Champions Guidelines (by edition) Question

[greypaladin_01]

I have been digging through my collection of HERO books, which is more scattered than I realized, in hopes of finding guidelines each edition had for the range of Stats, SPD, CV, Skills, AP and other game elements.   My brain had convinced me that each edition had these guidelines but so far the only version I could find was the Aaron Allston 5e Champions Genre book.   The information is on page 126 and breaks down all the listed elements by power level of the campaign (Low, Standard, High, Cosmic, etc)

 

While part of my question deals with comparing the power levels by edition, I do not want to list the chart here, I am unclear on how that would fall under guidelines.

 

Does anyone know if/where the similar breakdowns for other editions could be found?   

 

 

Thanks!

 

[Cloppy Clip]

I only have the info for 6E, but Champions has a table for superheroic games on page 135. This reproduces the table from 6E's first core rulebook on page 35, which has the guidelines for normal and heroic games as well. If there are examples from other editions then I'm afraid I don't know where to look for them, but the equivalent books would be my first guess.

[greypaladin_01]

Thank you that helps for the 6e side.   Now to see if I can find anything for 4e era.

 

My other curiosity is if anyone has looked into how accurate those guidelines are actually followed in the rest of the products, such as Enemies books and the like.

[Doc Democracy]

Page 11 in the BBB.

 

If I remember properly thus might have been the first time such a table was produced as this was the first step in a unified HERO Sytem rather than a bunch of books with similar mechanics.

[greypaladin_01]

4 hours ago, Doc Democracy said:

Page 11 in the BBB.

 

If I remember properly thus might have been the first time such a table was produced as this was the first step in a unified HERO Sytem rather than a bunch of books with similar mechanics.

 

I knew about this one from BBB, but was trying to figure out if 4e had the more detailed breakdowns that 5/6e did.     Seems it only did the general guidelines.

 

Thank you!

[assault]

On a bus now, but I will break it down for 1-3e when I get home.

 

Short version: 2e and 3e gave explicit guidelines. 1e included suggestions. If you followed them, a lot of 1e's bugs would be less of an issue.

[Doc Democracy]

6 hours ago, greypaladin_01 said:

 

I knew about this one from BBB, but was trying to figure out if 4e had the more detailed breakdowns that 5/6e did.     Seems it only did the general guidelines.

 

Thank you!

 

Ah!  Thst will teach me to read things properly.  😁

 

Yeah, this is the batural progression along making a truly universal offering, the need to deliver more and more guidance on how to use the system to design your game.

 

The mistake Steve made was trying to get all that guidance into the core rulebook.  I reckon the 6E could be 1/4 the size it is.  The discussion of powers and talents and everything else would then be stuffed, in a more focused way, into the genre books like Champions and Fantasy HERO.

 

 

[Hugh Neilson]

11 hours ago, Doc Democracy said:

Page 11 in the BBB.

 

If I remember properly thus might have been the first time such a table was produced as this was the first step in a unified HERO Sytem rather than a bunch of books with similar mechanics.

 

Adventurers Club ran a survey on this back in the pre-4e days. The results were very broad-ranging, with examples like 12 DC and defenses in the 30-35 range (where fights would be slow, and looking for ways to add damage was common) and 15 DC with 15 - 20 defenses where combat was quick, emphasizing tactics like Block, Dodge and finding Cover, and first strike was crucial.  That may have motivated the limited guidelines provided in 4e.

[greypaladin_01]

Awesome!  Thank you everyone,  this is exactly what I was trying to find.   I suspected that the deeper guidelines were result of the more expanded toolkit style.

 

I agree... it feels like HERO would have been better served with something like the Sidekick rules as core, then have Genre Books (Fantasy, Champions, Pulp, Etc) with expanded rules and guidelines for simulating the style and then finally having the APG line being the HUGE books that cover all the deeper Toolkitting.   While it would take more books to have "all" the rules at your fingertips, I think it would be less intimidating and confusing for people that were curious about the system and wanted to try it.

 

@Hugh Neilson  Do you know where those results for that survey were posted.  I am very curious to see what the spread looked like in the earlier editions.

 

[Hugh Neilson]

I know they were published in the old (pre-Online) Adventurers' Club, probably near the end of its run, but I don't recall which issue.

[assault]

On 6/10/2023 at 5:01 PM, assault said:

On a bus now, but I will break it down for 1-3e when I get home.

 

Short version: 2e and 3e gave explicit guidelines. 1e included suggestions. If you followed them, a lot of 1e's bugs would be less of an issue.

