The Unhinged Champions Game

Ever have one of those game sessions that completely changes how you see a game? Well, I had one recently, with the Champions/Hero System. Now, in hindsight, this could have happened just as easily with GURPS. But GURPS feels like it comes with built-in genre-toolkit limitations and toggles, since the system has generous toolkit support, plenty of books that toggle certain things on or off, and cinematic combat rules.

Champions has suggestions, but no rules enforcing tone or realism. We get this in the Hero System 6th Edition rules:

"Some modern comic books, which attempt to portray the “actual” effects of superpowers (i.e., people being mutilated, killed and warped by superpowered attacks), show this sort of high level of “realism.” Dark Champions campaigns often thrive on it. This approach may appeal to GMs and players who like to emphasize the tactical elements of game combat, or who enjoy stories dealing with the ramifications of their characters’ actions." - Hero System 6th Edition, Volume 2, page 269.

There is an assumption of four-color heroism; the art all seems to fall in line with the theme, and everything feels like it is a "bam pow!" level of Batman TV show violence with superheroes swinging punches and using powers, guards and thugs getting "knocked over", and the violence level generally fitting with the art and feeling of the game.

And the above paragraph explicitly allows unhinged superhero games in the "Dark Champions" genre. There are suggestions for lighthearted and romantic games "because the campaign allows for it," but nowhere in the rules are limits like "this or that must happen because of the tone" present. Where GURPS has toggles and cinematic combat rules, Hero System is more old-school and leaves everything 100% up to the GM.

You can probably see where this is going.

But I will take a couple of side roads before we get there. D&D 5.5E, the game that never lets you die, puts death behind an "are you sure?" dialog box. Instant death is "a single blow with leftover damage equaling negative max hit points" - and not this; it says "single blow," so this is NOT cumulative. A character with 60 hit points only dies at zero hit points with a single 60-hit-point single-blow hit, though any hit is a death-save failure (crits are two failures).

In my unhinged Champions game, enemy thugs were getting sliced in half by my anti-hero group, and limbs were flying. Fire blasts were incinerating bodies, coring out torsos, and melting skin. Arrows were going through eyes. Mental attacks were scrambling brains. Constriction attacks were maintained until limbs were severed. The bodies were everywhere, and the blood fell like rain. It was just "math damage"; there were no death saves, and only outside first aid or healing could stabilize them. No rules stopped us; the damage was done, and we interpreted the overkill results.

It is just math, and the math does not care.

Granted, yes, GURPS can get clinical like this. But GURPS feels like it has guardrails and controls on tone and violence. I can say, "That does not happen here," and it won't; the world isn't like that, and those things just don't happen. If you are using GURPS to simulate a GI JOE cartoon, the world works like it works: enemies always parachute out of shot-down planes, and nobody gets hit by a laser.

In Champions, all that happens is due to GM Fiat and group agreement, and there are no rules to control tone. It is very close to GURPS, but GURPS will give you tools where Champions leaves it 100% up to you. Both are very deadly games (GURPS, I feel, being more so), but Champions has soft guardrails based on agreement, where GURPS has toggles, rules, and tools.

In fact, that paragraph in the Hero System rules opens the doors to the unhinged style of play, and it is officially supported and recognized in the rules. This doesn't just open up realistic superpower damage versus normal targets; by extension, it opens up all sorts of unhinged styles of play, including permanent character changes. If "Doctor Mutagen" uses his mutonic ray on a hero, then that is that; that character could be changed permanently. You see this in DCC, and the door to this is open in Hero System.

There are times in D&D and other modern games where I feel I am not allowed to make a ruling that permanently changes a character without player approval. Cozy has been codified into the rules.

It is funny how modern games put safety padding around damage and death, and even death in Daggerheart will automatically grant you a cinematic "death scene" like you were in a stage play and expecting applause for your masterful thespian performance. D&D 5.5E gives you so many outs that, by the time you roll that final death save, the DM will just wave it off and have something save you at the last moment because of all the drama that has built up to that fateful moment. D&D has decreed what resting does and how it heals everything. Draw Steel (great game) tries to shape heroism and model it with rules, and the world is shaped directly by the rules.

