wcw43921 Posted November 22, 2014 Report Share Posted November 22, 2014 According to Topless Robot Champions is listed at #2, after Mayfair's DC Heroes game. This is part of what the author had to say-- "After two decades of playing Champions, I've found that the game is a perfect tactical simulation of comic book action. It's a kind of Star Fleet Battles with superheroes. But I've also found that the heavily mechanical character creation rules have two flaws. First, as inspired as effects-based powers are, the super math geek can manipulate the balance of the game to get extra-competent who push the boundaries of balance. As a small - and not particularly advanced example - players often buy 1 extra inch of movement so that their "half move" is one inch more than normal. Character creation can be heavily mechanical-exploit oriented, which I believe affects the feel of play. Second, it can be intimidating to new players. There are few games that take as long to create a character in as Champions. Only GURPS is more challenging since GURPS requires the same amount of time Champions would take to create Batman to create your average Little League ball player." Like many here, I don't really see his first point as a flaw. In fact, it was recommended for players in the supplement Champions II to buy an extra inch of ground movement for their characters. I think of it as part of the rules, like the way in chess that each distinct piece moves differently. The player works within the rules to to attain the best advantage, and the other players and the gamemaster are doing the same. As for his second point--like most RPGs, Champions is not as difficult as it first appears--once a potential player takes a closer look at the game to study the rules, the complexity falls away. Of course, having experienced players around to answer questions and check the math helps a great deal, too. Anyway, the article is a great read. There it is for anyone who's interested. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hyper-Man Posted November 22, 2014 Report Share Posted November 22, 2014 I don't see being called the Starfleet Battles of RPG's as necessarily a bad thing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zslane Posted November 23, 2014 Report Share Posted November 23, 2014 I think it is a little silly for that reviewer to call out a game for being, well, a game. Sure, the Hero System is a fine-grained combat simulation, but there is still a lot of simplifying abstraction underneath all its apparent complexity. Movement is quantized into 1 or 2 meter chunks, and the standard quantum of activity time, a Phase, is allowed to be split in half. That leads to issues of rounding, naturally. That is all part of it simply being a tabletop game rather than a computer-driven RTS (which can divide all player activity into much finer quanta, to the extent that it actually appears to the players as continuous, "real-time" action). Champions and SFB are/were fairly revolutionary in using a Speed Chart to evenly distribute character activity according to a speed stat; other games with far less granularity are even worse in the number of ways in which movement and attacks can be gamed by players for maximum advantage. But more importantly, not all players min-max the system. It is probably true that the ones who love the system because they can easily discern all its moving parts probably will be min-maxers. They are engineers of a sort, and part of the fun is seeing how to make the game engine really perform (for them). But there are also a lot of roleplayers out there who build for concept, not point optimization, and the Hero System is just as good a game for them as for the min-maxers. The fact that min-maxers and powergamers don't always mesh well with roleplayers is a social problem, not a system problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balabanto Posted November 23, 2014 Report Share Posted November 23, 2014 How can DC Heroes beat us? What CAN you say about a system where a bad miss can blow up the moon by accident? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted November 23, 2014 Report Share Posted November 23, 2014 ... The DC Universe has a very fragile Moon? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greywind Posted November 23, 2014 Report Share Posted November 23, 2014 No. The DC Heroes/Blood of Heroes system was inherently broken in the dice-rolling department. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wcw43921 Posted November 23, 2014 Author Report Share Posted November 23, 2014 Insofar as I remember, the Mayfair Expoential Game System (MEGS) for unintentional targets. The closest thing to the "bad miss" you describe is rolling double ones, which according to the rules is a complete failure, which I always took to mean that nothing happened. Besides, the only way you could get the column shifts necessary to inflict enough damage to destroy the moon would be to roll doubles several times over--and if you roll doubles that many times, you're going to hit your target, no matter how hard he dodges. Did this happen in a game, that soemone missed and destroyed the moon? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greywind Posted November 23, 2014 Report Share Posted November 23, 2014 Little Jason Todd/Robin punted Superman's genitalia out of the solar system once. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
drunkonduty Posted November 23, 2014 Report Share Posted November 23, 2014 I'll just say that I do not agree with the list. Clearly, I like Champions best. Marvel FASERIP totally deserves to be up there at about #2 on the list. If you want simple, fast paced and fun, it's awesome. TMNT is NOT a good system. And I never thought of TMNT as the super heroes' genre book for Palladium. Technically that would be,um, what's it called? Golden Heroes?? Anyway, an actual superhero genre book. The d20 supers system is too... I dunno, simple? Lacking in granularity? Not sure, but I don't like it. For the rest of the listed games I've never played them so I can't really say. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Burrito Boy Posted November 23, 2014 Report Share Posted November 23, 2014 The Palladium supers game was Heroes Unlimited. I understand the system isn't great but nostalgia compels me to love it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bubba smith Posted November 23, 2014 Report Share Posted November 23, 2014 burrito boy is correct Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
