HERO 1st times

[farik]

So does anyone have any interesting stories about how they were introduced to HERO? I'm always amused when I remember mine.

 

I and a friend were at our first game convention and he'd picked up HERO from a retailer booth and he thought it looked really good and I agreed based on what he was telling me (the 4th ed cover art helped I mean who doesn't think James Bond hanging with a Sorcerous looks cool). So we signed up for a HERO game which was already in session basically it was a celebrity deathmatch with characters like Lion-O and Mum-Ra in addition to some more traditional comic characters. I even won the game (okay technically it was a tie but the GM calculated that if the lont term endurance rules were used I would have won.)

 

So we get back home and I'm psyched to make a character. So my friend asks "what do you want to do?" since he's got the book and has actually had a chance to read it.

 

(paraphrased)

Me: I want to have a shield on a chain.

Him: But what do you want it to do?

Me: I want to be able to throw it and have it come back

Him: But what do you want it to do, hit people?

Me: (getting irate) Yes I want to hit people with it. Why else would I throw it?

Him: Okay how much do you want it to hurt?

Me: I want it to hurt like a shield being thrown. Sheesh, all I want is a freak'n shield with a change. Maybe this systems isn't as good as it seemed if I can't just make a shield with a chain on it.

 

Oh the options.....

[Solomon]

I got my first HERO book (Champions 3rd) as a mocking "gift" of sorts from a friend. He had bought it, but didn't like it in the least. He just loved over-involved, encyclopaedic games with no internal consistency, like RIFTS. So he was actually disgusted by HERO's consistency and effect-based approach!

 

So he gave me the book since he was going to thrash it anyway. I read the book, as I was curious to find out why my friend said this game sucked so much. As soon as I had read a few pages, I throughly fell in love with the game and run to the nearest games store to get any HERO book I could lay my hands on.

 

Guess that what's good for you might not be good for someone else.

[Isaiah_26_4]

Chello!

 

Ah, first time for Hero....

 

Well, I had plenty of friends who were playing Champs III in high school (88 grad). But I ran with the Marvel crowd and game and had been playing MSH almost since it had come out. And, as I worked at a Taco Bueno to pay for my car, my gaming nights were limited even then (that and having to sneak to games and keep gaming materials in my trunk to hide them from my fundamentalist mother. But that's another thread....).

 

Anyway, I didn't get to play Hero until I was in the Army. The BBB had just come out and one of the guys in our gaming group was all about Champs. So he bought it and coerced us into playing.

 

My first character was a felinoid alien who had crashed on the Earth and had some of his gear left with him (hey, I was on a Kzin-Hani-Caitian kick back in the day--today, it's all about polar bears! lol). I was kinda strong, I remember (30 or 35), had a laser SMG and a pistol, hovercycle, some armor (non-powered), knew some exotic martial arts, had retractable claws, etc.

 

Needless to say I was hooked.

 

While I haven't got to play as much Champions/Hero as I'd like to over the years, the times that I have gamed dHero have been memorable. Only Rolemaster gives memories that are just as vibrant. But, then, Hero published through ICE for a time....

 

Tony

[Blue]

They say you never forget your first, but I honestly don't remember. I remember my first D&D, first Gamma World, first V&V... but champions eludes me. Maybe becuase there's such a long history with it (More so than the others).

 

So I'll go to the first game I ran as GM, because that was when my Champions life began anyway.

 

First edition. As we were teenagers, the main hero was a busty heroine. She encountered her first arch-enemy, a classic zodiac style character named Taurus (powered armor type), and made her longest lasting friendship with the ubiquitous D&D transplant character, Frost Giant. Good old fashioned viper scenario, made up off the top of my head because I never prepared for anything. Ahhhh... good times.

[Lord Liaden]

I'm pretty sure it was 1982, when I was an undergrad. I was fairly heavily into AD&D at the time. (Wasn't that the RPG gateway drug for most of us in those days?) Visiting a new comic store hunting for the latest TSR release - exclusive gaming stores were virtually unheard of then - I saw the Second Edition boxed set of Champions, the one with (he who is now) Holocaust and an unnamed superhero on the cover. The idea of roleplaying supers appealed to me, so I picked it up.

