The GM is the center of everything that happens, so there isn't much to discuss where the gm is irrelevant. The players play by dealing with the gm, and players are told what is happening by the gm. Just about every interaction with the game happens through the gm.
The PLAYERS are the center of everything that happens. The GM lays out the game by dealing with the PLAYERS. Every interaction with the game happens through the PLAYERS.
Agreed with Tristan 100%.
If I knew that a GM in my play circle believed that "The GM is the center of everything that happens" in an RPG, I'd both abjectly refuse to ever play at their table, and I would also warn everyone I knew to avoid that GM as well.
Many of us come from the background of having been taught that the GM is but one of the players at the table in a collaborative storytelling game. We believe that player agency is the prime mover of the game, and recognize that for all the planning a GM can do, a player choice can reshape the entirety of the game in the span of a single die roll.
The argument that it is a performance based event solely centered on world building with the GM as delivery system and primary component is antithetical to that view.
The further arguments of GM competence and the honing of the GM skills to strive for professionalism are immediately confronted by the idea that we do have professional GM’s like Matt Mercer, Matthew Colville, Todd Kenreck, Brennan Lee Mulligan, Amy Vorpahl, B. Dave Walters and many many more. All of whom champion the exact opposite argument, many going out of their way to provide resources and encouragement to demonstrate that you don’t have to have a unique set of pre-existing skills to be a GM. That you don’t need to spend years honing your craft to be the most professional you can be. That it’s a game and all that matters is the fun your group has at your table.
So if you say we should strive to be more professional and the professionals all say to relax and simply have fun with it - who then should we listen to? The amateur who tells us the professional qualities we need to be the true engine of game play - or the actual professionals who tell us that GMing is a role that is there to be in service of the players?
This is honestly more engagement than your desired topic deserves. It isn’t what this thread is about, no one wants to discuss it with you here. This thread is about the journey we have taken through the hobby as seen in the lens of the systems we have engaged with over the years. We would very much like to have THAT discussion without these weekly derailments to discuss why GM competency is off topic. So please, if you want to have a conversation about the sacrosanct role of the GM - create your own thread to discuss that in.
Constantly hijacking our discussion is beyond rude.
Now back to our discussion, I’m eagerly watching the Exalted: Essence Kickstarter at the moment. I was a huge Exalted player in the early 2000ms with first edition but fell off with 2nd. 3rd edition released with a core book that makes PF2 look small and it was easy to bounce off of.
Essence is meant as a streamlined lighter rules variant engine to run 3e content in so that the barriers to entry for play are drastically reduced for newer and casual players. The balancing act with a system and a setting when trying to make it please those who have been with you across multiple editions while still catering to new players is a tough one.
Does anyone have a stand out edition change that particularly improved play and entry? Anyone have on that didn’t handle it particularly well?
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Does anyone have a stand out edition change that particularly improved play and entry? Anyone have on that didn’t handle it particularly well?
I think Mongoose did a great job of reviving Traveller for a new generation of gamers. They took the best parts of classic Traveller and cut some of the fat and stuck to the essentials. Mongoose then went further with their own 2nd edition by adding in some modern game design to round off some of the edges, while keeping the classic feel of Traveller as a hard Sci-Fi system.
Now back to our discussion...
Does anyone have a stand out edition change that particularly improved play and entry? Anyone have on that didn’t handle it particularly well?
Monsterhearts 2 was a huge improvement over the first edition. The new version restructured the experience point and characters advancement system, combined two moves that were difficult to adjudicate at the table into a single move that made a lot more sense, and put in better structure for sharing narrative beats between players and MC. It also built consent mechanics into the structure of the game itself, particularly for the Sex Moves. It's a much, much stronger game.
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Does anyone have a stand out edition change that particularly improved play and entry? Anyone have on that didn’t handle it particularly well?I think Mongoose did a great job of reviving Traveller for a new generation of gamers. They took the best parts of classic Traveller and cut some of the fat and stuck to the essentials. Mongoose then went further with their own 2nd edition by adding in some modern game design to round off some of the edges, while keeping the classic feel of Traveller as a hard Sci-Fi system.
I thoroughly agree. I think the mongoose stuff is fantastic.
I do wish they had a decent "lore book" covering the timeline/history of the imperium and its neighbours. I find the traveller "official timelines" online to be a bit of a mess given I haven't kept up through all the different editions over the years.
