had multiple games of Battletech Hero, using DI for character creation and combat; when RW came out, we did numerous campaigns there and even one that straddled both Battletech and RW.  There was a western game that blurred JI and DI together.  Anything we mixed and matched was GM driven; you started with the assumptions of whatever the base game was.  In FH, for instance, your character concept was most likely to start with, which fantasy archetype am I playing, and what Skills?  In DI, it would be likely what agency you started out in and what your experience was like, and again, what Skills I would have from that.  

 

With 4e, the basis was effectively the Champions ruleset, pulling in the default combat rules from the talented normal games as switchable options.  The default question for character concepts, regardless of the genre, started to be:  what Powers do I want?  Maybe for Fantasy Hero you start with which fantasy archetype, but then you're trying to figure out which powers a rogue or a warrior has.  If I want my rogue to be good at picking locks, the default suggestion is Transform Lock (locked to unlocked), not Lockpicking, and can I put it into a rogue tricks Multipower, and what else can I fit in there (Clinging, Invisibility to Hearing, Dispel Traps...)

 

What used to be separate games for separate genres is now Champions with a coat of paint and some switches flipped.  The comparisons between HERO and GURPS that Ron Edwards made are spot on.  

[Christopher R Taylor]

Its not that you cannot have a full game book with 6th edition, its that the focus has become less "here's a game" than "here are the tools to make your game."  There's nothing wrong with that, it just makes things more complicated and difficult for new players and GMs.

[Hyper-Man]

Well to put it in old computer programing terms, 6e was like a new Operating System release.  That OS unfortunately did not get adopted to the "tipping point" where enough gamers owned it (originally due to the books being out of print when there was demand and now there being much less demand). Most of the other company published 6e books can be thought of as patches to that OS.  It's now a great OS but the fact remains that there is a huge challenge to anyone interested in attempting to create End User Programs (an actual complete game) mainly due to the numbers.  It's arguable that there is a bit of chicken/egg stuff going on but I know there have been attempts on both side of equation (the new Strike Force and Narosia: Sea of Tears) but I don't think either have truly succeeded in bring in droves of new HERO fans. 

 

HM

[Chris Goodwin]

Its not that you cannot have a full game book with 6th edition, its that the focus has become less "here's a game" than "here are the tools to make your game."  There's nothing wrong with that, it just makes things more complicated and difficult for new players and GMs.

 

Which brings us to today.  Hero is once again in the position of not being able to attract new players; any notions of how to do so by making it so they don't have to drink from the firehose that is the full Powers system are shouted down.  

 

Most of those games from the GAS days didn't use Powers.  The Champions games did; the Fantasy Hero games used spells, and limited them to casters; there were a few oddball games that allowed them in as well.  But the Danger International games didn't, the Robot Warriors games didn't; and those were a massive part of the whole bunch.  I don't recall there being any Justice Inc. games while I was there, but if there were I'm sure they might have used that game's special abilities.  

 

You don't need the Powers system to have a fun game.  That's another thread, though.  (In fact, it's about three or four over the past five years or so...)