What other superhero RPGs have you played?

[fdw3773]

Champions was first introduced to me through 3rd Edition in the late 1980s (I started out with Villains & Vigilantes first in the early 1980s) and have been playing on and off since then along with Fantasy Hero along the way. At one point I collected some old second edition materials, along with 4th, 5th, and 6th Edition and more recently have Champions Complete that I run at the various local game convention events.

 

However, Champions has not been the only superhero roleplaying game I've ever played or owned. At one point or another I've played (and owned) DC Heroes, ICONS, Villains & Vigilantes, along with owning (but never really playing) Silver Age Sentinels (Tri-Stat and D20), Guardians, Invulnerable, Mutants and Masterminds, Supergame, Prowlers & Paragons, Savage Worlds (there's a superhero expansion), BASH!, Supers, Marvel Superheroes (FASERIP system), Truth & Justice, Mighty Protectors (updated version of V&V), and probably one or two others that I read digitally via DriveThruRPG but have forgotten. Although each of those systems had their strengths in style, rules for running a superhero themed RPG, substance, and play-ability, I always found myself comparing that rules system to the Hero System and going back to Champions.

 

What other superhero RPGs have you played? And, do you find yourself coming back to Champions afterwards?

[Sundog]

I've used Villains and Vigilantes, but I was put off by the randomness of it. The original Marvel Superheroes and DC Heroes games were better, but I've always returned to Champions after I was introduced to it in Third Edition.

[Gnome BODY (important!)]

Mutants and Masterminds:

Held up very well up until combat.  But in combat, there's exactly one correct choice and everything else is wasting your turn.  Damage is the king of offense, and nothing else even comes close.  It also has horrible problems with combat taking forever, because it takes two rolls to do anything at all.  Over half of all attacks do nothing.  It's a soul-numbing grind where combat is "I sure hope he nat1s first". 

The Power Level system is an attempt at getting all the heroes on the same playing field, but between an adamant refusal to say "Your PL 10 hero should be pushing the maximum numbers of PL 10" and a massive host of powers that give bonuses that ignore PL, it falls apart badly.  To say nothing of how dysfunctional it is with skills. 

 

BASH!:

In the three campaigns of BASH I played in, the system never managed to survive chargen.  The granularity is so absurdly high that even +1 Brawn or +1 Agility compared to your opponent makes you mostly unhurtable or unhittable.  Inevitably, the PCs who took one of those high were utterly invincible and the PCs who didn't were getting slapped around like ragdolls.  The huge granularity also makes "cool flavor power" absurdly expensive, since even a little something is competing with a +1. 

Unfortunately one of the worst systems I've experienced. 

[Spence]

Games I played and really enjoyed:

Champions (best supers game ever 5th edition and earlier)

Villains & Vigilantes (nostalgia keeps it on my like list)

 

Games I tried and that I just didn’t couldn’t get into:

ICONS

Mutants and Masterminds/ DC Adventures (loved the character creation system, but the "condition" based combat made it unplayable)

Savage Worlds Supers (SW just falls apart above adventure hero/pulp power levels)

 

Games that I actively disliked. 

Wild Talents

DC Heroes

 

Games I own but have never actually read.

Supergame

Prowlers & Paragons

BASH!

Marvel Superheroes

Capes Cowls and Villains Foul

[Duke Bushido]

Been with Champions since 1e.

 

Tried V&V (1 and 2e): didn't like it _at all_.  The Combat chart (what hits what and when) was simultaneously incredibly interesting and a serious problem.  The rest.....   Well, I've never been a big fan of totally random generation, and most of the characters we rolled up were, ultimately, complete crap.  Fortunately, so where the villains.   

 

For those of you familiar with both- and I ask because I have yet to find anyone familiar with both-  am I alone in getting a _seriously_ strong "Empire of the Petal Throne" vibe off of first edition?  Is it just me? 

