From: thornley@mega.cs.umn.edu (David H. Thornley)
Subject: Champions (was Re: RPG's That Belong on Every Gamer's Shelf)
Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, CSci dept.
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 18:50:36 GMT

In article <1992Nov22.191858.27144@news.unomaha.edu> dburgdor@cwis.unomaha.edu (Darryl Burgdorf) writes:
[Comments about Champions]
This is .advocacy, after all, so let's continue with the Hero flame war.	
>
>[In several cases, a small battle took most of an evening, and one large
> fight took three gaming sessions.   I didn't like the GM; it may be that
> he didn't know how to run a fight effectively.]

Apparently not.  Champions fights aren't *that* time-consuming.  Personally,
I think that they're fine if you like fighting (which many people do) and`
fine if you generally avoid it, and not so good if you spend a lot of time
fighting and don't like it, which seems odd.  The combat system need a little
experience to run, but small battles in our group (including one person who
always asks what he or she needs to roll) go by fairly quickly.

>As to the complexity of the character creation, it has nothing to do with not
>liking the math.  (And for the record, I'm a liberal arts person.)  The problem
>comes not from any difficulty with the numbers, but from the fact that there
>are, in most cases, upwards of half a dozen different ways in which one can
>buy virtually the same set of powers.  You end up having to spend hours trying
>out different options and "tweaking" the numbers to come up with the best
>method to use for any given character.  (Either that, or you find out later
>that you wasted x number of points by buying something the "wrong" way.)  

"in most cases, upwards of half a dozen different ways..."?  Can you be
more specific?  Usually I want to fly or jump or hit hard or fire energy
blasts or something, and there are strictly limited ways to do this.
There are some significant tradeoffs that have to be considered if you
wish to optimize a character, but any reasonable approach will usually
produce a reasonable character.  (Nor do I fret about wasting points through
inefficiency.)

>I
>also dislike the extent to which the rules and powers are subject to differing
>interpretations.  The game tends to be far too subjective for my taste; more
>than once, I spent several hours putting together what I thought was a good
>character only to be told that even though certain rules MIGHT mean what I
>had thought they meant, what they ACTUALLY meant was something else.  (OK, to
>an extent, that was also a flaw in the GM .... but it only became an issue
>because the game system is ambiguous enough to allow it.)
>
I fail to see the problems with the game system.  The rules are fairly
clear as they are written.  If the GM wishes to change the system, that
is the prerogative of the GM.  If the GM changes the system without telling
anybody, that is a mark of a bad GM.  The system is not more ambiguous than
the average RPG, and certainly a bad GM can modify any system (probably for
the worse) without telling anybody beforehand.

>With a good GM, I'm sure Champions can be quite fun.  But then, with a good
>enough GM, ANY game system can work. 
>
With an adequate GM, the Hero system works well.  You had a bad GM, and no
system will survive that.  If you get a chance to play Hero with a decent
GM, take it.

DHT


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