High Level Campaigns

[Metaphysician]

I am currently playing in a high level campaign, as part of the new Sentinels of our game world. Its quite fun.

 

Anybody else played or playing in a high level ( 550+ ) campaign, and have any stories to tell??

[Enforcer84]

Not currently but my fave campaing was high level. We started as 400 pt experienced charaters and periodically (and not always at the same time) would get "power boosts" of 50-80 pts by the end of the game we were 750+ points and much of the world knew and feared us. We lacked subtlety.

[Enforcer84]

Actually, my favorite story from that was the accidental space flight two of us took.

 

We were about 600+ points at the time, Powerman a Shazam styled brick and Ace, an assassin turned "good guy"...don't ask.

Anyway we had defeated Firewing on board his personal assault cruiser, Malva was trying to conquer Earth. In desperation, FW ordered the ship to take him back to Malva. Ace, who had a few teleportation powers then, transported him off the ship so he would have to face Earth Justice. But the ship left anyway with the two of us on it.

 

So we're flying at superlight speed and Ace asks if he can just Teleport out of the ship and make his way back. (Bare in mind he doens't have life support or any flight, he was just going to Teleport jump back to Earth.

The GM goes a little nuts, he explains that at the speed we are going a dust mote in space would put a hole in him the size of an ashtray. He ends with the immortal words: "Do you know how many dust motes you'd hit if you teleported out of the ship?

 

to which I said, in a slightly confused voice (Powerman wasn't a physacist) "Six? At least six."

GM never recovered. I think he made a paniversal luck roll and Powerman got the computer to speak english.

We were gone for six months.

[Lord Liaden]

IMHO it's a little tough to play an extended high-power campaign. You tend to be dealing with such critical threats on a regular basis that it's easy to lose touch with the everyday world and ordinary people. That kind of game can make for terrific limited-run campaigns, though. It's exhilarating to cut loose with some serious power once in a while.

 

My favorite of those campaigns was a spin-off from the old Champions adventure Wrath of the Seven Horsemen. The Horsemen (team of mystically powered super-supervillains) had allied themselves with the Prime (alien monstrosity and servant of Lovecraftian "Old Ones") to help the Prime call more of its kind to Earth, and ultimately free one of the imprisoned Old Ones, Azog, who ruled Earth in primordial times. The end result was an invasion of these horrors both from space and from another dimension.

 

Our group took on the roles of an ad-hoc collection of Earth's mightiest heroes, some from published Champions books and others of our own making. I got to play my favorite official 4E character, Nuada of the Silver Hand from Kingdom of Champions. I think the personal highlights of the campaign for me were dueling alone with both War and Death of the Horsemen, and helping try to delay Azog from passing through the rift from its prison dimension into ours until other of our teammates crashed one of the alien spaceships into the rift, collapsing it.

 

Hoo-hah! Heady memories.

[Ghost who Walks]

Originally posted by Metaphysician

I am currently playing in a high level campaign, as part of the new Sentinels of our game world. Its quite fun.

 

Anybody else played or playing in a high level ( 550+ ) campaign, and have any stories to tell??

Well, my campaign has 800 point PC characters running around in it. Of course, most of them spend as many points on skills/contacts as they do powers.

 

But even without that, they are one of the more powerful groups assembled.

 

My favorite high level story was when the characters went to an alternate version of Earth, where the Axis had won WWII.

 

Besides beating up on Germans, and Nazified versions of themselves, a couple of them did a sidetrip to Japan. Where they deliberately woke up Godzilla.

[Metaphysician]

Well, our campaign is still fairly new. However, the basic gist is that, in our world, the Sentinels were all but wiped out in the Battle of Detroit, and never reformed. . . until now. Its a 750+ point game, with us being those "High Powered Heroes That Come In To Save 350 Point Asses Who Got In Trouble."

 

Or we would, if we didn't have what appears to be a third invasion by Istvatha coming. . . and this one, unlike the previous two, isn't using provincial troops.

 

I think we are still less than a week from the actual start day of the campaign, since we've been having some *very* dense periods with little down time. Our starting adventure that brought us together consisted of Firewing coming along to challenge Horus-Re ( our Superman analogue ), with the Ultimates showing up to cause trouble ( and an armed probe that appeared out of nowhere ). Horus-Re fought Firewing solo while the rest of us ( not including me, I joined right after ) dealing with the Ultimates.

 

The Ultimates got their asses kicked *bad*, and Horus-Re fought Firewing to a draw, with both of them falling unconscious ( briefly ) simultaneously due to Firewing blasting the grappling Horus-Re with his area EB, catching them both.

[Tech]

It's difficult to tell what you mean by 'high-level' campaign, since a point total (550+) is given. I have a 670 total point character with about 670 experience (Cool, huh?) but he's like 11d6 EB with 7 SPD. I'm going to assume you mean like 20d6 Attacks, 50 PD/ED and stuff like that. If it's 20d6 etc, nope, I don't have one.

[Metaphysician]

What did you spend all those xp on, then??

[Guest Keneton]

I have 3 pC's with over 1000 earned EP, but presently I am not running these chracters and have started a new 5th edition campaign. My article on The Effectiveness Rating Deals with these sorts of campaigns. In one game the engineer had 16 old BBB mechanons as agents. Suffice to say against 4 PC's they were all done by the 6th.