 

Lots of folks here can probably sympathize with my reaction to the point-based "build your own" system after a diet of Character Classes and Levels. Crude as it was by today's standards, it was a revelation to me at the time. I went back to purchase the other Champions adventures they had on the shelves, The Island of Dr. Destroyer and Escape from Stronghold. I coerced my small gaming group to run in Island with me as GM. I think only one of them actually stayed with Champions long term, but I was hooked. I bought everything Hero as I could find it, not just the Champs adventures, but first edition Fantasy Hero, Justice Incorporated, Danger International (I somehow missed Espionage! the first time around), and so on.

 

I've branched out into other games over the years, but I've always come back to Hero.

[lemming]

My first game, I was talked through writing up a character, Nighthawk. He did fine until he ran into an NND cloud that one of the other heroes threw at a villian. This stunned Nighthawk and he crashed into the ground at full velocity.

 

For some reason, this wound up being a start of a trend. Nighthawk even though he had wings, would wind up being knocked out and fall from great heights into the ground. At least it justified me buying up his PD from the massive callous.

 

edit: Didn't even note the year, 1982

[Enforcer84]

I got the Second edition (?) Champs because V&V wasn't there. MY brother bought it the next week.

 

Tried to "D&D" it, rolled characteristics... then read it. Sold my Dex and Speed down to miniscule levels (5 and 1) and bought my STR up to 60 and didn't have to have any disads....

 

then read some more rules.

 

I came up with Enforcer after getting escape from stronghold...

 

he was a cross between wonderman, green lantern, and Ripper.

 

60 STR, lots of DEF and a Flight belt, strength reserve and a pair of combat guantlets that had entangles. His costume was similar to DC"s Geoforce.

 

He's changed a bit since then. But not much.

The first campagin consisted of 3 bricks 2 mentalists, and 2 martial artists. We fought Eurostar and one of the bricks, a robot with a 100 strength dropped a building on them...

[death tribble]

I started in a long running campaign in late 84 at Polytechnic.

There were three of us and we had been doing Cthulhu before hand. That was good.

This was simple and fun.

It built and mushroomed from there.

[Crimson Arrow]

Ah yes, it was the Summer of '83 when I discovered Champions (the same boxed set Lord Liaden referred to). That kept me occupied for the whole holiday (well, along with the two Enemies book and the two scenarios - again the ones LL remembers). I didn't actually get to play it until I went back to school though!

 

It was the versatility of the game (compered with D&D) that had me hooked. I just spent my time coming up with lots of characters.

[Doc Democracy]

I first bought Champions when I was 16 (1981) as some of the younger kids in our school roleplay group wanted to do superheroes.

 

Well - I looked at the system and gave up. About two years later during the Summer vacation before I went to university I sat and studied the rules for weeks before making my first characters. I remember the first villain - Titan. I then got a few friends and we played our first game.

 

My friend was sold on the system when his Black Ninja character got kicked through three brick walls and got up to run back into the fight...

[Wildcat]

My 1st time

 

Seems that Lord Liaden, Crimson Arrow and I all started at the same time with the Boxed set of Champions(2nd ed?). It was summer time and I remember being in a gamming lul. I hadn't played anything for all of that school year (except a small one on one Top Secret game with a neighbor kid who would rather be doing something else.) I found Champions at the Comicbook Store, and Just as Lord Liaden said, having come from a diet of AD&D, and other TSR games, I found the point based system to be exactly what I wanted. (Not to mention that I was a budding artist, and Champs had a place for your Character Image to go) Anyway I was starting a new School that year and hoped to meet some gammers. My 1st character was Cheeta, a Wolverien ripoff, but no claws, and lots of running. Then tried my hand at the X-men, The Teen Titans, and other Marvel/DC characters. All this to keep my summer time busy, but I never really played.

Then School started, and I met the guy who is to this day (geese 20yrs already Sheesh!) my best friend, and we started gamming. AD&D at first, and some other games too, but eventualy Champions, and that stuck!

