An excellent video today on mindsets and how we see games. How we get stuck in a frame of mind and can't seem to escape a game or an assumption of what the hobby "is" to us.
Please watch all the way through, subscribe, and like! Positive content like this elevates the hobby, and it helps us grow as gamers.
This is really good stuff; check it out.
Both games sit on the shelves right now, and both earned their spot. They come from the same stretch of years when many of us were done waiting for the next AD&D book to give us what we wanted. Point-buy, disadvantages, 3d6, tools instead of menus. GURPS and Champions (and the wider Hero System) still feel like they were built by people who expected you to finish the design work yourself.
They do not do the same job.
These were created in a special era of DIY roleplaying. Times were different back then, before the Internet and cell phones; days passed slower, and as kids, we could spend an afternoon poring over tables of numbers, adding columns, and using the scientific calculators our moms got us for school to play games with.
They were fun days, and I miss them.
GURPS is the better character builder. The skill list, the advantages and disadvantages, the way a person coheres around what they can actually do and what costs them something—that is still the strongest character system I have. You can dig in for an hour and walk away with a specific person. The setting books remain some of the best overviews out there. When I want gritty, low-fantasy, modern, historical, or just a solid simulation that doesn't break under its own weight, I pick up this game. It has never let me down. Two books still do most of what I need. The rest of GURPS is optional depth, not a requirement.
Champions is the better power builder. It focuses on effects, frameworks, and what makes a special being special. Skills exist, but they are secondary. The system assumes the interesting part of the character is the powers and the limitations that shape them. When the point of the game is high-magic, comic-book energy, or designing abilities that do exactly what you want (down to the area of effect or the trigger), this is the cleaner tool. It handles high fantasy and supers better than GURPS, and it stays coherent at those power levels. GURPS Supers holds up, but Champions was built for that job from the start.
If D&D 4 and 5E are all about powers, then Champions and Hero System can replace them directly. A game that is light on skills, all about powers, and depends on encounter math? That describes every version of D&D ever made, and Hero System was doing that before TSR went bankrupt.
If you see a hero as a person who also happens to have abilities, GURPS tends to win. If you see a hero as someone defined by what their powers do and how those powers interact with the world, Champions tends to win. Both assumptions are valid. Both systems reward the time you put into learning them. Both let you stop waiting for the next crowdfunded book to hand you a half-thought through subclass.
I still reach for GURPS when I want the character work to carry the night, or when the setting books already did half the research, or when I want something that feels reliable across almost any genre. I reach for Champions when the powers are the point of the exercise, and I want the freedom to build them without fighting the system. Low-powered, skill-heavy, interpersonal games still feel more natural in GURPS. High-powered, effects-heavy games still feel more natural in Champions. That is not a flaw in either design. That is why both still have a place.
They share the same era and a lot of the same DNA. Neither one asks you to accept that the designers already decided what a fighter or a mage is allowed to be. Both assume you will do the work. Both have the crunch reputation that comes with that assumption. And both, once you know them, make a lot of modern option-bloat feel unnecessary.
GURPS stays the game I can lose myself in for character design and solid play. Champions stays the specialist for when the special abilities are the center of the table. I enjoy them for different reasons. There is room for both.
Modern gaming assumes everyone is a superhero, so there is no real reason to play a dedicated superhero game unless you are playing with licensed characters. But I am tired of the licensed IP heroes; they are too overused. We have seen them too many times, and there are zero stories left to tell with them.
Sorry, they're overused and have told every story in the X-Men and Avengers. The Justice League is a worn-out retread tire. Batman is Batman. Spider-Man will forever be a new hero. I don't even want to tell those stories in a roleplaying game. What is the point?
We should be reading about Spider-Man's grandkids' adventures these days, not Peter Parker's 50th reboot. Batman should be dead and buried, and an inspiration for Gotham's newest crime fighters. Same with the villains, and please stop with the cringy "Harley in every group" nonsense. Get rid of her, too.
Seriously, let these humans grow old and die. Replace them. Give me new heroes. Give me new stories. Give me new groups. And not self-inserts or lame characters, more about social media identity and ideology instead of heroism. I want heroes. Those who sacrifice. Those who give toward greater goods. Not self-centered heroes who sit on a couch, order takeout, and talk about their relationships.
