assault

And one of these has wind powers. It seems he has personal immunity, so his hat doesn't get blown off.

If you look at Champions of the North (both versions - Scott only wrote one) and Kingdom of Champions, there's more to them than just a list of NPCs. That's what would make "Champions of the USA" funny. Not just the stereotypical characters. Also, the latter could be less than funny once you get past the white characters. That's actually why my attempts at drafting out "Champions Down Under" have shipwrecked. There's no way I could write something that includes fails like Walkabout. At best I could do a non-canonical version, but I'm currently more interested in Fantasy - and that's got its own traps. It's sad, because instead of a whole book like CotN, something like a chapter from Champions International would be fairly easy to write. But I'm not touching the canonical stuff.

I'm supposed to be concentrating on Fantasy at the moment. I could answer your request but it would be a distraction, and I have enough of those.

I've been trying to live and breathe this enough to work on it enough to produce at least a first draft of a single chapter by the end of this month. Of course this has required me to change from my own weird take on fantasy to something more generic, that can use the already published material. Annoying. A side effect has been that plots for short stories have been popping into my head at an interesting rate. I've been having to write them down and ignore them. "Cho-bu and the Goddesses" makes perfect sense if you know who Cho-bu is. (A very minor god). But he's a product of my brain, although "inspired" by a Lord Dunsany story. I've also had to learn to ignore a whole lot of shiny things.

A real name for a network of corrupt police in Australia in the 70s and 80s: The Joke. If you were receiving payments, you were in on the joke.

Was it a Transformer or a Decepticon?

If you want a compromise, just put Seeker on a jet back to Australia. The canonical Australian characters vary between "meh' and unintentionally racist. Seriously, I have considered writing Champions Down Under a couple of times and the canonical characters are one of the major problems. That and governments doing racist things. It's not easy writing a book about a modern society when the society is apparently moving in a different direction. Fun Thought: Champions of the USA. Somebody should write that. I dare you.

Another ditto. Although for any genre.

That makes much more sense. I was wondering what the heck you were talking about. FWIW, 3 is the worst. 4 doesn't really count. Totally watch 1 and 2. They're barely related, but each does its own thing well. I think 1 was on TV a few weeks ago. I don't know about the others.

You haven't seen 3?

That's definitely a possibility! Or use the current editions, and ignore all the bloated published characters.

As the tribble said. Also, it would require a major rewrite to ditch the dated Cold War stuff. The biggest problem is that the Cold War ended thirty years ago, so characters that were young then aren't young now. If it wasn't for that, the sleazier characters could just have reinvented themselves as authoritarian Russian nationalists.

Because of a post in the Champions Now forum, I've started thinking about building high end DC characters again. One of the classic conundrums in character modelling is the point bloat in the last couple of editions. Up until 4th edition, if you followed George MacDonald's guidelines: 100 points in a power is awesome, and apperently essentially a hard cap in his game, you could pretty much occupy the high end space if your character was built on 500-800 points. The published villains tended to support this. These days you need 10 times that many points, or you just get toasted by any number of published villains. In the early days, it was possible for a starting character, if you played enough, to get into the high end zone. You can't do that in the last two editions, unless you start with inflated points to begin with. So I've been thinking: why not bump up the rate at which characters gain experience? If you need 10 times as many points to create a character that isn't at the bottom of the pecking order, and you don't want to start on a zillion points, why not increase the rate at which characters gain experience? I'm thinking about a factor of 10 or 20. So if, under the current system, you get 1-4 points per adventure, why not 10-40? You would still have to play a lot to reach the big leagues, but at least you could. Thoughts? ("It's your game" is not helpful).

Of course if you wanted a lawyer friendly version, a third volume of the Hero System Templates books could be possible. (For Champions, not Champions Now, of course.) The biggest problem is the difference in power level between the biggest DC characters and normal Champions ones. And then there's the power bloat in the published Champions villains - DC characters would need to be similarly bloated to compete with them. That wasn't the case in older editions.

I've tinkered with a D20 based system myself. I took it back to the start of the Golden Age, during the brief moment when superheroes were basically Superman, the Phantom/Batman and Mandrake/Zatara. I would have added a wider range of characters once I had those three balanced. Conveniently, they roughly correspond to Fighter, Rogue and Magic User.

DC has had three licensed games. One was based on Mutants and Masterminds.