 

Anyway....  All those charts, completely random and wildly varying power levels--even in the same character....   Results that just made nothing cohesive...  You really couldn't make an enjoyable, sensible, theme-sort of character without just straight-up cheating....   So many other things I didn't like about it....   Never really went back. 

 

Just because of the timing, I never even tried mutants and masterminds.  Honestly, it was in the shelf for months before I realized it wasn't a supplement for 2e V&V.        So much similarity in the look, I guess.  

 

Tried Heroes Unlimited, but only the GM seemed to enjoy that (the book was well-packaged, though; I can't take that away from it).

 

Superworld the standalone, for reasons I can't really explain, wasn't as enjoyable as Superworld the game packed in with the World's of Wonder boxed set.  Being honest, that one wasn't that great, either, but there was so much more leeway to it than there was in the stand-alone.  Still, it wasn't really a "keeper" system (I did like Magic World, though, from the Wow boxed set.  Future world...  You really had to play Flash Gordon or Buck Roger's (not; not the TV show) type stuff, or it fell apart).  The thing that really killed Superworld was finding the rules:  you had new rules, corrections (tons of corrections! )  scattered throughout various modules and- of all things--magazine articles!  Seriously: you might find one major problem corrected in Dragon, another in Different Worlds, a third in White Dwarf....  You never owned a completely playable game.  Even the stand-alone version suffered from that, but nowhwre near to the extreme the first one did. 

 

 

 

Suoerhero-- what was that?  2049? 2044?  Dude, that wasn't even a _game_.  That was like a statistics and accounting exercise: it was like if a little kid playing Star Raiders on the Atari decided to start keeping a journal of his space mission, and you were role-playing filling in the journal.  It was so bad that Dragon magazine published a massive set of "optional systems" that, if you used all of them, turned it into an _almost_ role playing game. 

 

There were four or five others I can't even remember the names of anymore.  Oh: TSR's Marvel Superheroes.  I hear so much love for FASERIP the last couple of years, but that game was just a turd.  What the hell kind of ability score is "good" or "unearthly?". And the progression was just crap.  Oh, and God help you if you wanted to make your own character.  I couldn't unload that (and the miniatures) fast enough. 

 

To be fair, though, I'm not a superhero guy, so my biases fall down on the side of how the system works (or, in some cases, _if_ it works) and the freedom to do things with it.  I never left Champions.  Even as we moved our traveller and fantasy games, we slipped them onto Champions running gear.  The only other system I can say I have heavily played since was first edition Vampire by White Wolf.  It worked really well for the game at hand, but the only other thing I could see running well on it was that star wars game that used D6 the way Vampire used D10, with the little  dice pools, etc. 

 

As to why someone who was never seriously into superheroes played so many super hero games? 

 

My GM was absolutely _nuts_ over superheroes.  We did traveller, D&D, Role master (both of which ended up on Champions running gear; Traveller never really did) and a couple of other things, but Champions is where I stayed.  I know people that have left and come back, so clearly there's no reason to leave, is there? 

 

Though honestly, if HERO keeps getting more bloat, I have been giving _serious_ though to trying out Svage Worlds and just jumping ship all together if I like it.  Besides, then I could use Kieth "coolest signature on the internet" Curtis's knock-off Thundarr setting.

 

 

[Scott Ruggels]

I used to play A Lot of systems, before I found Hero. After Hero, it was R. Talsorian Games, that I GM’d for the company. 

My taste for Superheroics declined precipitously after high school. But I stuck with Hero.
 

 I have played Prowlers & Paragons and it’s sort of Hero light, but the combat is far to simplified for my taste. It’s a bit too “theater of the mind”, and has a Bennies or Force Points system, so the game rarely feels like a challenge.  
 

Savage Worlds works fairly well as a narrative game, but it’s entirely theater of the mind plus dice for combat. It works great over low to no graphics conferencing systems. But because of the cascading dice mechanic, you can get killed by a baby with a butter knife. We did see a deep one instantly taken out by a .32 pocket pistol. The ebb and flow of the dice though keep things “interesting “. 