Cheeta got a remake, and became Wildcat, but the team needed a leader, and Wildcat just wasn't the type, so Protector was born. Both characters have prominat places in my current campaign, as do many of the other PCs and NPCs from those early days, and while I have played other games since then, none have had the ability to hold my attention like Hero/Champs. I never sit in a movie and think "I wonder what level 'He' would be." But I contatantly find myself thinking "Dude that had to be at least a 10d6 Punch w/2x KB." (doese anyone else do this?)

Anyway I'm a Herophile through and through, and its all I play now (and I still have to have my character's image on the char sheet or it just doesn't feel right)

 

WC

[Yogzilla]

Don't remember exactly when I got introduced to Champions, but I do remember the reason why...

 

Sophmore year at college (1987), and a friend of mine was starting up a supers game using V&V. Cool; comics have always been a passion of mine. I came up with a concept that wasn't terribly original (flying brick w/ power blasts), but I was too enamoured of the concept to mind. Thus, Power Knight was born.

 

Another friend decided to also go with an iconic character (acrobatic martial artist). A couple of much-more-original characters from other friends and we were off and running.

 

But by about the 7th or so session, it became apparent that something was wrong. The martial artist was doing unholy amounts of damage with a single punch (modifiers were his friend), while PK - the then-only super strong character on the team - could barely knock someone unconsious after repeated blows. There were other inconsistencies, but that one particularly affected me, so I tend to remember it...

 

So, the GM decided to switch systems, and opted for the one he'd played in high school (in fact, the current campaign was somewhat based on his old game - so that was another deciding factor) - - and so he introduced the group to Champions.

 

That straightened out the problems we had with V&V, and the rest, as they say, is history...

 

Side note: True, switching to Champions didn't improve my luck with die-rolling, so PK still wasn't terribly effective. Even today, he's better known for crashing through walls than landing punches.

 

-Yogzilla

[Brandi]

I got introduced to Champions relatively late-- around 1994! I had some experience with GURPS so the idea of a skill-based system wasn't foreign to me; all the same, my first character idea-- a vocal mimic who might have a small suite of sonic powers with the help of something like a bullhorn-- seemed like such a nightmare to construct that I considered giving up on the whole stupid game altogether.

 

In fact, I did end up creating Ye Old Brick... but Irving's turned out to be much more interesting than his powers would indicate.

 

[ironically, the mimic character I was thinking of would be *much* easier to construct under FREd, now that Shape Shift can be described as affecting only certain Sense Groups...]

[assault]

This is my second attempt to write this. My machine ate the first one. I'm sure it was better.

 

OK, well, starting with background...

 

I went from toy soldiers to historical miniatures gaming with all of about a six month gap (1973). I read The Hobbit in 1975. I have magazines from 1976 (and perhaps late 1975?) with ads and reviews of DnD, so I was aware of its existence back then.

 

But. I lived in a provincial city on the other side of the world. The first RPG I actually got my hands on was Traveller, in 1979. I still play Traveller. I got DnD in 1980. I don't still play DnD.

 

In 1981 I went to university in Brisbane, which was where I had actually bought my copies of Traveller and DnD, and was a reasonable size city. In '81 I played a bunch of different games, including Runequest (nodding to Steve Perrin).

 

Early in '82 I came back from the Christmas (summer!) break. Someone had been to the national wargames convention in Canberra a week or two before, and had bought a copy of this superhero roleplaying game that wasn't available in the local shops yet.

 

About three or four groups ended up playing with photocopies of this original set of rules. Twenty years later, I seem to be the only one still playing Champions/Hero, although others are still gamers of one sort or another.

 

Although my copy of first edition is a pirate job, my copy of second is legit... As is my copy of third, and fourth, and fifth...

 

I actually found my copy of first ed last night. I haven't had time to read it in detail yet, but the quick glance I took at it was interesting. (Longer comments later.)

 

One of the interesting things is that it is bound with an article from Different Worlds from later in 1982. This article is a gem - Glenn Thain's "kind of official" Champions stats for the X-Men! Magneto was built on 1090 points! Sadly, 5th Ed Dr Destroyer is tougher.

 

Oh yeah. The 1st Edition version of Mechanon was built on 345 points. Yes, most present day Champions characters are built on more points than Mechanon...

