Can Champions Characters Die?

[Gauntlet]

I'm not sure if in any of my games I have seen a Champions Character die. Of course, I mean in a standard champions game, not a Dark Hero one. Unconscious of course, but never truly dead. Anyone else have recollections of having a true Champions Superhero die?

[Doc Democracy]

Yup.  I reckon two or three of the superheroes in my games have died.  I tend not to kill a character due to bad rolls but, if they have "died" in thus way, I will find a bendy physics reasons for them to survive.  I then talk to the player, saying that I am open to finding a heroic death for their character somewhere in the next few sessions. 

 

If they are up for it, and so far it has been three for three, I build scenarios where there may be opportunity for an heroic sacrifice and, if they take it up, they probably won't survive but I will guarantee their sacrifice will be successful.

 

RIP Vortex

RIP Firelord

RIP Black Ninja

 

Doc

Edited August 21, 2023 by Doc Democracy

[unclevlad]

Yes.  The player had built a multiform shifter.  I suspect now, he might've misunderstood the multiform rules, because I remember he said that after paying for it, he didn't have points left.  He got nailed by a near-max damage roll, on killing damage.

 

Another case...this was character murder by the GM, IMO.  Flyer with extreme DEX, therefore CV...probably 4E at that point.  It was something akin to Hawkman.  The GM decided that an autofire killing attack, based on ECV, versus Ego Def, DOING BODY!!! was somehow reasonable.  Oh, and 5 shots.  And on charges to blow off the END aspect.  Blithely ignoring 2 or 3 STOP signs, or anything like the fact that an autofire based on non-standard defenses rates an additional +1.  And he took PRIDE in how he build this stuff, cuz...by his math...it was SO CHEAP.  Yeah, he was a rules *mangler* at heart.  (Mangler being the family friendly word, rather than the accurate one.)  

 

That game largely fell apart at that point, altho it was also the end of the semester anyway, and everyone else was in college.  

[Duke Bushido]

Given how many "are you sure?" And "yyou understand that this could kill you if it goes wrong?" "You understand that you cannot control the dice and the dice don't love you?" And "there is no way you will survive this" and "get up, look at the map, maybe go grab a smoke, and take,another look" type warnings I give, I have never had a personal issue with letting a character get killed, and have never received a lot of flak (after the initial shock) from players who did it anyway and did not get lucky.

 

While it wasn't exactly what you re asking, our campaign city still celebrates a day of rememeberence for a weekend session where we thinned the hero and villain files (there is a problem no one mentions when a game makes a sort of minigake out of character creation:

 

An all-out war for the city where, across a three-day weekend, roughly twenty players grabbed characters (heroes and villains) and when it was over, we had killed off just short of 300 rarely-used or never used or haven't-used-in-a-couple-of-years characters.  If the guy you were using fot killed, reach in the files and grab another one.

 

I dont think _anyone_ was unhappy about that.  Great stress reliever, and it made managing the city easier be removing a thousand or so loose ends and "we will get back to that" references.

 

Again, not what you were easing, exactly, but periodically referencing the even in-game reminds even new players that death is alowed in this game.

 

Outside of that, "dying a heroic death" is the hands-down favorite way for my suoers and sci-to players to retire a character when they feel they are really ready to play another one.

 

This probably stems from the years before I was the GM: my first character qas a one-trick brick who, for whatever reason (presumably way I developed the character, but who knows?) That, even after I lesrned the game and was ready to make a thought-out and planned character, but let the rest od the group browbeat at me into playing that same character, over and over, even as they made new characters several times.  Eventually he was not fun to play anymore just because he was so out-of-scale power-wise, and I was miserable as a player even while they were delighted in game to be interacting with a character who the GM eventually made "legendary."  (Imagine playing Superman in a world full of Burt Ward's Robin).

 

 

Eventually they stopped asking, but those feom the original group ever sinve have made certain to go out of their way to die heroically than take a chance on getting stuck like that.

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Its up to you as the GM.  Ideally the only way someone should die in most Champions campaigns is in some tremendously heroic way, saving a train full of orphaned handicapped children, something along those lines.  And it should usually be in agreement with the player: here's how your character is going to go out, lets come up with a great storyline.

