RavenX99

Oh, right... I traded him a Clockwork Hero for a copy of RG once. I should have thought about how much he was always writing for that.

I'm always a little curious... do you think Aaron wrote such detailed notes because he knew he might want to publish, or was Aaron just that way?

Accidental Change doesn't rip a character out of the world for a few weeks. That feels like a pretty huge complication, and I don't feel the two axes of Physical Complication really reflect the severity because it doesn't really consider how _long_ the complication is affecting. It's the same points for a PhysComp that knocks you out for 5 minutes. you lose the fight you're out of the "adventure"... your immediate plans are disrupted you're just "gone" for 1-6 weeks... short-term plans are disrupted, you have to make excuses to everyone about where you were, you could lose your day job, etc. Hm. But these also feel like the same results of being knocked out for 5 minutes, leading to being captured and detained. 🤔 As a GM, I'd be really reluctant to put this kind of thing on an NPC, unless I planned to never actually roll for that 8- and just declared it happened as a plot device where I found it useful to the story. But also, it's an NPC, so points aren't really important here, unless you're writing for publication.

I own a lot of Aberrant material... never played it, but thought about using the setting with Hero. Also thought about Wildcards, but Wildcards is so close to "anything goes" that it wouldn't look all that different from a lot of other superhero RPG. (Modular Man being a good example of how far they stretched the idea of "alien virus gives you super powers".) So I kind of see Wildcards as being that "narrow focus, but the GM has given you so many 'outs' you don't really need to adhere to the theme too strongly. Plus you can play aliens."

I think it was Allen Varney who said something like "all the rest of us delve deep into the mine to dredge up a handful of gems, and Aaron just dipped his bucket in the well and it came up full every time."

I'm trying to imagine this as a convention scenario, how players would react to it. Sounds like a lot of fun.

Cool... so did you roleplay through that event, starting with PCs that didn't have powers yet? Or was it just background?

That sounds pretty cool. Have you gotten by-in from all the players? Wondering about the setup... have powers been popping up for some time, or is it a sudden world-wide phenomenon? I think the latter would be interesting to play... the whole "the world has never seen superpowers, and now you're in the middle of how it reacts when dangerous individuals suddenly appear."

I've been watching the entire X-Men movie franchise in like 2 weeks, and it really made me think about this... in the movies, there are no other supers, just mutants. In the comics, the "mutant panic" didn't feel so real because there were so many other supers... "Cap'n America and the Avengers and that sorcerer dude are the good guys, but them damn muties, they need to be locked up!" It's a lot more believable when it's just "damn muties" and _none_ of them are considered heroes until the shift in Dark Phoenix. So I really think this kind of focus can mean a lot if you want to explore something like "mutant panic" without diluting it. Or like my cyborg game, CHROME... the whole focus was megacorps and misuse of technology and using people as tools. (Because the cyborgs are all "owned" by somebody.) I was reading some commentary on the Gestalt universe, and how Bennie diluted the concept by giving players so many options to have powers without being a gestalt. And this is one of the dangers of such a narrow focus... you really need all your players on-board with the concept. Because either you're pushing them into a concept they didn't really want to play, or you're diluting the world concept by letting players create exceptions. And I've learned when you let players create exceptions, over half your players will want to be an exception, because so many players are looking to be "more special" than the other special people. (I once had 5 players agree, with no objections, to all play wood elves from the same village with no contact with the outside world... exactly 1 player gave me what I asked for. I got an outcast who was not allowed to interact with the village, one raised by humans not knowing they were an elf, one who had left the village to apprentice to a human fighter, and a human who wanted to be an elf. They were all interesting concepts, but they broke the fundamental nature of what the campaign was supposed to be about.)

The Champions universe, like Marvel and DC and the Forgotten Realms, is a kitchen sink of ideas... super science, mutants, magic, aliens, beings from alternate dimensions, you name it, it's all in there. Have you ever run or played in a campaign setting where the source of superpowers was limited to a single source? All mutants, all from an alien virus (Wildcards), all super-science (super soldiers, cyborgs), all psychic manifestations, etc? (Scott Bennie's Gestalt setting always fascinated me.) My wife ran one of my favorite campaigns with an all-cyborgs theme.... there were no innate superpowers, only cyborgs and robots. I find the constraints really satisfying, as the world and story having a solid thematic basis really helps things hold together. You can have really great adventures in a kitchen sink, but I feel the constraints make it easier to achieve when everyone is on-board with the idea.

And this is my concern... relatively few knew about it, and the material is of varying quality, but it's this little piece of hidden Champions history that I feel would enrich the community to preserve it where everyone can have access. One of the fun things about APAs is that writers often talk about what's going on in their lives, projects they're working on, etc, and I find reading through those in Haymaker! archives to be more compelling than the game material.

OMG, someone remembers Clockwork Hero. I'm actually looking at scanning the whole collection and making it available, but I'm working through the legal/ethical issues. Scott Heine wrote stuff for it that he later reworked and sold to a publisher, so I'm talking to him about his contributions, and I probably need to see who I can find from the original authors. The big problem is that technically, I don't have the right to copy anything but my own work... everyone participated with the understanding that the APA was distributed to a limited audience. There's one author I've searched for off and on for _years_ and have never been able to find.

I like my comic book movies to be mostly-serious, with occasional bits of humor. Ragnarok went way over my usual limit, and I still loved it. I think it helps that they set the humorous tone in the opening scene, with Thor explaining to his long-dead cell-mate. And I think the script-writer really knew how to make it work. I just wish they hadn't spoiled some of the best funny scenes in the trailers. All the best verbal competition between Hulk and Thor were in the trailers... raging fire/smoldering fire, "who won" "I did" "That doesn't seem right," etc. There was a lot to like about this movie... my only real issue is, as another reviewer put it elsewhere, it felt like two different movies crammed together. The invasion and destruction of Asgard is a serious thing, and they spent little time dealing with that. I suspect this was intentionally a light interlude before The Infinity Gauntlet, which I expect to be much more serious.

sentry0, I was recently in much the same place you are... I played 4th edition heavily back in the day, but I'm just getting into 6th and ramping up for a new Champs campaign, and I've spent a lot of money on PDFs, some of which I feel would have been better as later purchases. "Champions Complete" seems a good starting point... but be sure you get that an not just "Champions". The latter is a campaign sourcebook that spends hundreds of pages on what it means to run a superhero game (the spirit of my hero Aaron Allston lives on), but is not a rulebook. If you want campaign setting information, that's "Champions Universe," though I think villain books would serve you better in the beginning than the world book overview in the beginning. I have 6E1 and 6E2, Champions Complete *and* Hero System Basic (don't ask)... Champions Complete would be my starting point if I bought just one book, especially if I wanted paper. If you're going to get 6E1/6E2, then Champions Complete is kind of redundant. I only got it to have physical book to pass around the table (because I have 6E1/6E2 in PDF, which is my preferred format.) From there, the Villains books are pretty core, but that kind of depends on where you want to go... as you note, the 5th edition books are still very compatible. Point costs change, but the basic rules at the table really haven't, and there's a wealth of information in the 5th edition library that hasn't been reproduced for 6th. I just finished reading the VIPER book and it was great.

Re: Zero Information I'm with you here. I have enough trouble with players who submit characters that are inappropriate for the campaign even when they've been given adequate information.