Even the concepts of "hit points" and Palladium's SDC shape the experience with artificial health concepts. Even Hero System has "stun," but even that has a lethal-damage component.

Modern game designers seem obsessed with controlling reality and experience, even more so than older games.

Good or bad? Well, if you assume every game is about equal and handles reality the same way, you are in for a rude awakening. GURPS, Hero System, and Aftermath are probably some of my top-five simulation games, and once you've played something purely simulation, you begin to realize how game designers purposefully warp reality to shape experience.

Not good or bad, but it is a choice, and one to be aware of.

This is also something you may have a preference for.

Modern games are overly concerned with shaping heroism, tone, what can happen, resting, pacing, flow, injury, and death. They include "X card" rules that give players veto power over the game and the referee's rulings. These games have so many rules shaping tone and realism that they feel like they live in alternate universes. There is an artificiality to these games where things seem synthetic and unreal; things don't normally happen like this, but in these games, they work a certain way.

These games aren't math; they are an "experience." The experience works a specific way.

You get into a synthetic, artificial-food metaphor here, where you ask yourself, "Am I a hero, or is the game forcing me to be one?" Is this longsword lethal because of the math and rules, or are the rules getting in the way? Is there designer interference in reality? Should a long rest completely heal a shotgun blast to the face, and does a 10-minute break heal getting shot by a handgun?

When do game rules inject a false reality into the experience, and do we even notice, or do we assume that's how things normally work?

My unhinged Champions game, where my anti-heroes were unhinged and slicing through a team of enemy guards and soldiers, woke me up. How much do I like rules artificially shaping the experience? When do "reality control rules" interfere and override my GM rulings?

It is a question that never came into sharp focus until last night.

Dragonbane as a Post-OSE Game

I pulled Dragonbane down to the living-room shelf again. Last time it stayed upstairs because 5E made another promise it couldn’t keep, and that may have been my fault, but eight shelves of books for one game overwhelmed me. What changed is the other half of the shelf question: after 5E left the room and OSE became the traditional B/X stop, I still wanted something simple that felt like a combat dungeon crawler.

OSE is the clean game. One book, short sheets, characters that do not need software. You can open a small book and start in five minutes. But the careful version of that game still asks for the 10-foot pole, the torch count, and the preference for not fighting if you can avoid it. I have seen designers recently who said, “D&D is fundamentally about combat.” Newsflash: it wasn’t always this way. Maybe since 3E, but not before that. We were still thinking our way out of fights in 2nd Edition.

B/X is an amazing game, a true classic, but a combat-avoidant game is not what every table wants once the 5E books are in storage. Some nights I still want the dungeon to be about the fights, not about the resource management and the choices that keep the fights from starting.

Dragonbane does that without adding a library. The sheet is still the whole game: six attributes, skills that include the weapons, a few heroic abilities, Willpower, and hit points equal to Constitution. Professions are just the starting package- skills, gear, one ability- then the character moves through the world on a quest. You roll under on a d20. A 1 is a Dragon, a 20 is a Demon. Boons and Banes instead of a stack of modifiers. You can push a failed roll by taking a Condition, which then makes related checks worse.

The engine is just as simple and straightforward as OSE and B/X. It gives me a traditional skill system and open-ended development. This is what I want in a game.

Combat is what makes it feel different from careful OSR. You draw a card from 1 to 10 every round. The cards stay up so everyone can see the order and sometimes swap them. You move and take one action. Parry and evade are real choices. Weapons have small features that matter. Monsters often just hit, and the Game Master rolls on a table for what happens. It is still lethal—hit points do not climb, and a Demon or a stack of Conditions can end you- but the design wants the fight to happen. The point of the game isn’t avoiding fights; the goal is to finish them.

