If Champions never existed, what superhero RPG would you have played (or be playing today)?

[starblaze]

On 5/5/2022 at 1:13 PM, Spence said:

Started Supers with V&V. 

 

Then Champs 1e entered our neck of the world we quickly changed over. 

 

Played a little DC Heroes and really tried to play M&M but it's power/combat resolution system never clicked for me.

 

So if Champs never existed it would probably be V&V.  Early edition V&V.

 

Me too.  I dropped V&V after I found Champions.

 

[carmachu]

Depends on when you ask this at what age.

 

Teen years in the 80s? The old marvel superhero game.

 

College years In the 90s? Probably V&V

 

Now? Mutants and masterminds

[starblaze]

Well, my first Superhero game was Villains and Vigilantes so I probably would have stayed with that although mine was the 1st edition version so I would have eventually graduated to 2nd edition.

[assault]

A slight modification to my original post: in theory I could have ended up playing Super Squadron, a game published in Australia in the 80s. There aren't many games published in Australia, so I might have looked at it out of curiosity. (A friend actually bought it - he ended up giving it to me. I still own that copy.)

In that case I might have ended up playing something else, because it was a bit lame. It looked a lot like V&V.

[HeroGM]

Villains and Vigilantes more than likely. SuperWorld depending on what they had done with it.

 

I agree with others. Steve Jackson has come out and said GURPS was a mesh of D&D and Hero so it would be completely different.

 

You have to hand it to Jeff Dee for keeping V&V going in one form or another since it came out..

[Pattern Ghost]

For me, probably FASERIP Marvel, or something more rules light. There would be a lot of games that may not exist in their current forms if not for Champions/Hero, like the aforementioned GURPS, Mutants and Masterminds, and BESM to name a few.

 

Chaosium's Basic RPG system might have made an interesting base for a Superhero game, in an alternate timeline, or Top Secret / SI, for a skills-based game. I wonder what else may have emerged without Hero? Would someone else had come up with a system of core building blocks for powers and effects eventually?

[Opal]

Champions is what got me back into the superhero genre, at all, so most likely I'd have kept playing fantasy & sci-fi games until I got into Storyteller with Mage...

 

...which, BTW, had a magick system that essentially ran on special effects, like Hero.

[DreadDomain]

On 5/5/2022 at 10:58 AM, Tjack said:

   I got into Champions because a girl asked me to.  I was chasing after her and she was in a game and knew I was into comic books in a big way. I loved the game and stayed with it long after she and I were no more.  
   So you’ll have to ask her what game she would have been playing ‘cause she could have asked me to try laying down in traffic and I would have said OK.

Now we want to know, are you still with that girl today?

 

Assuming the disappearance of Champions would have left everything else unchanged, my early start would have been through SuperWorld and DC Heroes. Then I would have moved on to GURPS Supers. I would have dabbled in DC Universe, M&M and Marvel Heroic. The question is would I have stuck with GURPS Supers. I think so.

[Duke Bushido]

I wouldn't.  Supers isnt my bag.  It was the Champions mechanics and logical simplicity of the system and the ability to simplify or complicate it to precisely your comfort zone for any particular story that kept me playing it.  

 

If there had been no Champions, I would still be running Classic Traveller and several variants of it, most likely, and of course, Cadilacs and Dinosaurs, Space Opera, a bit of Star Frontiers with the right group, and the Fantasy Trip- possibly some T and T for nostalgia reasons, but I doubt it.

 

 

 

 

[Scott Ruggels]

14 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

I wouldn't.  Supers isnt my bag.  It was the Champions mechanics and logical simplicity of the system and the abikity to simplify or complicate it to prexisely your comfort zone for any particular story that kept me playing it.  

 

If there had been no Champions, I would still be running Classic Traveller and several variants of it, moat likely, and of course, Cadilacs and Dinosaurs, Space Opera, a bit of Star Frontiers with the right group, and the Fantasy Trip- possibly some T and T for nostalgia reasons, but I doubt it.

 Exactly my situation. slightly different games, but yeah classic Traveller, Bushido, and what ever FGU Game did a decent Crunchy fantasy.  Oh, and Welcome back, You have been missed.

[Duke Bushido]

Thank you, Sir.

