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Chessack

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Everything posted by Chessack

  1. Re: Drama Dice I would say you could use the idea almost as it was originally implemented. Unlike 7th sea, adding more dice isn't always going to be a good thing in Champions (for example, adding dice is a drawback when doing KB). And subtracting them doesn't always make a huge amount of sense either (it could lead to guaranteed actions in some cases, and drama dice don't strike me as being able to guarantee something). However, what you could do is something like this: For whatever reasons you want (reward for good RP, or however you do it), you award "Drama Dice." A player can use a Drama Die at any time upon making a die roll (but I'd say never more than one, as it could otherwise be abusive). To use the drama die, he simply chooses any one of the dice he just rolled, and re-rolls it. For example, suppose you have an 11 or less to hit something and on 3D6, you roll a 6, 5, 4. That's 15, so you miss. However, you could opt to re-roll the 6. You'd have a 33% chance of hitting (a 1 or 2 would work, anything else would not). This would give the player the option to try and change events, without guaranteeing success (if you take a die away in the example, it's an automatic hit, which strikes me as too much control for what drama dice are supposed to do). I actually like the base idea a lot, and I might well implement it if I were running a table-top campaign. As it is I'm not doing that right now... but it's in the mental file for the future. C
  2. Re: Least Abused Powers I agree about VPP. In principle it could potentially be quite abusive, and I have seen some attempts at seriously abusive things (the all-time prize winner has to be the guy who tried to put +3 overall levels - usable vs. others - uncontrolled/continuous into his VPP on the fly, and then before a battle, hit his whole team with it to give them all +3... and then pitched a fit when I disallowed it). However, early bad experiences with VPP taught me a very simple lesson... inform the players that all VPP powers must be pre-approved. Allow them to maintain a list of a reasonable number of pre-fab powers (20-30 powers total) that "could" be put into the VPP. I always said that in save-the-world or emergency situations, if the VPP nature allowed it (not all do), they could come up with something unique on the spot. Under normal conditions, however (which occur 99% of the time), they had to pick something off the pre-approved list. Once we started doing that, it became standard practice and VPPs were never a problem after that. Likewise, summon could be very troublesom if people can just make stuff up off the top of their heads in mid-session. However, that takes so long (designing a new thing to summon) and is so impractical that insisting on a pre-approved writeup for each summoned creature was pretty much a no-brainer. Requiring pre-approval (with the proviso that emergencies will allow some flexibility) pretty much solved most of the abuse problems with both of those powers, and some of the most interesting and successful characters we ever had, used those powers thereafter. C
  3. Re: Balance versus flavour The thing I always liked about Champions was that it does not have pre-defined roles. It doesn't force characters into such a role, and as a result, I have always found much more variety from one game to the next, than in D&D. Now of course, within the group there may not be that much variety in the short term. For example, in D&D you will often have a team consisting of say, a Fighter, a Wizard, a Rogue, and a Cleric. In Champions, you may not see as stark a difference between the "Energy Projector" and the "Martial Artist" as you do between Wizard and Rogue. But... over the years, if your game group plays long enough, you'll notice that all Rogues are essentially the same, all Wizards end up learning basically the same suite of spells, all fighters end up using the same weapons (some kind of sword, usually) and armor (some kind of magic plate). On the other hand, no two Energy Projector type characters are the same. No two Martial Artists are the same... they will be very different from each other. The other thing not having defined "archetypes" built into the game does, is it gives the players freedom to do unusual things or to "hybridize." D&D has a very limited form of this with things like, being a Fighter/Rogue, but even there, almost all Fighter/Rogues will essentially be the same. On the other hand, in Champions I have seen some VERY wierd stuff... like the guy whose super-power was to take newspapers, fold them into shapes, and transform them into full-sized creatures that matched the shape, and that then served him in combat (Summon, Charges, Fragile, etc). In other games, the designers make up pre-existing "cool stuff" like fireball spells or swords of vorpal madness, and the players and GMs "pick" from that pre-existing cool stuff when building characters, NPCs, etc. In Champions/Hero, you can buy source books with pre-existing cool stuff, but you don't need to (and we rarely did) -- you can just make whatever you want up as you go, using the fundamental building blocks. I find this leads to far more unique and unusual (and interesting) ideas than anything the game designers of most games can come up with. C