 

Oh, I remember I wrote this... I suppose I had better follow it up.

2e and 3e's guidelines were the same, although 2e suggested 225 point characters and 3e suggested 250. There was a bunch of extra things you could spend points on in 250, notably the skills from Champions II. In fact, if you did go for a bunch of those, it could be quite hard to tell a 3e and 4e character apart at first glance.

Anyway... the guidelines presented allowed you to buy a basic set of characteristics and powers for 200 points, and then you were supposed to pad the character out from there.

The characteristic suggestions were:
Dex: 18-30, centering on 20-23.
Con: 18-33, centering on 18-23.
PD: 8-28, centering on 12-18.

ED: 8-28, centering on 12-18.
SPD: 4-6, centering on 5.
Spending about 100 points here would make you pretty nice.

For powers:
Attack powers: 40-60 points.
Defenses: 20-40 points.
Movement: 10-40 points.
Again, 100 points here would work pretty well.

That's not factoring in Limitations, which would allow you to get close to the maximum values across a range of things, and exceed them in some.

You can see that, not counting skill levels, characters would have between 6-10 CV (very few would have 6!), attacks of 8-12 DC, and appropriate, or higher(!) defenses.

Frankly, the results were pretty close to 4-6e standards, although you wouldn't usually have a big menu of attacks. Characters tended to be simpler at first, but could grow in complexity fairly quickly.

Of course, since everyone was new at this, overcomplex and unbalanced builds were all over the place.

1e didn't have this stuff, but had the sample characters, and a suggestion that 40-50 points in a power was pretty good, and 100 was generally wonderful. (I think this was repeated in 2e and 3e, but I can't see it immediately.) If you used 100 as a hard cap, a lot of abusive builds were manageable. (From Facebook discussions involving early Hero Games alumni, I get the impression that George MacDonald's games did this, at least effectively.)

EDIT: oh, and in the survey alluded to upthread games along these parameters were the most common, although there were plenty of others. IIRC, attacks averaged out at about 11d6, which is within the range suggested, although at the higher end.

The survey was actually fairly early on in the Adventurer's Club run, which limped along sporadically for years.
 

Edited June 12, 2023 by assault

[Ninja-Bear]

The 3rd ed Champions has a section labeled Reasonable Characters. I’m glad that @assault got to post this.

[Hugh Neilson]

7 hours ago, assault said:

 

The survey was actually fairly early on in the Adventurer's Club run, which limped along sporadically for years.

 

 

I recall a comment from Hero that, if they ever managed to release 4 issues in a calendar year, they would call AC bimonthly just out of principle.

[Doc Democracy]

I think the one Assualt mentions was from issue 8 (1986)...

[greypaladin_01]

Sweet!  Thank you all for the help.    Was never lucky enough to have any of the Adventurer Club stuff...but I think they sell PDFs now.   This way I know which to look for.

[Doc Democracy]

Yeah, I gave them all in PDF, but I got a chunk of them in hard copy, they were difficult to come across in the UK.

[Ninja-Bear]

On 6/9/2023 at 5:28 PM, greypaladin_01 said:

Thank you that helps for the 6e side.   Now to see if I can find anything for 4e era.

 

My other curiosity is if anyone has looked into how accurate those guidelines are actually followed in the rest of the products, such as Enemies books and the like.

If memory serves me correct, in the beginning of Classic Enemies, Scott Benny does list a rough guideline of how the villains are built. Since most were 4th ed updates, they held fairly close to the reasonable character suggestions listed in 3rd ed.  Whereas in CKC, Steve Long modified characters up (and down I think) in power levels and also origins, for example Vibron is now an alien.

[Ninja-Bear]

On 6/10/2023 at 7:59 PM, Hugh Neilson said:

I know they were published in the old (pre-Online) Adventurers' Club, probably near the end of its run, but I don't recall which issue.

Its also reprinted in the BBB.

[Ninja-Bear]

I found it. Pg S22 “Playing the Numbers”

[Ninja-Bear]

On 6/10/2023 at 12:38 AM, greypaladin_01 said:

 

I knew about this one from BBB, but was trying to figure out if 4e had the more detailed breakdowns that 5/6e did.     Seems it only did the general guidelines.

 

Thank you!

Check out pg S25 of the BBB. It has some guidelines filled out for sample games. One is for Standard Supers.

[greypaladin_01]

Awesome!  Thank you!    Time to dig out several books from storage