 

Very kind of you to say that.

[Strand]

I've played GURPS Supers, V&V, I bought Mutants and Masterminds but never played it. I'm sure Steve Jackson Games had something. Played and loved DC Heroes. I've played Marvel. Is New Millennium considered Champions? I think RoleMaster (chart master) had ha hero game, though I played someone's custom version of Rolemaster. Back in the 90s, a friend was in the process of creating a game it was more like Gurps and a little heroic and it was called Zen and the Art of Mayhem. It was never finished but it was very fun.  I think the better question would have been what would you have played if D&D didn't exist because other games existed after it because they didn't like how D&D worked. 

 

[Scott Ruggels]

But that was the thing. Champions had these really elegant mechanics in that you could wargame Superhero battles. And later anything else.  This lead to the Mercenary battles and from then Fantasy Hero.  I read superhero comics, but I read more War comics, soot was all about elegant mechanics, not minimal mechanics.  

[assault]

6 hours ago, Strand said:

 I think the better question would have been what would you have played if D&D didn't exist because other games existed after it because they didn't like how D&D worked. 

 

 

Easy for me. I was playing wargames campaigns for years before I ever played an RPG, using rules based on those of British wargamer Tony Bath. These included NPCs with distinct personalities. I was also playing skirmish wargames. Putting the two together would create a rudimentary RPG.

 

The sources I am referring to either preceded D&D, influenced it, or were independent of it.

[assault]

To bring things back on topic: if you did want to play a superhero skirmish wargame, how would you assign powers?

Of course that is where Champions got it together.

(Superhero 2044, V&V, early D&D variants, Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World... all worked the same territory.)

[Sketchpad]

On 5/27/2022 at 4:19 AM, Pattern Ghost said:

Chaosium's Basic RPG system might have made an interesting base for a Superhero game, in an alternate timeline, or Top Secret / SI, for a skills-based game. I wonder what else may have emerged without Hero? Would someone else had come up with a system of core building blocks for powers and effects eventually?

 

Chaosium BRP did have a supers game called Superworld, which was created by Steve Perrin. Very influenced by Champions (or so it felt), and was the rules used in the famous Wild Cards setting.

[Joe Walsh]

2 hours ago, Sketchpad said:

 

Chaosium BRP did have a supers game called Superworld, which was created by Steve Perrin. Very influenced by Champions (or so it felt), and was the rules used in the famous Wild Cards setting.

 

And it's still available, as a pretty reasonably priced PDF for anyone interested in this little bit of supers RPG history:

https://www.chaosium.com/superworld-roleplaying-pdf/

 

Also worth mentioning "Bad Medicine for Dr. Drugs" and "Trouble for HAVOC", both of which are available as inexpensive PDFs that are compatible with not only Superworld but also Champions 1e-3e!

 

I love how intertwined so many companies and authors were back then, especially Hero Games, Chaosium, and Steve Jackson Games.

 

 

[assault]

8 hours ago, Sketchpad said:

 

Chaosium BRP did have a supers game called Superworld, which was created by Steve Perrin. Very influenced by Champions (or so it felt), and was the rules used in the famous Wild Cards setting.

 

Steve Perrin admitted the Champions influence. I read somewhere that he felt it might have been a bit too influenced by Champions.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I doubt GURPS wold have ever been made were it not for Hero.  It would have at best been a more advanced version of The Fantasy Trip

I did like a lot about Heroes Unlimited, but it was a pretty bleak setting.  If you like shows like The Boys and English wave deconstruction comic writing, its your huckleberry

[rjd59]

First superhero rpg I ever played was Villains and Vigilantes, until I found Champions 4th. So probably that or M&M (which I've never played, but seems popular).

[Jhamin]

I played a lot of the '80s Marvel Superheroes game (the FASERIP one) and had a good time doing it, but the way their product line worked made the game feel like it was really hard to take it away from it's "simulate Marvel Comics of the '80s" roots and the Character Creation system was so bonkers as to be unworkable without the group basically sitting down & deciding what they were going to play.  I had a good time & still think of it fondly, but my group had moved on for several years and bounced off GURPS Supers (too bloody) when we found Hero, in the form of the 4E Big Blue Book in the early '90s.