Just, expect your other players to have their characters do their damndest to prevent it and keep them alive.  Because that's what heroes do.

[Doc Democracy]

Of course, in my current campaign, I have pledged to my players that any villain captured an imprisoned will never escape unless they specifically request another scenario featuring that villain.  In essence, every villain put in prison "dies" for the purpose of gameplay.

 

I do not have the same need as comicbook authors to write the ultimate Joker, or Doctor Doom story. Though the principle is the same, it's not Batman's fault that the Joker lives to kill again, it is the fans'.

Edited August 22, 2023 by Doc Democracy

[Christopher R Taylor]

I prefer the ambiguous end for villains, where they are last seen in a collapsing ancient temple or falling into a crevasse, a vat of acid, etc.  Did they die? Well probably and they certainly ought to have, but... they can come back still.

[LoneWolf]

Depends on what you mean by dying.  If you mean taking enough damage to put you at negative of your BODY, than I have had 2 characters die.  In both cases it was a good excuse for a radiation accident.   If you mean a character that remained dead that is a different story.  

[Gauntlet]

No, I mean dead as a door nail, closed grave homeowner, expired, and many others. Someone who has taken enough BODY to go to go less than their full BODY twice over.

[unclevlad]

I don't mind if a high-powered villain escapes...OCCASIONALLY.  And it'd better be someone not too lethal.  From Dark Knight...Joker blew up, IIRC, a police station and a hospital.  How many died there?  How many did he threaten to kill on those boats?  My only real complaint about the film is that the damage and chaos that Joker represented, drew FAR TOO LITTLE of a response.

 

When someone is a threat of that magnitude, then NOT having the death penalty for them is promising they'll never get out...so a promise they'll never escape is entirely reasonable.  On the fiip side, the prison can only go so far.  Defenses are static.  Someone may occasionally work out how to get around them.

 

I take the position that it's much like felony murder...if someone dies during an attempted robbery, it doesn't matter that it was your partner in crime that shot...or that he tripped and the gun went off accidentally.  If someone died, it's the same as deliberate, premeditated murder.  In other ways, almost ANY power constitutes at least a deadly weapon, and in many cases, might even border into a weapon of mass destruction.  The judicial system, IMO, can't afford to be forgiving.  

[Sketchpad]

A few over the years. I think the first vaporized himself with a massive attack in one of the first Champions game I played in. In most cases, though, it was a discussion a player had with me (or visa versa). 

[Lord Liaden]

One of the things I like about the published Champions Universe is that it has a long history of superheroes dying, heroically fighting the good fight or saving lives. It's a substantial tally of heroes, which specifies their names and often their powers and a bit of their background, along with when, where, and who/what was responsible. Mind you, no few heroes are noted as having died from age or illness, particularly those dating from the mid-Twentieth Century.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I ran a one-shot in which a player built a character designed to die.  He was built with an accidental change into a multiform that was just a bomb, a no range always on 8d6 killing attack explosion with no personal immunity or special defenses.  The entire idea of the character, who was otherwise sort of average, was to blow up at some point, and in the scenario, he did so destroying an alien base of behind the scenes invaders.  Everyone else cleared out and he went up like a mini nuke, and was very, very dead as a result.

Edited August 22, 2023 by Christopher R Taylor

[unclevlad]

Heh, I did something like that too, altho it wasn't a one-shot.  It was an alien invasion scenario, and I built a Radioactive Man kinda character...STR Drain damage shield, always on.  Unpleasant person...and HATED what he'd become.  At one point, the GM let us board a ship.  

I headed straight to the engine room or reactor room, I forget.  Had something to use to stab with...

 

Double pushed STR, Haymaker, to trap the containment.

 

BOOM.  

 

Yep, the character was vaporized, no argument.  Took out the entire ship tho.

 

I never count suicides as "character deaths" tho, in the sense OP meant.  And, well, with both of ours, it's potentially debatable whether they were really heroes in the usual sense.   And to a degree, it's true in any one-shot or tournament scenario, as at that point, there's probably no real consequence for the character death, unless it's REALLY early in the event.  That kinda bites, the player's gonna feel cheated.

[Ninja-Bear]

I’ve been close to dying but since that GM ran a more Silverish game. I survived. I have killed Black Claw because it was a different GM and I didn’t understand that it was a Silverish game. 
 

