We’ve had an off-and-on Champions (Hero system 4th edtion) game running for years now, and it occurred to me to see if there were any fans on the board. It doesn’t get all the press of DnD, but there’s no better system for running high-powered games. It gets pretty awkward at a low level or play. It’s really boring unless you’re buying fancy powers, but there’s nothing more fun for
Did you abort your action defensively? 
Longtime fan. Played in 2 campaigns long ago, ran a campaign for 10 years when I couldn’t find anyone to GM for me. (I’ll never understand the assertion I see made from time to time that one should be willing to dump a game master at the first sign of trouble and go find a better one; where is this pool of people willing to do the work and not play?)
My one claim to fame Champions-wise is being mentioned in the credits for the 4th edition.
Interestingly, although I have been away from the game for a long time, I just last week bought one of the Sixth Edition books to see what’s changed…
I’ve been a fan of Champions since… jeez, I guess around 1987. I’ve played with Denis Loubet and Aaron Allston (although not necessarily Champions, especially in Denis’ case).
I’m not sure I’ve ever played any of the source material- every game I’ve been in has used whatever custom world the GM came up with. This was one of the complaints I had about Champions Online- the only thing that game has is the source material, which I always thought was the weakest part of Champions (PnP).
That said, I haven’t bought any books since the Big Blue Book. I didn’t even know there was a sixth edition- I’m really out of the loop. I wish I could find a group to play with 'round here.
Cool, didn’t know you were in the creds, Sailboat.
I think I did abort to dodge:
It’s really boring unless you’re buying fancy powers, but there’s nothing more fun for epic, flashy superheroic battles. You can do anything if you know how and have the points to spare. There are some unusual issues which you must carefully consider, because there’s really nothing which prevents your starting character from utterly pwning every villain on the planet (though the ways I’ve seen fo doing that result in you not doing much else, ever). All in all, it recalls a fun, friendly game style and a lot of
My current character is a poor FedEx employee who’s life has been utterly wrecked over the course of 3 days and 2 games. He’s now an immortal ultimate copycat shapeshifter (able to borrow and match other hero’s tricks) on the run from the evil magical organization known as Demon.
He has been…
*Given Dark Imbuement (duh duh duuuuuh!), so technically his superpowers are result of a curse. I’m prety sure that flunky of Demon who sent sloppily-labelled packages of evil magical nanites through the parcel service was flayed and sent to Hell. Also got a minor illusion device.
*His sandwich was stepped on by a ninja (a current PC) and they were attacked by a supervillain… in a Fedex building in Memphis.
*Dragged through three afterlives and Japan by a current PC.
*Turned into a were-jaguar by a former PC’s son by a nightmarishly awful pre-Mayan war god.
*Got werejaguarness removed by transfering it to his new adopted daughter, whom he immediately sent onto my old character’s X-Men style mansion/orhphange for young supers. In retrospect, he realizes this was a bad idea start to finish, but he was under a lot of stress, all the preceding having taken place in about 24 hours.
*Got sent off to New York when the other current PC hacked into FedEx and transferred him.
*Now the local FedEx office got attacked by more supervillains looking for him. Got pwned by supervillains.
Went to sleep bruised and battered - taking on a new guise as Red Scarf!
Woke up as a werecheetah this time (this is just not his week)…
*Got called off to stop even more supervillains attacking FedEx in Memphis (seriously… FedEx is having bad luck there, but none of the attacks were random).
Hehe, it’s all pretty fun. This is a game system you can simply go all-out on and throw in almost anything. Plus, there’s books and books filled with cool characters to use as opposition, and unlike most such books they’re pretty useful. Almost everyone takes the full point value for disadvantages - which actually exceeds the base amount you get! Pretty much everyone takes at least one ENemy, so there’s often a congo line of them on a bad day.
I played Champions in college in 1985-87 and had a blast. We had a very quirky, offbeat GM who always worked in lots of gags. I remember my character, Nightspeed, was very fast, kinda strong and could fly. He was a Brit who got his superpowers from being exposed to a nuclear experiment in his youth; he later became a minor diplomat in the U.S., his day job when he wasn’t fighting crime in the city of Megaopolis. I remember one of his buddies was Mucker, who was like the Hulk, but made of mud. His battle-cry: “Here’s mud in your eye!”
Good times.
I played in the early 80s.
Used to GM, too.
When I played RPGs I played the Heroes system almost exclusively. Who here remembers Pulp Hero, Danger Inc., Star Hero, and the rest?
Psychological Limitation: defines phenomena in terms of Hero game mechanics. Frequent, Mildly limiting: 10 points.
We played a couple of Justice, Inc. campaigns – Hero System for pulp heroes from the 1930s. Not sure if that’s the same thing as Pulp Hero.