  4. Re: Regen Regeneration in 5th ed is the way it is because they (for some reason I will never understand) decided to remove the actual Regeneration Power (I re-instituted it in my campaign, and the link gives you the text of the old Power from 4th ed), but realized they needed to have some way to have regeneration, since it is such a common Power in Champions. So they made this bass-ackward, super-complicated modification to the rule that takes them 3/4 of a page to explain, when the old Regeneration Power accomplished the same thing (better, actually) in a few sentences. I will never understand what the "benefit" was of getting rid of Instant Change and Regeneration and turning them into very complex variants of other Powers. It provides no good I can detect, and ends up taking far more lines of text both in the game rules and on character sheets, to accomplish exactly the same thing. The Regeneration rules in particular are so insanely complicated now, for no good reason, that my game group (all old school Champions players who just bought 5th edition recently) were acually laughing at the rulebook over it. There was not even any question about whether we would use the 5th ed version of Regeneration. It's a silly formulation. My advice would be to just institute "old school Regeneration." That's what I did. C
  5. Re: Total Darkness Sight Yup. This is how we do "Classic N-Ray Vision" in my campaign (i.e., old-school N-ray, which was an unusual sense, not a sight sense). I give players the option of buying it the "5th edition way", and making it a sight sense, but then it gets blocked by anything that blocks Sight senses... Or buying it for 32 pts and keeping it "Unusual", and then it is only blocked by something that for +5 points "blocks N-Ray." And since N-Ray has to define one thing that it can't see through, you're all set with the blockage business. C
  6. Re: What is special about this? The category is there as a guide. The fact that the GM has to give special permission to allow Special Powers into Frameworks means he has to think about it. That tells the GM that the designers think this isn't a great idea, and that it can be unbalancing... and so he should be cautious and not just willy-nilly allow it without at least considering whether it could cause some imbalances. If they remove it and turn them all into Special Powers, what happens is this: Vet GMs who know what the Special Powers used to be, will keep a careful eye on whether those Powers should be placed into Frameworks, etc, and New GMs, not knowing this, won't know to keep an eye on it. To be honest, if they got rid of the designation, I'd just add a new House Rule to my campaign that re-defined the former Special Powers back into Special Powers, and I would rule that these may not, without special permission, be placed into Frameworks. I.e., I'd just re-institute the rule even if they removed it -- because I think it's a good rule. It's done that way because Special Powers inside Frameworks can be abusively powerful if not done right. In fact in my current campaign's house rules, I re-instituted the old forms of Instant Change and Regeneration, in part for this reason: so that they would become, once again, Special Powers, as I believe they ought to be, rather than variants of Standard Powers (Healing, Transform). I also re-defined Multi-Form as a Special Power because I don't think it ought to be put into Frameworks. This points out another use of the designation. If I don't want a Power -- any Power -- placed into a Framework, all I have to do is make a house rule that re-defines it from a Standard, Mental, etc, Power, into a Special Power. That automatically brings all the rulings on Special Powers into effect without me having to re-state every one of them. C
  7. Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... This thread his huge... but enjoyable. I have a simple one. We had one guy who was an awesome GM and player, and made great characters, but really bad at naming them. He had martial arts villains named (I kid you not), "The Ninja", "Ninja", "Ninja Man", and "Ninja Master." You get the idea. So this player made up a hero who had telepathy and empathy powers, and called him "Telempath." Everyone thought it was a goofy name but he was rather sensitive by this point so nobody said much to him. One day Telempath, the team leader, got out there and delivered a blistering soliloquy to the villains and made a nice PRE attack. One of the other characters turned to him and slapped him on the back and said, "You tell 'em, path!" We all about died laughing... even the guy playing Telempath. C
  8. Re: Best superhero game thread poll: Go Vote Yes that was what is known as hyperbole, or emphasizing how much I love Champions above any other game I've ever played. C
  9. Re: An Old Quiz, But A Nice One. You scored as Storyteller. You're more inclined toward the role playing side of the equation and less interested in numbers or experience points. You're quick to compromise if you can help move the story forward, and get bored when the game slows down for a long planning session. You want to play out a story that moves like it's orchestrated by a skilled novelist or film director. Storyteller 92% Method Actor 83% Specialist 67% Tactician 58% Casual Gamer 33% Power Gamer 25% Butt-Kicker 8% BTW -- nice quiz! Great find. C
  10. Re: Best superhero game thread poll: Go Vote And so because you no longer like Hero the best, the fact that I do makes my approach "small-minded?" I'm not sure it's reasonable to refer to having a clear favorite being "small-minded." By that line of reasoning, anyone who's a Bears fan and cheers them on over all other teams is "small-minded." To be blunt I might somewhat agree with you if you were to say the current incarnation of the Hero system is no longer all that great. I have said elsewhere (to the point people are likely sick of it) that I far preferred Champions (by which I mean actual Champions, when the game was only a superhero game, and before they added all this other "Hero System" junk). The reason I say this is that tons of stuff has been added to the game deliberately to make it generic, converting what was once a highly specialized and perfected superhero RPG system, to just a different form of GURPS. I actually wish Hero hadn't gone down this road, but I'm probably in the minority. When it comes to superhero RPGs though, Champions is far and away my favorite. Nothing else comes close to it that I have tried. If that's gonna classify me as "small-minded," then I'll accept the title. C