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Does anyone have a stand out edition change that particularly improved play and entry? Anyone have on that didn’t handle it particularly well?I think Mongoose did a great job of reviving Traveller for a new generation of gamers. They took the best parts of classic Traveller and cut some of the fat and stuck to the essentials. Mongoose then went further with their own 2nd edition by adding in some modern game design to round off some of the edges, while keeping the classic feel of Traveller as a hard Sci-Fi system.I thoroughly agree. I think the mongoose stuff is fantastic.
I do wish they had a decent "lore book" covering the timeline/history of the imperium and its neighbours. I find the traveller "official timelines" online to be a bit of a mess given I haven't kept up through all the different editions over the years.
I know what you mean. Whenever I run Traveller I find myself just winging it on lore.
My biggest wish was that Mongoose artwork was better. Not a system thing, but I find good artwork to supplement the imagination.
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It's been a LONG time since I've dug into them, but a big part of me really likes the emergent lore of Classic Traveller: It was just assumed that each group would take the broad-strokes published lore abd then fill in their own details. The rumor tables were fantastic for guiding that sort of play.
I picked up the Classic Traveller bundle on "Bundle of Holding" a few months ago. I'm really enjoying reading some of the modules: they appear to all be sandboxes of one sort or another.
And speaking of Bundle of Holding, there's a Mongoose Traveller 2E bundle live now.
(Note: Bundle of Holding is completely unrelated to Humble Bundle.)
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Still thinking about world lore for RPG campaigns...
While I have purchased many detailed setting books [e.g. as I write this, my username has the "Pathfinder Lost Omens Subscriber" tag], in recent years I have become less enamored of highly-detailed settings.
Looking back to the earliest years of the hobby, many RPGs either didn't provide a setting, or provided a bare-bones outline of a setting that you were expected to make your own through play. (e.g. Classic Traveller).
A number of contemporary OSR games and indie RPGs/story-games have gone back to that well. There are a number of published settings that present information about the world obliquely, often in the form of rumor tables. In many of these cases, some rumors on the table directly contradict each other: It's up to the players and GM to decide what's true for their iteration of the world.
RPG artist and designer Luka Rejec (author of the "psychedelic metal role-playing" setting The Ultraviolet Grasslands) calls this type of setting "anti-canon", and the term seems to be pervading both OSR and indie RPG circles. An anti-canon setting is specifically designed not to have canonical answers to setting questions. Instead, the campaign materials provides a high-level backdrop of the setting, plus tools that provide evocative prompts for the players and GM to come up with their own answers that fit the intended aesthetic without giving prescribed answers.
Here is Luka's 2019 blog post about anti-canon settings
Since then, a number of RPGs have started to use this sort of approach for their setting, including Troika!, Mörk Borg, Trophy, Esoteric Enterprises and Best Left Buried. But it's an old approach: GDW's Classic Traveller was using it for their "Spinward Marches" setting back in the early '80s.
I do like both approaches. Even though Traveller is typically Anti-Canon, its also covers a lot of space (see what I did there). So you have a lot of sandbox to explore and many threads to pull. On the flip side, I love the Inner Sea guide for Golarion. It's so detailed and informative it allows you to make just about any type of fantasy game in the setting.
Some others that sort of fall down for me are either too narrow in specifics (you get one detailed city), or they are so vague you have no starting point.
I want my games to have SOME kind of setting suggestion as a jumping off point, but not so much lore that I'm playing someone ELSE'S vision.
I cannot recommend The Ultraviolet Grasslands highly enough for this approach: It's probably my favorite campaign setting at the moment.
Acid Death Fantasy for the RPG Troika! is in a similar vein. (And kinda/sorta compatible with UVG on a conceptual level).
On a much darker note, the forthcoming Trophy Loom is an anti-canon setting and source book for the dark-fantasy/horror RPGs Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold. (Note: I am a minor contributor to this book.)
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Honestly, I like to play mix-and-match with settings.
When I've run games set on Golarion in the past, I've made significant changes. For example, I ran a short pirates game set in the Shackles, but I replaced the city of Port Peril with the Freeport from Green Ronin's Freeport: City of Adventure sourcebook, and also included a bunch of NPCs from Frog God Games' Razor Coast campaign sourcebook.
I've dropped the city of Parsantium from Ondine Press' Parsantium: City at the Crossroads as a free city-state on the border between Taldor and Qadira (and a political rival of Absalom).
I never actually ran it, but I started prepping to run Frog God Games' Victorian-influenced dark fantasy/horror adventure series The Blight, and was going to drop the city of Castorhage in the spot that Westcrown officially sits.
