Can Champions Characters Die?

[Gauntlet]

I actually still have a lot of the second edition books for D&D in my garage somewhere in a box. And yes, they almost made it pointless to play anyone other than a human. But I am pretty sure they didn't have experience penalties, just crazy level maximums.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah that's what it was, you were maxed in level you could gain.  It was pretty silly and I never even met or talked to a GM that used those limits

Edited August 23, 2023 by Christopher R Taylor

[Gauntlet]

3 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Yeah that's what it was, you were maxed in level you could gain.  It was pretty silly and I never even met or talked to a GM that used those limits

 

I ran into a number of GMs who did use those limits, but they were all at external games at the games store where we gamed at on Saturday evenings. None of our inhouse GMs used them.

[Lord Liaden]

3 hours 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?

 

IME the mechanical defaults for Champions tend to skew toward less lethality: greater reliability from Normal Damage attacks to knock out your opponent (even more so with 6E having eliminated the KA "stun lottery"); avoidance in using Hit Locations, Bleeding, etc.; need for -2x Body for a character to actually die. Beyond that, the convention of not killing your opponents is less common in almost all other genres than it is for superheroes.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Also, characters in Champions tend to have better defenses than other genres, so even if there are lethal attacks, they'll tend to do less overall damage.  Its hard to kill a superhero, even the glass cannon ones like Cyclops.  Its not just genre conventions, but they almost all wear armor or have some kind of special defenses.

 

Add to that powers like regeneration and healing and its even harder to kill a superhero

Edited August 23, 2023 by Christopher R Taylor

[Sketchpad]

To bounce off the OP, has anyone ever played in a game where being "killed" was just taken out of the action and returned after the combat? I know that's more popular in modern games, but just wondering if anyone's played that way in Hero?

[tombrown803]

13 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

I actually still have a lot of the second edition books for D&D in my garage somewhere in a box. And yes, they almost made it pointless to play anyone other than a human. But I am pretty sure they didn't have experience penalties, just crazy level maximums.

In the original books they had level limits, but some of the supplements added experience penalties for some races/sub-races (like playing drow)

[Tech]

The closest I ever came to killing a character was when I planned to drop a small nuke on the character. (it'd be 10d6 NND KA + 30d6 Physical). The player agreed to try it, aware of the situation. When it came time, I rolled lousy and the character easily survived. (actually, I'm glad I rolled badly). The resulting presence attack by the hero for surviving was 71...

[LoneWolf]

If you look at the comic books death is usually not the end of the character.   More often than not death is just an excuse for a radiation accident.  Look how many times Jean Grey died?  When I did a quick search to see Bing said she has been killed and resurrected 15 times.  When death is incredibly rare in the source material is it any wonder if a game follows that?  

 

Outside of the Marvel movies how many superheroes have actually been killed and stayed dead.  I am not talking about dying from old age, but actually killed in action.  Even those that died of old age tend to be from a much earlier time and die offstage.  The only Marvel Superheroes I know that have died and stayed dead were the original Captain Marvel and Bill Fosters Goliath.  
 

[Lord Liaden]

It's mostly minor side superheroes who are killed and stay dead, e.g. White Tiger and Torpedo in Marvel Comics. Even then, their identity is often resuscitated for another person to carry, usually with the same or similar powers or gimmicks, as those two examples illustrate.

 

The Champions Universe follows that trope, with numerous "legacy" characters fully developed or just named.

[Christopher R Taylor]

The death toll in the official Champions Universe setting is a bit ridiculous, there's a whole Arlington Graveyard of dead superheroes and villains.

[Lord Liaden]

To be fair, that graveyard commemorates the battle where 60,000 people where killed by the setting's arch villain.

 

IMHO the death toll in mainstream comics is ridiculous. Not only do killed heroes usually come back, but the places where major heroes hang out with lots of normal people are almost never destroyed, with the death toll one would expect, despite literal planet-shaking events happening. Even on the rare occasions when losses on that scale do happen, usually it's at a place with no real-world analogue. Savage Land or Bludhaven or Genosha wiped out? Who cares, it was made up anyway. And more often than not the destruction is magically reversed later by another writer.

 

At least in the Champions Universe those events have lasting consequences.

[BoloOfEarth]

As a GM I've killed a few PCs.  

