Powers and knacks you favor for your Champions characters

[Hermit]

Okay, just nosey... but it was brought up in another thread how some GMs get irritated by players who play the same type of character over and over again. That got me thinking, I don't think I know anyone THAT bad (I'm blessed with good players), but we all have favorite sthicks to go with.

 

Anything you find yourself playing more often than others? Not necessarily archetypes (Bricks, Energy Projectors etc) though that would also count, but anything really that most of your characters have in common. Do you enjoy rich characters, and often end up as the moneybags of the team? Do you somehow end up with flight for every character no matter what the other powers might be? Are 75% of your characters Public ID types?

 

That sort of thing.

[Chuckg]

I always try to put on Regeneration, or at least the Rapid Healing talent from 5e Fantasy HERO. No way I'll RP days of waiting in the hospital when I can just rest for a few hours and heal the broken bones.

[lemming]

I haven't played a true secret ID in many many years.

 

The closest I got in recent times was the character who hid his godly origin by giving different stories such as bit by a radioative beetle, given a power ring by a dying alien, etc... Being a god, people tended to believe him.

[Pegasus]

I realized one day that most of my characters had something freakish about their appearance. Some were full blown non-humans (ie, The Machine, robot/golem), some monstrous (Grunt, Thing ripoff, err, homage ), and others were more subtle (Slipknot, normal except for 6 foot writhing green braids). So I challenged myself to create a totally human looking character, and that was Crisis.

 

He does have three large tattoos, though...

[Corven_Ren]

I personally have never been in a character rut I always try to be various in my characters. My wife however has always played the same kind of character in fantasy RPG"S she always plays wizards/sorcerers..... and the only way I could probably ever get her to play Champions is if I made her a magic using superhero.

[Blue]

I refuse to answer on the grounds I might incriminate myself.

[Guest WhammeWhamme]

Yep.

 

High Intelligence. Only when justified... but my concepts tend to end up justifying it.

 

Money. Again, needs to be justified, buuuuut....

 

From this I glean that I want to play idealized versions of my future self.

 

(shrug)

[assault]

Well, I'm a serial Brick player, for starters... In the end, I think I want to play Superman. (shrug).

 

A lot of my characters tend to have fairly similar personalities. They tend to be me, with only some rather minor changes. Assault was one of the more extreme cases, since he was a lot more assertive (aka loud and obnoxious) than me. Then again, he's become part of the template for my standard character. He was also difficult to play after a while, so I had to gradually tone him down.

 

I have a particular fondness for buying Life Support for my characters. If I can justify it at all, I will stick it in. In some cases, I will even resort to saying: "this IS the character's superpower. Otherwise, he's a normal."

 

I rarely play female characters, too. I just don't think that I play them well, or maybe I have just seen too many other males play female characters rather badly.

 

My non-superheroic characters are a bit different, but they also tend to cluster around certain characteristic patterns. At least the patterns vary a bit between genres.

 

I'm not too bothered by people playing the characters they like playing. It can, occasionally, be a problem, if the characters are inappropriate to a particular game, but generally I don't have much of a problem with it.

 

I suspect that a lot of players really like playing "themselves" in a (super-)heroic setting. In some cases, unfortunately, you could add a "with" to that sentence.

[Trebuchet]

Two common tendencies:

 

1) My characters are always extraordinary people even before they get their powers. I don't do Joe Average.

 

2) All of my characters are multilingual. Even Ranger, my classic all-American powered-armor brick, spoke fluent German as well as his native American English.

[CrosshairCollie]

My characters are invariably furry, or have the capacity to be such (werewolves), or are robots. Or, occassionally, I combine the two (a la the Maverick Reploids from the Megaman X series).

[Spideyguy]

Getting there is half the fun....

 

I think that most of my characters can fly, because I always think to myself, "What good is having superpowers if you can't fly???" As Garth would say, SHAH!

 

I think this is borne of my own desire to fly. Once, I had a GM tell me that in a game he was going to create ME, only after a super-powered accident, and wanted to know (broadly) what I wanted to be able to do?

 

I told him, "You make it so that I can fly fast and turn on a dime, and I don't care what you do with the rest of the character."

[JmOz]

Not only in Champs, but I tend to do Jack of all trades, for instance my current Champs character has 20 some slots in his MP, PLUS the most skills of any character in the game (He also has the lowest DC and Def, but highest DCV and hass a lot of exotic Defenses...

[TheEmerged]

Whenever we do a superpowered campaign, regardless of the continuity or power system, one of my players WILL build a PC using duplication or multiform. Her current PC under Champions has both

 

Speaking for myself, I tend toward a couple of standing schticks. In the superheroic genre I'm either the mentalist or the gadgeteer (sometimes both). In science fiction I'm the pilot or engineer.

 

I've played fantasy so long however that I don't focus too much. Generally I play whatever the other members of the group don't want to (in the last campaign for example I was the rogue).