drunkonduty Posted November 24, 2014 Report Share Posted November 24, 2014 Heroes Unlimited! That's it. I actually quite like the Palladium system for fantasy. But I prefer Hero for fantasy as well as supers. Of course. :-P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Echo3Niner Posted November 24, 2014 Report Share Posted November 24, 2014 So, one of the items I hear often quoted as a limitation of Champions is the 3d6/low number system. I have seen it mentioned that some "house rule" a reverse, where high numbers matter instead, is there a good thread on how to do that here somewhere? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hyper-Man Posted November 24, 2014 Report Share Posted November 24, 2014 from a thread on rpg.net http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?639534-Hero-Traditional-roll-under-or-switch-to-roll-high&p=15730513#post15730513 One trick I've had success with for new HERO System players is writing their Attack Rolls as if they were Skill Rolls. In other words, instead of the 11+OCV-DCV thing, just write down their common attacks on their character sheet, with the 11 already added in. For example, say we've got a character with STR 20, OCV 7, DCV 6, a 1d6 HKA Sword (2d6 w/STR), and +1 Combat Skill Level with Blades:[table=width: 500][tr] [td]Attack[/td] [td]Roll[/td] [td]DCV[/td] [td]Skill[/td] [td]Effect[/td][/tr][tr] [td]Punch[/td] [td]18-[/td] [td]6[/td] [td]---[/td] [td]4d6N[/td][/tr][tr] [td]Haymaker[/td] [td]18-[/td] [td]1[/td] [td]---[/td] [td]8d6N[/td][/tr][tr] [td]Sword Strike[/td] [td]18-[/td] [td]6[/td] [td]+1[/td] [td]2d6K[/td][/tr][tr] [td]Dodge[/td] [td]---[/td] [td]9[/td] [td]---[/td] [td]vs. all attacks; Abort[/td][/tr][/table]So when he attacks with, say, his sword, he knows his "attack roll" starts at 18- and his DCV at 6, add he's got a +1 skill bonus he can add to either. When he rolls the dice, however much he makes his attack roll by is the DCV he hits. (Frex, if he rolls a 13, he can easily see that he makes his roll by 5, so he hits a DCV of 5.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher R Taylor Posted November 24, 2014 Report Share Posted November 24, 2014 I kinda liked Heroes Unlimited as source material and ideas. The Palladium system wasn't really all that great even when it first came out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
drunkonduty Posted November 24, 2014 Report Share Posted November 24, 2014 Oh I think palladium had it's pluses. It had a skill system at least. Some interesting character classes and an interesting setting. But I wouldn't play it nowadays. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zslane Posted November 25, 2014 Report Share Posted November 25, 2014 I have virtually every commercially sold superhero RPG there is or was, and even the best of them had/have their faults. Of them all, I feel Champions offers the most bang for the buck, hands down. The more interesting question, to my mind, is which game deserves to be called second best (and morbid curiosity makes me wonder which one is the absolute worst). I think once you get past the top three, you are talking about systems burdened with too many compromises to really compete, except perhaps in terms of fostering nostalgia. The top candidates for second best, I think, would be: Marvel (FASERIP), DC Heroes (MEGS), and M&M (3rd). Few other systems enjoyed the level of publisher support those games did/do. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
drunkonduty Posted November 25, 2014 Report Share Posted November 25, 2014 So I've gotta ask. Which is the worst supers game then? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Enforcer84 Posted November 25, 2014 Report Share Posted November 25, 2014 My Top 5 in Descending Order: 1. Champions 2. Villains & Vigilantes 3. DC Heroes 4. Mutants and Masterminds 5. Marvel Superheroes (FASERIP) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zslane Posted November 26, 2014 Report Share Posted November 26, 2014 So I've gotta ask. Which is the worst supers game then? I've read reviews online that make Avengers of Justice sound like the worst superhero RPG ever committed to paper. I've never seen a copy so I can't confirm or deny. But my candidate for worst ever would probably be GURPS Supers 1st ed. While Superhero 2044 may be objectively worse, GURPS Supers 1st ed. still gives me apoplectic fits, so it goes straight to the bottom of my list. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher R Taylor Posted November 26, 2014 Report Share Posted November 26, 2014 I have a Superhero 2044 adventure (Hazard) I got from somewhere. Its not real high quality printing but the adventure seems decent. Never played the actual system. People seem to like Marvel Superheroes but it looked like kindergarden RPG to me, so I never touched it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zslane Posted November 26, 2014 Report Share Posted November 26, 2014 You might be thinking of the Marvel Super Heroes Basic Set. Judging from the writing and presentation style, it was definitely aimed at a younger audience. However, the Advanced Set was pretty much a straight up RPG with all the usual bells and whistles. Now, the use of descriptive terms to indicate power levels was unique to the FASERIP system, and some people liked it and others didn't. I guess having your character's Strength rated as "Monstrous" made the game feel cartoonish to some. Never really bothered me, to be honest. What probably bothered me more was being impressed that the Hulk could adrenaline surge in MSH up to Shift-Z Strength, which is listed as "up to 1000 tons" (a kiloton), and still find himself being almost three orders of magnitude weaker than pre-crisis Superman (his MEGS Strength of 25 lets him lift on the order of 800,000 tons, nearly a megaton). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
drunkonduty Posted November 26, 2014 Report Share Posted November 26, 2014 GURPS supers! I have played that. I'd forgotten. I'm not sure if the version I played was 1st ed. I think it was. I didn't like it either. It did not work as a supers game and the mechanics for putting limitations on powers was... bad. It was just a straight percentage. Easier for the maths I suppose but made building characters weird. Can't remember enough details to say any more but I didn't like it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher R Taylor Posted November 26, 2014 Report Share Posted November 26, 2014 Yeah the color bar and the name system for powers and stats was just childish to me, offputting. I never played the system to see how it played out so maybe it was better than it looks. Savage Worlds isn't as simplistic and poor as it appears at first blush. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
assault Posted November 26, 2014 Report Share Posted November 26, 2014 Superhero 2044 was unplayable as published, but had a cool setting, and inspired the games that followed, including Champions. It certainly wasn't the worst one published. Incidentally, it's author has put some additional material online that brings it closer to being playable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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