 

The first was totally by accident, and mainly due to a quirk of power interaction the player had unknowingly included during character creation (but also due to overpowerful NPCs).  The PC hero had Absorption, with his defenses dependent on how much he absorbed - so if both got Drained or Suppressed, his defenses effectively took a double hit.  Two Genocide Pawns (used as-is from the Mutant File book - never made that mistake again) attacked him, one with a dampening field that suppressed his powers, the other with the mini-gun.  Tore him to shreds.  IIRC, I offered to undo it, but he said it was okay, he'd come up with a better character.

 

Another was at the player request - he didn't like the character he had drawn up and wanted to go with a new one, while giving the old one a nice heroic sendoff.  To be honest, though, I don't recall much about it, as it was decades ago and that character was only in a handful of adventures before we pulled the plug on him, so not highly memorable.

 

A third I actually turned into a non-death, with the player's cooperation.  Really nasty villains had a bus full of hostages, with the bus's axles chained to the axles of a fuel tanker, with one of the villains (fire powers) ready to blow it up if the heroes were winning.  The heroes pulled a nice distraction while one of them unhooked the chains and another got onto the bus to drive it and the hostages away.  All was going great, though the fire guy did set fire to the tanker as the bus was pulling away.  They were trying to get the bus far enough away from the burning tanker before it would explode, when Tempest (wind-based character) decided to use her wind TK to grab the burning tanker and send it off the bridge, away from the bus.  Problem was, that meant pulling it toward where she was flying.  Winds fanning the flames made sure the tanker was going to go boom, which it did basically in her face (taking out part of the bridge in the process).  We played it off as her dying in the explosion but her body wasn't found, likely buried underwater in the rubble from the bridge.  She resurfaced a few sessions later, with amnesia and disguised, manipulated by a mentalist villain to turn her against the heroes until they figured out who she really was, captured her, and restored her memories.  It was a great storyline, overall.

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

I killed off almost every PC in a superhero campaign once.  I was young and upset, I'd do it totally different next time.  Basically everyone got together on game day to BS and screw around and I was trying to run a "New Mutants" sort of game with a much closer focus on school and training rather than fighting bad guys.  Finally I got so mad at being ignored and people messing around and talking about literally everything but the game, that I sent my version of Genocide in, fully prepared for them.

 

Like Bolo above, the Genocide team just tore them to pieces, the only one who lived was one character who just bolted as soon as he saw Genocide.  They were all dead and the campaign ended.

 

These days I would have found out what people weren't connecting with, worked on ways to make them more interested, talked to the players to see why they weren't paying attention, etc.  But like I said, I was young.

[1corpus christopher]

On 8/21/2023 at 4:29 PM, Gauntlet said:

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?

 

 

Um... I used the Champions of Millennium City to start a campaign for my lone player.

 

I didn't really intend to when I started the adventure that I had as the introduction to the campaign, but...

 

The master class villains I had the Champs and the player character go up against did indeed knock the Champions out, and dropped each-and-every-one of the Champions group to negative BODY that signified DEAD.

 

I made the rolls. They were all deceased.

[1corpus christopher]

 

...This is perhaps a sensitive subject for several of you due to your longterm familiarity and/or friendship with Mr. Darren Watts, who we lost last year.

 

I must say that I look at the birthdays and name of DOJ...

 

I actually ran a SH campaign back in '90 to '92 in 4th edition format. In that campaign I ran a superhero I called Quantum Fire. I know that at that time in the 4th ed. core rulebook there was the character named Quantum. She was a member of the Champions Super Team. 

 

Well Quantum Fire was similar to Quantum, but he was based more on Captain Atom in his origin story. 

 

Anyway, the team I GMed and also ran my NPC/PC Quantum Fire in (sometimes, i usually left QF out of much of the adventuring until the other team members needed some extra help) went nameless for nearly a year. Then some of the team members said, "We need a name for our team."

 

I picked the name in '91 because no one seemed to have a palatable choice.

 

I picked:

 

Defenders of Justice.

 

I really did.

[1corpus christopher]

1 hour ago, 1corpus christopher said:

 

...This is perhaps a sensitive subject for several of you due to your longterm familiarity and/or friendship with Mr. Darren Watts, who we lost last year.

 

I must say that I look at the birthdays and name of DOJ...