And I'm currently running a Trophy Gold minicampaign using a setting that's a hybrid of Varisia and Trophy Loom's Old Kalduhr.
Actually, I haven't really played a new system since 5e came out, with the exception of Haladir's own Trophy Gold sessions (thanks again for excellent game running BTW).
Aww, shucks! That game was a pleasure, and I still feel bad we were never able to conclude it!
I'm running open games weekly on The Gauntlet Calendar these days, Thursday nights 8PM Eastern. Sign up ahead of time... supporters of The Gauntlet Patreon get 48 hours advance sign-up privileges.
I haven't posted games for July or August yet, but I have just decided what I'm running...
In July, I'm going to run...
a two-shot series of the lightweight "Forged in the Dark" game Project Perseus, an RPG of supernatural Cold War espionage in the 1980s. This is a really interesting game with asymmetric player roles and prescribed characters.
and one-shots of:
Candlelight, a "Rooted in Trophy" game about spirits of the dead trying to move on to the afterlife while being tempted to remain as ghosts.
The Final Girl, a GM-less slasher-movie story-game.
Paranormal Minstrels, a "Powered by the Apocalypse" game where PCs are ghost-hunters who use the power of music to exorcise spirits.
In August, I'm going to run a 4-session series of Comrades: A Revolutionary RPG, where the heroes are revolutionaries of the people seeking to overthrow an unjust regime. I'm going to set the game in Kintargo on Golarion, using the Pathfinder module In Hell's Bright Shadow as the adventure framework. (Comrades is intended to be a pseudo-historical game, so I'm going to have to graft in some magic rules from another PbtA game... probably Monster of the Week.)
I didn't interact much with most of the Old World of Darkness, but I agree with thejeff that Vampire: the Masquerade's metaplot - while engaging - could be overwhelming when trying to figure out how to move within to create your own chronicle. God help you if you got behind on the events of the metaplot and something massive happened in a Chicago book and you didn't include it.
Exalted's metaplot was less constraining, but it still felt voluminous, so much so that bouncing off of second edition made attempting to come back for third feel overwhelming due to the changes to the metaplot.
Even in games like those two, I don't know that I've ever fully locked myself into the metaplot or setting. I always tend to cut away bits I don't care for, craft my own bits and pieces that I like, and flesh out any lore left vague. So I guess I've always just looked at the "canon" setting as a set of suggestions.
On the flip side of the argument: I'm running a campaign now in PF2 set in my own campaign world that was built entirely to explain one vague sentence in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes about a longstanding canon monster. Deep Lore can be used to great effect sometimes.
As to those excited for as yet unreleased super powered games - Onyx Path is releasing their 2nd edition update of White Wolf's superhero game "Aberrant" tomorrow.
On a personal note, I'm really looking forward to that new Marvel game mentioned a couple pages ago! I miss me some super hero gamingSpeaking of a setting with way too much lore. :)
Interestingly, I've been on the market for the previous Marvel RPG, Marvel Heroic RPG, for the past few years. This game was released in 2012, and used the Cortex Plus system. It was only on the market for 12 months before Marvel yanked the publisher's license, meaning that the few copies on the secondary market had very inflated prices. (Cover price was $40; I'd seen copies list as high as $500.)
The day the new Marvel Multiverse RPG (and it's "D616 System") was announced, I happened to look for the earlier game... and the algorithms had drastically lowered prices! I snagged a copy of Marvel Heroic for just $35 (plus tax and shipping) from an online used book store in, of all places, Peoria IL!
Everyone I know who'd played Marvel Heroic says that no other supers game handled comic book-style teamwork better this game, and I am really, really looking forward to reading it and bringing it to the table for a while.
Given that this and the revised Cortex Prime core rulebook are both in the mail, I'll have a lot of reading about this system ahead of me!
I dont like the supers genre, so I haven't played any Marvel, DC, mutants and masterminds, etc.
How do they typically play out at the table? I mean, in comics characters rarely die, and villains always escape prison, so is it just a constant stop the other from achieving their plans kind of thing?
The new Aberrant addressed the classic comics of it all by providing guidance for the ways that the rules centered around combat and damage apply to a few different styles of superhero storytelling.
In their core book they break the genre down into three (really four) distinct styles.