I want villains, too. Despicable bad guys who hate society, and not reflections of people the writers don't like on social media. I want real, classic, heinous villains with powers who reflect humanity's seven deadly sins. Give me something biblical, literary, and important.
I have tried many superhero games, and they all failed me. Some only play with licensed characters, and they never change. Others are too lightweight and simplistic. Others are too complicated and simulation-heavy. Nothing touches Champions and Hero System.
Nothing.
Once I learn the system, I can do anything I can imagine. Also, while GURPS would work, Hero System is more focused on powers than skills. Hero System has too few skills, and while I first saw that as a weakness, I now see it as the game's focus and strength. If a game is laser-focused on powers, let it do that, and let's not have a skill list 300 entries long. I don't want a game focused on skills if it is focused on powers and designs.
Yes, the game is dense and requires mastery on both the player and game master side. But these are power tools for superhero roleplaying. Once you get basic competency and learn how the system works, you can do almost anything you can imagine.
The real benefit is that you can replace D&D 5E entirely and create unique, stylistic, power-based fantasy heroes who can do anything you can imagine. Nobody puts you on a level track; you aren't limited to designer-created subclasses, and you can develop any power you want based on your "power source."
If the game is only about powers, give me a game that lets me build anything I can imagine and set me free. This is a basic user versus power-user thing, and how sometimes it is better to start as the power user and save yourself the pain of buying books you later realize are limiting and just taking advantage of your wallet.
Yes, this is different and "not D&D," but who cares? If my necromancer has a death-ray laser finger and a "skull shield" that floats around him, you can't do that in D&D 5E. Maybe I want him to fly on "ghost boots." Go intangible and walk through walls. Summon a laughing skull as a floating attack minion.
Yes, that sounds like a supervillain. But he is unique; there will only be one, and no other necromancer in the world will follow that build. A high-level 5E character will be the same type of character, but stamped out by a prebuilt template.
My character will be mine.
Someone else will have their own idea of what a necromancer is, and that character will be theirs. A "she-necromancer" may summon an army of skeletons and throw exploding skulls. She has a ghost form and a fear laugh. She is cool, too. Not a subclass build, and you don't need to buy a new book for her to have any of that - just my imagination.
Uniqueness is why you suffer through learning the Hero System.
Why do people go crazy for personal individuality, yet strictly adhere to character conformity?
Laziness over individuality, I guess.
What makes this game even better is the plethora of unique characters in the universe. They are all based on superheroic archetypes, but each is unique, fun, and not what I am tired of. I could kill them all off and start again. I can ignore them all and start with new ones. I am not obligated to have Superman and Captain America running around in my universe. There are no retcons. Characters can die and retire. Villains can be killed or locked away. New characters can appear, heroes and villains. Heroes can fall into infamy and become villains. Villains can redeem themselves and join the forces of good. Others can exist between them, and who knows which side they are on, probably only in it for themselves.
If I ever include IP characters in my game, they will all be just as vulnerable, just as expendable, falling to villainy, or passing the torch.
I was doing a few battles between a level one, level two, and level three party against 1-3 HD creatures, and wow, is this a good game. Taking damage means something! There are no easy rests, so every choice is hard. If I take damage, do I spend a healing spell I may need later for comfort? Or do I save and push forward a bit banged up, but still within my comfort zone to keep going?
Institutionalized resting is one of the worst rule additions we have ever seen in the game's history.
D&D 3 started pushing the video-game mentality hard into the game, with players treating every adventure as a CRPG, where they feel they could "go back to town" every 15 minutes to refresh resources for the next encounter. Adventure writers never pushed the idea that "you get one chance" in the adventure, or that the monsters get reinforcements, ambush the party on the way back, flee, or kill the captives they were trying to rescue.
The game's acceptance of risk-averse behavior destroyed D&D's heart and soul.
So they introduced institutionalized resting into the rules, using hit dice as a resting resource to encourage parties to "stay in the dungeon" and "avoid going back to town." What was already a terrible assumption- that D&D is a tabletop video game- started killing the game. D&D got more and more like a video game, with infinite-use MMO spells that made casters "shooty" and made all the classes feel like MMO counterparts. Rogues became "DPS classes" and "everyone got healing."
