Galactic Champions

[massey]

For the first time in many many years, I have decided to run a game. Our regular GM will need a break soon, since he gets stuck running all the time, and I have decided to help out. But I bore easily and have a tendency to lose interest quickly, and so I have decided to mix things up, and keep it interesting. Therefore I've decided to run a Legion of Superheroes-esque Galactic Champions game. It will be me as GM and then 4 players. I have some ideas and have decided to go wild with it.

 

One of the things I loved about the LSH was the wild power scale between the characters. Sometimes you'd have Duo Damsel, and sometimes you'd have Supergirl. I want to maintain that feeling. But clearly there's nobody who wants to get stuck playing Duo Damsel, least of all me playing characters like that as NPCs. So I have decided on a rather unusual point breakdown for the campaign.

 

Three characters totaling 1500 points. Different game sessions will have you rotate between the three characters. Each character must be playable. You can't have Captain Awesome and his two Incompetent Normal friends. But you could have a 1000 point character followed by two 250s. Or three 500s. Or a 279, a 415, and an 806. Each character will be given free LSH-ripoff equipment. You get a free Flight Belt (20"x8 noncom, and 5" megascale 1"=10 km), a Personal Force Field badge (LS: Space and a 10/10 Force Field that won't raise defenses above 25/25 and 15/15 resistant), and a Telepathic Earpiece (Mind Link and High Range Radio). These are for free, and are designed to benefit the low powered characters who can then focus on their "one big power". High end characters will generally eclipse these abilities anyway. Low powered characters need to be able to do 10-12 dice to be useful (or generally have a really useful noncombat power), high powered are limited to 25 dice unless they are a glass cannon in which case they can go higher. Balancing the game will be totally by the seat of my pants and we'll just see what happens.

 

Characters will have access to a free base and a free ship, though neither will set the world on fire with cool abilities. That would have to be paid for by the group.

 

Background-wise, it is a thousand years in the future, a generic future somewhere in between standard Galactic Champions and a modified future of our own campaign world. I don't like the "superpowers go away for a while" of the standard 5th ed universe, so I won't use it. Instead superheroing just falls out of fashion for a while. Depending on the era people with powers don't necessarily feel the social pressure to put on a costume and save the day. Imagine if Clark Kent decided to keep his powers a secret and just make a billion dollars being LeBron James. During one of these "down times", humanity founds hundreds of colonies, before interstellar war destroys the Earth space fleet. Colonies are left to their own devices, cut off for a century or more while Earth rebuilds. During that time, without Earth's technological support natural hazards on some of the colony worlds force the activation of the meta-gene. Since the colonists all face the same hazards, they all develop the same powers (at least, the 10 to 15% who have the meta-gene). When Earth reconnects 100 to 150 years later, these mutations have bred true, resulting in entire planets that have 40 - 50 point power sets (in keeping with LSH logic). PCs, of course, represent those truly gifted characters who stand out from the norm (and are built on a lot more points). The last 20 years or so have seen a resurgence in the popularity of the old "superhero" phenomenon, when crazy people dressed up in weird costumes. People haven't quite gotten the hang of "cool names" so things like Solar Boy or Tornado Lass are considered perfectly valid code names (and will count as a 25 point disad for "dorky name").

 

Anyway, I'm looking for people's general thoughts and ideas about this. It probably won't start for at least another month or two, but I just wanted to gauge reactions. The group seems pretty excited so far.

[Zephrosyne]

Seems like a cool idea. Of course, I am a bit biased because I am a huge Legion fan. I do think a 25 point Disadvantage for just having a dorky codename is a bit generous. Frankly, I'm not really convinced it should be worth anything. The multiple character concept you have is also pretty interesting. I'm looking forward to hearing more.

[Lucius]

How will you handle rotation?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary thinks rotation is easy, revolution is hard to handle

[massey]

The dorky name thing is just to encourage people to take it. I still haven't decided how to divide up disadvantages since there won't be a set amount of points for each character.

 

As far as rotation, I think I'll have them switch each adventure. Not necessarily each session, since we might not finish what we were doing in one sitting, but generally so. The idea is that the guy who spends most of his points on one character gets to be the star that day, but the next two games he's a supporting character. I plan for each adventure to be fairly self-contained, so in one they could be fighting space pirates and in the next they're up against the Brotherhood of Supercriminals, In trying to minimize the number of big huge story arcs, I can rotate characters more quickly. Kind of a Justice League Unlimited style game, where each episode focuses on what other guys are up to.

 

Then if I need I can always take over one of the inactive characters as an NPC, or if it's a huge battle or something I'll let people play multiple characters at once.

[Kirby]

Sounds awesome! I would love to be able to do that, creating possibly a 700, a 450 and 350 character. Great idea!

[Cassandra]

I came up with this recently

 

Flight 1", Megascale 10 LY (+3 3/4), Can Be Scaled Down (+1/4)

 

Cost 10 Points

 

This is a much faster way of moving a character across the Galaxy then FTL Travel. For 10 Points you can move at 240 LY Per Minute. It can easily be adapted to a larger focus to simulate a ship that your characters could use to get where they need to go.

 

Flight 1", Megascale 10 LY (+3 3/4), Can Be Scaled Down (+1/4), Use Simultaneously (+1/2), 4x Mass (+1/2), OIF[bulky]: Starship (-1)

 

Cost 6 Points

 

[Lord Liaden]

If you haven't seen the following before, you might benefit from it: Theron Bretz discussed the concept of how to run characters of very different point totals in the same game in his fine article for Digital Hero #3, "Pointless Champions." The article deals primarily with the supers genre, but also provides suggestions for taking this approach to other genres.

 

The Hero Games website used to host a sizeable excerpt from that article online for free viewing. Although it's no longer here, you can read it on this archived webpage.

 

[massey]

LL, Thanks, I'll take a look at it.

 

Cassandra, I like your concept as far as building background equipment efficiently, but I think I'll have space combat be a substantial part of the campaign. Spaceships will need stats so people can smash them.

 

Update:

 

So I got our first character writeups last night, handed in by a few players. It seems I need to be a little more clear on what I want. Martial artists running around with 50 PD/ED and 50% reduction are not exactly what I had in mind. But no worry, as a GM I have the ability (and the definite inclination) to say "no". Apparently some of our players haven't actually read any Legion comics and don't know what I am going for. I've decided to create a handout that will hopefully give everyone a much better idea. The point of having a 750 point character available was not to just take a 250 character and triple everything, as appealing as that might be.

[TheQuestionMan]

Pointless Champions is Pointless Roleplaying. Just call it what it is... Group Storytelling. Jm2c QM