@Christopher R Taylor, I mentioned years ago on this forum that I had an idea for a game where the player was on getting killed in an opening game so the players knew that death was possible. Man the disagreements I got for that was more than what I would’ve expected. It was akin to me saying something blasphemous. 
 

P.S. I ran a few weeks back a solo adventure with one of my Champions characters, a Stretching guy. He got shot twice from a Covert Viper Agent, even Dodging the second shot, and well, dying as I didn’t buy him any Resistant Defenses. 

Edited August 22, 2023 by Ninja-Bear

[Tech]

On 8/21/2023 at 5:09 PM, Christopher R Taylor said:

Its up to you as the GM.  Ideally the only way someone should die in most Champions campaigns is in some tremendously heroic way, saving a train full of orphaned handicapped children, something along those lines.  And it should usually be in agreement with the player: here's how your character is going to go out, lets come up with a great storyline.

Just, expect your other players to have their characters do their damndest to prevent it and keep them alive.  Because that's what heroes do.

 

And this is why I can say, No, no hero has died in the campaign I'm in. It's come close a few times but the players have become very good at protecting teammates.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Tech

[Hugh Neilson]

A fellow I gamed with a lot back in the day described the three games we played a lot as

 

In Champions, even if you screw up royally, your character probably survives.  If you play half decent, you'll have a good chance at winning, and if you play really well, you'll almost certainly win.

 

In D&D, if you screw up royally, your character probably dies.  If you play half decent, you'll have a good chance at survival, and if you play really well, you'll probably  win or at least be able to retreat and fight another day.

 

In Call of Cthulhu, if you triple-check everything and play almost perfectly, you've got about a 50% chance of survival and a slim possibility you'll win one.

 

A bit extreme, but not too far off the mark.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Here's where I bring up Gary Gygax' sample dungeon where the level one characters run into a pack of ghouls and one is eaten alive in reward for figuring out a puzzle.

Edited August 22, 2023 by Christopher R Taylor

[Duke Bushido]

52 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Here's where I bring up Gary Gygax' sample dungeon where the level one characters run into a pack of ghouls and one is eaten alive in reward for figuring out a puzzle.

 

 

One of many, many reasons I don't believe D and D became a role playing game until some point during third edition.

[Christopher R Taylor]

The concept of role playing is pretty simple, and in retrospect, pretty obvious but it took a while for games to really catch on to what it meant and how to play that out in the rules and in sessions.  They  had the basic pieces in place, but only in an RPG computer game sense: you play an elf in this game.

[Gauntlet]

22 hours ago, Hugh Neilson said:

A fellow I gamed with a lot back in the day described the three games we played a lot as

 

In Champions, even if you screw up royally, your character probably survives.  If you play half decent, you'll have a good chance at winning, and if you play really well, you'll almost certainly win.

 

In D&D, if you screw up royally, your character probably dies.  If you play half decent, you'll have a good chance at survival, and if you play really well, you'll probably  win or at least be able to retreat and fight another day.

 

In Call of Cthulhu, if you triple-check everything and play almost perfectly, you've got about a 50% chance of survival and a slim possibility you'll win one.

 

A bit extreme, but not too far off the mark.

 

Of course a lot of this depends on the GM. I have ran with a number of GMs where everything is just completely random by the die roll and in those cases pretty much everyone dies. But of course this has been with D&D or Pathfinder. But with Champions (superheroic games) I have never seen a character actually die when the player didn't want them to. Not sure if this is due to the rules in Hero or if Champion gamemasters just don't like killing people. Are GMs who run Full Superheroic games different than ones who run other games?

[unclevlad]

22 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Here's where I bring up Gary Gygax' sample dungeon where the level one characters run into a pack of ghouls and one is eaten alive in reward for figuring out a puzzle.

 

Back then, tho, low level character deaths didn't mean anything.  Roll up a new one!  Takes 5 minutes.  Characters had about as much depth as the paper they were written on.  Early D&D had almost no sense of balance.

