Big Game Wednesday - Dougal: From Face to Heel

So I haven't updated about our current game in a while, and thought I'd throw out a little update (which is kind of silly, since most of the people who read the blog are people who are already playing in the game--oh well...).

Dougal has gone through several transitions in the game, and has emerged as a rather contradictory character. He started out as an engineer with a healthy skepticism for claims of "magic"--a giant Scully with man-boobs. That opinion has obviously had to go through a few revisions over time, since like Jack Burton, he's experienced some very unreasonable things. Some of it he has explained to himself in terms of Christian faith (a seer with visions of the future being analogous to a Biblical prophet, or of course, the whole "we're in Hell" episode which still gets some mileage) and others in terms of scientific principles that have been lost (alchemy and monsters, for instance).

Interestingly, though, the Hell that is Atlantis has morphed from a place of punishment to a Purgatory designed to tempt and corrupt him so completely that he might finally be consigned to the flames of an even worse Hell. He has been tempted by money (vast riches carted out of an ancient city), violence (he's done a lot of killing), pagan worship (an ancient evil goddess with whom he had to bargain to escape said ancient city alive), lust (the Princess with whom he has fallen in love has some very... flexible morals when it comes to sexuality), and power (his prowess with a mighty flaming sword having helped him defeat demons and sorcerers, drawing him into intrigues surrounding the throne of Atlantis and the vice-regal government of the British colony).

Though he has fallen short in most areas, he had always remained a loyal British citizen. Until he learned that the Princess Leda (one of the contenders for the Atlantean throne whose death was faked following the attack of a demon foretold in visions) was carrying his child. Dougal is smart enough to know that his child would be perceived as a threat by both the boy-emperor and the viceroy, so he has decided to ally himself with the supremely dangerous Amice Belden, descendant of the most reviled sorcerer in the history of Atlantis, the man responsible for the cataclysm which sank the island originally.

So Dougal has now transformed almost completely into someone that he would have reviled had he met him at the start of the game: a brutal killer allied with witches and a traitor to the Empire. It remains to be seen what effect this will have on his behavior in the future.

I'm of two minds about the whole thing, myself. On the one hand, the roleplaying is a lot of fun, and as I've said, light-years beyond most of the gaming I've done. On the other hand, this is not a game in which any kind of long-term planning is rewarded, because circumstances can change completely from one week to the next. I feel as if I'm somehow not contributing if I'm not trying to help shape the story, assert some kind of positive control over my actions rather than simply reacting from week to week. But then, so much happens that simply must be reacted to.

Big Game Wednesday - Digger Returns, But Then...

After a couple months of diversions, what with Gary's attempt to run Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, followed by mine, Gary decided to resume Champions again. He told me up front that I could bring Digger back if I wanted. Digger was a fairly well-conceived character with some history behind him, and importantly not a min-maxed monstrosity. When I mentioned that Digger had, you know, died along with everyone else in D&D land, he waved it off with a "characters in comics return from the dead all the time."

So Digger ended up being the only one who returned from an alternate dimension brush with death, and a new team was formed. With Digger being the only experienced character in the group (and since there had also been churn within the gaming group due to older players graduating and newer students joining up), he became the de facto leader of the New Champions.

I also decided that his return from apparent death would be a good time for a costume change, a not-so-proud tradition for comics characters with a new creative team trying to find a new creative direction. What I ended up with was the horror you see above--striped military pants out of Star Blazers, combined with the shirt from the original X-Men uniform, with a weird (and non-functional) anime-armor piece thrown over the top. I also included the signature poncho I'd had him wear whenever he tried to go out incognito and switched the boots to have an insanely large flap hanging down.

Plus a short-cropped haircut and a beard.

All in all, it was an almost total change from the previous look. The only common factor was the presence of the Drillers, and I'd even decided to have him weld on little fins to make those look cooler.

Unfortunately for Digger, the new look didn't make things any easier for him. His unlucky streak still held, and Digger was simply unprepared for the demands of leadership. The new group was younger and more volatile than the old one, but Digger was slowly beginning to grow into the role of leader.

And then he accidentally awakened an ancient Aztec deity from his ages-old slumber in a subterranean chamber. Tlaloc, God of Storms, emerged to conquer the world. Digger and the New Champions tried to stop him, but he overpowered them and sent them into the future.

This happened for a couple of reasons. Number one, Gary and I both liked X-Men, and "Days of Future Past" was still fairly fresh in our minds, as it had only been published a couple of years before.

And number two, Hero Games had published a new rules variant called Autoduel Champions that adapted the futuristic road combat of Steve Jackson Games' Car Wars into Champions terms. Gary was eager to try it out, and this was his way of doing it.

The big problem for Digger: he had lost his main powers. In those days, the Drillers were still defined as foci (obvious, inaccessible)--defined as unique bio-metal power batteries that could be removed for maintenance purposes. Tlaloc, after defeating the New Champions, had removed the batteries from the Drillers, then sent Digger fifty years into the future without them.

Still, I decided to accept the challenge so I could maybe develop Digger's skills in other ways, make him a really multi-pronged threat. I even drew up a special new character portrait of an anime-influenced Digger, his beard shaved off and his hair grown long again, surrounded by flames, with his shirt torn and that silly chest-piece missing. Dramatic, don't you know? Digger at bay, trapped in a world he never made.

We learned that Tlaloc had managed to take over the entire country (perhaps the entire world), establishing a totalitarian order that demanded obedience and human sacrifice. But there was an underground resistance, and they determined to help us do something to try to defeat him. I don't remember what the specific MacGuffin was, but it involved a road trip.

So we convoyed in two separate vehicles, and on the way, were intercepted by a cop (a trooper working for Tlaloc's evil regime, that is). That's when everything turned to shit. The driver of the lead vehicle decided to panic stop or something and failed his control roll, at which point we learned that we were traveling really fast, like 100 mph. That car rolled, basically incapacitating everyone inside. Half the team was out of the fight instantly.

Meanwhile, one of the guys in the car with Digger said, "Don't worry. I've got a force field. I'll draw their fire." He flew out and did just that. The laser on the cop car was really powerful, though, and Gary rolled amazing on the stun multiplier, so there was another hero out of the fight.

At that point, it was like Digger and one other hero (a martial artist or something lame), plus a female NPC who was not so combat oriented. As the other two characters tried shooting it out with the cop car, Digger grabbed a shotgun and leapt on top of the cop car's turret, using his clinging to stay balanced while firing down through weak spots in the car's armor (using his Find Weakness skill).

After a few rounds, the other PC and the NPC were both down, and only Digger remained. The car stopped and the cop got out to shoot Digger off the top of his car. This was the moment Digger had been waiting for, his crowning moment of cool. He would single-handedly prevail against this guy who had wiped out the rest of his team (though to be fair, half the team had actually wiped themselves out).

Digger did not have his blasters, but he had the highest allowable human strength, and insane speed and dexterity. He jumped down and punched the crap out of the cop, putting him down for the count. Sweet Victory!

