Super-Hero RPG Reviews: Champions

Based on the popularity of the previous post, I figure I'll start a series here on the Howling Curmudgeons featuring a specific super-hero or comic-book themed RPG line or product. I'm calling it a review, but it's not, exactly: my purpose here isn't to promote or critique so much as merely to discuss these games and how they draw inspiration from the comics. I have no idea how often I'll get around to doing this: I own a lot of these, as I pointed out in my previous post, but I tend to be somewhat of an uncritical consumer (although I didn't buy The Foundation when it came out... sorry, Dave, but it looked like crap from the beginning, sorry you got hosed) and so changing my tactic is going to take a bit of work.

First, the good word: Champions is unabashedly and deliberately trying to bring in as much of the comics as possible. Between creating a setting which goes back to the dim mists of prehistory ala Marvel Comics' Chthon and Gaea with a sword and sorcery flavor anyone whose read Chris Claremont's Kulan Gath storyline in X-Men or its predecessor in Marvel Team-Up, where Spider-Man and Mary Jane (acting as host for the spirit of Red Sonja, no less) fought KG would recognize and their focusing on select periods from the Revolutionary War and Victorian era to today, the guys at Hero Games are taking an everything and the kitchen sink approach. Since Champions is one of the oldest continuous superhero RPG's in existence (although by now the Hero System itself has done its level best to become a universal system ala GURPS) this isn't surprising: what is surprising is how cohesive the modern Champions universe has become. I'm telling you, you could easily imagine there being a whole line of Champions comic books, and not just because there already were. (Those older comics were, as you might expect, set in a different world than the current Champions setting.)

I often wonder what would have happened had the old Champions comics taken off. Considering it was around the same time that DC and Marvel were invading the RPG market with their licensed games, a push from RPG's into successful comics might have been interesting, indeed. Certainly the comics themselves were no worse than what was being put out by First or Comico at the time, which may sound like faint praise until you realize I'm a huge Grimjack, Nexus and Badger fan. Still, while an interesting notion, ultimately Champions comic books were not as successful as the RPG was.

One of the reasons for the game's success, especially during the Iron Crown years, were a series of extraordinary supplements put out by some of the leading lights in game development at the time (can you say Monte Cook? I know I can - also shouldn't forget Aaron Allston or Allen Varney) as well as art by guys like Patrick Zircher (who also did V&V art, I believe). More importantly, the game took a catholic approach to the comics: not being hamstrung by a license, they were free to model their rules and setting on whatever they wanted: this often resulted in supplements that allowed you to play whatever flavor of comic books you wanted. Were you into the DC silver age? Not a problem. Maybe you wanted to do a Dr. Strange-style magical campaign? Thanks to Allen Varney's Mystic Masters that was easy. A fan of Richard Dragon and the Bronze Tiger vs. the League of Assassins? Welcome to Ninja Hero. While the Champions rules had their down side (I'll discuss it more later) they did allow for a great deal of flexibility... the innovation of buying generic powers like 'energy blast' or 'transform' and then customizing them with whatever special effects you desired went a long way towards making the game so eminently suitable for a wide base of potential players - it's probably the single most copied aspect of the system.

By not being forced to emulate a specific comic book company, Champions reached out to anyone who wanted to play in a super-hero game. (It also indirectly led to a million websites with Champions stats for Spider-Man, Superman, and Spawn, but that's not the game's fault.) It achieved its greatest accomplishment with the publication of Champions 4th Edition, also known as the Big Blue Book, and followed by more than a score of those aforementioned excellent supplements from Iron Crown. I'm fond of the BBB for many reasons... hell, the cover art alone is a good reason to be fond of it. George would come back to do four other covers for Champions, including the cover for their 'Olympians' supplement, which was a pretty good comic book in-joke if you think about it. In fact, I'd have to say that spirit of awareness of what was going on in comics without being slaves to any specifc comic book or book line is what gave the game the longevity that the licensed lines couldn't match, while at the same time making it the juggernaut that endured when games like V&V and Superworld were falling by the wayside.