  11. Re: "Point inflation" in Hero A lot of it may have been how my group played. But that's sort of my point. In the 2nd ed era, a lot was left up to the GM and players. In later editions, less and less has been left open to interpretation, and much more has been set out in black and white. And I'm not sure that's a good thing. I preferred the freedom. Yes, you can still do what you want. But now that involves throwing out existing rules which is much harder for players and GMs to bring themselves to do, rather than just making stuff up to fill in the existing gaps, which is something GMs and players do more easily. C
  12. Re: "Point inflation" in Hero I suppose our group has always subordinated lists of skills to well-written and comprehensive (and interesting) backgrounds. And to be honest we felt like this was not our idea but was encouraged by the Champions writers and AC article writers. And I still feel this way. That's why in my Campaign rules I list first and as most important, what you're supposed to put in the background fields, and only get to the points 3/4 of the way down the page. I suppose to some the points are guides, and to others the points are gods. I fall firmly into the former group. C
  13. Re: "Point inflation" in Hero That's true to a point. However, in a 2nd edition Champions world, where the points are not THERE to slap onto the sheet, these things sort of HAD to be in the background. If my friend wanted his character to be "rich", there was no place else to put it but in the background. Similarly, if he wanted to be a military Lieutennant, there was no place else to put it but in the background. Thus I think that the over-abundance of these sorts of things in the game has led to players skimping more nowadays than they used to. If you can pay 5 points and be "rich", some players will just do that, and others will do that and write it in the background. But if you couldn't pay points for it, 100% of all "rich" characters would have to have it listed in the background. To see that this is not just a phantom of my imagination, look at the example of Dr. Destroyer. In the first version of him (pre-4th) he had no music skills but his music was listed in his background. In the current incarnation of him, he has the music skill, but it's left out of the background. So it's not just that players are skimping on their backgrounds, but that the rules, as written, are sort of (without doing this on purpose or deliberately) encouraging them to do so... or at least enabling them to do so. C
  14. Re: Character sheet -- comments requested Oh my! That is wonderful! Yes, it looks just like 2nd edition's layout. /cheer C
  15. Re: Best superhero game thread poll: Go Vote That was my thought too. Champions has always, to my mind, been the beginning, middle, and end of Superhero roleplaying. Yes, I know there technically exist other superhero RPGs (DC heroes, Marvel, COH for online play, etc). But honestly compared to Champions and the Hero system, every other one is laughable. I can't imagine anyone who's ever actually played Champions, ever considering any other superhero RPG as good, let alone better. C
  16. Re: "Point inflation" in Hero Clearly, one does not need to justify every skill or power individually. If one has written down an explanation for the fact that, for instance, one's character is a black belt in Judo, the appropriate skills (KS: Judo, martial maneuvers, Find Weakness w/Judo attacks, skill levels, etc) can reasonably be assumed, and not only need not, but in the interest of good writing probably should not, be explained in painstaking detail skill by skill. Similarly if I explain that my character, say, "was born with his fire/ice powers" (in Marvel terms, he's a mutant), then this presumably explains any and all fire or ice Powers on his character sheet. There is no need to explain, then, where "Fire EB" or "Ice entangle" came from... these make sense based on the origin already. However, one does not, in any campaign for which I am the GM, put 20 points of Judo martial arts, KS: Judo, and skill levels w/Judo, on one's character sheet, and then proceed to make no mention whatsoever of the character's martial training in the background. In my experience as more and more things have been "buyable" with points, more and more things on the character sheet have been left totally unmentioned in the Background. The single biggest culprit of this has been, and remains, Perks. People think that if they buy "rich" they do not need to explain how their character came into money, or if they buy "Miltary rank:captain" they do not need to include the character's military history in the origin story. And at least when I'm the GM, they most certainly do. After all, one must imagine that a background description for Batman would at least bear a passing mention of the fact that the Waynes were quite rich before mommy and daddy were popped in an alley by Jack Napier... and that his player would not simply put "Rich: 5 points" (or whatever) on his character sheet, and leave it at that. C
  17. Re: Character sheet -- comments requested Yes that is why I like 2nd edition sheets... critical info, and no fluff. The problem I have with all 3-column formats is the squeezing that occurs with things like powers. I find it much harder to read long word-wrapped power listings than the more spread out versions. C
