Back Behind the Screen

So a couple of weeks ago, in the final throes of no-power-having (which I'll write about pretty soon), I'm visiting some game friends in their house with lights, and efamar mentions that she would like to try Champions. I keep talking about it, and Sargon keeps talking about it, how complex yet fun it can be, and she just wants to know for herself.

And the thing is, I've been thinking about trying to gamemaster again for a few years now, but hadn't gotten the nerve for a few reasons. I'd been trying to put together a very large game world that was a little too ambitious, I had been trying to adapt the Champions design into something a little simpler (coming up with some similar approaches to the guys who did the Fuzion system) with not much success, and with Sargon already running our once-a-week game, I wasn't sure people would have time to fit a second game into their schedules.

But efamar wanted to try it, and jormungandr said he wanted to give it a go as well, and when efamar said that Sargon had expressed a wish to get to be a player instead of a GM at least once, I decided to give it a try.

But instead of trying to launch a big campaign in a new world, I decided to start small. One of the biggest hurdles to new Champions players is designing a new character. There are so many options and variations, and so much math, and that's only after you've wrapped your head around the concept of the effects-based system Champions uses. It can take hours to put together a good character--fun hours for a certain brand of game geek, admittedly--but it can be off-putting to new players.

So I decided to use a fairly small pre-generated adventure with the players using introductory characters from the 4th Edition Champions rulebook. The adventure was the classic "School Holiday" by Aaron Allston, published in The Space Gamer magazine in 1982 (later expanded into School of Hard Knocks for GURPS Supers). Because the adventure's NPC's were designed with 1st edition rules, however, I also used characters from either the rulebook or from Classic Enemies (4th Ed.), sometimes with slight changes to names and powers. I threw in a quick introductory Danger Room fight to get people used to the way combat works before throwing them into the big fight. I ended up getting way more into it than I expected to.

The actual night itself was fun, after a rocky start. A couple of players weren't in great moods coming in, and I don't know if the two-page quick-start rules I sent out were actually helpful at all in introducing concepts, so the Danger Room fight didn't go quite as quickly as I'd hoped.

When the PC's got to the hostage situation at the school, they leapt forward a lot more quickly than I'd expected and hit from two fronts, so the fight was a lot less self-contained than anticipated. The encounter was supposed to be pretty challenging, but doable as long as the characters took on a few enemies at a time. We ended up running out of time in the middle of the big fight, with one character alone against a few of the enemies in the final room (he tunnelled ahead) while the others were fighting against the rest upstairs.

I was a lot more out-of-practice behind the screen than I'd anticipated. The last time I gamemastered was in 1987, so we're looking at over 25 years. It was fun, but I had forgotten a lot of the rules on things like Flash Attacks and Entangles, so I spent more time consulting the rulebook than I prefer. But people said they enjoyed it, and we're planning on getting together perhaps week after next to finish out the encounter, and beyond that, who knows?

I'm getting the itch to pick up that old campaign I was designing, although I'm having trouble choosing a rules system. Part of me wants to stick with Champions, but putting together NPC's and things is really time-consuming. Another part of me is really curious about something rules-lite, like the Fate System. You don't get that satisfying crunch of improving skills and watching your numbers go up, but it seems like it could be really fast, fun and flexible, ideal for a group of people who wouldn't have a lot of time for either preparation or play. And I've downloaded a lot of d6 system stuff that I've never gotten to play, as well, so there's that.

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.