 

One cross-genre schtick I'm guilty of to the point of cliche is creating "missmatched" PC's. One of my favorite D&D characters ever was my Kobold Telepath (3rd Edition), SythRyss. Half the joke was this tiny kobold with mind control powers

[Capt. Kung Fu]

I have a tendency to make the guy with alot of skills and languages....cant be a hero if you cant disarm the bomb. Or know if the guy you just beat up is calling you a putz in Swahili or something like that.

 

And of course you gotta have Martial Arts. But I like to be the "Competent Normal" as it were...when you spend 200+ points on skills and MA.

 

Might throw some gadgets on the end..just to give him the edge

[lemming]

One thing I've noticed in playing any sort of fantasy based game, is I never play magic users.

 

Champions, up until zornwil's game I hadn't played a mentalist.

[Mike W]

I'm a smart person so I never play dumb characters. I usually pile on the skills too, though the character type obviously has a major influence on what I pick. I usually go for characters with above average defenses(though I generally don't play bricks so they aren't tremendously high). I tend to like characters with a variety of offensive options too.

[Doug McCrae]

Originally posted by TheEmerged

One cross-genre schtick I'm guilty of to the point of cliche is creating "missmatched" PC's. One of my favorite D&D characters ever was my Kobold Telepath (3rd Edition), SythRyss. Half the joke was this tiny kobold with mind control powers

I don't think this is mismatched at all. If anything beings with awesome mental powers tend to be physically weak - the Mekon, Professor X. If your kobold had the strength of a giant now *that* would be mismatched.

[BobGreenwade]

About half my characters tend to be flakes of some sort. Only one has ever been flaky enough to be a detriment to the group, but then again the entire group in that case was a detriment to itself (that was the game's concept -- a very silly Champions game, somewhere in the realm of the Inferior Five).

 

I also tend to play characters who are highly intelligent, and I like to spend about 5-10% of my points on Skills that would be of unlikely but still quite possible use in a game -- little-used foreign languages (like Thai or Swahili), semi-obscure Sciences and Professional Skills rarely used in the campaign's focus (like a superhero with SS: Archaeology or a fantasy thief with PS: Vintner), hobbies, and similar stuff.

 

I also have an unusually high proportion of Australians -- I can think offhand of two PCs I've played in Champions, one from Star Hero, and one from Justice, Inc. who were from the Land Down Under.

 

One character (the aforementioned JI character) fit all three of the above categories.

[winterhawk]

I'm happy to report that when I get a chance to play, I have a pretty varied list of characters. But this thread did make me realize a trend.

 

I have GMed the same group for some time now, in two different campaigns. None of the players ever plays a brick, so I invariably whip up an NPC Brick just to give the team some muscle. I've just realized they are always female. Perhaps I should consult my shrink.

[Doug McCrae]

Originally posted by Mike W

I'm a smart person so I never play dumb characters.

Huh??!! What's wrong with a smart person playing a dumb character? A dumb person playing a smart one is problematic but not vice versa. And anyway all roleplayers are smart people. Right?

[Hermit]

Originally posted by Doug McCrae

Huh??!! What's wrong with a smart person playing a dumb character? A dumb person playing a smart one is problematic but not vice versa. And anyway all roleplayers are smart people. Right?

 

Yes we iz!

[Doug McCrae]

What are people's thoughts on why it's wrong to always play the same type of character, assuming it's not grossly out of genre like Superman in a DnD game or a dwarf with a magic axe (not *quite* as gross due to the resilience of the typical superhero universe) in a supers game?

 

Is it wrong at all? There's one gamer in my wider social group who irritates the heck out of me. He invariably plays dark, sinister outsider type characters, like a demon, vampire or supervillain in a superhero game or someone from the Courts of Chaos in an Amber game. I don't enjoy gaming with him but I'm wondering if this is just because I don't like the guy. Is there anything wrong in itself with his gaming style? It goes without saying that the GM has always okayed these PCs but y'know, GMs don't always get it right, do they?

[Hermit]

Nothing wrong with it, IMO... provided:

1. There are some variances as well as commonalities between the characters. For example- A person who plays Bricks only could still (and should) vary in personality, origin, source of powers etc.

 

2. It must respect the setting/campaign concept. Another example- Rich characters all the time are fine, unless it's a 'constantly on the run downtrodden' sort of scenerio, in which case it wouldn't be appropriate.

 

3. You give others a chance for the same niche. If your friend joe wants to play the master detective of the group just once, and you keep hogging it every campaign, it might be a good time to let Joe have his shot..especially if you normally prefer to be THE expert in the field normally.

[Corven_Ren]

I must make an notation on my earlier post in this thread about my wife's "rut". Altho she has been role playing for almost 5 years now she has in that time only played about 3 or 4 characters due to the fact that we tend to go monts or even a year at a time without playing.

[McCoy]

Hadn't thought about it before, but back in the D&D days I played mostly Clerics. Now many of my Champions PC's have some healing power or at least Paramedic skill.