Going back to OSRIC, I see the original game again. Your fighter is down to 16 HP from 20, and you are accepting the risk of going into the next room with a wounded frontline fighter. Your magic user has two of three spells left. Your cleric still has healing. Your thief took 2 HP of damage and is down to 10 HP. Your archer is down 5 arrows from 20. Of the 700 coins your party can carry, you have 150sp, which doesn't really pay the bills.
You look at those resources and decide you can push further. In some cases, like a rescue, you must push further, or the townspeople will be sacrificed to the frog god. You have a time limit. The road here is dangerous, with encounters along the way. You don't want the froglings to reinforce the entrance and trap you in the halls on the second foray. You have surprise and initiative, and coming back tomorrow means the fights get harder against a prepared enemy with traps, allies, outside patrols, and poisoned weapons.
While they're surprised, keep pushing the attack.
You look at your party's state again and wonder if you'll get out of here alive.
The elimination, simplification, and abstraction of resource management removed all of the tension and challenge from the game. You no longer need to be a "smart poker player" at the table to judge odds; D&D 5E flat-out tells you the party should "win all encounters." There are no losers. There is no risk. There is no danger. There is no tension. Gold means nothing.
There is no reason to play the game.
It is all self-centered "story gaming" and fake reasons to engage with the narrative. The world doesn't care and doesn't matter; it is a backdrop for your interpersonal drama. Like players on an "RP server" in an MMO who never challenge themselves or play the game, the world just sits there as a backdrop for their stories. That is fine, and they have the right, but it gets boring and pointless once nobody plays anymore. D&D 5E has institutionalized the story-game mentality, and all those monsters and treasures really don't matter. Your powers don't matter.
The rules say "everyone wins" and "you should be able to safely have X encounters in a day."
Build optimization is not D&D.
The truth is, I can roleplay only using a ham sandwich. I don't need a 16-page printed 5E character sheet to roleplay and tell stories. All those special powers and action economy choices slow the game down and distract from the core gameplay loop. When we sat down to play, we made no build decisions or turn optimizations within an action economy, and all decisions stayed in the game, live, as we played. Press forward or retreat? What is the cost? Can we go a little longer? Do we take this fight? How do I spend these limited resources?
And my OSRIC classes"do more" than a comparable 5E version. If I pick a ranger in OSRIC, I am the same ranger I am in 5E, but the game is easier to play. If "something comes up that a ranger should know how to do," like setting a trap or building a shelter, I ask my referee, and my referee lets me do it. That does not need to be a subclass ability, a feat, or written into the rules. Today's games tell you if it is not in the book, you can't do it. In OSRIC, you are what you are. In 5E, you are what the rules allow you to be.
In 1E, we used our brains and this thing called imagination, and we worked it out.
The party weighs risk versus reward.
No MMO mechanics institutionalize bad behavior.
Character sheets are simple, and the classes are iconic.
The game feels real again.
I am going through a strange phase where all my best 1990s games are making it onto my premier display shelves. Two exceptions are Traveller (more 1980s) and Dungeon Crawl Classics (2010s), but all the rest are solid 1990s games, around the time of the late 1980s and early 1990s:
Two notable differences: AD&D is OSRIC, not the 1990s AD&D 2nd Edition. Vampire: The Masquerade is not represented. I have VtM, but I don't have room for it. Some of the editions are newer, such as Hero System/Champions and GURPS. Traveller for the 1990s should be MegaTraveller, which I have, but the base game and Cepheus fill the need nicely. Open and community licenses always win in this house.
Cyberpunk should be on these shelves too, and I will look for it. That is one that is in my garage now, but it belongs with them. Classic Shadowrun belongs here too, but I am a little cool on the 6th Edition. Maybe 4th will work.
Palladium and Rifts are on my shelves, and they bring me more happiness there than the 5E books they replaced. All I want are good times and great memories, and 5E feels hollow and lifeless to me. Some Open 5E editions are great, but I haven't really played with any of them, and I'd choose a game I played with friends in the 1980s and 1990s over today's crowdfunded, too-many-books versions.