Two incidents stand out in my memory.
Once, we went into the Savage Land. I brought a shotgun from the game’s list of four shotguns. When we were assaulted by the inevitable Tyrannosaurus Rex, the shotgun in question killed it in one shot because of a rules quirk (each shotgun had a certain range in which all its damage was added together to overcome resistance; after that range, it applied in separate packets that were much more easily resisted. This shotgun had the longest and hardest-hitting such cone). “You only brought that gun because you read that rule and knew it was the only one that could do that!” the game-master said to me, accusingly.
“Actually,” I said, indicating the shotgun’s manufacturer and model on the game’s weapon table, “I brought it to the Savage Land because it’s named the Savage Guard Gun.”
In the other funny incident, my character was walking along a balcony with a croquet mallet idly resting on one shoulder, when, in a surprise attack, a Nazi hurled a hand grenade up onto the balcony at my feet.
Naturally I swung the mallet, bunting the grenade back down off the balcony onto the Nazi in question.
“I say, does that award me a bonus stroke?”
Yep. I’ve been playing more or less continuously since 1986 or so.
Our current campaign is based on the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher. Superheros in pseudo- ancient Rome for the win. And it is really hard to imagine the campaign working this well in any other system.
That said, I really haven’t been a fan of Steve Long’s changes since he took over the company. And after an abortive campaign in 6th we have reverted to our modified version of 5th edition.
Ha! Good fun, all.
It seems like no game except Amber or maybe Torg produces more crazy-fun stories than Champions.
I think you’re right, the game was called Justice, Inc. We played a Cthulu campaign set in the 20s. I was a hard-boiled detective, my friend was a defrocked alcoholic priest who had come face to face with the devil one too many times. The system took the sting out of high school virginity.
There was also Fantasy Hero and one set in a martial arts universe. I bet I still have the manuals somewhere.
Jolly good show!
I love Champions - or rather, I love the flexibility of the system. I don’t love the Champions IP, since it feels both derivative and banal (Dr. Destroyer being the worst example of that).
I played a lot in high school (86-88) and some in college, then on and off for the next 10 years or so. My friends mostly switched to Fantasy Hero, and the Hero system doesn’t work well at low point levels, so I wandered away to other games.
I’ve run Champions games at conventions for years, although in the last few years I’ve switched to using a lightweight version of the rules system optimized for fast convention play. We started calling it Champs Light, but I renamed it to “Threat or Menace” a couple of years ago when I was thinking about releasing it online under Creative Commons - I don’t want to infringe the copyright of Hero Games.
I’m currently playing in a Champions campaign and having a blast. My PC is named Sentinel (technically Sentinel II, as he was trained by the original Sentinel who retired in the early 80’s), and he’s kind of like Captain America, with small amounts of the Tick and Spiderman added in (Spidey for the sense of humor, primarily).
He’s mostly a hand-to-hand combatant with combat levels and martial arts to go along with his 40 Strength. He also has recently discovered that he can teleport, due to a hereditary link to a race of dimensional travellers.
I like this company and try to support them by buying game books through their website, even though I haven’t played in years. It used to be that when you made a purchase, you could donate a sum (I think it was $15) to support the Comics Defense Legal Fund, which I did. The bonus was that if you made the donation, they would put you in a book.
A few months after I made the purchase and donation, someone I knew posted to a message board asking why my name appeared in the book he was perusing. They didn’t tell me which book I was going to get into, when it would happen, or how it would be done. But there it was, I had a supporting character named after me!
I’m a fan, having been introduced to 4th and 5th Editions around 2004, and having run a few campaigns in the system, but I do tend to gravitate more towards Mutants and Masterminds, these days. It just flows a lot better for me. I haven’t picked up the 6th Edition, but have an impressive collections of 5E.
When I played (about 1985), I wasn’t very good. Mostly I liked to create funny character names. I had a Wolverine knockoff, “The Otter”; an Iron Man analog called “Ferric Man”; and “The Potato” (his first name was Russ - for Russet), “El Autobus”, and a power draining master called, of course, “Drano”.
Played when I was in high school, in marathon-length weekend sessions (breaks only taken to walk to 7-11 for more soda and snacks). We had two campaigns going: one at 350+ disads, and the other at a whopping 650+disads (our top man weighed in at 1007 at the end of the game). Lots of crazy stories.
Also played on a Champions MUSH that was completely awesome, with an ‘alpha’ test for the mush being 1943, the ‘beta’ being 1965-1989, and the open play going on after that.
My only strike against the game is the level of math. I enjoy Mutants and Masterminds due to it’s simplicity in that regard. Unfortunately, the first game of it I ran, I was ready for six-hour-long, champions-style combats, and the PC’s took out the bad guy in 10 minutes. I was at a loss for the rest of the evening.