So, you may ask, what were the downsides? It can't all be good, right? This is true... all games have their achilles' heels, and Champions/Hero System is no different. First off, the basic mechanic can be a touch obscure to learn, although it's not all that difficult. It's ultimately based on rolling under a certain number on 3d6 based on your offense vs. their defense... the higher your OCV (Offensive Combat Value) is, the better your chances of hitting, while the better their DCV (Defensive Combat Value) is, the worse your chances of hitting are. It's not inherently difficult in of itself, although it does get kind of hairy at higher levels. Still, every Champions player gets used to the sight of a lot of d6's flinging around a table to determine damage (powers can easily be in the 12 to 16 dice range), and decrying it is sort of pointless: it's an ingrained element of the system. The real flaw of the game is in extreme rules lawyering, especially during character creation. There's always that one guy who can somehow squeeze maximum value out of a series of ridiculous disadvantages and who jobs out his powers with an excrutiating array of limitations and advantages that make him insanely powerful, if he can make the activation roll on his magical doo-dad or power armor suit or whatever. I've seen more sessions of Champions go downhill because someone's limitations require a ten minute slowdown in play to work them all out. Finally, the game is based around a SPD statistic and a series of phases that determines how often in a round you get to take an action... there are twelve segments in a turn, and the higher your SPD score, the more often you can act in a turn, up to twelve times. In my experience, and I freely admit this may just be a fifteen year run of bad luck, having characters with more than a 2 point difference in SPD scores leads to a lot of people sitting around a table waiting to go.

Also, The Hero System Rulebook is 360 pages long as of this writing, and it's printed on fairly thick stock, making it look even bigger than it is. As a contrast, the d20 Modern rules were released in a book which is around 350 pages long, and it's half the size of the Hero System. This is a quibble... I know Hero Games doesn't have the money that Wizards of the Coast does... but it can be daunting to try and get new players into the system when the book it is contained in looks to be as big as a family Bible. To their credit, Hero Games has released a Sidekick product to answer this issue.

In general, the modern Hero System and its Champions line is a worthy successor to the game. The setting is broad and has room for just about any style of comic book you'd care to emulate, from 'widescreen' world-girding superheroics ala The Authority or Morrison's JLA to street level heroics ala Miller's Daredevil, and anything in-between. The new supplements aren't quite as interestingly named or provocatively set-up as the Iron Crown era, but the system's changes are small: you could use any of the stuff from 4th Edition with minimal changes (let's see you say that about AD&D vs D&D 3e) and the new supplements are informative and broad as well. Champions, in my experience, is worth buying just to read it... the villains all cohere together and give you a real sense of a world that could actually be appearing in comic books, if you wanted to use them, and even if you don't the examples of how to create various powers out of the comic books are interesting. (The game really shines as an 'all-in-one' kit for modeling any effect you want, really.) And I'll always have a soft spot for Doctor Destroyer, the most unabashed Dr. Doom rip-off you're ever going to see, except he's even better because he's too big for any one super-hero group to be his foils... when Destroyer gets rolling, it takes a whole army of super-heroes to balk him. (Imagine if the Anti-Monitor had style.)

So, to sum up; Champions is the big dog of superhero RPG's, and it deserves to be. It's the one most open to any style of comic books you'd ever want to run, the one most obviously and openly willing to bring in anything, the one with the best pedigree and history (including, and it must be said again, Perez on art) and the one with the best backlog of supplements for previous editions, all of which can be used with the most recent revision of the game fairly easily. Finally, almost any Champions supplement could be used with one of the newer superhero RPG's, because the system uses benchmarks for its statistics and is fairly detailed... you can convert this stuff once you know the system, it's not hard. Also, it's fun to make characters with it. It's not my absolute favorite system on the market, but I come back to it often.

And they had their own comics line in the 80's. Then again, so did ROM, Spaceknight.

Posted by Matt Rossi at October 29, 2004 8:02 PM | TrackBack