That is the post-OSE happy place for me. Not a better OSR game or a lighter 5E. A simple, sheet-driven game that still feels like a combat dungeon crawler, without the 12-page character sheet or the “fight and you are dead” feeling. It stays in the one-book zone and the night can still be about going into the room and fighting.

The bigger shift from OSE is that advancement is skill use instead of levels. You mark the skill on a Dragon or Demon and roll to improve it at the end of the session. Still simple, different rhythm. Plus, this hits all the wonderful notes a skill system gives me. This is good stuff. My character is not locked into 14 to 20 levels of pre-planned advancement where I know the entire road ahead.

Right now it is on the living-room shelf next to the other books I am looking at again. I do not know if it stays. I know it answers the specific question that OSE left open: something simple, still a character sheet, still a dungeon, and the fights are still the star of the show.

Breaking the Habit

I play solo now. Life’s too busy to put real effort into a 5E group, and honestly I don’t want to. If it were one of the other games on this list, I might make the time, because those feel like a better deal. The default 5E package just stopped being worth the hours I actually have.

The only 5E I still open is the Tales of the Valiant PDFs, and only if I turn multiclassing off. It’s still the same family- same rolls, same slots, same class bones- but between Talents, Lineage and Heritage, and the background stuff, most of what people dip for is already covered. Dropping multiclassing just makes that the rule instead of a suggestion. I’m not sitting there building combo characters. I’m running a regular party when that’s what I feel like, without the rest of the modern 5E distractions.

Nimble and Shadowdark are the 5E Lite versions that still get used. Nimble keeps the modules and the monster books but cuts the waiting: you just roll damage (miss on a 1, explode on the max), three actions, and fights don’t stall. Shadowdark keeps the ascending AC and advantage so the dice feel familiar, then strips almost everything else down to a character on a card, low hit points, torches that burn in real time, and roll-to-cast. Both let me do a night of dungeon delving without the full head-load. They’re not what replaced the habit. They’re what’s left of the feeling once the habit is gone.

The actual replacements are different.

Draw Steel could be the 4E replacement I’ve wanted for years. It has the grid, the feeling that everyone has something interesting to do, and the early-level energy my brother and I liked. It skips the late-game HP slog and the daily-power treadmill that eventually wore out. The 2d10 tiers mean you’re not wasting turns on binary misses. It’s not trying to fix 5E. It’s just aiming at that dungeon-chess feeling without making me carry the rest of the history. The Encounters book and Codex help.

Dragonbane is the quick one. One book, official solo rules, and you can sit down and get something done in the time you have. I pulled it into the living room because it turns into fun instead of homework.

OSRIC is still the classic. The newer editions keep stacking feats, subclasses, and software on top of a core that already worked. When I want a traditional night, none of them beat it. The extra layers are just overhead for solo.

GURPS still has the best character design. The point-buy means something, the advantages and disadvantages are part of the person instead of afterthoughts, and I can build who I actually want without reverse-engineering a class. More work than Dragonbane up front, but the work is on the character, not on figuring out how the current edition’s menu fits together.

Mutant Epoch is just a lifetime of post-apoc d100 charts. You roll what you get, and the excavation loop plus the tables do the rest. For solo, it’s the opposite of holding a bunch of class engines in your head- the system hands you the situation. It’s also completely outside the fantasy conversation, which is nice when the point is leaving 5E.

Champions is Superhero Battletech. Segment combat, precise power builds, numbers that model something specific. If I want supers that feel like units with costs and capabilities, this is still the one. It doesn’t ask me to care about whatever the current superhero discourse is doing in other games. The default Champions universe is better than most current comic-book universes in Marvel and DC, and all I need to do is add in my favorites, and I have an instant "best of" superhero campaign with batteries included.

