Supers on the Brain

 

All the M&M 4E talk sent me down a rabbit hole last week. Besides starting a re-read of the 3E rulebook and looking back through all of my other M&M books I started feeling the urge to check in on Champions, started poking around online and I ended up picking up the Hero Designer software and the Old School Enemies book that just came out which collects all of the entries from original Champions and Enemies I, II, & III and stats them up for 6th edition. This is just the kind of thing that lights the fires for sketching out a new campaign. I'm feeling pretty fired up about it right now. My players mostly haven't touched Champions since 4th edition so now I get to figure out whether it's smarter to go with 5E which is very close to 4th, or just go with the latest and greatest and use 6th.

For a short version of where Hero System/Champions stands there are roughly 4 generations ...

• Champions 1st-2nd-3rd pretty much were just building on the same framework and tweaking one design. This was before the concept of "Hero" as a system, not a set of similar but different games, had arisen. It's more loose, there are some holes and weird rules interactions here and there but it is totally playable as many of us ran many games back then.
• Champions 4th came out in 89 and was the big blue unifying rulebook that took many of us through the 90's. I suspect that popularity-wise this was the high water mark for the game as I knew multiple groups playing it then and there was a ton of support for it. One version even came with a character generator on a floppy to expedite character creation. I would run this today if someone wanted to. This is also where the game became part of the "Hero System" and the rules got unified. Some people did not like the changes here and stuck with the older editions and whatever house rules they had created - the first schism.
• Champions 5th and 5th Edition Revised (2002 & 2007) was a big black book that was very similar to 4th but with a lot of things more defined and more definitive language in general. It was less "fun" in some ways as a read and while it's a tighter ruleset it comes at a cost that was too much for some and this is a second break point among fans. This version was very well supported though - lots of cool an interesting books. The revised rulebook mainly added in examples - lots of examples.
• Champions 6th edition (2010) finally grew too large to be contained and was split into two books. I'd say this one has the biggest breaks from the past as it drops all figured characteristics - a signature feature of Champions in my opinion - the comeliness stat, certain powers - at least as separate powers, and just rearranges a lot of classic Champions features. Now I don't hate it but if you had been playing for 20+ years when this one came out it brought a lot of changes that not everyone was asking for - the third break among fans. 

So nowadays if anyone talks about a Hero or Champions game one of the first questions has to be "which edition?" and then the real conversation starts. Hero Designer thoughtfully includes both 5E and 6E so there is support for the two latest versions. If it did 4th I'd probably jump back there out of sheer nostalgia. Since I don't have a working floppy drive any more it's probably smarter to go with 5th or 6th so I can use the current application.

That leaves coming up with the actual campaign outline, regardless of mechanics. I think a short campaign is better to start but Champions takes enough initial investment that a one-shot would be kind of pointless so I'm thinking something with 3-6 sessions of "go" in it. Start small and expand as we go. I have a vision of a campaign with short bursts in the 40's, 60's, & 80's timejumping forward to each in turn to set up some history for the current day where the longer campaign would sit. It's probably too ambitious but I'm noodling on it for now. If I'm finally going to commit to a long term superhero game, why not make it something ambitious?

Even came with documentation right there in the book

This is also ignoring the imminent arrival of the M&M 4E playtest rules this weekend which will probably fire up this cycle all over again.

I just need more time! 

More to come.