[Duke Bushido]

Oh! 

 

I almost forgot Supergame.

 

Well, actually, I had forgotten it, until you had me dredge my memory for super's games I've played.

 

Do you have any _idea_ how long it took me to forget that horrid thing?!

 

 

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

4 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Though honestly, if HERO keeps getting more bloat, I have been giving _serious_ though to trying out Savage Worlds and just jumping ship all together if I like it.  Besides, then I could use Kieth "coolest signature on the internet" Curtis's knock-off Thundarr setting.

 

I'm interested as to why you would want/need to use Savage Worlds to play in Keith's magnificent The Savage Earth setting, which is written for Hero Fifth Edition. Would you mind elaborating?

[Duke Bushido]

We dabbled with it in HERO for a few sessions, and there wasn't really any excitement-- possibly because we had just come out of a fantasy campaign and wanted a break.

 

Have some friends in Brunswick who used it in Savage Worlds, and listening to them, that system added just the right bit of "wild" to it to give it an over-the-top feel.  And evidently "exploding dice" were very popular, even when used against the players.  

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

Over the years I've tried a little Superworld, V&V, GURPS Supers, M&M, SAS Tri-Stat, and Fuzion (Champs New Millennium). Never really tested any Marvel or DC game, mostly because using those settings made me feel like I was playing in someone else's sandbox with whichever toys he was willing to let me use.

 

To be honest, as I've gotten older my play has become more about setting than system, and I love the richness of the current Champions Universe. It has more breadth and depth than any supers world outside of the Big Two comics companies (and in some areas it surpasses them), but unlike the games for those it feels like it was built by gamers for gamers, rather than shoehorning them into something better suited to comic books.

[BigJackBrass]

5 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Oh! 

 

I almost forgot Supergame.

 

 

For years I only knew of Supergame from the ads in Space Gamer magazine, but remarkably Precis Intermedia Games reprinted it a couple of years ago! They also did a "third edition" which is actually an entirely different system. Unfortunately it looks like it's following their typical path of buying an old IP and not following up with the promised supplements. 

[fdw3773]

16 hours ago, Sundog said:

I've used Villains and Vigilantes, but I was put off by the randomness of it. The original Marvel Superheroes and DC Heroes games were better, but I've always returned to Champions after I was introduced to it in Third Edition.

 

The randomness of V&V turned us off as well, and we ignored that rule and ended up picking powers when we created heroes and villains back when we played it in the mid-1980s. Granted, there was little game balance as a result and had way over-powered heroes and villains at times.

 

Just to let you know, after a long, drawn-out court battle Jeff Dee and Jack Herman finally regained their intellectual property rights from their work on Villains & Vigilantes and in recent years released Mighty Protectors via Kickstarter, which is basically V&V 3.0. The players and GM now have the option of being allocated points to choose the powers and level of that ability and follows the same basic game mechanics with that "old school" feel.

[fdw3773]

11 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Oh! 

 

I almost forgot Supergame.

 

Well, actually, I had forgotten it, until you had me dredge my memory for super's games I've played.

 

Do you have any _idea_ how long it took me to forget that horrid thing?!

 

 

 

 

It's funny you mentioned that game. I didn't discover it until the past couple of years and had no idea that it had been around for as long as Champions and Villains & Vigilantes. I definitely would've had fun with it when I was starting out with RPGs in 5th and 6th grade since the system was fairly easy, but definitely would have moved on from it after a year or so. 🙂

[pbemguy]

I played the original Marvel Superheroes (FASERIP) very briefly. I started Champions and this game at the same time, GMing both.

 

I ended up using the ranking system (and the Handbook to the Marvel Universe) to improve my Champions game, and I used some of the Marvel modules to spice up my Champions campaign. (The Marvel RPG and the Official Handbooks made me a much better character designer, period.)