 

10 minutes ago, Gauntlet said:

 

Of course a lot of this depends on the GM. I have ran with a number of GMs where everything is just completely random by the die roll and in those cases pretty much everyone dies. But of course this has been with D&D or Pathfinder. But with Champions (superheroic games) I have never seen a character actually die when the player didn't want them to. Not sure if this is due to the rules in Hero or if Champion gamemasters just don't like killing people. Are GMs who run Full Superheroic games different than ones who run other games?

 

It depends.  Does the GM recognize scaling issues/problems?  2 examples, both from Living City...which got to be murderous almost out of necessity.  I'd played the scenario;  there was a seriously nasty fight that our pretty balanced party had a hard time with.  (LC fights were scaled by total party levels...and woe betide the party that *just* cleared a threshold.)  Then I happened to watch a session...same scenario.  TERRIBLE party construction.  4 total newbie characters...a couple, IIRC, were multiclass demihumans, which was a bad idea in LC due to the impact on tiering (and VERY slow advancement).  1 player had a pretty high level character...but it was a thief.  The GM added up total levels, never even thinking about it.  When they hit the fight my group had a hard time with?  2 or 3 of em dropped in the first or second round...THEN the GM was worried it'd be a TPK.  Little late.  It was a very bad session.

 

Different con, different GM.  I ran my 6th level fighter;  most of the rest of the party was, again, super low level.  GM took me aside and flat out said, my guy was gonna catch the brunt of the fighting.  I said, of course.  AFAIK, no one else caught on.

 

Oh, yeah...and slavish attention to rolls.  <sigh>  Literally the start of the 3E era...so everyone was converting their characters, when no one really got the details.  One guy, IIRC, a triple-class elf...which he converted to something like a fighter 2, wizard 2, thief 2.  Translation?  USELESS compared to a 6th level *anything*.  So we start the scenario, and we're chatting player to player...new system and whatnot...the scenario dictates an ambush if the PCs weren't paying much attention.  We weren't, for various reasons (some of it organizational, too)...and the ambush included crossbowmen.  DM rolled 3 crits before anyone could react.  Yeah, you can guess, TPK.

 

LOTS of things done wrong.  Organizational problems led to VERY late start.  Changing systems and no one understood them.  Poor choices by the GM.  Everyone agreed to write off the whole thing...we didn't even fill out sheets.  

[Gauntlet]

21 minutes ago, unclevlad said:

 

Back then, tho, low level character deaths didn't mean anything.  Roll up a new one!  Takes 5 minutes.  Characters had about as much depth as the paper they were written on.  Early D&D had almost no sense of balance.

 

Of course in 2nd Edition D&D each character type had different experience requirements. I believe that a thief needed about one fifth of what a wizard required.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I think the different races had experience penalties as well, probably to offset their special abilities that humans lacked.

[unclevlad]

17 minutes ago, Gauntlet said:

 

Of course in 2nd Edition D&D each character type had different experience requirements. I believe that a thief needed about one fifth of what a wizard required.

 

It varied.  Levels 1-5, thief was about 1/2.  6-9?  Wizard for some bizarre reason made these *fast*.  The jump was at 10, and at that point you needed a ton of XP.

http://www.sisterworlds.com/olde/2e/xp.htm

 

But, also remember that the thief class in 1st and 2nd Ed was pretty bad.  Poor hit points, poor attacks, thieving skills took a LONG time, IIRC, to be good enough.  And traps were frequently Save or Die.  (And often far, far, far too common.  It says a lot, IMO, that there was a Dragon (?) article titled Do YOU Trap Your Bedroom Door?  Because traps tended to be grossly overused.)  

 

Quote

I think the different races had experience penalties as well, probably to offset their special abilities that humans lacked.

 

No.  The limitation was level caps, which were often VERY!!! low.  Like, an elven fighter could never be higher than 7th level.  The highest levels also required HIGH!!! stats...like, for fighters, not just 18 STR but 18/75...for half elf fighters...?  Been forever, so this might not be right.

 

If you're curious, then look online for the manuals from the SSI AD&D games, like Pools of Darkness.  That was #3 in the series, so highest level characters and that should show the limitations.  They were pretty bad.

 

In 3E, there was the notion of a racial level adjustment for some of the powerful races.  You might have 1 class level, but if you're a drow?  You were treated as 3rd or 4th level in terms of power.  It was a terrible notion;  it almost never balanced out.