At which point, the partner which Digger did not suspect was still in the car rotated the turret and shot him with several d6 of laser-fueled Killing Attack. And since at the time, he still had his damage resistance as part of a multipower, meaning he had to state he was consciously resisting damage--this due to the ridiculously low point totals Gary had instituted at the beginning of the campaign--he took full damage from the attack.

Digger died. Again. Like before, this was in an alternate world scenario using a variant rules set, but still...

This time, it wasn't so easy to handwave away. He hadn't had his form magically changed to a legendary monster, nor had he been killed in a land which included magical resurrection spells (as far as I know, anyway). He had just been shot through the chest by a really powerful laser.

I was devastated. I had played Digger at that point, off and on, for well over a year, so having him die suddenly like that really hit me hard. I went out and drowned my sorrows at Fatburger. The big lesson I learned? Don't try to jazz up your campaign by changing the rules on people. Players get used to the way the world works, and it is really hard to adjust mentally to a sudden change in rules, especially something that affects combat and lethality.

As far as I know, that was the last game of that campaign. We were coming up on the end of another school year IIRC, so we left it on the cliffhanger, and I think everyone just decided to let it hang. It wasn't as if the other players were real gung-ho to keep going after the serial embarrassments of losing to Tlaloc and a Highway Patrolman, and without Digger, I didn't see the point. I was going through my own troubles at the time anyway, since I was flunking out of Cinema Production.

We continued to game, but I really don't remember much about it. I know that we had a new guy come in at one point claiming to be a very experienced Dungeon Master with an awesome set of house-rules designed to create very powerful characters. He ran probably the most boring session I had ever sat through up to that time. We didn't really do much other than meet some powerful NPC who was pretty evidently his pet character, an elven princess who wore a distinctive crown of leaves. He spent probably five to ten minutes just describing her, including a leaf-by-leaf and dewdrop-by-dewdrop description of her crown (apparently just the kewlest magical item in his campaign , and he wanted to make sure we knew it).

I think I rounded out my time in L.A. playing Bushido and Runequest with Brian running while I worked a couple of horrible part-time jobs over the summer, trying to make it in L.A. When my dad called a few months later to tell me I could come home and stay rent-free in his house in Oklahoma City, I said 'yes' in a heartbeat, thinking I would take some time to regroup, get my screenplay writing honed, then someday come back.

I never did. But Digger did.

Big Game Wednesday - Stalking the Night Craptastic

So in keeping with the Halloween theme, I held over the discussion of this game from last week. In the early 80's, a company called Tri-Tac Games published three RPG's designed by a guy named Richard Tucholka: Fringeworthy, FTL:2448, and Stalking the Night Fantastic. The first two were science-fiction oriented, and the third was a horror game... sort of. I'll get to the "sort of" in a bit.

Now, if you're an old-school gamer, Tucholka's name might set off some alarm bells. That's because he was also one of the designers of another game I've talked about before. Yeah, that's right, this one. And like The Morrow Project, Tri-Tac's RPG rules system featured very detailed combat rules that would conceivably allow you to adapt any firearm from history easily into the system. Like The Morrow Project, that meant combat would be realistically deadly. But unlike The Morrow Project, the scenario set out for Stalking the Night Fantastic wasn't meant to induce the sort of paranoia that would cause the party to kill each other off within the first game session.

At this point, allow me to make a slight digression from the topic at hand. One thing that has held pretty consistent throughout my life is that, given a binary choice of competing products--VHS vs. Betamax, Macintosh vs. Amiga, Chevy Aveo vs. Mini Cooper, Champions vs. Villains & Vigilantes--I almost invariably choose the wrong one. I had a Beta VCR. My first computer was an Atari 400. I was loyal to the Amiga when IBM ruled and Mac was ascending.

And standing in the store, deciding whether to pick Stalking the Night Fantastic or the only other available horror game, a minor work titled Call of Cthulhu, well, you know which one I picked. The reason?

Sanity. I wanted a game where characters could fight back against and conquer evil. A game where the characters could improve into better and better monster-killing machines, not a game where the characters were doomed to a slow degeneration into madness. I chose... poorly.

Because although Stalking the Night Fantastic was a horror game--pitting the players as agents of a shadowy organization known as Bureau 13 against a wide variety of monsters--it also tried to be funny. The third edition of the game even featured cover art by Phil Foglio, known for his lighthearted style.

The humorous touch was reflected in the history and timeline of Bureau 13, as well as in the cast of sample characters. Not only were the NPC's in charge of the agency rather silly, but also the sample monsters and other enemies, like some kind of undead TV preacher and a redneck werewolf or something (the rulebook has long since been lost, so I remember it only vaguely--the cover image up top was taken from rpggeek.com, so while it features the same cover art as my lost copy, mine was not spiral bound, I don't think).

The combat rules, on the other hand, were deadly serious and very detailed. Looking at the book in the store, I was excited by the level of detail you could achieve in determining wound locations and severity. I thought it would really bring things to life in a vivid way to be able to say, for instance, "the bullet hits you in the left forearm, shattering the bone," or "the bullet hits your thigh, but misses the major blood vessels and passes through." I thought that could be cooler than the AD&D standard of "Hit, 6 points."

So how did Stalking... achieve such a level of realism? Let's look at the character sheet. Here's the first of two pages:


That big block of stuff toward the top is 16, count 'em 16 stats, plus hit points listed in 25% increments. And here was where we encountered the first element which made the game (at least in its first edition) virtually unplayable.

Although I no longer have the rulebook, I did have a cheat sheet I made up as a quick reference for combat (check it out--it's typed with badly-yellowed photocopied tables cut out and taped onto the sheet--kicking it old-school, man). I was confused recently when checking this sheet, however, because I remembered hand-to-hand combat as using a completely different dice mechanic than ranged combat (which was corroborated here). Apparently, this sheet I made is a simplified house-rule version I adapted to try to get some playability out of a game that had otherwise turned out to be a waste of time and money.


Because combat in the game was a mess. If you look at the character sheet above again, you'll notice that Accuracy, Dexterity, Agility, Dodge, and Throw are all separate stats. And although it's pretty stupid to bring a knife to a gunfight, the situation could turn up at some point. But the systems for hand-to-hand and ranged combat were so incompatible (with hand-to-hand rolled on percentile dice and projectiles rolled on a d20) that the first time I tried to run a sample combat, I seriously could not figure out how to make the two work together. Epic Fail, as the kids say today.

So I apparently adapted the percentile tables to a d20 equation for all types of combat. But then came the real killer, illustrated on page 2 of the character sheet:


Damage.

See those silhouettes? They're covered with a grid. Basically, once you had rolled to hit, you would then roll to see which part of the body was hit (lettered A through G on the grids). Each lettered body part was divided into a 6x6 grid, so you would roll two six-sided dice to determine in exactly which spot you were hit. Then (as an optional rule, IIRC) you could consult several pages of damage tables to see exactly what the result of the damage was.