 

Marvel Superheroes wasn't as good as Champions, but it really boosted my Champions game, and I only have fond memories of Marvel Superheroes.

[Mr. R]

I have played ---

 

V&V:  This was actually my first game with all the random Char. Gen. and wonky power combinations (Like He3 man who had chemical powers, ice powers and flight)  It was fun, but many of use were turned off by the randomness of the rolls.  One person rolled flight, str, end, invulnerability, life support ( this is after rolling a weakness and discarding a power).  Next one rolled illusions B (this was after rolling a weakness and discarding a power).  Trying to make both fit in a combat.........

 

HU:  This was the old version where you rolled ONE power.  After V&V we found it.... limiting.

 

Champions:  One I played and GMed the most.  You get what you pay for.  You want your martial artist to have psionics?  Pay for them.  Sorry no freebies.  

[Mr. R]

17 hours ago, Spence said:

 

Mutants and Masterminds/ DC Adventures (loved the character creation system, but the "condition" based combat made it unplayable)

 

 

Not meaning to threadjack, but could you explain this to me.  I have seen many who laud the M&M system, so a counter argument perks my interest!

[dsatow]

18 hours ago, Sundog said:

I've used Villains and Vigilantes, but I was put off by the randomness of it. The original Marvel Superheroes and DC Heroes games were better, but I've always returned to Champions after I was introduced to it in Third Edition.

 

I actually liked the randomness of V&V sometimes.  It would push me creatively out of a repetitive rut after a while.  I would roll up powers in V&V and make a Champions style character out of it.

 

[dsatow]

I've played Marvel Superheroes(TSR), FATE's version of Supers, and V&V (all versions).  I've read at some point DC Heroes, ICONs, Mutants&Masterminds, Marvel Superheroes (Marvel initiated) and Silver Age Sentinels but never played.

 

Marvel has some interesting mechanics and V&V forces me to think in interest combinations, but I always seem to comeback to Champions.  I tend to like the HERO system for its level of crunchiness and universal design nature(effect over special effect).  I do have minor issues with the some of the powers/abilities and the bell curve on skill/CV resolution, but not enough to cause me not to want to play.

[Tom Cowan]

Marvel Superheroes (FASERIP) and GURPS supers

[Sketchpad]

Let's see, I've played and/or GMed: Marvel Superheroes, DC Heroes, Champions, Villains & Vigilantes, Silver Age Sentinels, Marvel Saga, Heroes & Heroines, Guardians, Enforcers, Icons, GURPS Supers, DC Universe, D6 Supers, Supers, Mutants & Masterminds, and a few others that I know I'm forgetting. Lately I've been running M&M 3e, which feels like the union of DC Heroes, MSH and Champions in many ways. As much as I love Hero, if I were to start running it these days, I would probably streamline the system down to what I want it to be. Mind you, I'm also a little biased toward M&M, since I work on third party products for them. 

 

4 hours ago, Mr. R said:

Not meaning to threadjack, but could you explain this to me.  I have seen many who laud the M&M system, so a counter argument perks my interest!

 

I started some video tutorials for M&M over at YouTube. The first one is on the basics of the game (seen in the link below), and the second one covers an introduction to the character creation system. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTljKSHhP2A&t=604s

 

[Gnome BODY (important!)]

5 hours ago, Mr. R said:

Not meaning to threadjack, but could you explain this to me.  I have seen many who laud the M&M system, so a counter argument perks my interest!

To elaborate on my complaints up-thread: 

 

At a glance, it's similar to HERO system.  Point-buy, buying ranks of powers, stats, and skills.  Powers have a cost per rank, and modifiers can increase or decrease that.  Power writeups are shorter, feats are present, and the math only involves fractions if you go below 1 point per rank so it's "simpler".  I think that's where a lot of the praise comes from, it's perceived as easier to run/play than HERO but just as flexible. 

