From: thornley@nano.cs.umn.edu (David H. Thornley)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.advocacy
Subject: Re: marvel
Date: 28 Aug 92 21:43:55 GMT
Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, CSci dept.

In article <5212@blue.cis.pitt.edu.UUCP> seawasp@vm2.cis.pitt.edu (Sea Wasp) writes:
>In article <oeb2ml_00VogM3419A@andrew.cmu.edu> af2e+@andrew.cmu.edu (Alex Feely) writes:
>>      Look, it's obvious i touched a _champions_ nerve.  To tell the
>>truth I had never heard of champions in any great deatail before. Does
>>someone want to tell me the gist of it?
>
>[Sea Wasp generally doesn't like Champions.]

Champions is the superhero game from Hero Games, and was the original game
that evolved into the Hero system.  It has point-based character creation
and a fairly detailed skill system instead of classes.

Characters are created with points.  Characters get a certain number of points,
and can take disadvantages worth a certain number of points.  With this, the
characters can raise their characteristics, buy skills, and buy powers.
The powers are handled differently than most games, in that the character
buys the result of the power.  In the other games I'm familiar with, a
character will receive something like Wind powers, which list a certain number
of things the character can do with them, whereas, in Champions, a character
would write down the things he can do with wind (blow things around, hit
people with damage-causing windblasts, fly, deflect missiles) and buy those
things.  This leads to a certain amount of confusion between what most people
call powers and effects and what Champions calls special effects and powers,
respectively.  In Marvel, a character might take wind powers, and could do
certain things with them; in Champions, a character would take Energy Blast
and Flying and Missile Deflection (with appropriate modifications) and declare
that his special effect is wind.  The advantage is that this is a very flexible
system and can handle almost any powers.  The disadvantages:  Different sorts
of powers don't have different flavors, in general, so that magic works much
the same as mutant powers; it can get difficult to describe some powers that
don't work quite like the given effects; bad role-players may describe their
power by the Champs designation rather than the appropriate one (Boreas had
a "wind blast", which I never referred to as an "energy blast" in game time);
it tends to attract munchkins, who look for the ways inherent in any point-
based system to crock it.

The game uses only six-sided dice.  Three dice are rolled for each skill use,
trying to roll the skill number or lower.  In combat, each turn is divided
into twelve segments, and a characteristic determines how many segments a
character can act in, and in which ones.  If a character wants to strike,
he/she rolls three dice, trying to roll at or below the attacker's Offensive
Combat Value minus the defender's Defensive Combat Value plus 11 plus or
minus modifiers.  This isn't difficult, but is slightly intrusive.  There
are two kinds of damage, body and stun, and combats are usually decided by
stun damage.  There are two kinds of weapon damage, normal (fairly predictable
results, body and stun damage stopped by all defenses) and killing (much more
variable results, damage not stopped by some defenses).  Combat can become
a small-scale wargame, and can take time, so the Hero system is best suited
to games where combat is either important or rare.  This suits superhero
games very well, in general.

The game as a whole is well-done and very flexible.  One disadvantage of this
is that players and GMs seem very reluctant to leave the published rules
or change the published point totals, whereas in games less well-done or
more rigid the need to change is more obvious.

DHT





>	Don't let the Champions junkies get to you, man. Champions is
>no better than most of the games out there, and in my completely arrogant
>opinion is much WORSE than a lot. I've played Chumpions quite a few times,
>and not once have I gotten the feeling that it had a SINGLE advantage over
>the other games in the world, except one: compared to games like Marvel or
>V&V, it has a better system for DESIGNING a character. In both Marvel and
>V&V, you have to just create the concept without a system, which for those
>worried about the eternal bugaboo of Game Balance is very upsetting.
>
>	Champions is a point-based system. It has the nominal advantages of,
>at least theoretically, allowing you to construct a large number of very
>widely varying characters who are actually exactly comparable to each other
>in power if the points are the same.
>
>	In practice, IF you have a GM who has a brain, this works pretty 
>well. The characters tend to be balanced as are the points. The problem
>is that Champions tends to attract pointmongers who are VERY upset over
>a slight variation in points. 
>
>	Its combat system annoys me, but that's just the way it goes; all
>combat systems please someone and annoy someone else. I don't like the 
>way it describes powers in a rather mechanical, no-life way. I prefer
>a more visceral, less mathematical description of my powers.
>
>	My own preference for systems is Marvel (for simplicity) and
>V&V for more detailed approaches.
>
>
>                                 Sea Wasp
>                                   /^\
>                                   ;;;