For instance, let's say you rolled a damage result of D,2,3 (with an extra roll to determine it was the right side). You would make a dot on the character sheet to indicate the hit, then go to the damage tables for D,2,3 which would look something like this:

S,M,B3,M,S

Where the S meant skin, the M meant muscle, the B meant Bone (with the numeral indicating how strong the bone was; the thigh and pelvis were thicker than the fingers and skull, for instance). So say your bullet did 8 points of damage; counting through from front to back of the damage table (and counting the bone as three), we get seven. So your bullet would pass completely through the upper arm of your target, shattering the bone in the process. But if you had armor over that location which stopped four points of damage, the bullet would only have four points left to apply to the arm, meaning it would pass through the biceps and lodge in the bone.

On paper, it all looked cool. But when I tried running my first adventure, in which a group of agents attempted to foil a coven of witches during a demon-summoning ritual, the damage resolution rules brought the game to a maddening crawl. One of the NPC's had a Thompson submachine gun, which meant burst fire and multiple bullet hits. I think it took somewhere in the neighborhood of a half-hour to resolve the damage from that one attack, after which the PC was rather thoroughly dead, the rest of the players were bored, and no one wanted to play this stupid game for another minute, me included.

That was probably one of the last games I game-mastered in California. Luckily, Gary decided he was willing to give Champions another try, but that's a story for after Halloween.

Big Game Wednesday - A Distinct Lack of Staying Power

Going back over the games I ran in college, I realize I ran a lot more stuff than I thought at first. It's just that much of what I ran ended up being one-shot games. I've already mentioned the Morrow Project disaster.

One Halloween, I decided to have the guys over to my apartment where I ran a one-shot Villains and Vigilantes game inspired by a convention game I've talked about before. I had the players basically generate themselves as V&V characters, then the game began on one of our typical Saturdays on campus. As they were coming back from a meal break at Burger King, they heard sirens. Gunmen ran past them, making for a getaway car. In the process of the getaway, the players' friend Fraze was shot and lay bleeding the streets, mumbling the crooks' license plate number and clutching a mask he pulled off one of them.

Following the clues led them to a costume shop, which was a front for a secret organization known as the First Kingdom. The bad guys were seeking some source of cosmic power known as the Bloodgems, located in multiple parallel dimensions. At some point, the players encountered a guy who ran an occult bookshop, the dude who was battling the First Kingdom to protect the Bloodgems. He recruited the players to help him find the gems first, and off they went through a dimensional portal.

They awoke in a forest. The forest was very big. Or it would be more accurate to say that they were now very small. Bunnies, in fact. The bunnies had to find the old Owl, who owned the Bloodgem, while avoiding traps, a hunter, and one of their First Kingdom foes, a demonic bear. Retrieving the gem gave them the ability to open a new portal, which took them to their next world.

The players arrived in a space cantina, just ahead of an alien First Kingdom warrior named Sunbow. They learned of the recent theft of a huge, blood-red diamond called the Royal Star, and had to retrieve it with the help of the Starjammers from X-Men. Upon retrieving the diamond, their next portal opened.

They appeared in a medieval fantasy village, where a crowd of people watched a small group of heavily-armed heroes journey toward a castle. The players fell in with the heroes. One of the folks seemed to have a device that functioned remarkably like a movie camera. He told the players that he was Danny, the Documentary Filmmaker, and introduced the rest of the party: Phil the Fighter, Marian the Mage, Karl the Cleric, Thaddeus the Thief. The players noticed one other member of the group, a guy clothed all in black, dripping poison onto the blade of a scimitar.

"Who's that?" they asked.

"Oh, that's Al," said Danny.

"Al the Assassin?"

"No, he's a druid, actually," Danny answered. "He doesn't really fit in."

The heroes entered the castle and were promptly thrashed, after which the players entered to battle the final enemy, a demonic wizard. Once they retrieved the last of the gems, the portal opened to their final destination.

The game was meant to conclude the following week, but I never finished writing it up. I got too ambitious, planning to run a superpowered At the Mountains of Madness, but I let my ambition overwhelm me yet again. It was okay. Whatever I did would pale after Al the Druid.

At one point, Dragon Magazine published some variant rules for Top Secret called (IIRC) Crimefighters. It was meant to be a pulp-era game, taking place in the 30's. I thought it looked awesome and ran an adventure with it. The big bad was a knife-wielding murderer who was a straight-up rip-off of Michael Myers from the "Halloween" films. But the players never really got to that final confrontation, for in the process of trying to interview a mob boss, they got in a gunfight. One of the players then decided he would throw some dynamite that he had written on his character sheet. He storked his roll to estimate how much fuse he would need, with the result that the dynamite went off in his hand. Thus setting off the other sticks of dynamite he was carrying and blowing up the entire penthouse floor. Result: TPK, except for the one person who decided to stay with the car.

Sometime later, I think I ran the adventure again, with the group actually finishing it this time. That led into another adventure with the same characters, investigating a funeral home in New Orleans that was turning corpses into zombies, an adventure which led the party to the Caribbean and a search for Atlantis. The players wanted to continue the campaign, but I was hard up for adventure ideas, especially since they wanted to go to China, and one of the players was originally from Hong Kong. I was so intimidated by the idea of getting China completely wrong that I quit running instead.

But I still liked the idea of a pulp-style game, so I kept my eyes open for pulp-style systems. One which excited me when I first looked at it was Stalking the Night Fantastic, so I bought it and ran it.

Once.

It was a disaster.

Next week.

Big Game Wednesday - Aversion Therapy

Last week, I discussed Gary's short-lived attempt to run a by-the-book AD&D campaign. After he quit running, I decided that I was one of the few members of the group who had not yet stepped up to run D&D and decided to try my hand at it. However, my campaign wasn't going to be by-the-book like Gary's, not by a long shot. Nor would it be the same extended ultra-killer Monty Haul power trip dungeon crawl of Paul's game.

No, my game would be closer in spirit to what Homer had done, in trying to bring the flavor of his favorite novels to the gaming experience. I've mentioned before that I'd had a very ambitious plan for my first V&V campaign that I never came close to fulfilling. Well, this time would be different. I had more time and experience under my belt, and I had a better idea of how I wanted my games to run. And I already had a campaign world in mind.

I had actually tried to start the campaign a couple of months before, as a Dragonquest game. Dragonquest was a roleplaying system put out by SPI, the wargaming publisher. SPI published lots of games that simulated battles in the Civil War and World War II, but also put out some other odd games in other genres, like the mini-game classic, "The Creature That Ate Sheboygan" and even a game based on the prime-time TV soap opera Dallas. Dragonquest was their version of a role-playing game, with the rules written in numbered sections, just like their wargame rules, for easy reference.