  18. Re: Character sheet -- comments requested D'oh! OK let me think about it. It just seems like there is enough "negative space" on the 2nd page that you could consolidate it and make a spot for a picture, which would be ever so nice. C
  19. Re: Character sheet -- comments requested I might be tempted, if possible, to move the hit locations to the bottom of the middle column, and use the extra space on the right for a nice box for the picture. It's just about the right size for it. C
  20. Re: 4th Ed. Veteran looking for advice on 5E I'm in a similar boat. I grew up actually on 2nd edition, and still prefer it to all the other flavors. Never really liked 3rd at all. 4th I thought was good for re-balancing some troublesome powers (mostly ones that cropped up in Champions II-III), but also added a lot of "bloat" to the game system, most of which was (IMO) entirely unnecessary. I stopped playing Champions in 2002, right around the time H5E came out, and never bought it. Recently some friends from City of Heroes prevailed upon me to start up a play-by-email online game, and my old BBB is totally falling apart, the poor thing. I came here to try and get a 2nd copy and found that they don't sell it anymore, so I bought H5ER. H5 is also compatible with Hero Designer, which a lot of my computer-savvy players are using, so it helps to have that book. I actually went for a compromise. Being old school (2nd edition) there was an old rule (I think it might have been from an AC article) along the lines that you are not supposed to have more BASE points than DISAD points. In later editions, BASE = DISAD became the definition of non-superheroic (heroic, normal, competent normal, etc), and BASE = 2/3 DISAD was the definition of Supers. I'm so used to that, that doing 200 base + 150 disadvantages just didn't seem right. However, the rebalancing they've done ends up costing players more than before, so I wanted to give them a few more points to play with. I ended up going for a compromise, 300 points total, 150+150. This seems to give a decent amount of room for the players to build their characters while maintaining a balance between the total power level and the amount of Disadvantages. I've always ruled that there was a Max of both OCV and DC, and you could not be capped on both at the same time. So if you wanted max OCV, you had to have minimum DC, and vice versa. The same was true of PD/ED and DCV. High-DCV characters had to be low PD/ED, and vice versa. The specific details I use in this campaign are visible here. Since when have "bricks" ever been required to have a particular SPD? We had lots of bricks who had 5 SPDs and evena few with 6, under all versions of Champions from 2nd ed onward. I haven't really put any restrictions on who can have what SPD, but in our old campaigns, usually the non-Martials had 5-6, and the martials had 6-7. Most of the time, the non-Martials would start out with 5, and the martials with 6, and then when XP was spent, they'd eventually all bump it. C
  21. Re: "Point inflation" in Hero Yes, Questar's comments are exactly along the lines I've been thinking about. In a way the old school Champions system was kind of saying, "Your background is free. You do not have to pay points for it." And the newer way of doing it will even refer to KS, PS, etc, as "background skills" -- meaning that there has in fact been a fundamental change, from the idea that "you don't have to pay for your background" to, instead, "you *do* have to pay for your background." I'd still love to see a Champions 2.5 ed where they basically update what existed in those books(I-II-III), in terms of the rules for the existing powers at the time (so, for instance, replace the old way of doing Vehciles with the current, much simpler, way, and so on), but leave out all the stuff that wasn't in those books (Perks, most Talents, etc). They don't need to change the Hero System... but it'd be nice if they had a book with *just* the parts of the Hero System that you need to play the old school variant of Champions, and nothing else. I'd pay good money for that. C
  22. Re: "Perk inflation" in Hero The statements are clear taken by themselves. I think the problem is that they devote one sentence to expalining that you don't have to use Perks, and then pages and pages describing them. This decreases the weight of the sentence by sheer volume. Why, after all, would they devote pages and pages to stuff they don't intend for you to use? Plus, once you are introduced to the idea that a Contact is worth points, it may be difficult to imagine not charging points for it. Better, would perhaps be to illustrate ways of constructing different types of campaigns. So for example, instead of their vague references to "using simple Powers" in the Genre by Genre section, they could have charts, showing the kinds of campaigns, and which things would be used/not used. This could include a "Classic 1980s Champions" section that would list which game elements you would use, and which you would probably not use, if trying to reconstruct the "old school" feel. So you're right, if they were more explicit about it, this would be a bit less of an issue. C
  23. Re: "Perk inflation" in Hero Some fine posts here gents. I appreciate the high level of discourse we are having, I will say. I would like to focus on this tiny little part of the Dr. Destroyer example (excellent one by the way):
  24. Re: Character sheet -- comments requested You are my hero. HTML I can somewhat do, but RTF I just have no clue about. I tried building something in word and doing an RTF export but, at least with Word 97 (which is what I still have) it just makes a mess. C