 

The basic combat routine in M&M is "Roll to hit, target rolls to resist".  The to-hit roll is basic D&Dism, you roll 1d20+your accuracy and hit if you get 10+their defense or better.  The resistance roll is them rolling 1d20+their bonus against 15+your damage rank.  If they fail by 1-5, they get a cumulative -1 to resist more damage.  Fail by 6-10, cumulative -1 and they lose their next movement action.  Fail by 11-15, cumulative -1 and they half their movement and lose all their movement actions for the rest of the fight.  Fail by 16+ or by 11+ a second time, KO. 

Non-damage attacks use a lower threshold to resist and omit the cumulative -1s, on top of allowing a new check to reverse the effect (no penalty if you fail) every time the victim gets to act. 

What this means in practice is that combat is basically (generally very slow) Russian roulette.  The average attack has a less than 50% chance of doing anything to anyone but a mook, but a non-zero chance of instantly KOing the supervillain.  There's zero predictability as to what the result of an attack will be and I've seen both heroes and villains going down instantly due to nat1s and full pass around an 8-player table having absolutely no effect on anyone. 

There's metacurrency that permits die-tweaking, but it's consequently so critical to horde your metacurrency to not get instantly knocked out that either the entire metacurrency system falls apart or the entire combat system falls apart.  Or both fall apart at once for different people! 

 

Balance between characters is provided (in theory) by the Power Level (PL) system.  Your accuracy bonus and damage bonus can't have an average greater than your PL.  Same for your not-get-hit bonus and your not-take-damage bonus, your other not-get-hit bonus and your not-take-damage bonus, and your not-suffer-mental-effect bonus and your not-suffer-physical-but-not-damage-effect-bonus.  This sets up a system of "tradeoffs".  Want to hit often?  You don't hit hard.  Don't mind getting hit a lot?  You won't take damage often. 

But there's a giant pile of things that ignore this.  You can purchase an attack that always hits, and you can still give it a damage bonus equal to your PL so the guy who sacrificed damage for accuracy looks like an idiot.  You can buy invisibility, which gives attackers a -5 to hit which is basically the same thing as +5 to your not-get-hit bonuses but doesn't count against PL.  You can regenerate to reverse damage, be outright immune to weak attacks or certain SFX, staple three attacks together to snap the action economy over your knee, the list goes on and on.  And none of that counts for PL calculations, making PL questionably useful. 

 

Skills have a problem mainly because there's so little guidance given.  Your skill bonus is capped at 10+PL.  The default PL is 10, so the default skill cap is +20.  Many examples, including example characters, imply that +6 to +8 is a good bonus.  But looking at the rolls required in the example adventures, that doesn't bear out.  You really do need +doubledigits, and ideally in the +16 to +18 range to be really successful unless you like blowing your metacurrency on skill checks and thus losing combats because you can't reroll your bad save. 

It also has a bad problem where powers obsolete skills.  If I have flight that's usable underwater, the entirety of acrobatics and athletics are meaningless.  Invisibility has no rolls, stealth has rolls.  And it's cheaper to be invisible to human senses than it is to max your stealth bonus.  Being outright immune to social skills is cheaper than capping your social defense skill.  So on and so forth. 

[drunkonduty]

I've only ever played Champions and Marvel FASERIP. But they're the two best so that's okay.

[Spence]

10 hours ago, Mr. R said:

 

Not meaning to threadjack, but could you explain this to me.  I have seen many who laud the M&M system, so a counter argument perks my interest!

 

It has been a while and even though I am referencing one of my M&M rulebooks, I may get some of this wrong. 

 

The basic concept is that M&M doesn’t use damage, instead you apply “conditions”.   

 

A straight up fight where supers are punching each other is easiest to explain.

 

The Attacker roles to hit, and if they hit the Defender rolls to “resist” the “damage. 