Four Color - the more classic Superhero comic storytelling that has existed over the years. They subdivide this a bit to account for the more Gold and Silver Age stories where as you note - the bad guys always escape and characters rarely die - and the Modern Age where there are more consequences for actions. The biggest difference between these two is how you apply the systems "Collateral Damage" mechanic in a supers fight. In Gold and Silver Age stories it generally only impacts property and only in major combats (DC Silver Age style) and Modern Age where it always has effects and sometimes on people.
The second tone presented is Cinematic Supers which replicates something more like the MCU where collateral damage is constant and potentially deadly.
The third and final tone is the Deconstructionist Supers where the destruction and body count are not limited by the system as you take on Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns style stories.
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I dont like the supers genre, so I haven't played any Marvel, DC, mutants and masterminds, etc.
How do they typically play out at the table? I mean, in comics characters rarely die, and villains always escape prison, so is it just a constant stop the other from achieving their plans kind of thing?
How I've run supers RPGs in the past...
Keep it as on-genre as possible!
We do a Session Zero where we figure out setting, tone, and power-level, and then do some basic sketching of the kinds of heroes the players are interested in playing. Character gen for supers games often gets complicated: If it's a crunchy ruleset like Champions, I'll let the players build their characters between Sessions Zero and One.
Session One: Open up in media res with the super-team in the middle of a big fight against a group of medium-power bad guys. This introduces the players to the game mechanics and also gives everyone a feel for the setting and tone of the game. I'll take our time with the fight, and try to make it interesting. This fight should take a third to half the first session.
After the bad guys are defeated and hauled off to Super-Jail, we have a a debrief scene at the team's HQ. We then have a few scenes in the heroes' secret identities to establish NPC relationships and what's going on in their normal lives. I'll try to end on a reveal or other minor cliffhanger.
Sessions 2 and 3 will be non-arc episodes: A crime happens, the heroes investigate and track down the bad guy. The bad guy monologues, the heroes beat him up, and save the day. This to establish base-line expectation and to explore non-combat game rules.
Also in Session 3, I'll start to introduce "signs and portents" of the Big Bad and his Evil Plan. It's important that the heroes meet the BBEG early, whether or not they know he's going to be the bad guy. Ideally, I want the players to get to know the BBEG and care about the character... whether it's love, love-to-hate, or really hate.
I'll drop the signs and portents of the BBEG's Master Plan in sessions 3, 4, and 5, and by then the heroes should know enough of what's happening to start planning how to stop him. Depending on how many sessions we'll go, they'll have a few missions to thwart part of the BBEG's Master Plan. Maybe the BBEG threatens dependent NPCs or gives the heroes a choice between stopping him and saving people they care about. Y'know... typical comic book stuff.
In Session 8 or so, there some kind of Shocking Reveal or other Turn that throws the plot sideways from which the heroes must recover.
Finally, somewhere around Session 10, the BBEG tries to enact his Master Plan, the heroes discover its fatal flaw, and then the heroes show up for a big Boss Fight finale.
The heroes are victorious... but there's something they missed that sets up the next Story Arc.
Do folks have some mechanical examples used in supers systems? Like resolving a fight or more interestingly something in a social aspect or perhaps narrative agency?
In Trinity: Aberrant almost every challenge is resolved with a roll of a dice pull made up of one D10 for each dot that a character has in their core attribute and an associated skill plus any "enhancements"
vs the opponents static defense and any "difficulties."
Enhancements are dice bonuses, Difficulties are dice penalties.
One of the ways that the game manages the difference between types of characters and objects is a mechanic called scale. Scale creates difficulty when acting against something bigger or creates enhancement when acting against something smaller. Superpowers interact with this by providing extra enhancements.
For example a person is Size scale 1, a car is size scale 2, a trailer is size scale 3, an Elephant is scale 4 and on up. So a scale 1 baseline human trying to lift a car would get difficulties to their roll to do so, but a strength based Super would get enhancements to do so.
To further offset the two - normal humans succeed those d10 rolls on an 8, 9, or 10. Supers succeed on a 7, 8, 9, or 10.
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Mechanics in supers game vary wildly.
Champions/HERO System
Champions is by far the crunchiest system that I've played: It's extremely math-heavy, such that back in the '90s, I used Excel to calculate hero point costs when building characters!
Heroes are built on a number of points; players design their heroes by spending these points on ability scores, skills, and powers. You get extra points to spend by taking Disadvantages.
HERO system only uses d6. It also uses tactical combat with minis on a hex grid.
Characters have two sorts of "hit points": STUN and BODY. If you're dropped to 0 STUN, you're knocked out. If you're dropped to 0 BODY, you're dead.
