[OT] Champions

> --- Brian Bilderback <bbilderback@hotmail.com> wrote:

All superhero RPGs are inherently sucky. I played one
once--built a character that could basically shoot
anything dead that truly annoyed me. Drove the GM nuts. Got bored inside a
week. It made such an impression that I don't even remember which one it was.

> All superhero RPGs are inherently sucky.

That turns out not to be the case (ie, you're wrong).

> I played one once <snip>. Got bored inside a week.

And on the basis of this week's experience you presume to judge all of them?

As it happens, I played Champions 2-3 times a week for four years with
2 GMs (one of whom was Rob Bell, who edited one edition) and would still be
playing if I had players around. In our case, we had good players and good
GMs. I leave it to you to judge whether you lacked a good GM, a good player,
or both.

> At 10:27 PM 1/22/02 -0500, you wrote:

Mr.Atkinson's good at judging, it seems. I'm just glad to see that he's got a
hobby.

> As it happens, I played Champions 2-3 times a week for four years with

Actually, it's worth nothing that "Godlike", a supers game set during WWII, is
due out in a few weeks. Written by some of the folks who gave us Delta
Green, it appears to be a very well-thought out and designed game.  It's
going to be a huge book, and I've been looking forward to it for months now.

http://www.hobgoblynn.com/GODLIKE.html is the home page, although it's
not responding right now. Probably being worked on; they update it almost
daily.

> On 22-Jan-02 at 21:18, John Atkinson (johnmatkinson@yahoo.com) wrote:

Champions requires a bit of input on character design by the GM. Most of the
problems can be caught by:

1. Disallowing 1 dimensional characters 2. Requiring a character still be
conscious after taking his own best punch. 3. Requiring a character to take
damage from his own best punch. 4. For new players I allow no killing attacks.
You are "dropping genre".

The game system allows such a range of powers that munchkinism can run rampant
unless you have a GM that puts his own stamp on the game. The usual problem is
combat people need to drop
back and think of roleplaying instead of min-maxxing.

FWIW I did the same thing the f irst time I played, the GM slapped me down
hard.

> From: John Atkinson Wrote:

> All superhero RPGs are inherently sucky.

All RPG's are inherently POTENTIALLY sucky. I've played champions for years,
the secret is we had a good group of guys who were all decent players AND
GM's. The trick was that we had to run our characters by the GM before
we could play them.  Most anti-cheese group I've ever been part of.