I hadn't played Dragonquest much, but I liked the many ways in which it was different from D&D. Everything was rolled on 10-sided dice, which was simple. It emphasized a wide range of skills that D&D didn't include. Magic was not a Dying Earth-style fire and forget system, but a point-based system that split magic into several different disciplines, so that you could never know exactly what spells a given wizard might know.

So at some point during Gary's campaign, I announced that I was going to start a Dragonquest campaign in the evenings, but for many reasons, it didn't happen. Instead, I decided to make it easier on everybody and stick with a rules system we were all familiar with.

This was going to be a huge, epic campaign. The idea was that the party of adventurers would start out low-level nobodies, like any other D&D game. But, influenced by Raymond Feist's D&D-adapted novel Magician, as well as game-mastering advice absorbed from the many Champions books I'd been accumulating and an interview with the brilliant Aaron Allston that I'd read somewhere (The Space Gamer, I think), I decided to put my players on an epic quest.

Actually, several epic quests. They would start out as adventurers from the same village sent on a quest to solve the mystery of a poisoned spring. Then they would have a few more adventures to season them and spread their fame, including at least one adventure that would gain them the attention of a high-ranking noble. Then they would travel to the capital of the Empire, where they would come to the attention of the Emperor himself, who would send them on a quest to recover his lost seven years, which would put them at odds with corrupt nobles, evil clerics, anti-paladins and an ancient demon.

The first adventure went very well, if a little too quickly. The players were sent to discover the source of the poison tainting their village's water supply. It turned out to be blood from a wounded Gold Dragon that was causing the problem. The characters drove away the Lizard Men harrying the dragon, then went on a long journey in search of the rare Snow Lily to make a healing potion for the slowly-seeping wound. The search was supposed to take several sessions, but they did it in one. I didn't have nearly enough side-quests set up, and the ones I did, they didn't really follow.

That should have been my first warning.

Weeks of game time went by in one long afternoon-evening-night session, and when it was over, everyone agreed that they'd really enjoyed themselves. The next game, I set up another not-quite-as-epic quest for them to follow--a horde of Wemics (lion-centaurs), nomadic tribes from the plains, had gathered under a single leader who had discovered a royal seal from the ancient kingdom . The Wemics were threatening war against the Empire in a bid to set up a new kingdom in the plains. The characters were sent in as a sort of special ops force to steal the seal. Think of the Seven Samurai infiltrating Sitting Bull's camp and you're in the ballpark.

It was crazy, suicidal, but I had decided I was going to run things more like Champions than D&D. The characters were the heroes of the story, and it was my job as the DM to help them achieve coolness, not try my best to destroy them. So I fudged a lot, and made much out of the Wemics drunken confusion to keep the players from being overwhelmed, and everybody agreed it was intense, but fun.

So now I was on a roll, but I could tell that the whole "There's this awful menace threatening the world that you can only stop by finding this one rare McGuffin" approach would wear thin really fast. So I did a change-up. The characters traveled to a nearby city for training and supplies, and I informed them that the city was going into curfew because of a visit by the Emperor's Inspector General.

The plan was that the Inspector General would learn of them through some adventure in town, and then send them off on another adventure that would gain them a powerful friend in court.

Unfortunately, as soon as Gary heard the words "lock down" in association with "Inspector General," his paladin panicked. He insisted that the party camp outside the city, then run in the next day, buy their stuff and take off. He wanted nothing to do with the I.G.

This, of course, would leave me with nothing to run. The in-town encounter wouldn't happen, they wouldn't meet the I.G., they wouldn't get the clue to the dungeon--a clue I was particularly proud of: a music box with a jeweled lid in which the jewels formed a map of the region leading to a lake, and the shape of the box itself matched the shape of the lake with the dungeon being located at the point on the shore that matched the latch on the box--and all my work would be wasted.

One of the other players (I believe his name was Robert) realized that, yeah it was a railroad, but if they didn't get on the train, they couldn't enjoy the ride. So his thief snuck into the city and broke into the palace where the I.G. was staying. And got caught, leading to the rest of the party being arrested. The I.G. then basically forced them to go off to the dungeon and bring back what they found there to prove their innocence or something, which led to hard feelings in the group and Robert's character being banished from the party by the paladin.

The players solved the puzzle, found the dungeon, cleared it out and found the item the I.G. wanted. But instead of going back to the city and gaining a powerful ally, the paladin decided to beat feet in the other direction. I had based my world very roughly on a map of North America, with the city the players had been sent away from being either Houston or New Orleans (memories fade and the maps are long lost). Gary and the others basically took off west, heading for the Rocky Mountains.

Which left me double-fucked. Not only could I not get them into my Seven-Years Quest, but I had never really filled in the map on the Western side. I had no idea what was out there. Not only that, but I had the feeling that no matter what adventure seeds I threw out there, Gary's Brave Sir Robin of a paladin would flee screaming from them. I was triple-fucked.

I think I ran one or two more perfunctory adventures, where they ran into lost temples on the far frontiers of the Empire or something, but my heart wasn't in it any more. I had designed the entire world to lead up to an adventure that now wasn't going to happen because the players didn't trust that I wasn't going to try to wipe them out, and the idea of running a fleeing fugitives campaign didn't appeal. So I let the campaign drop.

Big Game Wednesday - By the Book

As I mentioned last week, our Champions campaign was put on hold because Gary wanted to run Dungeons and Dragons, which didn't much appeal to me. Of all the systems we played, D&D had become one of my least favorites.

But Gary wouldn't be dissuaded, and we had to play something, so D&D it was. But Gary had more in mind than just running a game. He intended to run nothing but by-the-book D&D, and to pull all the adventures from TSR modules. No more mutant homebrew rules and homegrown worlds; this was going to be real D&D, baby.

The campaign didn't last very long. The party never came together very well. There were a lot of problem players, and I'm sorry to say I was probably one of them. But let me complain about other stuff first.

What I mainly learned from the experience was that TSR's modules may have had cool promo copy on the back covers, but they weren't great adventures. A lot of situations were very obvious to experienced gamers (or at least to me), and there was a lot of railroading (I'll give the perfect example later).

My first character was a paladin, for whom Lawful Good did indeed mean Lawful Asshole. In our first adventure (which was probably The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh), the first chapter of a lizard man trilogy of adventures, the party was exploring an abandoned house. And as we came across stuff in the house that was obviously only there to fuck with us (abandoned clothes in the closets, a dead body on the floor), the paladin pronounced that we were not there to rob the house, nor to loot from the dead.

Some of this was simply principled Lawful Good roleplaying. But another part of it was based on the fact that I'd been looking at the Monster Manual fairly recently and been struck by the monsters that only existed as a means to dick with players for being players.

See, aside from the mythological monsters like the dragons and demons and hydras, or the monsterized versions of real animals like giant rats or giant spiders or even dinosaurs, there was a class of monsters specifically designed to fuck with players' tactics and players' stuff. There were monsters designed to look like normal floors and ceilings. There was a monster that looked like a treasure chest, that would bite your hand off if you tried to open it. There were Disenchanters and Rust Monsters, who would target your weapons and ruin them.

