Champions RPG

[ShinHakkaider]

I have never had any problem with this in M&M. Two weekends ago I ran three FLGS demos with the system using the Avengers against the Legion of Doom. All of the Avengers were the same PL they just had differenet point totals. The guy playing Hawkeye had just as much fun as the guy playing Thor.

I'm surprised that wasnt a bit of a problem for you because even in the comics there are plenty of cases where you have a mixed group of heroes (in terms of power levels and abilities) go up against a villain that only a few of the heroes can actually directly hurt.
The example that comes quickly to mind is FF#244 when Galactus shows up and the FF, Avengers and Dr. Strange are fighting him. There's a frame where Capt. America is hacking at Galacticus' leg with his shield and I'm saying to myself : "Even in his presently weakend state, there's no way that Cap is actually hurting galactus." In same book Spider-Man and Daredevil are sitting on a nearby roof when Daredevil says some thing close to: "Shouldnt we do something?" and Spider-Man is like "D00d, it's Galactus, I think we should let the FF and the Avengers handle it..."

Basically what I'm saying that in any game as GM it's up to you to make sure that the players have fun no matter what their powerlevel is. In the aforementioned M&M game that I ran I had a group of heroes built off of the same PL, same amount of points, but one of the players decided to build a detective / espionage type PC with a high level of concealment / invisibility. Now during the big superhero battles we realized that he could only safely operate on the fringes or he'd be KO'd pretty quickly. But then I made him aware of something going on with the Villains normal troops which he investigated and was actually able to thwart an attempt to blow up the hero's base by stealing the demolitions equipment and going invisible (I think he actually stole the thermal goggles that would have allowed the flunkies to detect him as well).

In short it's not the system in this case it's the job of the DM to accomodate characters of different power types for his/her games

 

[buzz]

Big differences usually happen in terms of taking damage versus # of actons.

This reminds me of another important thing to remember: comparing # of dice in HERO doesn't really tell you enough. What matters is total Active Points. A 10d6 EB is not better than a 5d6 EB if the former has Reduced Penetration and Only Works Underwater while the later is Armor Piercing or NND and has Autofire.

And you could probably make a similar point about M&M, since its Power system is functionally identical to HERO's in this way. Given this similarity, I'm not sure I buy that the Batman/Superman issue is a big problem in HERO while being happy fuzzy puppies and kittens in M&M.

Which is neither an indictment of HERO nor M&M. Most supers RPGs don't handle this problem well, save for the few that have cropped up recently, mentioned above, that focus on being genre simulators rather than combat simulators.

 

[MarkAHart]

Some of the best role-playing I've ever experienced used Champions/HERO 4th edition. The game had its warts, like all games do, but it could be crazy fun.

Like any game, there are times where game reality takes a strange turn. A motorcycle needs to have the power Shrinking, always on, no END cost?

I picked up the 5th edition "toolkit" over on Ebay for $15 plus shipping, out of pure nostalgia.

I am in the process of collecting M&M sourcebooks, hoping to run a campaign in that soon, the first superhero campaign in a decade I've been a part of...

 

[buzz]

A motorcycle needs to have the power Shrinking, always on, no END cost?

Not in the current rules, at least.

 

[Jim Hague]

And neither M&M nor Hero model characters like Thor or Superman very well i nthe first place I'm afraid. A 10 PL Superman is no Superman.

This statement makes absolutely no sense. Who said that heavy-hitters like Superman or Thor are PL 10? When the Think Tank comes back up, go look at the various builds for those two characters and others and try to back up your statement. Seriously.

Saying 'you can't build my idea of Superman at PL 10' is about as inherently meaningless as 'you can't build my idea of Superman on 150 points in HERO', or 'I can't build Achilles at 1st level in D&D'. Hell, you could look at Marvel (any version) or the DCU games, and those characters aren't going to be on the same relative power level as guys like Cap or the Question.

 

[buzz]

Who said that heavy-hitters like Superman or Thor are PL 10?

I think that's the point Joe is trying to make, i.e., they are not, ergo the difficulty of balancing accurate portrayals of them against accurate portrayals of other characters (e.g., Question) who would be significantly lower in PL (M&M) or points (HERO).