None of these need me to rejoin the 5E argument or pick a side. The online chaff and anger were part of what made 5.5E feel empty to me. These either came before it or ignored it. They get me to the table on the time I have- whether that’s a fast Dragonbane night, a Draw Steel fight, a GURPS character that actually means something, or a Mutant Epoch chart that just hands me the next problem. The Lite options stay around when I want the familiar shape without the rest. Everything else can stay in the garage or my upstairs closets if I want it where I can find it.

Off the Shelf: Dragonbane

I pulled Dragonbane out of an upstairs closet today. There’s room on the living room shelf now, so it came downstairs. Star Wars is heading into that same closet.

Last time I wrote about Dragonbane, it sat on the living room shelf for a while and then went back into storage. It was hard to start. The core set is beautiful, the art does a lot of the work, and Free League’s production quality is still the best in the hobby, but something about it never quite clicked the way the OSR books or the games I already knew how to run did. It felt tied to its own mythology in the same way Forbidden Lands and RuneQuest do. Shadowdark could be any world. This one wanted to be the Misty Vale. I also kept reaching for the games that already lived together on the same shelves. When the system is different enough that the rest of the library doesn’t play with it, the nights go to the games that do.

That hasn’t changed. Dragonbane is still its own thing. Roll-under d20 skills, conditions that matter, Boon and Bane dice, Dragon and Demon results, initiative and treasure cards, professions that open up instead of locking you into a class track. It is closer to a fast, skill-based BRP cousin than to B/X or 5E. The solo booklet is actually in the box. The adventures are there. The standees and map are there. You can sit down with the core set and run something without needing a second shelf of support.

The living room is the place for the Free League games that other people recognize and the ones that turn into play without a lot of setup. GURPS is already there. Mutant Epoch just joined it. Star Wars is going upstairs into the closet Dragonbane just left. Dragonbane fits that room better than it fits the premium wall with DCC and Palladium. Those two already get the nights I actually want. A third fantasy rules set that wants the same attention starts to split time I don’t have. This one doesn’t ask for that. It isn’t trying to replace the games I love. It is a different lane: heroic, a little chaotic, quick to get moving, and not an OSR book in disguise.

The test is the same one everything else is getting this month. Can I generate a character, pull out the cards or the solo booklet, and have thirty minutes of actual play before it starts to feel like work? Character creation is short. The resolution is one roll under a number. The conditions and the cards give the table something to touch. That is more than a lot of games manage. Whether it stays out or goes back upstairs is the same question as the rest of the boxes that have come down lately: does it still turn into fun, or is it another set of books waiting for a night that never shows up?

For now it is on the living room shelf. The art is still good. The rules are still short. The solo support is still written into the product instead of promised later. That is enough to give it another look. Star Wars can sit in the closet it used to share with this one.

Modern Multiclassing is a Design Failure

I've watched a few Draw Steel design videos, and the reasoning for dropping multiclassing is solid. Wizards' own data shows only a fraction of players ever use the feature, yet it forces every class designer to constantly account for the broken combinations. They can't ship the best version of a class that exists in their heads because some multiclass build will break it. So the classes we get are already pared back, designed to "play well with other builds" so a minority of players can keep the option.

Eleven percent of D&D characters are multiclassed by level 2. Twenty-seven percent are multiclassed at level 20. Almost no campaigns ever reach level 20, so that second number is mostly noise. The real rate most tables see is closer to one in six or one in seven characters. My experience matches that. When multiclassing shows up, it is almost always chasing a specific combo or an exploit. I have rarely seen a pure story-driven multiclass that was also suboptimal and still fun to play. The ones I have tried were genuinely terrible. The character stopped working. So the actual user experience skews far more toward rule exploits than broken-but-flavorful characters, and that latter category shouldn't be something a new player can stumble into by accident.