And in the case of our adventure, there was something in the closet where the clothes were--maybe some kind of worms in the fabric, or maybe a slime in the shadows, I don't remember--whatever it was, the clothes weren't tempting enough to go near them and risk attack by whatever. So the paladin said, "Leave the clothes alone."

Our greedy thief, though, played by club president Janice (an annoying woman who always played a greedy thief and insisted on holding all party treasure until it was divvied up), grabbed the clothes and got attacked. My paladin then refused to heal her, on the grounds that she was paying the consequences for her own greedy actions.

When, a couple of rooms later, the same thing happened with a corpse on the floor and rot grubs (another pretty obvious trap), the paladin was quickly wearing out his welcome. Overall, the adventure seemed pretty obvious and dull.

The next week, we went on to the next module in the series (I'm guessing it was Danger at Dunwater), a visit to a half-submerged lair of lizard men. And this was where things started to turn sour. We found out the location of the lair and went there. And then, the group spent over an hour debating how to go in. Not how to open the door; it was unlocked. Fearful of ambush, they spent an hour debating in what order to enter, what spells to cast, which way to face once inside.

Finally, I'd had enough and declared, Wang Chi-style, that I was going in, alone if I had to. Denise, a new player who was also losing patience, had my back and followed me in. The rest of the party trailed along, feebly protesting that we couldn't just go barging through without checking for traps and shit first.

But I was sick of the whole lot of them. So we walked in the front door and were attacked by... absolutely nothing. We explored a few rooms, got hit by a couple of minor traps, and found a guy dying on the floor who managed to say, "Metamorph," before breathing his last. When Chuck asked me what I thought that meant, I said without hesitation, "Activation word for a magic wand." I had never played nor read the adventure, but that was just so freaking obvious...

This goes right to the heart of one of the problems with D&D in its traditional form. On the one hand, D&D was a game with a high mortality rate, in which you were expected to play your best game, using all your knowledge and resources, to survive the obstacles set in your way by the DM. And this is still the philosophy of the "Old-School Revival" players, who never cease to bleat about how character death is a necessary component of good gaming, because without the imminence of death, success is meaningless and all that twaddle. So using your wits to spot patterns in adventure design, spot potential traps, remember details about monsters and items, those are just necessary components of good play that will keep your characters alive.

On the other hand, as a player, you had lots of knowledge of the game that your character would not have. So, for instance, my paladin would not necessarily be an expert on wands, so he should not have known about activation words, in the same way that he should not have seen the dead body on the floor and thought, "Obvious trap" due to the existence in the Monster Manual of creatures like rot grubs. In modern gaming circles, like the "Happy Jack's" podcast, this is called "metagaming" and frowned upon. But of course, if you don't do it, you die. It makes as much sense as the Democrats' continual insistence that they are pro-jobs while simultaneously being anti-business, which is to say, none.

Anyway, we found the wand, which came in handy, because we had to go underwater to get to the final encounter area and the wand was what enabled us to get there. It was a good final battle, although we probably missed a lot of stuff, because I rarely lingered long in a room before moving on, and the other players didn't dare leave me to my fate, since I was one of the only strong fighters.

At some point, the paladin ran into trouble, and Janice's cowardly thief abandoned him to his fate (as revenge for all the humiliations he'd visited upon her, I'm sure). So I created a cleric called Akbar and ran him, but Akbar was soon just as impatient and even more metagamey than the paladin had been.

We went to this town where there had been a murder of a theater owner or something (checking Wikipedia, it appears to be the murder of a baron in an adventure called The Assassin's Knot. There were rumors of an assassin's guild, and clues pointed to a local temple. So we did some investigating, and at one point, a witness asked to meet us at a certain place and time to tell us all about it.

Well, of course, my spider-senses started screaming, "Plot device," because it was obvious to me that our witness would never make it to the meeting. So I convinced the party that we had to covertly observe/guard him all the way from his home to the meeting place, so we could actually learn what he had to tell us. And of course, because the module demanded that he die without telling us what he knew, Gary contrived to have him disappear from view behind an obstacle for just an instant, and be killed in precisely that spot. One dead witness, no suspects.

At that point, I was pretty much disgusted with the entire adventure, since there was no way we could take it off its rails for even an instant. So I went into the temple, forced a confrontation with the head priest in which I got him to show his hand, then agreed to leave town for the duration of the adventure. Then I sat things out while waiting for everyone else to actually clean things up.

The campaign didn't last very long after that. The TSR modules just weren't much fun, though we were a little excited to see what was going to happen with a new series of modules that had just started coming out, called Dragonlance. It was going to be a series of 12 modules, but only one or two had come out by then. So Gary's campaign went by the wayside.

It did have two significant outcomes, though, at least for me. Number one, it resulted in me eventually running my own D&D campaign for a brief while. And number two, it got me laid. So I will never complain too much about it.

Big Game Wednesday - Champions, Season 2

Short update this week, recounting Digger's origins as a character in a Champions campaign. The Champions home city of San Francisco had been obliterated by a nuclear bomb in the final adventure before summer vacation. Returning the next fall, Digger and the other Champions experienced strange dreams and other signs that maybe not everything was as it seemed. They soon learned that the detonation and subsequent fallout had been, in fact, a mental illusion set up by their arch-enemies in Eurostar (I think) to break up the group and remove them as a threat to Eurostar's plans.

The next few adventures were nothing tremendously exciting. The revived campaign, since it felt like a big retcon designed to absolve us of the consequences of our massive failure, felt like we had all discovered Bobby Ewing in the shower, and not in a good way. Still, we persevered, because we liked the system, we liked the way Gary ran things (mostly) and I personally liked Digger.

Although...

I was mulling over the idea of a "radiation accident," an idea put forth in the Champions 2 supplement that proposed saving a big bunch of unspent experience and then having the GM run an adventure that would basically allow you to rewrite your character from scratch to match a new character conception. In comics terms, think of that period when DC decided to change Superman from a vanilla strongman to an electric-type hero. It didn't strictly have to be radiation, mind you. If I'd still had the spell book, for instance, I could have gone on some fantasy-type adventure which would have left Digger without the Drillers, but with a newfound magical aptitude, learning the spells in the book as his new powers.

In the case of Digger, I had set things up from the beginning to allow for this. I had put forth the idea that the metal used in what would later be called the Driller Beam Generators was a special type of "living" metal (hence their original name, "Bio-Blasters"). I think the exact pseudo-scientific phrasing I used was that the ionic structure of the metal matched the pattern of Digger's own DNA, which was what allowed the metal to bond with flesh without infection or rejection.

So my concept was that at some point, exposure to a massive amount of radiation or other energy would activate the metal somehow, causing it to grow, consuming Digger's flesh and replacing it. He would end up a metallic being, but not smooth and regal like the Silver Surfer. He would be more like a chrome Skeletor, with exposed musculature made of steel cables and a skull-like face.

