Super Hero RPG...

[kipling]

Champions is without a doubt the best superhero game in existence. I dismiss everything else out of hand. Some will tell you it does not meet your criteria as being simple, but the truth is, once you understand the mechanics, it is a simple system, as simple as D&D is anyway.

Hmmm. I don't think I'd say that.

I played Champions starting in 2nd edition, and still play it. It's an excellent system and there are parts of it that are engraved on my cerebellum. Hero is still my default system if I'm trying something new because the mechanics are second nature to all of us in my group so we can ignore those and tell the story we want to tell.

But for elegance, I preferred DC Heroes system. (Haven't looked at the MEGS Blood of Heroes thing.)

The Guardians of Order one--Silver Sentinels--I was in the playtest and parts of it seemed seriously unbalanced to me, and GoO didn't address those issues, it seemed to us.

I hear good things about M&M, but I haven't played it yet.

Tried the two TSR Marvel Superheroes games (dice and cards) but found them lacking. Might just have been an issue of group style.

Villains and Vigilantes was good, though it desperately needed a point-build system.

 

[Ranger REG]

That being said, I also own SAS d20 and want to own Mutants & Masterminds (grabbed a pdf of it to browse thru from Kazaa but haven't yet).

I wish you hadn't publicly stated that. IIRC, there is no PDF of MnM that can be distributed with Green Ronin's permission, other than their preview pages from their own web site.

 

[Keeper of Secrets]

M&M is great. Character creation, as stated, can be a little complex due to all the little numbers you have to keep in your head. However, you can do characetrs pretty easily if you set aside the time and work straight through it. The only problem I have found would be when it comes to add in points later. If you forgot where some of the points were spent and where they came from you could end up being on the wrong end of an acconting glitch that makes Enron seem pretty attractive.

 

[billd91]

Let's see, of the Superhero game I have played (I will be dating myself here) include Heroes Unlimted, GURPS Supers, Superworld, I playtested the original DC Heroes, Villians and Vigilantes, and Marvel Superheroes. There were a few more, but they were small press stuff whose names you probably won't recognize.

I do have some knowledge of other games, by far and away Champions and the HERO system have them all beat in terms of the system. I have yet to come across something that the system can not represent, the combat system is both elegant in it's simplity and amazing in it's versatility.

One word of warning though, know how to add and subtract. About at the level of 3.0.

I've played Villains and Vigilantes, Champions, Marvel Super Heroes, and Mutants and Masterminds. Champions is, by far, the most complicated. It's a good and flexible system. It's very good at simulating various minute details of superheroes form the comics. It's got some horribly complex ways to do it. If you wanted weather control, you had to buy power frameworks that included change environment, energy blast, telekinesis, flight, blah blah blah and could get prohibitively expensive (but modeled with a great deal of subtlety).
The old Marvel Superheroes was simplistic to the point of being kind of silly.
Villains and Vigilantes (which I played most often) is a much simpler system to teach to new players as the powers were all broadly defined. If you wanted weather control, you got weather control and all of its attendent effects.
Mutants and Masterminds splits the difference between Champions and Villains and Vigilantes. It's well worth a look.

To get an idea about complexities between M&M and Champions, check out this PDF detailing ways to do the Hulk in a bunch of current game systems:
http://www.gametrademagazine.com/PDFs/GTM_40_PDFS/Hulk SMASH_1.pdf

Champions is a good game, but simple? I don't think so.