In the original game, multiclassing was mostly a non-human feature paired with level caps. It gave demi-humans something special while the limits stayed punishing. It was never intended as an open tool for everyone to use on everything. Modern D&D has treated open multiclassing as a core feature since 3.0, and it has broken the game ever since. 4E tried to roll it back and mostly failed. At this point, I see the entire feature as a design failure. It is used infrequently, and when it is used, it tends to break the game. Worse, it permanently taxes every class that gets designed. The game can never be its best version because designers are always forced to design for the worst multiclass interactions.

If D&D were going to keep multiclassing, the whole game would need to be redesigned around supporting it. My shelves are already full of skill-based, classless games that handle "I want some of this and some of that" cleanly. GURPS and BRP do it without the constant balancing tax.

The Draw Steel choice is interesting for exactly that reason. They refused multiclassing so they could focus on party combinations instead. That is design effort spent on something that actually matters more than making twink characters. I would rather have a game that delivers the best classes the designers can build, then makes those characters work well together so the party is more than the sum of its parts. That feels like a better use of the design time.

Off the Shelf (Almost): Draw Steel

If I could find Draw Steel, I'd revisit it. As it is, this game is lost in my garage. My brother and I loved D&D 4E, so this should be a natural fit. As it is, I bounced off the very dense rules. I never gave it another chance, which makes it feel like Cypher System to me, a game I bounced off five times before I understood it.

I like D&D 4E's design goal: make D&D a tabletop battle game. You are here to kick butt and take names. This isn't "story gaming" or soft stuff; nope, you are all "dungeon killers," and you are here to end trouble, stop the bad guys, say a few catchphrases, and go Duke Nukem on the forces of evil.

That's good stuff, and why we loved D&D 4E. The change of pace from the glacial 3E, with its 15-minute adventuring day, alpha attacks expected, and overly complicated skill point system, was a good one. With 5E, we're back in the mire of story gaming, and there are better games for that these days, such as Daggerheart or the Cypher System. A tight, balanced dungeon-battle game keeps the action on the table and people honest. With games too focused on skills and roleplaying, people get the idea they can skill roll or roleplay their way out of a situation.

In a battle game, the reason why we are here is clear, and the rules can be better balanced for great fights. With 5E, boss monsters go down in a turn and are nothing-burgers many times. The game is nearly impossible to balance, and the splat-book powergaming makes it worse. Some DMs give up on tracking hit points and just fake the boss fights to be "good fights," since doing all that work and fixing the encounter just isn't worth the time, and they will likely be wrong anyway. When the boss monster should die, it will, and who cares if a 300-hit-point boss took over 800 damage, at least the fight was competitive and fun for the table.

Give me a game where the fights are designed to work and be fun all the way to maximum level. Draw Steel and Pathfinder 2 are those games. Part of Draw Steel's problem is that people never give up on 5E or Pathfinder, and it remains a niche audience. Shadowdark also takes away people who want tension and a tight, turn-based, exploration game. There are too many games out there, and the good ones tend to fade. Still, I like 4E's tactical first combat. This should appeal to me.

But D&D 4E let us down hard since the game was barely playtested on the way out the door of Wizards. It took them two tries to fix the monsters, so we ended up with three bestiaries, and the first one was practically unusable with 1,500-hit-point red dragons. Even D&D 5E is approaching that level of math-insanity, where the damage just gets too big, my eyes roll, and the boss monster is vaporized in a turn and a half. In D&D 4E, it went the other way; we would spend 3 hours fighting a boss monster, and by the end, the boss monster was begging for it to end.

D&D 4E was a great game presentation-wise. Everything else was a letdown. The magic items were lists of the same item from +1 to +6. The rules said you were supposed to give your DM a "wishlist" of magic items for your build. I have no clue what drugs the designers were on. Maybe they weren't paying attention and were playing World of Warcraft all day in the office. Some magic items were so broken they were errattaed before the book hit the shelf. They revised this into a "4.5" with the Essentials line, but the books weren't complete and left things like rituals out. The whole game was "designed as they wrote it," and it was a huge mess.