His powers would not be tremendously different from before, except that he could reflect energy attacks back upon the attacker and also attack at range without the huge power costs he currently suffered. Although Digger's main attack was at zero range, meaning he had to punch someone to blast them, I defined the Drillers as being able to change the focal point of the beam, with associated energy costs. The optimal focus was tunnelling range, a couple of meters in front of him; he could dig tunnels with no endurance cost. Attacking at zero range (and therefore diffusing the beam to make it non-lethal) cost him a minimal amount of endurance (3 pts per attack), but shifting focus to blast someone at longer ranges required him to pump a lot of energy into the attack (15 pts of endurance per shot).

In the end, I didn't go through with it. Because Digger had been built so cheaply, there were just lots of weak areas he had to shore up to get him closer to my original conception before I worried about changing him in a fundamental way. And several weeks into the new school year, Gary announced he wanted to put Champions on hold anyway.

We had started the school year also playing a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign in the evenings. The Dungeon Master was my friend Chuck, another Air Force ROTC guy who ended up being a navigator on cargo planes. But it didn't last very long. There were personality conflicts among the characters, and my character in particular, an elven thief named Stim, turned paranoid and chaotic. Even though we had some fresh blood in the group (including a woman named Denise whom I would briefly date), the game dissolved within a few weeks, leaving us without a major D&D campaign for the first time since I had joined the club.

So Gary announced that he wanted to put Champions on hold and instead start up a D&D campaign. Moreover, in a stark change from all the previous campaigns I had played in so far, he wanted to play the game straight from the rulebooks, without extensive house rules, which would allow him to use TSR modules for the adventures.

So one week a short time later, the sorceress NPC who had previously summoned us to the Savage Lands reappeared in our headquarters, asking us to help with another problem. When we agreed to help, she told us there was one complication: we would have to travel to an alternate dimension where things worked differently, and we might not make the trip unaltered. We passed through the gate and turned into monsters.

Gary's basic idea was that this would be our last Champions adventure for a while, and that he would use it to transition into D&D. We passed through the dimensional gate as Champions superheroes in a world that ran on Champions rules and came out the other side in a world that ran by D&D rules, transformed into D&D monsters that approximated our major superpowers. Digger, for instance, emerged from the dimensional gate as an Ankheg, a gigantic burrowing insect.

Almost immediately, we encountered a group of human fighters who attacked us. We fought back, but it was a slaughter. Our minds were still in Champions mode, a system which was very rarely lethal. While this simulated comics well, it didn't encourage smart tactical play. We all ended up being killed, and that was the end of Champions.

At least for a while.

Big Game Wednesday - Unluck and Luck

Last week concluded with Digger going on his first adventure. That was a fun campaign, though it was hampered by the fact that Gary had us start out with such small power levels. The rules recommended a basic starting point level of 100 + 150 (100 starting points plus 150 pts. in disadvantages). But Gary limited us to 100 + 100. Even after the 15 pts experience I got from the Matrix event, Digger was still very limited.

Still, we had some fun adventures. We had formed a group called the Champions (whether that's appropriate or unimaginative, I can no longer judge) based out of San Francisco. A couple of guys played some recurring NPC's during the first few adventures, sort of test-driving to see if they liked the game enough to go through chargen and play for real. So for instance, Chuck played Wasp (not Janet Van Dyne--she was basically Shrinker from the basic rules, although she was pretty much a power-clone of the Marvel Comics Wasp, so deja vu all over again) a few times, though by the time we answered a distress call from a beautiful princess/sorceress asking us to come to the Savage Lands, he had made his own character named Crystar and Wasp faded out of our group.

The Savage Lands thing was fun. There was an evil sorcerer in a tower who was oppressing the people. We basically had to do a Super Seven Samurai-type deal, where we led an army of natives to battle the evil sorcerer's army using some mass combat rules Gary had kludged up. That was when I realized the utility of area-effect attacks. Crystar had several in his repertoire and owned that battlefield, while Digger was just plunking one enemy at a time here and there.

But after we defeated his army, we had to face the sorcerer in his tower, where Digger emerged as the hero of the day. We were well on the way to a TPK (although not really, since Champions combat is rarely actually lethal), with only Digger left standing. So Digger ran away, just tunnelled straight down about three floors. Then he used his Clinging to run back up the outside wall to the sorcerer's lair at the top of the tower and hit him by surprise. After a few rounds of these types of hit-and-run tactics, the bad guy went down and the day was saved.

For some reason, Digger decided to keep the wizard's spellbook with the vague idea that he might save up some experience to maybe try to develop magical powers or something, though he never really got around to it.

But on their return to San Francisco, some bad things started happening, including the return of Wasp as a vengeful villain, intent on taking revenge on Digger for spurning her love (which was news to him). Other things happened as well, targeted specifically on Digger, until it became apparent something was going on.

For a while, I had thought it was just Gary getting creative with my Unluck disadvantage. Unluck in Champions was basically a roll you would make at the GM's discretion if things seemed to be going your way. A bad result on the roll would result in a bad turn of events (which got worse the worse you rolled). I figured Gary was just using the Unluck disad as an excuse to pile extra complications on my character.

But instead, I eventually learned that Digger was in fact cursed by a demon inhabiting the wizard's spellbook. It was weeks, months, before this came out, but finally I had to bite the bullet and destroy the thing, at which point the curse was lifted and Gary gave me a cool opportunity: I could use XP to buy up to three dice of Luck and/or buy off my Unluck.

And yes, this meant that for a while I had both Unluck and Luck simultaneously. If things were going well, I rolled to make them worse, and if things were going disastrously, I could roll for a lucky break. And yes, I did actually end up making both kinds of rolls in a single combat encounter, a dust-up with Foxbat being the one I remember specifically.

As players, we really enjoyed the campaign. Gary did a bunch of things right. He had a good variety of adventures, where one week we would stop a bank robbery, the next week we would fight international nuclear terrorists, and then battle sorcerous monsters the week after that. And he would have character subplots revolving around Hunteds and things that played out over several weeks. We never got bored with that campaign.

By the time the end of the school year rolled around, Gary decided to have a big season-finale adventure, involving us in a race against time to stop a bad guy from detonating a nuke in San Francisco.

A race that we lost. Oops.

Big Game Wednesday - Digging Deep

When we left off, Gary had proposed killing off Matrix and letting me use her experience points to build a new character. So now I had to come up with a new concept.

I had been getting back into Spider-Man at this time and found the idea of his core suite of powers--agility, speed, clinging--very appealing. But I didn't want to make a straight Spider-Man clone, and I wanted a bit more offensive punch. And for some reason, my mind kept coming around to an obscure DC hero named the Human Bomb. He was an old Quality hero who had been ported over to DC and appeared in a Justice League crossover in the 70's. His hands had been coated in some sort of liquid explosive formula, so he would punch stuff and it would blow up.