 

That my friend is powergaming.

[Killer Shrike]

How powerful are the PCs in relation to the rest of the world at 550 points?

 

If most supers are in the 500 pt range then the game will play out much the same as it does at any point level where the PCs are on par with the norm.

 

If most supers are in the 350 pt range, say, then its going to be tougher to challenge the group and you will have to rely on "soft" challenges more often -- circumstance and social demands mostly. Maybe the challenge in most situations isnt to defeat the baddies, but to do so without appearing to be overpowering jack-booted thugs enforcing the status quo for the benefit of the haves vs the have nots for example. Motivation and spin become more important. Oddly, the TV show Smallville is actually a good example of this. Even as a young man Supes is obviously WAY more points than anyone else on the show in HERO System terms; his greatest challenge isnt really the foes he faces, but rather maintaining his Secret ID and protecting his friends and family who are not invulnerable -- his challenges are indirect, or "soft".

 

If most supers are in the 750 pt range, then the PCs will be the underdogs. The challenge will be survival, or earning their places amongst the ranks of the "big dogs".

 

Its all relative to whats going on in the rest of the setting.

[Metaphysician]

Well, I was working off of the feel I got for how powerful the canon super heroes in Champions are. Granted, that would make 550 a little on the low end, but I was trying to be conservative.

 

In any case, my estimate holds that 350 is about the lowest you'll see normally for superheroes ( or villains ). 600 seems to be unusually high for heroes, so I pegged a little less as the boundary for high level.

 

Personally, I'd like to see at least one hero in the entire world at 1000 points, and have the elite be in the 700-800 range ( powerful enough that a gathering of about six elite heroes vs Doctor Destroyer without minions would be a non-suicidal fight ), but thats just me. OTOH, the only hero writeup I really *don't* like is Meteorman III. The guy has 15 years of experience, and is the inheritor of a powerful legacy. He should be more powerful than a starting level hero.

[AtomicGladiator]

Originally posted by Lord Liaden

Our group took on the roles of an ad-hoc collection of Earth's mightiest heroes, some from published Champions books and others of our own making. I got to play my favorite official 4E character, Nuada of the Silver Hand from Kingdom of Champions. I think the personal highlights of the campaign for me were dueling alone with both War and Death of the Horsemen, and helping try to delay Azog from passing through the rift from its prison dimension into ours until other of our teammates crashed one of the alien spaceships into the rift, collapsing it.

 

Hoo-hah! Heady memories.

 

Woah, now that sounds like a great time of gaming! You stood alone against War and Death of the Horsemen?!?!! Hoo-hah, indeed, never-to-be-forgotten! Our high-level campaign kind of peaked with the original 7 Horsemen adventure, one (NPC) hero actually died in that battle, and a PC became a Horseman himself, controlled by his evil aspect. It was our battle of all battles with huge amounts of damage being dished out all around, and felt more like a real comic book than anything we ever played.

 

When the dust settled, the group kind of realized we couldn't top this one easily, so we set aside those characters and started a whole new (lower-powered) campaign.

[Vigil]

d'oh!

 

I just finished posting my thought on exactly this issue in the Doom/Destroyer thread.

 

Anyway, a recap. We always tried to play games with a distinct Marvel feel that the original Champions point totals didn't seem to capture soour early campaign (over 20 years ago! yeesh!) had our heroes in the 350 - 400 point range.

 

Now many years later they're in the 370 - 2000 point range with the average being 800. As for how they fit in relation to other supers, well, Worldwatch have long since been considered our Earth's equivalent to the JLA or Avengers so they're the dominant force for good. A few years back the team reached its maximum membership with over 50 supers on board in what was a literal army brought together by Vigil to right all of the world's wrongs. This army was later decimated by Rex Monday and The Cartel in a world altering story arc and the team is now back, more or less, where it started with 8 members.

 

Active points tend to be in the 90 - 150 point range with Nirvana's Dark Matter Blast being the big gun with 24d6 EB VA (+1) and 302 active points.

 

While it's true that manyadventures have a rather philosophical or "soft" tone to them there's still plenty of villains and teams out there for Worldwatch to duke it out with on an ongoing basis and the power level doesn't make soft stories any less effective.

 

Vigil

[Chuckg]

Meta -- after reading the stats on the UNTIL helicarrier _Ragnarok_, I now begin to understand what shows up to stop things like Mechanon and Destroyer if there isn't a 750-point hero team handy.

 

(Specifically, a flying _Iowa_-class battleship with what looks like a short battalion onboard of UNTIL Heavy Weapons troops backed up by grav tanks and gunships...)

 

PS -- I'm one of the other players(*) in the high-end campaign metaphysician referred to, and so far we're having a /blast/.

 

If anybody cares, the link to the message board thread on which most of us posted our character sheets, we post game announcemenst, and I've been putting up each session's transcripts is at:

 

http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=78583&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

 

(You have to page down a bit to find all the transcripts, 'cause we had some metagame discussions during the setup and early weeks.)

 

 

 

 

(*) Specifically, the aforementioned "Starguard", our team's resident Innocent Novice... who happens to have a wee bit of the Power Cosmic.