Draw Steel is supposed to be "fixed D&D 4E" with the same design goals, and written by those who loved the game. That gives me hope, and now that I put 5E away, I can give this game a little attention, if only the PDFs, while the hardcovers elude me. D&D 5E is such a huge distraction; now that eight shelves of 5E books are (still) on their way to the garage, I have time for a lot of fun games, and to read some that I have been sleeping on.

D&D does suck the air out of the room when other games are waiting to be enjoyed or played, and it is beginning to feel like the loud person at the party who won't stay quiet so we can enjoy the fun.

The game only goes 10 levels, but like DCC, those 10 levels are all good, and they are more like "power levels" than weaker D&D levels. A good game does not need 20 levels, or 30, just a design that makes thematic sense and uses its math well. Another thing is that games with 20 levels feel obliged to give characters something at each level, and the design gets cluttered and messy. 

Sometimes original D&D with "dead levels" was better design than a game that hands out twenty levels of rewards that eventually need tracking. Ten levels, and get something each level? That's manageable, and a sane reward progression. I would rather have fewer, more meaningful levels than a bunch I will never reach and feel the need to record a dozen more level bonuses on an ever-growing character sheet. 5E's character sheet bloat makes the high-level game unplayable for me.

The art in Draw Steel is better than most games, far above ToV and A5E, and even better than most D&D 5.5E art, which says a lot. The art in these books is very good, and it is not on the eye-bleeding level of some games. They spend a lot of good money on amazing art, and it sets a mood and style that makes me take the game more seriously than many other games. I have had games I have put in storage just because of embarrassing art. Some, like 13th Age 2nd Edition, have middling reviews for the art, and I liked the first edition, so I am staying away. They put a lot of care into the art in this game, which makes Draw Steel a step above others.

The ancestries in the game are different, with a science fiction one and strangely named, similar-yet-different ones. That threw me off at first, but I can ignore the unusual ones or use them as I see fit. I wish they had a few more traditional ones, but I can't complain since I am a bit tired of the "wannabe 5E" games that give us exactly the same everything, and I wonder why I am not just playing 5E.

This time, I hope I don't bounce off.

And I find those books someday.

Winter 2026 Changes

My Star Wars Edge Studio shelf is being put in an upstairs closet. Despite having a ton of "anti-energy" for this game, it never materialized. I read the books and tried to picture what I wanted from it, but Star Wars feels dead to me, and generic hard science fiction appeals to me much more than the "put-on" Star Wars does. The new TV shows and movies ruined the entire universe for me; too much low-quality streaming garbage gave the galaxy a smell and feeling I can't shake.

And I don't have much hope when it changes hands. Honestly, given the D&D 5E model, everyone in the universe needs "force powers" to be an appealing, playable, and high-damage-output subclass. At least the Edge Studio game tries to make non-force users shine, but I don't have good feelings about the D&D version. I do like the Edge Studios "Expanded Universe" game, so it is not heading for the garage. This is probably the best Star Wars RPG we will see in our lifetimes.

Maybe someday I will come back.

Old School Essentials is going upstairs to a bedroom shelf to sit alongside my OSRIC books and other BX books. These have completely replaced 5E and Pathfinder for me. OSRIC is the better game, just because it offers the options I want: phased casting, specializations, a strong fighter, and the classic 1E feel. If I have my choice, I buy OSRIC versions first because I want 1E compatibility over BX, and that puts BX spell compendiums at a disadvantage since they don't include casting times in phases. OSRIC is the "superset game" - write for that, and BX will still be 100% compatible. Those extra bits OSRIC needs are important, and they are a small add-on that covers both games and makes for a better product.

OSE covers your new players, and OSRIC will cover those wanting the original 1E game of 1980. I have given up on the reprints, as they are not open and free to write for. Why should I bother? I support the community-supported game. This is like Linux to me, and it means something. Sure, I can use Windows for a while, but on a deeper philosophical level, I am against it. Playing and supporting the community games makes society and the hobby a better place.