  25. Re: "Perk inflation" in Hero Not explicity, no. But since the game system originally had no mechanism for buying any of the Perks and most of the Talents, and since many characters HAD those things, there wasn't much a GM could do but either "allow it" based on background, or "disallow it." Take Eidetic Memory for example. Before that came into existence, we had the occasional character who had a Photographic Memory. How would you do this in Champions, 2nd Edition (no II or III either)? You really couldn't do it with points, so the GM either had to "allow the player to RP that" or not. The rule of thumb then became, if the player can reasonably justify it in a way that makes sense, he can have it. If the player is just making stuff up to give himself freebies, and not really justifying it well in his background, then it's disallowed. I don't have 2E or any of the AC mags anymore but I am quite sure this was not something my game group made up -- we got the idea from the writers of Champions 2E. Other examples are things like Money. Again, there was no Money Perk or Disadvantage. In our group, the same player, at different times, played a brick who worked at a meat packing factory and lived in the boiler room of his building and rode a rusty bicycle, and (at a later time) a wealthy guy who lived in a penthouse condo on Park Avenue and had a butler and a chauffer. In 2nd edition, there was no way to work this out with points, and in fact, I believe the 2E rules even stated somewhere (or it might've been Adventurer's Club) that in Champions, money is something that is a background element, and that you RP -- it's not something that costs players points. I know I still retained the text I'm referring to (though I don't remember the source any longer) when 4th edition came out, because when the first player bought the BBB and was showing me the perks, I exclaimed, "What!!" and pulled out the text and showed him right there, where it said you don't do money in Champions with points. I considered this a fundamental departure from the basic design philosophy -- and still do. The difference between Classic Champions and the current Hero System is really this: In Classic, since a lot of stuff was not accounted for by the rules, you really couldn't pay any points for it (or get any via Disadvantges), and therefore these things had to be controlled via the Character Background sheet (or in Champions III, the Character Development Form). In Hero 5, they've got basically everything you can think of covered one way or another, so almost anything you can put into the background of your characdter, could be codified with points -- and many GMs will, in fact, insist that you do so if possible. We insisted you do so if possible back duing 2E also, but the difference was that Classically, "if possible" did not cover everything and the kitchen sink. It covered major comic-book genre effects, and the details (things like whether you have a driver's license or whether you're rich), it was not possible (without inventing rules from whole cloth) to codify with points. One of the (I'm sure unintended) consequences of this situation is the slow but steady deterioration I've seen in Character Background development. The Background used to be extremely important for us. Since, as I said above, there often was no way to codify with points the fact that you were rich, were a secret agent in secret ID, had a passport, etc, people had to write all that stuff into the background and, as a result, were compelled to explain and justify it. Once 4E came out (and I see this trend in 5E as well), where everything could be codified with points, I started seeing people adopt more of a cavalier attitude. They paid for the passport with points, so why justify it? I ran into this problem a lot when I ran a MUSH based on Champions. I ran the game for five years, and each character had to have 3 "GM approvals." As the head GM I did one of the approvals on most characters -- probably 200 if not more, from gamers who were everything from totally new to both MUSH and Champions, to vets in both areas. The #1 comment I left when refusing to approve a character was, "You need to justify the following things in your background: ....." Often, Perks were the ones I mentioned... sometimes talents, etc. Players constantly complained I was "nitpicking" because after all, if they paid points for it they should "get it" and why was I asking them to explain? But in Champions, the points are supposed to be codifications of an existing idea -- the points are not the idea itself. That means the idea should be separate and independent, and should be expressed in the Character Background (or other appropriate elements of the Character Development Form, such as "Enemies and why they are foes"). At least, that's how I always saw it... how my game group always saw it... and how, to my recollection, the writers and editors back in the 2E era, always seemed to intend it. They regularly wrote that the elements of the Character Sheet, or the expenditure of Experience Points on new or improved Powers, required "justification" -- you aren't supposed to just slap some points into a power and then "have it." And, in a game system where not everything has been codified, the idea of "justifying" is obvious to the player. But in a game where every possible thing you can imagine is already codified with points, many players seem to have begun thinking that paying points is the justification -- and it never has been, and never really should be. If points become the justification then characters become just a "bag o' points", rather than characters. C
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