For a physical attack like a punch or a hit with an object (steel bar, telephone pole, etc) the Defender can have the following conditions imposed:

1) Nothing

2) A cumulative –1 PENALTY

3) the condition DAZED plus a cumulative –1 PENALTY

4) the condition STAGGERED plus a cumulative –1 PENALTY

5) the condition INCAPACITATED.

These are not that hard to track.  The higher the condition the worse it is.  And the defender recovers the condition in order. 

 

So, if Brickman got punched by Megafist and was STAGGERED.  He would recover by going from STAGGERED to DAZED to just the penalties until they are gone. 

 

So far so good. 

But here it goes off the rails.

 

There are right about 16 Basic Conditions and 13 Combination Conditions. Some Basic Conditions examples are Normal, Stunned, Dazed, etc.  Combination Conditions examples are Bound (defenseless/immobile/impaired) or Staggered (dazed & hindered).

 

When building a Power, the player will pick the effect and special effects (very very very similar to Hero System) and if it isn’t predefined, select the conditions that will apply for the 3 condition levels.  For example Damage is predefined and pretty much Blast in Champions except where Blast’s default is ranged, Damage defaults to touch.  Both systems use modifiers to tweak the base power. 

 

But for Affliction things are not easy.  Affliction is a very wide effect power that can be used to simulate many things.  From turning someone into a frog to an agonizer ray.  You select one condition for each level with descriptors of the special effect.  Here are the picks.

 

Failure (one degree): The target is dazed, entranced, fatigued, hindered, impaired, or vulnerable (choose

one). Potential descriptors include coughing or sneezing, creeping mental influence, drowsiness, euphoria, fear, itchiness, lethargy, nausea, pain, or tipsiness.

 

Failure (two degrees): The target is compelled, defenseless, disabled, exhausted, immobile, prone, or stunned (choose one). Potential descriptors include agonizing pain, confusion, ecstasy, momentary emotional or mental influence, paralysis, seizure, terror, or vomiting.

 

Failure (three degrees): The target is asleep, controlled, incapacitated, paralyzed, transformed or unaware (choose one).

 

Now that doesn’t sound too bad, but the conditions do not follow a consistent hierarchy.   Since you pick from each degree field, recovering one step from Disabled doesn’t always lead to Dazed.  Each power set is very custom. 

 

To run the game you cannot allow players to build PC’s without direct supervision.  Not to limit their characters, but to decode what their PC’s can do beforehand.   You can go into Hero blind as soon as you grasp the underlying common rule structure.  For M&M you either limit the players or memorize 28’ish conditions as well as the possible combos allowed by the open effects of some of the powers. 

 

We tried to play it a few times, and most of the players had issues just running their one PC, and those that tried to GM were pulling their hair out.  Not a single condition flow to be found. 

 

Topping it off, nothing felt WoW!.  It all felt Meh…..   Instead of getting pounded with “something” and getting a feel for a Hero getting knocked into the ground with concussive force.  You get “you fail to make you resistance roll, you are Dazed”.  Meh…

 

I get it that many people do not like “buckets of dice” that you can see in Champions.  But V&V, ICONS and Savage Worlds Super all gave a good sense of the damage from a super punch.  Champions knockback is an integral part of what makes a super battle cool.  Knockback is not even in the core book, but is tacked on in the GMs Guide. 

 

I don’t know, but we tried several times to get a game off the deck and failed.  It just didn’t flow. 

 

Anyway, I know that there are a LOT of people that really like it and have a great time. 

But for me and those people I know that tried it, we never got it to play.  Maybe it’s because I can play Champions.  I have heard similar complaints from M&M players about Champs not working when reading forums. 

 

I have a full M&M collection, both 2nd and 3rd Editions.  Every once in a while, I get a wild hair and give it another go.  I am firmly convinced that I am missing something extremely simple, that the answer is glaringly obvious.  But I just keep missing it.  Maybe someday I’ll actually meet someone that runs it and get them to run a training game. 