Well, the liquid explosive thing was pretty silly, but just the visual image of a punch resulting in an explosion sounded really cool, and it was easy to model in Champions (Energy Blast, 0 Range). So, why would things blow up when he punched them? I got the idea of some kind of device attached to his hand that would release a blast of explosive force. But why would anyone ever have something like that?

I don't know if I got the inspiration from seeing Tunneling on the list of powers or not, but the idea of railroads using dynamite to "dig" through mountains came to mind. And as I toyed with the idea of my Spider-Bomb character a bit more, I tossed in pieces of Wonder Woman (using his incredible reflexes and the metallic blasters on his arms to deflect bullets) and Karnak from the Inhumans (sensing the weaknesses in a structure, an ability he would use infrequently to demolish buildings in one blow).

I named the character Digger and rounded him out with a few skills and some weaknesses based on his origin story, the standard stuff about being an innocent dude who learned too much and was used as the subject of horrible experiments by an evil corporation. That's his original costume on the left there, as part of a team concept I was playing with for a potential comic book (note on the picture--that's Matrix floating above Digger's head, and there on the left is a preview of a mysterious character soon to appear in Hero Go Home ). One thing I did to save points was to buy his blasters as a Focus.

Focus is a Champions term for a power that derives from a device, like Green Lantern's Power Ring. Now, the key element for determining whether you could get points for a Focus was whether the character could lose the item, and therefore lose the powers temporarily. If they could not (such as Thor's hammer, which always returned to his hand and was too heavy for anyone else to wield, with one exception which I don't even want to think about right now), then the item was a Special Effect and not a Focus.

Digger's blasters were permanently attached to his arms, which would normally eliminate them from consideration as a Focus. But I needed the points, so I came up with the idea that the blasters contained a special type of battery that would recharge from the electricity produced by Digger's nervous system. These batteries would need to be removable for frequent maintenance--cleaning the contacts and such. So Gary let me buy them as an Inaccessible Focus, removable after I'd been knocked out for a round or so. Oh hell, was that a bad idea.

All in all, though, with Digger, I had finally gotten the hang of building characters for Champions (and yes, I guess it does say something for the complexity of a system that takes you three tries to come up with a decent character build). He was not a haphazard collection of powers tied into a blank slate of a character (like Blaze) nor was he a blatant rip-off of a particular character or a particular comics publisher's universe (like Matrix). He was a character with strengths, weaknesses and a unique history who made use of the flexibility inherent in the Champions system.

So the next week, when the heroes returned from the mission which had resulted in Matrix's heroic sacrifice, they found a new hero waiting at their headquarters, drinking a beer and wishing to apply for membership. And he immediately proved his worth when Eurostar took over a nuclear missile base and set up hordes of agents to guard it from attack. Digger simply tunneled the team under the base and bypassed the agents, taking the heroes directly to their big fight with Eurostar. The day was saved, and a new hero was born.

Next Week: Luck and Unluck

Big Game Wednesday - The Hand That Was a Face

I'm going to put off discussing you-know-what until next week, in honor of Relaunch Week, and instead would like to mention another facet of Champions that is long gone and never mentioned: Mark Williams.

Who's Mark Williams? Well, he was the guy who drew about 80% of the illustrations for Hero Games from the time they started until mid-1984, including that cover you're seeing on the right there. Just like the illustrations of Dave Sutherland III and Dave Trampier gave AD&D its particular flavor, Mark Williams's illustrations gave Champions a lot of its particular personality.

I'll be honest. I hated Williams's artwork at first. I thought it was clumsy and amateurish, and it was a big part of why I didn't buy Champions the first few times I looked at the books in the game store.

And it really was clumsy and amateurish. His figures were stiff, his anatomy was all over the place, and his inking was really uneven--sometimes solid, but other times depending on liberal amounts of zip-a-tone to cover for deficiencies in the drawing. Part of it was limitations to his abilities and part of it may simply have been the workload. In the 2nd Edition Champions rulebook above, he had 25 illustrations. For books like Enemies, he illustrated every single villain.

But over time, I grew to like his art. I don't know whether he really got that much better or I just got used to his quirks and became more forgiving as I grew to like the game his illustrations accompanied.

Part of it was that he never took himself too seriously. Many of his illustrations displayed a kooky sense of humor, like this illustration from Champions II.


And frankly, he did improve a lot. His work certainly became a lot more ambitious. For Champions II, released in 1982, not only did he do most of the interior illustrations, but he also did a full color wraparound cover. That same year, he painted the color cover for Espionage, a Champions spin-off game that became the first step toward establishing Hero as a universal system.


Yes, the figures are still stiff and clumsy, and the layout could use some work, but the execution of this cover showed an artist growing by leaps and bounds over his previous work. Not only was he improving technically, but he seemed fearless in attempting to illustrate anything he was asked to.

And then in 1983, Hero came out with a magazine, the Adventurer's Club.


That's a solid piece of work. It's not perfect, by any means, but the blacks define the figure well, and I really like the iconic nature of the costume design. Not only was Williams the artistic face of the company, but the Super-Hype article in that first issue also mentioned that Williams was writing the first supplement to the upcoming Justice, Inc. game, an adventure featuring Nazis and zeppelins titled Horror in the Sky. I was really looking forward to that one.

But something happened between this issue and mid-1984. Hero was bringing in other artists to help with the workload, and Williams's work slowly disappeared from the products. He did some more work for Adventurer's Club. He drew the cover to Champions III in early 1984, and split the interior illustrations with Mike Witherby.

But in mid-1984, his work suddenly disappeared. He had a few illustrations in Justice Inc., including a hilarious cover to the Campaign Book featuring cameos from a bunch of different characters from movies and pulps. He pencilled the cover to the third edition of Champions, which Witherby inked, but aside from a couple of reprinted illustrations from the original Champions rulebook, the interior art was all by Mike Witherby and Denis Loubet (this is not a complaint--I love Loubet's work).

And after that, nothing. The first supplement to Justice Inc. was released, and it was Trail of the Gold Spike by Aaron Allston. Williams's Horror in the Sky never saw the light of day.

I always wondered what happened to him, but never seemed to have good enough search-fu to find anything definitive. Turns out (according to this page), he moved to L.A. (right after I left) and got into special effects. Worked on "Aliens," among other things. Sadly, he died in 1998, but I'm glad to see that his move away from Hero was a move up, not just a move out.

But I still wish they had released Horror in the Sky.

Big Game Wednesday - Enter the Matrix

Some time went by after that disastrous first Champions game. We were probably playing Bushido, though it's hard to remember so far back now (how far back? oh, you'll see most vividly soon enough).

Gary was still talking about running Champions, but maybe starting over with a new campaign now that we'd had an introduction to the system. And maybe not starting off brand new characters by taking on Dr. Destroyer (who was basically the Doctor Doom of the Champions world, a ludicrously powerful villain who just gets more ludicrously powerful with every new edition of the books).