Palladium is a system I can count on. Rifts is still awesome, and it is the game "your mom gets you if she is really cool." Not my words; one of my friends said that. And she was a really cool mom.
I will play a game with great memories over a modern game I feel nothing for.
As the 1980s fade into history, the real nostalgia upon us will be for this era, and I feel it. The 90s were a decade of change that saw TSR go bankrupt and D&D's future come into doubt. Comics ruled the era. Magic: The Gathering killed tabletop RPGs. But some of the best, highly tuned, post-Golden Age games were made during this time, and they delivered on the fantasy just as well. Champions/Hero System remains one of the best superhero games ever written and one of the best generic systems outside of GURPS.
If D&D 5.5E is Windows 11 Home Edition, Hero System is a Linux distribution for power users that still gets the job done. Hero System is one of those games that, once you learn it, you have zero reason to open a 5E book again, unless your group won't play anything else.
Hero System is the best game ever designed for special powered beings. I don't care what genre you play; if it relies on special powers, you should play Hero System and be happy here. Once you know how to DIY a power, you will never accept game designer handouts that are poorly thought through and never balanced. I have been burned too many times by 5E books, and even some official ones, to keep seeing them as competent game designers.
The biggest difference between Hero System and GURPS is that Hero System focuses more on powers than skills, while GURPS does the opposite. GURPS has the best setting books. Champions focuses on whiz-bang comic book powers and is the best system for them. GURPS does gritty, low-fantasy games best, whereas Hero System does high-magic, high-fantasy games best, and that feels more like 5E to me.
Hero System beats 5E for me since I can design anything I want and stop waiting for crowdfunding books to fill the next gap. Do I want a Pokemon to show up? I can design the Pokemon, and the book has all the powers somewhere. This is the easiest system for an "anything goes" campaign, and one of the best-balanced "powers" games ever written.
The "complete" books for this Hero System are simplified, easy-to-grasp starter sets that are the best entry point into the hobby. They have one for fantasy and another for superheroes. Champions Complete or Fantasy Hero Complete: start there and never look back. These are one-book games that will get you started.
Even Western Hero if you want a more grounded game without special powers. This is a Hero 6th Edition game, so it uses the newest rules, and since you are not as focused on powers, it is a good way to introduce yourself to the system. If all you are doing is fist fights and shooting guns, you will get a good introduction to combat and skill use without powers coming into play.
OSRIC carries my AD&D game, and I have For Gold & Glory, the 2E clone, and it deserves a spot. They're the same game, just presented differently, and FG&G even omits demons and devils, as 2E did. FG&G drops the assassin and adds the bard, though 1E bards exist in other community add-ons. For me? OSRIC is it, the greatest game ever written and the community version of it. I need nothing else.
I still like FG&G a lot. The game is beautiful and worthy.
GURPS always has a spot, too. We loved GURPS in the 1990s, and our love of Car Wars lasted into 2000. Our Car Wars campaign lasted 20 years. GURPS is one of those games I can pick up and never be let down by it or have it break. When I want something solid, reliable, and the best character-creation tool in the hobby, I reach for GURPS.
With GURPS, I don't need 5E. I have the tools to do it myself. While Hero System is similar, both systems are great and do what they focus on very well. GURPS is the better character builder; Hero System is the better power builder - though GURPS Supers is no slouch. If you see heroes as reflections of a character, you will gravitate towards GURPS. If you see heroes as someone defined by powers, Hero System will appeal to you more.
I have Edge Studios Star Wars on my shelves, but Star Wars is dying, and I may swap those shelves for something that speaks to me more. Sorry, Star Wars, we loved you, but you did this to yourself. You lost your way and made yourself irrelevant. It is a sad end for a great brand, and I feel D&D is following the same path. I'd rather play my older games and keep the good memories than be subjected to negativity and strife over the game's future direction. I don't care about the future direction for some of these games anymore; I have the versions I love right here.
Another missing 1990s game is Rolemaster. I have this in an upstairs closet, and once I make room, it can escape onto my shelves. While I love RMFRP, I would support the new version to keep the company around. It is still a worthy, solid 1990s-style game that delivers.
I am probably missing a few here, but these were our 1990s games. These deliver for me. These have memories. Some have fallen off, but most still feel good to me.