To make an attack: The attacker picks an attack maneuver/offensive power and rolls 3d6 + the attack's Offensive Combat Value (OCV). The target is the defender's Defensive Combat Value (DCV).
On a hit:
Attacks are defined as either a "standard attack" or a "killing attack", with a damage rating in number of dice.
For a standard attack: roll damage rating, adding all the dice together for the amount of STUN damage. You then look again: For every die you rolled, the attack does 1 BODY except 6s deal 2 BODY and 1's deal 0 BODY. You then announce your damage as, "X STUN, Y BODY." [Note: Some attacks can be bought with the limitation "STUN Only," meaning they don't cause BODY damage; that's generally true of psychic attacks.]
For a killing attack: roll the damage rating, adding all dice together for the total BODY damage. Then roll another d6 as the STUN Multiplier; the attack does STUN damage equal to BODY rolled x STUN Multiplier.
(Each 1d6 of a Killing Attack is roughly equivalent to 3d6 of a Standard Attack, and has 3 times the point cost.)
Depending on whether the attack is physical, energy, or psychic, the defender then subtracts their Physical Defense (PD), Energy Defense (ED), or Mental Defense (MD) rating from both the STUN and BODY inflicted.
Characters also have an Endurance (END) score, which represents stamina: Using Powers and Abilities has an END cost: Subtract that cost from your current END. (If you run out of END, you can dip into your STUN point-for-point.) It's possible to purchase powers and abilities with Advantages that reduce or eliminate an END cost.
Characters also have a SPEED rating: That's the number of times they can act in a 12-second round. Normal humans have SPEED 2; "Trained Agents" have a SPEED of 3 or 4; supers tend to have a SPEED between 4 and 7 (5-6 tend to be the sweet spot). On your action, you can choose to "recover" instead of doing anything else: This lets you add your Recovery (REC) rating to both your current END and STUN. Everyone gets an automatic free recovery at the end of a round.
Those are the basics, but some powers can get really complicated and/or bypass the standard combat mechanics entirely.
A hero's power level is proportional to the number of points they're built on.
Normal Human: 25 points; no Powers. (e.g. cab driver, high school teacher)
Skilled Human: 50 points; no Powers (e.g. cop; lawyer; scientist)
Trained Agent: 75 points (e.g. Navy SEAL; Agent of SHIELD)
Street-Level Hero: 125-175 points (e.g. Luke Cage, Black Canary, Black Widow; Huntress)
Standard Hero: 200-250 points (e.g. Spider-Man, Captain America, Batman, Zatana)
Epic Hero: 250-300 points (e.g. Thor, Captain Marvel, Superman, Wonder Woman)
Godlike Being: 350+ points (e.g. Ultron, Darkseid, Thanos, Galactus)
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In Champions Speedsters go a lot during the turn, get really tired, and cause damage to themselves when they run into things until they can run fast enough to go through things.
I ended most combats as a speedster unconscious but having ended the fight by running into the NPC combatants knocking them out.
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Speedster builds in Champions are hard; you really need a good level of system mastery to pull it off.
(Rookie move: Buying Autofire on your punch. Sounds cool, but: when facing a tough villain, if you make 10 small attacks in an action not a one is going to get through their armor... plus that's a LOT of attack rolls. Instead, just buy a bunch of extra dice on your punch and define the special effect as "punching a hundred times a second".)
To do the stuff that The Flash can do on the TV show, you'd want to buy...
Flight, with limitation "must touch a surface" (which allows running up buildings or across a body of water).
Phasing (allows vibrating through walls)
Telekinesis, with the limitation "must be able to physically get there" (grabbing guns out of bad guys' hands; showing up with something from another room; picking up people and carrying them out of harm's way, etc)
Energy Blast - electricity (speed-force lightning bolts)
Force Wall, with the limitations of Concentration, No Range, Extra Endurance. (Literally running circles around someone to keep them from moving.)
Oh, and a SPEED of at least 9! (And that's EXPENSIVE!)
Yep totally was looking for a tutorial on a game I played 20 years ago for 5 sessions
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Ah Champs... go grab your calculator and start looking through this list of powers to see what you can use to tangentially explain powers and abilities that have been central to the genre since it was invented.
Once you've actually built your characters, Champions plays pretty well at the table. That said, the last time I played it was a 4-game miniseries back in 2011 that was a reunion of our long-running "H.E.R.O. Squad" campaign that ran 1995-98. Two of the players who'd moved away happened to be back in town for a few weeks in the summer of 2011.