 

I actually ran a SH campaign back in '90 to '92 in 4th edition format. In that campaign I ran a superhero I called Quantum Fire. I know that at that time in the 4th ed. core rulebook there was the character named Quantum. She was a member of the Champions Super Team. 

 

Well Quantum Fire was similar to Quantum, but he was based more on Captain Atom in his origin story. 

 

Anyway, the team I GMed and also ran my NPC/PC Quantum Fire in (sometimes, i usually left QF out of much of the adventuring until the other team members needed some extra help) went nameless for nearly a year. Then some of the team members said, "We need a name for our team."

 

I picked the name in '91 because no one seemed to have a palatable choice.

 

I picked:

 

Defenders of Justice.

 

I really did.

 

That introductory adventure I ran was Battlegrounds. It got a very long delay (over 2 years) and we didn't get to the final part until 2021. We finished the Battlegrounds adventure around April of 2021.

 

I also never knew that DOJ was Darren's campaign name until I just researched it. Today.

 

I just never paid attention to much about the publishing and ownership history of Hero Games and Champions until the past year to the 

past few months.

 

I certainly had no idea the name I picked for our team back in '91 was the same as Mr. Watts campaign.

 

 

[megaplayboy]

How to get your PC killed in a Champions campaign:

1. Play an edgelord vigilante who kills indiscriminately and wait for karma to catch up to you.

2. Play really stupidly in dangerous situations, even after a GM warns you of the risks.

3. Play with a PC with no rDEF in a campaign where killing attacks are commonplace. 

4. Opt for "heroic sacrifice" over "heroic retirement" and let the GM set the stage.

5. Go out fighting against the BBEG at the climax of the campaign.   

[Acroyear II]

I've had a couple of PCs perish in my Champions campaign. And a handful of villains.

For the hero deaths, two come to mind:

Aqualung was killed by the ninja the Dark Death (El Muerto Oscuro from the 4th Edition Champions rulebook), but not before he succeeded in his mission to bring down his father, a notorious drug lord of Detroit. It was a bittersweet ending to the character's story.

The hero Winter Wolf and the master villain Omega both perished when the villain's battlesuit self-destructed. The two had been carried by a brick flying hero very high in the sky when the explosion occurred, inflicting massive killing damage to all (Omega died instantly). The fall from the great height finished Winter Wolf (I forgot what the damage dice was, but I think it was like 30d6 according to the rulebook). The kicker is, before the master villain activated the self-destruct device, he revealed that he reported to a superior, which was a twist no one saw coming at the time.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

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.)  

 

Yeah thief skills were frankly terrible until high level, so bad it was just not even worth trying them particularly as you note the consequences of failure were often excessive.

Edited September 2, 2023 by Christopher R Taylor

[Duke Bushido]

I won't do any specific examples because--  well, there are many excellent and interesting ones posted already, and because outside of the youth group, death is on the table in all of my games (though there are varying shades of difficulty getting there).  To answer your question, though:

 

Yes.  I have presided over many, many Champions deaths since the early 80s, and I think Megaplayboy's most above sums up how the bulk of them come about.

 

The never-discussed upside of character deaths is that I don't have a Manhattan with eleven-hundred superheroes working at any given moment, nor a guy who was 45 in 1940 still being 45 in 2023.

 

[Grailknight]

11 hours ago, megaplayboy said:

How to get your PC killed in a Champions campaign:

1. Play an edgelord vigilante who kills indiscriminately and wait for karma to catch up to you.

2. Play really stupidly in dangerous situations, even after a GM warns you of the risks.

3. Play with a PC with no rDEF in a campaign where killing attacks are commonplace. 

4. Opt for "heroic sacrifice" over "heroic retirement" and let the GM set the stage.

5. Go out fighting against the BBEG at the climax of the campaign.   

 

Number 2 and number 5 are the most common IME with number 2 ahead by a large margin.

[Rails]

I can think of one hero I know was killed in a Champions game.  He'd been designed for a new player, but the player opted not to join the game on the night the character was being introduced.  One of our regular characters had been captured and was being experimented on by the big bad, so the team was trying to break him out of the villain's lair.  During the firefight in the holding area of the lab, a grenade got knocked into one of the cells . . . where the new character was being held.

 

Since the player had decided not to join the game, the GM decided "BOOM!  First-Aid had no resistant defenses without his armor.  He's DEAD."

 

Our *characters* had no idea the room was occupied and were fighting just to get out, so we never checked the room.