 

Alan

[Alex Raven]

Ahh...this takes me back to 1982. I was at Beresford Park in San Mateo with a bunch of schoolmates hanging out waiting to play D&D. I saw a few guys hanging out talking about Champions and asked what the game was all about. They sat down with me and explained the game and I've been hooked ever since.

 

My first character was a straight Wolverine rip off. I played in one of my first games with Glen (Ice Star) Thain and some other guy who worked at Hero back in the day.

 

I've been playing with the same core group ever since 1982 with a few additions and subtractions over the years.

[Tim]

The Year: 1983. I had just moved to Cape and still in High School. I had only started playing DnD the year before.

Another guy on my bus and I became freinds due to both of us liking RPGs. He introduced me to Champions 2nd. He also gave me a photocopied set of the rules. (I later bought a 2nd ed. book as well as champ II & III) My first character, Dagger, was a mostly Snake-Eyes ripoff. (A Martial artist with daggers I could throw.)

In the first adventure, the heros were stopped by the police, after stopping the villian. I had a police officer beside me, holding a gun on me, and another character tried to shoot him, missed, and shot me. I did a leaping kick and KOed my teammate. Then the police got to act, after showing our speed.

[pinecone]

I still remember my quote..."How could this Possably be as good as Runequest".... Well I found out....someone wanted me to run this "cool new game" and I was not even interested in looking...so he ran a game and I was hooked, I started running 2 weeks later....

[The Souljourner]

Good lord, I never thought I'd find an RPG where the majority of its players are significantly older than I am (26)! I don't remember when I picked up 4th edition. It was something like mid to late 90's. I never actually played it. My friends were (and still are) all into D&D. I'm starting my first game on the 14th of this month, with some people I met on here. I hope it'll be the first of many, because I do love this system, even if I haven't gotten to play it yet.

 

D&D... that I started back in '89, but that's another story.

 

-Nate

[Korvar]

I'd started roleplaying Way Back In The Mists Of Time in Australia with Tunnels and Trolls (this would be 1980-ish), buying my first roleplaying game (Superhero 2044!) about 1981-2. Me and my brother did a lot of the T&T solo adventures (repeatedly - we even worked out which adventures your character should do and in what order to pop out the other end with all stats 20+, level 12+, and a General in the Khazan Horde), and a friend of mine at school used to run "Fighting Fantasy" books for me as scenarios.

 

1983, came to Britain. No roleplaying that I recall until '85 (except I got into miniatures at that time, and got AD&D books as presents), where there was a D&D group in high school, replete with all the teenage D&Disms (player vendettas - your character killed my last character so my new character turns up and attacks yours; any situation with a beautiful woman always turns out to be some hideious deadly trap...).

 

Then, 1988, University! Roleplaying Society! So many roleplayers we needed more than one game to be run at a time! Heaven! And, in fact, so much roleplaying that there were two game nights a week and weekend games! Games other than D&D!

 

People have wondered why I never left this town, and still attend the Society fifteen years later...

 

And one of the Weekend games, with the Old Guard (the honour!), was Fantasy Hero, set in Krynn, the Dragonlance world. That campaign went on, it seemed, forever, until all the Old Guard graduated and moved away. And basically, ever since I've been playing something Hero pretty much once a year, and if I ever even think about running anything, it's "blah-blah-blah run using the Hero System".

[bcholmes]

Originally posted by Yogzilla

Don't remember exactly when I got introduced to Champions, but I do remember the reason why...

 

Sophmore year at college (1987), and a friend of mine was starting up a supers game using V&V.

 

[...]

 

The martial artist was doing unholy amounts of damage with a single punch (modifiers were his friend), while PK - the then-only super strong character on the team - could barely knock someone unconsious after repeated blows.

 

<nod> I'm with ya there.

 

I loved V&V, but more because of how much my gaming groups evolved in terms of role-playing than because of the system. Some of my favourite gaming moments come from old V&V campaigns. (I also fondly remember playing against Jeff Dee and Jack Herman at GenCon one year).

 

In fact, I resisted Champions for a long time because V&V had so much nostalgia for me. Then I briefly played a metamorph in a Champions game, and decided to buy the rules to understand how the system worked. Hero has been my favourite system ever since.