 

[JoeGKushner]

I think that's the point Joe is trying to make, i.e., they are not, ergo the difficulty of balancing accurate portrayals of them against accurate portrayals of other characters (e.g., Question) who would be significantly lower in PL (M&M) or points (HERO).

Pretty much.

Everyone starts at PL 10 so the guy who flies and has super strength doesn't have an innate advantage over the guy who fires mystery gun 1.

Unlike say the original FASERIP MSH where the Hulk is going to whomp on Thor quite a bit thanks to his Monstrous Armor and Thor's merely Excellent Armor and both are going to absolutely smash Daredevil, Nick Fury, and other 'regular's.

Many point based systems, well, good ones anyway, provide caps and advise for ways of making starting characters equal.

Following character creation versus following genre emulation are two very different things. I mean if Batman was written in JLA like he is in Batman, Darkseid would've blinked and Batman would've been dead. "Oh, I'm sorry. Did I just kill the World's Greatest Detective?" Only in comics like Watchmen are the differences really showcased as it's a non-continuing series. 99.9% of characters from the big two vary in power depending on whose writing them.

For example, good old Spider Man. One of the first things that happened when he got the Spider Armor was he was shot. How many times has he been shot in such a fatal area? Not too often before and I'll bet not too often afterwards.

 

[BkMamba]

As it is, I don't think your comparison really maps. 10d6 is double the damage of 5d6 in HERO, i.e., +100%. +10 is not double the damage of +5 in M&M; it's the difference between a DC25 and a DC20 Damage save, which is +25%. A 10 Toughness villain has a 30% chance of making the former, and a 55% chance of making the latter.

A more accurate HERO analog would be 7d6 vs 5d6, which isn't out of whack at all.

Talk about using skewed math. For the HERO example you are comparing damage output to damage output to get your 100% but for the M&M example you are comparing damage output versus defensive toughness. You must compare apples to apples. For damage ouput +10 is 100% more then +5 in both games.

For comparing defensive toughness, In HERO a 5d6 attack averages 18/5 Damage. The average Defense in the game is 20. That means the 5d6 attack does 0 Damage to the average foe. In M&M a +5 Blast has a 45% chance of damaging the 10 Toughness average foe. M&M just allows you to have a wider range of damage output so you are not required to have everyone assume an 8d6 minimum like you are in HERO.

 

[GreatLemur]

Posting in support of Mutants & Masterminds, here. I was a die-hard Champions fan until that game came along.

I don't know the Avengers as well as I do some of the DC characters, but I'll take your word for it. I still think you'd be hard pressed to keep accurate versions of Supes and a trained normal like Question balanced with each other in most mainstream supers games.

I think getting a Question-and-Superman game to work isn't really a mechanics issue so much as a campaign style issue. There's no reason in the world the two of them ought to be physically fighting the same opponents; any enemy that could come close to holding his own with Superman is somebody the Question would very logically stay the hell away from. Instead, the GM needs to keep the Superman-type character fighting giant monsters and carrying cruise ships to safety, while the Question-type character follows clues and helps his buddy better apply his obscene power.

I'm currently playing in a monster-hunty World of Darkness (1.0) game where all the PCs are mages . . . except for one guy who's an FBI agent. The FBI agent is currently making more progress than the rest of us put together, because the campaign has so far been about investigating a mystery rather than killing vampires. Once we've actually identified an accessible enemy, then I expect things will even out nicely.

 

[BkMamba]

This statement makes absolutely no sense. Who said that heavy-hitters like Superman or Thor are PL 10?

PL is nothing more then a statement of internal balance. You can build a very servicable PL 10 Thor - I did it for my Avengers game - but you cannot do it on 150 points. The main thing about building characters in M&M is to turn off the fanboy ideology that just because my character is starting at PL 10 that means he must be weaker then and all the comic book characters. Freedom City does a wonderful job of listing out the Freedom League and showing fans that even a JLA type team can be built with members in the PL 10, 11, and 12 range. PL 10 is not weak within the game. At PL 10 you can fight battlestars and destroy tanks with a single blow. People forget that sometimes due tot he D&D mindset that I will spend experience and get better.