And I'll be honest in saying that I'm not all that interested in going back to such a math-focused game at this point in my journey through RPG systems.
Ron Edwards (co-founder of The Forge and author of ground-breaking story-game Sorcerer) wrote a parallel game called Champions Now. co-published by Hero Games and his own Adept Press. This game went back to the first edition of Champions and re-imagined what building a game on that foundation would look like today. It's a fascinating hybrid of the famous Champions crunch with a lot of contemporary story-game elements. I backed the KS and have both a hardcopy and a PDF, but I've never brought it to the table. Earlier this year, I backed a different KS by Jahmal "Mad Jay" Brown called Lifted that's a supers RPG setting that's using Champions Now as the game system.
Champions requires players to define their characters' powers in excruciating detail with heavy math and complicated mechanics that make Pathfinder look like Quest in comparison.
"I want my character Lightning-Bug to be a woman in a power-suit, who has a gun that shoots lightning bolts. So... the gun is going to be an 8d6 Energy Blast (40 points base), and let's make it Armor-Piercing (+1/2 Advantage), but STUN only (+0 Advantage). It's obviously a gun, so bad guys might take it away from her, so that's an Obvious Accessible Focus (-1 limitation). Let's make it self-powered rather than using the hero's Endurance... the battery pack is good for 12 shots before it runs out of juice (-1/4 limitation). And let's say that when it's fired it makes a very loud zapping sound that can be heard two blocks away (-1/2 Limitation). So total cost would be (40 x(1+0.5))/(1+1+0.25+0.5) = 60/2.75 = 22 points (60 Active)."
...and that's just her gun.
Damn, that seems like a lot of upfront work. I'm guessing it also has levels and you do this fairly often?
“Played pretty well” after the math intensive slog that was character creation twenty years ago. What a ringing endorsement.
Once you get the hang of it, creating a character in Champions is mot really any more complicated than building a high-level PC in Pathfinder. (It's less looking for feat combos and more number-crunching.)
I played the hell out of Champions back in the day, but there are much better choices for supers games now. I'd pretty much only play it today for the nostalgia.
That’s a bit confusing.
You just said it is no more complicated than Pathfinder, but not four posts ago you said it made Pathfinder look like Quest.
It seems like you’re just countering whatever any negatively perceived thing is said about Champs, even if they are statements that jibe with your own stated criticisms, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.
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That’s a bit confusing.
You just said it is no more complicated than Pathfinder, but not four posts ago you said it made Pathfinder look like Quest.
It seems like you’re just countering whatever any negatively perceived thing is said about Champs, even if they are statements that jibe with your own stated criticisms, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.
My relationship with and feelings about Champions are complicated and somewhat conflicted, and my thoughts about it are evolving.
It's not a game I've given any particular thought to until I brought it up as an example of a supers game that I knew. I had initially intended that post to be far less detailed, and then compare it to Mutants & Masterminds, Marvel Heroic, and Masks but nostaliga got in the way and I found myself going down memory lane just thinking about it. And I also realized that, despite not playing it seriously since the Clinton Administration, it's the supers game I know by heart better than any other.
On the one hand, Champions has the most mathematically complex character generation system I have personally ever used. On the other, the actual gameplay at the table is not not particularly complex... at least compared to its contemporaries like GURPS or RoleMaster.
I am absolutely fond of the game, but it's been over a decade since I played it at all, and over 20 years since I played it regularly. I'm sure some of what I'm saying/feeling is clouded by a sense of nostalgia. (Plus, two of the players who were in that campaign have died... and I hadn't thought of either of them in a while.)
I'm finding it weird that I'm defending this game so vigorously: It's 180 degrees from the sort of game I prefer to play these days.
It's like when you and your brother insult each other nine ways 'til Sunday, but you'll immediately jump to his defense if somebody else says a harsh word about them, even if it's a far milder insult than the one you just threw!
Anyway, I think I've said all I want to about Champions for now.
It's like when you and your brother insult each other nine ways 'til Sunday, but you'll immediately jump to his defense if somebody else says a harsh word about them, even if it's a far milder insult than the one you just...
And sibling-less people are like "Huh? What does that even mean?"
I think that any character generation process that requires someone to encourage you to stick with it because despite the complexity of creation the game play will be worth when you finally get there - is probably bordering on being too complex.
...Dang. Now I really want to play an Advanced MSH game.
Now I never want to play an Advanced MSH game.