[Duke Bushido]

Wow.

 

Sounds like a lot of us dodged a bullet not picking that one up, way back when.....

[DreadDomain]

somewhere else I have answered this...

 

For me, this is a no brainer, a no contest. Over the years, there was one system to rule them all when it came to superhero roleplaying; Champions/HERO. I thought about creating a top ten ranking but after Champions, whatever would come up next would only be a very distant second place. To make this post a bit more than just “Champions is the best”, I have used different lenses when thinking about other systems that I am still fond of or interested about. Let’s see…

 

The Nostalgia Effect

There are a few games that always kind of interest me because of the good old days. It includes, Villains & Vigilantes, FASERIP, DC Heroes. I like these games but when it comes down to choosing a game to play or run a superhero game, there is less than 1% chance I would choose one of those games. DC Heroes specifically would also have to compete against M&M so even less likely for this classic.

 

The Games I Read Over and Over Again

These are the games I read, decided it wasn’t for me (didn’t scratch my itch or decided other games would suit me better) but still, occasionally come back to because of positive comments on these boards or elsewhere. Invariably, I come to draw the same conclusion. The comic-booky simplicity of those games is attractive, but it is not for me. They are not granular enough, or too hand wavy or don’t provide the full power definition or tactical options that I love. It includes ICON, BASH and SUPERS. Although they seem to be very good games, there is 0% chance I would end up choosing one of those.

 

The Games I am Curious About

There are a few games that I have skimmed through, thought looked excellent but really don’t have any kind of experience with them. They give me this warm feeling that I could love them if I would invest a bit of time with them… or they could become Games I Read Over and Over Again.  For a game or a campaign, I could choose one of those games… but only if I had enough time to invest in preparation.

Prowlers & Paragons is a nice-looking game that seems to fall between the simplicity of ICON and the full-blown power of Champions. Does it hit a sweet spot? Does it play well? Would it offer me enough options, both in character creation and in play, to satisfy me?

Wearing the Cape might be a game that make me get, and like FATE. I haven’t read the novels but the game looks good. Where P&P might offer an easier Champions, WtC seems to offer a different game play altogether, more in the vein of Marvel Heroic Roleplay perhaps.

Eschaton, powered by EABA is a game in the same vein as HERO and GURPS and both have an obvious influence on its design. The game uses very interesting mechanics (the resolution system, the turn rate) and a very deconstructed power design system that feels very powerful but somewhat hermetic and difficult to master. Granularity is good and the number of tactical options available seems reasonable. The setting is set after the Eschaton, the emergence of super-powered individual, and is introduced through scenarios on Day 1, Week 1, Month 1, etc. The game seems to be easily tuneable to get either a four-color style or a more post-apocalyptic feel. The books would benefit from better graphic design and editing.

 

The Games I’d Like to Love

These are the games I’d like to love enough so they could dethrone Champions or at least give an alternative. While those games don’t quite have what it takes to do so, I really do like the idea or the concept behind the game.

GURPS Supers is surprisingly the only other system we have successfully used in a long-term superhero campaign (all other attempted collapsed quickly). GURPS is very granular and is very detailed when it comes to mechanics but scales very awkwardly for a four-color game. It does up to say Spider-Man level reasonably well but becomes somewhat difficult to balance at high level. To put it another way, it takes a lot of effort and campaign decisions to make it playable when you have a lot of points to spend. So why would I like to love it? GURPS is allegedly one of the best all-around system on the market and the support for GURPS is phenomenal in quantity (although mostly in PDF) and quality of content (less so when it comes to art). If it could do supers in a convincing way, it could end up being my one stop shop for roleplaying. The only reason I would use GURPS Supers these days would be for a gritty, low-powered game… but chances are I would still choose Champions anyway.