While I love the 1980s, the 1990s were the second-best decade for tabletop gaming. Even the second-best stands a mile above gaming today, as long as some of my 1980s stalwarts hang around on the shelves.
I got an email today from Wizards (from my D&D Beyond account that I never use) stating:
Big changes have come to Wizards Accounts
It now runs on a new account system, giving you more digital access across Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast brands.
Sign in to check out your account profile and make sure everything looks up to date.
If you have social accounts connected to your profile, you'll need to relink them the first time you sign in.
Your Wizards Account is an all-access pass to the Hasbro + Wizards Family of Brands.
So it is not really a D&D Beyond or Wizards account anymore; it is a Hasbro "all-access pass." Notice they put Hasbro first. We will look back on this moment as the first signal of the next major change in D&D and every other game they make.
When I log in, will I get Transformers, MTG, and GI JOE news pushed to my feed before I have to dig for the D&D section? I get why they did this; why let new products fail to reach an audience when you have a huge platform here that isn't helping them? But I also don't want Transformers spam before I set up a D&D game. This also solves the problem of platforms like YouTube not pushing their live-play shows, and having those wither and die because nobody knows they exist.
This is clearly a "my audience is mine" sort of play, and also a statement that social media platforms aren't doing their job pushing the hobby they once were (or the price to feature content as a premium partner has skyrocketed). YouTube telling D&D creators to "find something else to make videos on" seemed very sus at the time, and I always wondered if the checks stopped coming in and YouTube started pulling D&D videos off people's recommended lists.
If that is the case, I can't blame Wizards for taking their audience and running. If Wizards can get D&D YouTubers to create over there and share revenue, that would be good. I doubt it, though.
From the FAQ:
Which brands, websites, and products are included?
You can use your Wizards account to log in to a variety of existing and future Wizards and Hasbro products. Current products include:
- Magic: The Gathering Arena
- Magic: The Gathering Companion App
- EventLink
- Wizards Play Network (WPN)
- Store & Event Locator
- SpellTable
- Secret Lair
- Dungeons & Dragons Beyond App
- Dungeons & Dragons Beyond Website
- Dungeons & Dragons Store Website
When future games such as Exodus release, you will be able to sign in with your Wizards account as well.
So this unifies the MTG and D&D logins, which is a bit surprising it took this long. This feels like they're trying to become a more generic "gaming platform" rather than a collection of games with different sites and audiences. With new releases coming out (such as Exodus) that people have low confidence in, this gives them a channel to farm interest and push the IP, and the same could be said for some of their video games, though AAA gaming is dead and dying.
If the next Xbox and a good video card cost close to two grand, then yeah, consoles and AAA gaming are dead. People will run games off CPU graphics for the next 10 years. Video cards will slowly die, and will the silicon be affordable enough to replace them? It is a good time to be a retro gamer, though, and even the retro RPG space is better than many current offerings. Cutting-edge PC gaming is facing an extinction-level event. As PC gaming gets more expensive, Wizards and D&D will have less money.
So, survival is job number one. If Wizards has to pay through the nose to get its new products out there, fewer channels are covering them, D&D YouTubers are quitting and cutting back, and YouTube isn't recommending D&D, it might as well consolidate its market and push new games directly to its customers. What else can they do? I don't blame them.
This also feels like something a company does before it preps itself for a merger or sale.
When the original Marvel Superheroes went out of print, Champions saved superhero gaming for us. This was in the early 1990s, when Marvel and Star Wars were still small brands, and TSR lost the rights to Marvel. We were left with a pile of Marvel gazetteers, a DC game we liked but never really played, and superheroes were changing to the Image Comics and Wildstorm style.
Marvel was dead.
Even trading cards couldn't save it.
And we were left with a few superhero games without a system. Sure, we could still run Marvel Super Heroes (MSH), but the game ran its course, and like Star Frontiers, the d100 system limited high-level play. And along came Champions.
In our home game, the Champions heroes and villains stepped all over the Marvel Universe of the 1980s. Our universes collided, and the Champions' bad guys were so much better than Marvel's. Mechanon, Dr. Destroyer, and Eurostar savaged the Avengers and X-Men simply because they were better-designed characters, not Marvel's soft, one-trick power ponies.