 

Had Hero not existed there is a good chance I wouldn't be playing supers at all.

[Spence]

2 hours ago, Jhamin said:

I played a lot of the '80s Marvel Superheroes game (the FASERIP one)

 

With the number of people that seem to love this game I can only conclude we were playing it wrong. 

 

All I can remember about it was the color coded chart and that whoever had the higher number in a stat won. Period.

No point on trying anything because if the opponent had a higher stat you simply lost.

 

I am getting the vibe that this may not be true

[Chris Goodwin]

Probably V&V or Marvel FASERIP.  

 

43 minutes ago, Spence said:

 

With the number of people that seem to love this game I can only conclude we were playing it wrong. 

 

All I can remember about it was the color coded chart and that whoever had the higher number in a stat won. Period.

No point on trying anything because if the opponent had a higher stat you simply lost.

 

I am getting the vibe that this may not be true

 

In practice, no.  Attacks do a flat amount of damage, so if you're comparing attacks vs. defenses, it's possible to be up against an opponent whose defenses you can't get through.  As with Champions, that means you have to get creative.  Blast the ground under his feet, or blast the tree behind him and knock it down on him, or something else.  

[Jhamin]

3 hours ago, Spence said:

 

With the number of people that seem to love this game I can only conclude we were playing it wrong. 

 

All I can remember about it was the color coded chart and that whoever had the higher number in a stat won. Period.

No point on trying anything because if the opponent had a higher stat you simply lost.

 

I am getting the vibe that this may not be true

 

When me and my group played it, it helped that we were all Comic Nerds and actually *wanted* our supers games to simulate the comics we were reading at the time.  I remember one player feeling put out that there was no way his gadgeteer hero could even hurt the Abomination.. but then when we talked about it we realized he had basically made a Hawkeye type character and those kinds of Heroes would just never fight the Abomination in the comics and if they somehow do the mission is to distract and escape not to actually have Hawkeye take down the Abomination so we shouldn't make his character do that in the game either.  It was basically us self-discovering the idea of campaign limits.  This really prepped me for toolbox games later on

 

The chart was a ton of fun.  The key was to try not to have rolloffs, they weren't fun.  The person initiating the action rolled.  If you wanted to grab someone you rolled your fighting.  If they were actually spending actions resisting you you rolled your fighting vs a difficulty of theirs and the color you needed depended on what the difference was.  It worked if you assumed that most of the time they weren't actually spending an action resisting you, they were spending an action attacking you back & most rolls were largely unopposed.  If their fighting was way better than yours it turned into a question of "how come Kitty Pride can't roll well enough to pin Captain America if he is focusing on keeping her from doing that?", which when you said it out loud made complete sense.

The game specifically called out that they rated things in categories and that if two characters were in the same category that didn't make them the same, it just made them similar enough not to worry about the difference in a world of teenage mutants and Jack Kirby space-gods.  If you actually looked at how comic battles played out in 80s era Marvel Comics the game worked surprising well

 

It was a lot of fun, but had it's limits.  The system's "sweet spot" was from around New Mutants on the low end and the Avengers on the high end.  Street Level Daredevil vs Punisher stuff didn't work right (noone did enough damage, fights lasted forever) and the granularity evaporated once you hit Thor/Silver Surfer level stuff.  Those fights sorta worked, but the cosmic heroes started to all seem super samey stat wise.

 

Also: Defense powers were kind of Over Powered.  The system worked great if you were tough but not actually armored like Spiderman, Thor, Cyclops, etc.  Characters with actual defensive powers like Invisible Woman, Colossus, and Iron Man could outright ignore a lot of threats (like Spence mentions) and it warped encounter building if you had parties that had mixed levels of defense.  There was a strong temptation to make sure all your characters had body armor or force fields because of how efficient they were.  We dealt with that with some home-brewed campaign guidelines that forced PC defenses to all be pretty similar so it was more fun for everyone to participate.

[steriaca]

It should be noted that Hero wasn't the first point buy system. That would be Steve Jackson's The Fantasy Trip, which eventually morphed into GURPS. So they might still be point buy character creation systems if Champions didn't exist. 

 

But it would be a bland world without Marksman and the other Guardians, and Defender, Seeker, Doctor Silverback, etc.