Marvel Heroic Roleplaying soon to be Coxtex Prime (althought CP is more than just supers) really brought something to the table. It did make me think about roleplaying in a slightly different way. The system is very flexible across all power levels. However, it is not very granular, has limited tactical options in play and is very gamey. When we tried it, we really struggled to remain immersed in the story because the system is less about what characters choose to do in game and more about how the players will use plot point and assign rolled dice to get to a result to narrate. Still, MHR brings a totally different game style to Champions and the upcoming Cortex Prime could convince me to give it another go. With Cortex Prime, I will be able to pick and choose game elements according to my tastes. You can be sure Affiliations will not be used by me again.

Mutants & Masterminds is closer to Champions than any other games on this list so it seems natural that it is featured. While GURPS Supers turns the granularity/options dial to 11, M&M turns it down to 7, which could be a good thing. While M&M fans will repeat the meme that M&M does 80% of what HERO does for 20% of the complexity, it is only exactly that, a meme. The numbers are chosen (sometimes we see 90/10) to stress a point: M&M is somewhat less powerful than HERO and somewhat less complex. My own perception of M&M is that it can do 80% of what HERO does for about 80% of the work (and because I am more fluent in HERO than M&M, it is currently 200% of the work 😊). The quality of the supplements is excellent even if they do not produce as often or as quickly as during the better days of the game. Full colour, hard covers with good art and contents, what is not to love. Add to it a streamlined scale and generally more compact write-ups than Champions and you really want to adopt it. However, the d20 resolution is swingy, the tactical options are not as numerous as it is in Champions and character creation not quite as meaty. I appreciate this is exactly what others are after but for me, it means that M&M is only 80% as enjoyable as HERO. The trade-off in the end is not good. Maybe one day it will click but for now M&M plays in the exact same space as Champions and unless I specifically want to give it another chance, I would never choose it over Champs.  

 

The Uncontested Champion (see what I did here)

Champions is far from perfect but it ticks a lot of the boxes that I am looking for in a game. Characters are well defined with abilities, interact with the story in a tactical way and suffer very measurable consequences. As I said in another thread, Champions is very "crunch scalable" and most of the complexity lies in the power creation system. During character creation, the system gives you the power to detail, tweak, to the nth degree so you can mechanically come up with the exact effect you envision. But you don't have too. By choosing the rules enforced in the campaign, the GM contributes to set the crunch dial for the game but when creating a character, the player(s) also have a heavy influence on how crunchy they want to play. I’ve seen players (including me) totally enjoy the character creation mini-game, tweaky, changing, trying different powers until they were absolutely satisfied. I’ve seen other players creating ultra-versatile characters making them much more complex to play but hey, that is what they wanted. I have also seen other players putting a very simple character in half an hour. One of my most epic character was built that way. In play, because the game is so well balanced, how crunchy or detailed you go doesn’t really advantage nor disadvantage you (but that is not to say some builds are not more effective than others, it is just not a function of complexity). Once character creation is done, I have found the in-play experience to be one of the most immersive because the rules work in a way that you would expect them to work; they make sense. The Champions Universe is very well detailed and emulates the mainstream comic books from cosmic power gaming to dark urban gaming. The quality of the first batch of books published for its 6^th edition is excellent. Champions, Champions Universe, the three Champions Villains volumes, Fantasy HERO and Star HERO are gorgeous books. My own personal favorite books are none other than HERO 6^th volume 1 and 2. Champions Complete, while not as striking, gets kudos for returning the game to a much more manageable format (240 pages).

 

What-If?

But in true super-heroic tradition, what-if Champions didn’t exist? What system would I choose? That’s a tough one. Assuming I would still look for crunchy goodness, I believe I would try to get the most out of GURPS Supers but would complement it with better suited systems for high level games, most likely M&M or Eschaton/EABA. I could also give a try to the latest edition of V&V, which I haven’t read yet or, if could finally be bitten by the Cortex Prime bug. Irrespective of what my choice would be, there are so many good games to choose from these days…