 

I've often bought games and played them under the Hero rules -- FASA's Star Trek, a Shadowrun-like campaign. I even ran a Mage campaign briefly using Hero rules. (I'd love to do Castle Falkenstein some time, and maybe Fading Suns).

 

BCing you

[projecktzero]

Long ago in a galaxy far far away...

 

1980's - A friend invited me over to play Champions(1st ed). My 1st character was an alien(humanoid bug with Ace Frehley like costume) bounty hunter with the most complicated name ever: Alien.

 

He got his but kicked pretty quickly, but it was fun.

 

My first time GMing, I took Cobra from that villian or enemy book and created a team to go with him. Unfortunately, the super heros had probably a couple of hundred points more than my villians, so the villians didn't wake up for months.

 

We were going to switch from Table Master(er..Rolemaster) to Fantasy Hero when it came out, but I don't remember if it ever happened.

[Magmarock]

My AD&D group was introduced to the Hero System by another of our regular players back when 4th Ed was just released. So switching to FReD was our first time of having to change rules in Champions (wasn't that hard, either). The player who introduced us to the game had the BBB, but the rest of us invested in the sleeker, brown-cover book.

 

Because of Champions we met many people who gamed with us through the years since, some of whom we would never have had a chance to game with otherwise, so that's pretty cool.

 

Back then, we were easily converted to the superhero genre because, between my brother and me, we collected close to 20 titles of comics.

 

Mags

[Eyendasky80]

I was introduced to Champions by my Uncle. He's a crazy avid gamer/ minature painter and I think I was like 9 or 10 when he showed me the ropes. He pretty much made my characters at first and I went through three pretty rapid fire as I started to realize the possiblities of creating my own super heroes. THe first was a pretty vanilla energy projector I called Blaster and my uncle mistakenly thought I had said BlaSTAR, which I found to be a good mistake because it was much cooler than blaster. He ran me through a solo adventure and then he invited me to his game. I think he intended me to keep his best friend's ten year old company because although my Uncle liked having me around, later on I realized he does not suffer fools gladly in his games. Number two was a detective with a massive suit of armor called Tracker. Who gleefully launched missles at people and never really did much "detecting." The best part was when I attempted to invade an underground lair and couldn't find the entrance for the life of me. World's greatest detective? Sadly, no. Third he helped me create the character I used for the next year or so, Chamelion. Who was basically a guy with the powers of a Chamelion with a whip. Although I didn't realize it at the time, (I just thought whips were cool because my Uncle was a big Indiana Jones fan and so I was too) the whip was a good representation of a tongue. After that I got into a min/max phase and made a guy with a 4d6 pentrating RKA with x10 autofire and ugly ammounts of CVs with it. It was pretty rare in his campaign to have such a lethal bastard and I don't think he really liked that character. I put between 4 and 6 shots into my targets and they usually went down. I remade the guy with a pistol that was 3d6 RKA penetrating with double knockback and my main tactic was to line people up in front of walls (or if I was luck cliffs) and let them have it.

[Guest TheAuthority]

I bought a copy Champions 4th ed. from Waldenbooks basically because it had a George Perez cover. It took me about 5 years after that to actually play!

[Dr Divago]

Re: HERO 1st times

 

Originally posted by farik

So does anyone have any interesting stories about how they were introduced to HERO? I'm always amused when I remember mine.

Well my first hero was... is... will be...

:(

today, i've NEVER played Hero :(

'cause my friend all hate american comics, or prefer other games like DnD or like, or have no time to play another RPG

so i've never played Hero...

 

But i've played Fuzion; i've know Fuzion some years ago, looking for Talsorian Games CP2030 and other RTG product (even DragonBallZ:RPG )

after played Fuzion some times, i began to find for Hero, but in italy is not simple find games (only d20 and/or WW product are easy to found here... and games translated in italian, of course, so some OLD "Stratelibri" production like CP2020, Call of Cthulhu, and MERP)

So in a year or two iv'e bought HERO System 5 edition (thanks to a friend who import games from USA...)

But have'nt found time and/or player to play it...

 

Now, next saturday i'll play a one-shot champions gaming session, and hope i'll start a campaign in the next avril...

please wish me good luck