Champions RPG

[BkMamba]

You forgot half dice, which makes that range either 10 or 14 steps. If you use the Increased Damage Differentation rule (I believe it was in the Ultimate Brick), you can also use d6+1 steps, which increases the range to 15 or 21 steps (an energy blast could be 8d6, 8d6+1, or 8 1/2d6, among other things). I see a lot of martial artists that end up with attacks like a 9 1/2d6 punch.

Half dice are meaningless to the discussion because it does not increase or decrease the Damage Range - the Range still stays between 7 and 14. There is no functional 4d6 Combat Damage level in Champions; you could not even knock open a front door with 4d6 in Champions.

Combat maneuvers also make a huge difference. Even a 5d6 attack can be haymakered to 9d6 (at a cost of being easier to hit), and a martial artist that can't do any real damage to a brick can still drop him with a legsweep.

Maneuvers are pointless to the discussion because both games have them. You can "Haymaker" and "Legsweep" in M&M just as easily as you can in Champions. I am trying to express that which is different rather then that which is the same between the two games.

This, of course, is excluding advantages - yes, M&M has the equivalent, but HERO does have more than M&M does. Which is both a boon and a curse - it's a more complex system. You have Armor Piercing, Attack versus Limited Defense, No Normal Defense, Penetrating, Area of Effect, Explosion...the list goes on and on, and you're not limited to one of them (as long as you stay within active point limits).

As with the Maneuvers section above, M&M has Extras - and I am not sure that Champions has more which are only associated with Attack Powers. M&M has Alternate Save, several different Areas - including Explosion, Aura, Autofire, Contagious, Disease, Penetrating, Poison, Sleep, Vampiric, No Saving Throw and Secondary Effect; and you are not limited to one of them either.

No matter how much you might want to muddy up the discussion with things which are irrelevent the simple fact is there are no combat-functional superheroes in a standard Champions game only doing 4-5d6 Damage. That does not mean that Champions is broken. It only means that most characters end up having a Damage sameness about them - as in the Champions team example. To some extent M&M 1E had the same sameness problem. Fortunately 2E does not.

As I stated in my first post, I played Champions for two decades but I prefer the flexibility, simplicity, and character differentiation offered by M&M. In M&M I do not need my Nighthawk punching for the same Damage as my Ironclad to make him combat-functional. I can play Bowman with arrows doing +5 Damage and not feel like I only need to fight the Mooks while Captain Thunder fights the "tough" guys. It is a good feeling.

 

[Fedifensor]

Half dice are meaningless to the discussion because it does not increase or decrease the Damage Range - the Range still stays between 7 and 14.

You said that there were only 7 distinct steps (5 if you considered the maximum 12d6 instead of 14d6. I corrected that statement, pointing out the additional points in the range that you missed. Also keep in mind that even a 10 Str Martial Artist with no added MA damage classes can still have a 6d6 attack. And if you have someone with higher than average Strength (15+), you'll have access to 7d6 or better. You seem to be hung up on the amount of the dice, rather than looking at how easy it is to get access to that amount of dice.

Maneuvers are pointless to the discussion because both games have them. You can "Haymaker" and "Legsweep" in M&M just as easily as you can in Champions.

Again, your argument wasn't based on that. It was based on the fact that a character with a 5d6 attack could "never" damage someone with the average defenses of a superhero (20). I pointed out the error in that statement by showing that anyone can push up their damage by +4d6 with a Haymaker, bringing their damage to a range where it has an effect.

 

[buzz]

I pointed out the error in that statement by showing that anyone can push up their damage by +4d6 with a Haymaker, bringing their damage to a range where it has an effect.

I think that only reiterates his point about needing to get into a certain range to be effective. Haymaker-ing isn't as good a tactic as simply having a more effective attack Power.

But, hey, supers are tough customers. Now that I get Bk's point, I don't see this as a real biggie.

 

[Karl Green]

2. Hero is more work when designing characters, but a breeze when running the game. An energy blast is an energy blast is an energy blast. No special rules because one is called "magic missile", another "color spray", another "fireball", and another "prismatic spray". Once the characters are built, gameplay is much smoother, IMO, than many other RPG's.

I am going to disagree a tiny bit, as many players get REALLY slowed down with the whole counting STUN and counting BODY damage, especially with 10+ dice. I can do it really fast but I have been playing a long time. The last time I ran a game, two of the players would just roll the dice and one of the other players or myself counted the results for them. Also the SPD chart get a few people turned around as do a lot of the combat maneuvers. Not that you can't get around it, but I feel there are FAR more options then say M&M that can slow down game play a lot. Just my experiences though

4. I think I still like 4E best. It wasn't as balanced as 5E, but it was simpler and (IMO) just had better flavor. If I could still print out my characters in the old Heromaker software, I'd probably still be playing it (darn software won't print right on anything but a 10-year old printer...)

100% agree with you... plus the cover by Preze was cool (poor little Seeker was going to DIE!)

 

[Karl Green]

The #1 mistake you can make when introducing someone to HERO is starting with character generation. Hand them a pregenerated sheet with the combat maneuvers already listed on it. I know a local HERO GM that runs at all the cons, and he's mastered the art of making the characters easy and intuitive to use in his games.

And I am afraid I see this as a WEAKNESS. If I am going to play in a game, and I can't make up my own character in the system in a resonable amount of time that it is not a good system IMO. I am talking about players who have lots of experience in lots of different systems...

I handle it with a combination of the Power skill and withholding 1 XP per game session. If the character wants to do something different with their powers, they can make a Power skill roll. If they start doing it a lot, I would have them use the withheld XP to buy the power.

Hmm interesting idea...

 

[buzz]

(Deleted. I'm not helping. )

 

[Sketchpad]

100% agree with you... plus the cover by Preze was cool (poor little Seeker was going to DIE!)

Perez .. and yeah, it was awesome There's part of me that would love to see M&M and Hero fuse together. I'd love to see a bit more crunch with my supers game, but have the love of superheroes as well

 

[Felon]

I will "no" you, because you were wrong about a revised edition of 5th Edition being put out months after the 5th Edition debut. Read my post to see what context it's I'm talking about. Thanks.

The amount of time between between the releases is actually trivial in regards to the point I was making, so I'm not sure why you fixated on that to the extent of taking a contrary stance to my entire post and paste in sections from Wikipedia.

Months, years, whatever, there are two different 5th ed books out there with the same cover and that's why they seem to sell for cheap on eBay. Usually, folks are just buying the older book.

 

[Karl Green]

Perez .. and yeah, it was awesome There's part of me that would love to see M&M and Hero fuse together. I'd love to see a bit more crunch with my supers game, but have the love of superheroes as well

Yea that would be kind of cool... and I know I would get burned over on the HERO board but I did not hate Champions: the New Millennium. I thought the FUZION was an interesting idea on how to remove a lot of the weird math etc in character creation and how damage was worked out. It was wacky in a lot of regards and I was not happy with everything BUT the beginnings of something cool were there...

 

[Lord Liaden]

I just want to offer a little input regarding balancing disparate power levels in Champions or other point-buy supers games: Hero Games's electronic magazine, Digital Hero, provided an in-depth article in issue #3 by veteran HERO player Theron Bretz with some of the best advice I've ever seen on how to approach this issue, Pointless Champions. (No, not the way some of you are thinking.) There's a very sizeable free sample from that article posted on the Hero Games website, here: http://www.herogames.com/digitalHero/Samples/dh03pointlesschampions.htm