Given that M&M, and other D20 based superhero games, seem to work fine, I suspect this is exaggerated. D&D has always worked for high power games. The point is that higher level characters don't really hang around with lower level ones (Henchmen, etc, aside). So the discrepancy in power levels within a group is seldom as broad as it notionally could be. The same applies to Hero though. Characters on similar point totals tend to be of similar levels of power. They don't have to be, but, barring intentional nerfing (whether on the part of the player or the GM), they tend to be. Of course some tricky design decisions would have to be made. In particular, which characters are included, and which aren't? You could say: "Superman is a very high level character, and thus doesn't need to be able to be rolled up at first level". But what about, say, Supergirl? Is there such a thing as a "First Level Kryptonian"? If so, what are they like? (1938 Superman, maybe?) Character creation is a big problem, in other words. Forcing characters into a set of character classes, while possible, breaks down around the edges. Eliminating character classes, like Hero, or perhaps more relevantly, Runequest/Basic Roleplaying, is possible, but of course balance becomes something that needs to be laboriously worked out. I mentioned Basic Roleplaying intentionally, because of Superworld. Steve Perrin acknowledged the heavy influence of Champions on its design, while BRP as a system shows its D&D roots. If your scope is "everything", then no system will be adequate. Not even Hero. Within a narrower range, a D20 superhero game is perfectly viable. But that's reinventing wheels that have already been invented. Oh, and check out Darren Watt's Champions LARP game for a cut down Hero-like system that uses a D10. It technically uses a stopwatch to generate a number between 0 and 9, but that's just what a D10 does. Changing it to use a D20 would be a piece of cake.

I can't speak for Hero Games, but it seems unlikely to me. The company is running on the smell of an oily rag, and licensing reduces profits.

Not if you do it right. Or at least, not much. There is the problem that it is a "feminist" group being created by men. No female players have commented in this discussion. That means we have to step warily. There is also the problem that it doesn't make as much sense as it would have in the early 80s. Back then you could draw on real examples of 70s era lunatic fringe groups - these days, the lunatic fringe has moved on and taken new forms. A modern WITCH seems a little anachronistic, unless you reinvent it completely, which means effectively creating a new group. Some connection to the emergence of second wave feminism seems like a good idea. It can be rather attenuated though, with the founders having moved on or passed on. So this can be a version of WITCH reimagined by younger members, who don't necessarily share the vision or values of the founders. There are some interesting possibilities. For example, the original WITCH could have been the first queer supervillain team (or agency). Of course they were nuts - supervillains, duh - but they were in their own stupid way pioneers. (Plot seed - Who Needs Men? Can humans (women) be bioengineered for parthenogenesis?) Actually, they were probably mainly agents, with some supervillains. That's why the serum that created Gremlin was so important to them. I would have to rummage about to find the original published writeup of Gremlin. (In an issue of Space Gamer in, umm, 1982 or so.) I think she had WITCH as a Hunted. It would be Watched, these days, naturally. Anyway, the point costing can tell us something about its composition. Their conflict with VIPER is important - one of the few canonical pieces of information we have about them. Possible ideology: "the patriarchy" has messed up the world. It's time for women to take over. Fair enough. They are (or started as) Well-Intentioned Extremists. An early activity of most second wave feminist groups - consciousness raising. In a supervillain world, that can be literal! Or they could use super-drugs as a tool to do that. What tools do they use? Any available. It wouldn't be fair for an organization named WITCH to not contain witches. But science should also be used - Gremlin's serum is an example. The comparison with pre-5e DEMON seems fair. --- Final note: don't use the term "woke". While it might still have some currency in radical African-American circles, outside that it is code for "the person that uses it is an idiot and can be ignored". It's mainly right wingers that use it, of course, but a few of the more vapid white liberals may also. They are the only ones who take themselves seriously.

I'm looking at character creation now. Since fantasy, aside from Urban Fantasy, involves a world other than our own, a data dump is necessary. It should, however, be as short as possible. You can't really expect people to read your book before they can start playing. You can, in fact, cheat, by incorporating their character decisions into your world building. That can get out of hand though. For example, if a character is Hunted by Orcs, Orcs exist, and are a significant factor in the setting. But what if you don't want Orcs in the setting? Of course you can ban such an option in your data dump, but the problem is: what is allowed? You can cut down some problems by using a familiar set of tropes - but that restricts you to settings your players are familiar with. Worse, you can't assume that your players have read the same stuff you have. So a mediaeval setting would end up being Hollywood mediaeval, without all the interesting options from the actual Middle Ages. Or worse, sub-Tolkien. Poor Tolkien. Anyway, Hero is relatively rare as RPGs go, by putting Complications/Disadvantages so up front. A character isn't complete without them. A game doesn't work unless both the GM and the players are happy with them. It might be best to have some serious guidelines about what is desirable. Of course that means that you are basically using stock characters. I don't really have a problem with that. They will be fleshed out through play. The other benefit of using stock characters is that they are quick to create, fixing one of Hero's major problems. So I have just talked myself into using stock characters. Has anyone else had experience with this? Or are there alternative solutions that reduce analysis paralysis to manageable levels?

It seems likely that the area along the river would be fairly heavily populated too. That's another reason for both being large and powerful.

That's the point: they are just labels. Except that's not how people in the setting see it. The other team. They are evil because we are good.

Their ruling classes should be heavily intermarried. That way, every war is a family feud.

Exactly.

I'd probably make them relatively evenly matched, so they can be each other's Big Bad. And major trading partner.