Champions is a professional-level superhero system designed to do anything. Unlike GURPS, which is more skill-focused, Champions focuses purely on powers and abilities, with skills as a minor part of the game. Champion is professional home audio, hi-fi gear, expensive speakers, heavy-gauge speaker wire, great amps, a powerful subwoofer, a professional mixer and receiver, and a record player with a diamond-tipped needle.
Champions felt like pro home theater gear compared to the cheap Sears hi-fi record player in a fiberboard stand with a black plastic lid and two cassette decks on top of a cheap Marvel Super Heroes AM/FM radio.
And what did we do with this system?
We converted our D&D Mystara campaign to it. Oh yes, this was good stuff; we were playing 5E in 1993. We had superpowered fantasy heroes long before many of you were born. Magic spells were multi-powers; elemental spells could summon ice creatures, and the speed chart was your bonus actions if you could afford them. The spells were good, and you could design them down to the hex pattern of the AOE. You could put magic spells in items and give them charges. Someone designed a magic mind-control helmet and made the goblins in the first cave in Keep on the Borderlands fight the other factions until they died. You still can't do this in 5E, yet we got up to all sorts of incredibly fun, silly stuff back in the 1990s.
Did the book care where the powers came from? No. If you were a mage, you had these limitations; if you were a cleric, you had those. You got more points for spells and powers. If you were a fighter, you had ability scores in the 30s and 40s, and you were a muscle-bound freak with tons of hits and skin so thick that crossbow bolts bounced off of it.
So I recently compared this system to 5E, and it is still the better game. It's dense at the start, but the complexity stays linear and flat as you go up power levels. In 5E, it just gets worse: turns drag on because nobody knows what to do, and battles become one-sided blowouts. All that indecision for a predetermined outcome.
And there are far fewer books than a 5E library.
And they do 1000 times more.
I can design any power fantasy in any genre with these books. And I am not paying game designers to do it for me and trickle out the next cool thing in a book that costs 50-80 dollars. All I need to do is learn the system, and I never need to blow money on 5E books that slow-drip options and force us to buy the book twice for the VTT version.
Champions and Hero System: you make your own balance. If you don't know the system, your character dies until you figure it out and get the next power you need to defend against whatever killed you last time. Low-powered, humans-only games are like GURPS with a very limited skill list. No superpowers; there's little reason to play, but the system is solid and still works well. As a universal resolution system, it runs fast, and it is skill-light.
And Champions characters were much better than Marvel characters. These were characters built for that high-end audio setup, far better tuned and crafted than heroes who let the spandex do their marketing. And, to be honest, you didn't care if a Champions character died; they weren't anyone, but another hero could replace them and pick up the torch. The game was dangerous because the characters were a bit generic and relied on comic-book tropes.
You could run an X-Men game where the characters regularly died and were never resurrected or retconned back to life because marketing complains and the artists don't know how to draw anyone else. We don't need the Krakoa recycling-waste-management island to bring everyone back so new writers can ruin them all.
Your characters died, and you created new ones.
Yes, you could retcon with a "comic book trope" and bring popular characters back to life, but you never had to, and you didn't need to. The fallen heroes got a marble statue in the city park, and people remembered them for their sacrifices. That was a part of the fun of playing a superhero RPG; few get that these days. We are forced to play with the official characters, and they never change. Nobody dies. Nothing changes. You play with the official sock puppets, and you are allowed to be happy within IP allowances.
Champions' heroes could fall from grace, and they could fall hard. Anything could happen. Go ahead and make that choice; the next writer won't save you or reset anything. You may end up the villain. You will probably go out in a blaze of glory like James Cagney in White Heat. However you choose to fall from grace, there are no guardrails here, and there are no retcons. The danger is real, and one wrong power blast could vaporize a crowd of innocent bystanders.
Just one small mistake can start a downfall, and it takes a lot to walk the true path of a hero. You fall, and you fall hard. After the crowd destroys your statue, the city will tear it down in disgrace. That can't happen to a Marvel or DC character. They are "profitable IP" and can never change, and when they are sold to the next company, here we go again.
And you don't know how good a superhero game can be.
Hero System went from the garage today to my coffee table, and now it's heading to an upstairs shelf.