So I started thinking about what kind of character I might want to build and came up with a crazy concept. Both Gary and I were pretty avid Uncanny X-Men readers, so I came up with this character called Matrix. The idea was the classic Marvel snake eating its own tail.

See, in the early 80's, Chris Claremont and John Byrne had put out an X-Men storyline called the "Dark Phoenix" saga, in which Jean Grey, Marvel Girl, had died and been resurrected as Phoenix, a much more powerful hero. And at one point she got brainwashed by a bad guy, which had the end effect of turning Phoenix into Dark Phoenix, an immensely powerful and destructive force who flew off and destroyed a planet before coming back to battle the X-Men.

There's much more to that story, but it doesn't really apply here. My idea was, what if that planet full of aliens that Dark Phoenix killed came looking for her? I mean, take the idea of ghosts being souls that have unresolved anger, who are unable to move on until their issues are resolved. Now multiply it by a few billion and have all those ghosts move en masse to Earth, searching for revenge against Phoenix. They find a pretty young woman at random, someone they can possess and empower to facilitate their vengeance.

That was Matrix, a young woman who possessed by the souls of x million D'Bari (or "asparagus people" as John Byrne described them) looking for some payback against Phoenix, who destroyed their planet. Most of the time, she's just plain Sandra Dobyns, an aspiring dancer. But she hears voices in her head, lots of them, and when she's under stress, the voices get louder until she loses control and explodes into Matrix, who can fly and shoot power beams and read minds and wants nothing more than to kill Phoenix, if she can ever find her (of course, what she didn't know was that Phoenix had already been killed off by this time--irony!).

This is her pencilled in over the character silhouette from my old character sheet, with a hastily-inked version underneath to give a better idea of what her costume looked like.



How 80's is that? Big ol' feathered hair (huge hair, like Starfire from the Teen Titans, but even bigger, anticipating the whole Power Makes Your Hair Grow thing from DBZ by over ten years), glowing eyes, Kirby dots, and freaking leg warmers! What the hell was I thinking?

Anyway, Gary was torn over the idea. On the one hand, he was like, "Finally, somebody puts some thought into a character concept instead of just throwing together a bunch of random powers or else making a straight clone of a Marvel guy." But on the other hand, the fact that my character concept came straight out of Marvel canon didn't thrill him, since he wasn't really running a Marvel universe. But he allowed it and we started to play.

Problem was, Matrix turned out to be a pain in the ass once the game started. The idea was that she would start out not knowing about Matrix, and once she did, she'd be kind of like Bruce Banner, afraid of her other self and reluctant to change. Which made getting her into the action a big hassle. I only played her for a few weeks before Gary came to me to talk about retiring Matrix and bringing in somebody else.

His suggestion: Matrix gets a big heroic death scene, sacrifices herself to save the rest of the group, and then I could use what little experience she'd gained in building a new character, one who would fit the group dynamic better. So that was what we did. And all things considered, it was for the best. And it was a demonstration of good GM'ing on Gary's part, a valuable lesson to me.

My third try at a Champions character would finally be the one that stuck. You know who I'm talking about. Stay tuned...

Big Game Wednesday - We Are the Champions

So as I said last week, there were two main new gamemasters I was playing with a lot after moving beyond D&D. I talked about Brian last week. The other was Gary.

Gary was a skinny nerd who was not nearly as cool as our old core group, but I actually turned out to have more in common with him than with some of the other guys, because he collected comics, and so was about the only guy in the group I could really talk comics to.

Somehow he had gotten into the Air Force ROTC program, although there was nothing about him, from his slight frame to his geeky snort-laugh, that said "military." In a bit of game to real-life irony, he had played through my Hammersmith nuclear missile base V&V scenario and scoffed loudly at how unrealistic it was; a few years later, he graduated, became an officer and was assigned to a real-life nuclear missile base. He was one of the guys who would have pushed the button had any button been pushed, and looking back, I can't think of anyone I would rather have had with that job. Gary was trustworthy.

So one day, he says he wants to run Champions.

We were a little bit doubtful. Number one, none of us had any experience with the game, but I'd looked at it in the store, and it looked cheap and complicated. The production design on the game sucked. The typesetting was in this sad san serif font that looked almost typewritten, and the illustrations by Mark Williams were stiff and clunky, not nearly as cool as the Jeff Dee and Bill Willingham art that had graced the Villians and Vigilantes products.

Adding to my dubiousness was just the idea of Gary as GM. He didn't seem to have the imagination it would take to keep the game fun.

But Gary asked us to please trust that the system really worked well. It wasn't as complicated as it looked, and it was really fun once you started playing. So we gave in and picked up our dice to roll characters.

But no. You don't roll characters in Champions. You build them from points. This way, Gary said, you could have exactly the character you wanted, with no randomly rolled powers to shoehorn into your concept.

So we spent probably two hours or more building characters, and it was a pain in the ass. I thought I would maybe play a Human Torch-type character, but I couldn't find Flame Powers.

Gary said that the powers weren't categorized that way. You defined what effect you wanted your powers to have, then bought the powers that did those things, then assigned "special effects" to them. So if I wanted to blast flame, I would buy Energy Blast and call it "Fire."

I ended up designing a male version of Starfire from the Teen Titans whom I named Blaze, with medium high strength, flight, force field and energy blast. I also bought him Martial Arts (not knowing that Martial Arts was usually reserved for low-strength characters).

Gary had told us to keep our characters at around 8-10 dice for attacks. Blaze came in on the low end of that, with 8 dice of strength and an 8d6 Energy Blast (which, still not really twigging to the "special effects" concept, I defined as a blast of "energy" - okay, "solar energy"). It didn't take long to come up with the basic outline of the powers I wanted, but getting everything bought and paid for with disadvantages, along with the advantages and limitations on powers which forced you to consult tables like this...


Was a real time sink and made my head hurt. Just for further illustration, here's the Champions character sheet and the Villians and Vigilantes character sheet.



See how much more open the V&V sheet is? How much whiter? Although the one really cool thing that the Champions character sheets had going for them were those character silhouettes, so you didn't have to be an artist to design your character's costume. Just draw in some boots, gloves, belt and mask, and you're ready to go.

You know, after 2-3 hours of math.

So we finally got our characters built and the next thing we knew, we were winging off to this island to confront somebody named Doctor Destroyer. We ended up fighting some robot guardians, who were virtually impervious to my weak energy blasts. So I flew up to one and used my Martial Arts to kick him, which doubled the dice of damage. Gary nearly spit Coke all over the table when he realized I had bought Martial Arts on a 40 STR, so was going to do 16 dice of damage.

I pulverized the one robot, but the other characters were dropping one by one, and then I ran out of Endurance, my Force Field dropped, and I was easy prey. Game over.

Man, I thought, Champions sucks. I'm never playing that again.

Ha.