Grendel_Khan
Hero
I realized early on that Champions wasn’t simulating most cape comics in a direct way. That few supers in comics have any sort of defenses, and that the fights in comics were mostly just neat but had no internal consistency. Champions doesn’t do that. You don’t have to be a brick, but you gotta have something that prevents you from getting floored right away. And that changes character concepts and power sets and so on, and suddenly it’s less about a soap opera with powers and more about big balanced showdowns.At least for my part, I want a supers RPG to emulate the comics I love.
But that also made me fully come to grips with RPGs just being their own odd subgenre. Most stories have a protagonist, not an ensemble with no clear lead. Most team-based comics have tons of solo stories and betrayals and so on. RPGs are just weird, and can take on the trappings of different genres, but they can’t really capture them directly, IMO. At least not in extended campaigns.
Absolutely not saying you or anyone else should avoid trying to do a supers game that leans all the way into the action-as-melodrama nature of stuff like X-Men, just that, to me, that was a lost cause, and maybe a bit too meta for my tastes. The fact that both Cyclops and Storm are gonna get knocked the hell out the instant anyone looks at them in Champions wasn’t ideal, but that system made for some great fights and action scenes that never felt arbitrary or, dare I say, Chris Claremont-y.