And the OSRIC PDFs are PWYW, with a zero-price option, so anyone can play. The only game more permissive than that is the classic For Gold & Glory, which has a very liberal file distribution policy written into the source document. This is also out, on a shelf, and not going anywhere. If "not forcing others to pay to play" with you is important, pick OSRIC, FG&G, or Basic Fantasy. Stay away from boutique, expensive BX versions, versions without open licenses, or pay-to-play PDFs. I love some of these BX games, but they do get as expensive as a 5E habit, and asking people outside the hobby to play with them is a non-starter.

Shadowdark still stays out. Good game, and this and Nimble are more than enough 5E for me. They are small enough to be non-problems for storage and keeping them out. Small Book 5E is where the fun is in the 5E side of the hobby.

GURPS has been a favorite ever since 1.0 came out; I've loved this game. It never leaves, and it has a place on the living room shelf, so anyone who comes over can see I am a proud GURPS player. For me, this is the best full-featured generic game, and it is like 1E in the generic game sphere. This is the be-all, end-all of generic gaming, especially when you factor in sourcebook support. The only downside is the non-open license. If that matters to you, choose Basic Roleplaying from Chaosium. For me, GURPS has the best character designer in the hobby, and this matters since characters are at the heart of what I do and why I love the hobby.

Also on this shelf are my "Without Number" games, which are some of the best "I do not need anything else" games ever written. Cities Without Number is a better Cyberpunk game than many others in the genre. SWN can do both Star Trek and Star Wars easily; just change a few ship weapon names, and you are there. WWN is a best-in-class far-future science fantasy game. These games call to me, asking me why I still play others, and the simple, one-page rules summaries make play instant and easy. They are all BX compatible, so you have near-infinite adventures and toys for the system.

If you ever want to use BX as your "generic system," start here and don't look back.

BRP is a classic game, and under the ORC license, it is even better. If you know Call of Cthulhu, you know this system, and it disappears during play, with your character sheet driving the action and not the books. Under the ORC license, you are pretty much free to create your own games with this system, write adventures for it, or use the main book to craft games. This is probably one of the easiest generic systems to get started with in the hobby, and it is well worth playing this as your main game and ignoring most everything else.

Two games are taking the spot BX had in the living room, one of them being Champions/Hero System. There is an argument about why you need Champions and Hero System when you have GURPS. I still love this system; I have memories with it, and it is still one of the best "superhero wargames" you can play if you look at Superhero gaming as a tactical problem and not a roleplaying one. If I want roleplaying superheroes? It's GURPS all the way. For tactical combat and fiddly point-based power design? It doesn't get better than Champions, and the power balance feels extremely fair. Champions also feels like it scales better for hard-hitting superhero fights than human-based GURPS, with buying up defenses and hits easier and more built into the system. If I want my superheroes to feel like BattleTech mechs and wargaming units, Champions can't be beat.

Mutant Epoch joins the living room shelf! Why? It is a fun "rando game" where the system forces me to accept whatever the character creation dice hand me. Every character, I have no clue what to expect, and even my starting situation is random and unpredictable. This is one of the best post-apoc games for me: unhinged, silly, deadly, and completely random, with some excellent solo-play support. This is a cross between the classic Aftermath and 1E Gamma World, with a little classic Palladium TNMT thrown in. This is also only a half-shelf of a game: dense, packed with fun, and off-the-wall insane fun.

You can start with the core book and have enough for years of play. When you start to add the massive rules expansions, the options multiply into the trillions of character builds (or more), and the dice control your starting situation and fate. You will be challenged to play characters completely outside your comfort zone, indentured farmers to full combat cyborgs, holographic AIs to psychic cannabis plants; you have no clue what you are going to be, and that is such a refreshing change from 5E, where you walk in the door with your idealized character concept, the game hands it to you. You sit there bored with the "what's next" feeling in your gut.

I want to be forced outside my comfort zone so completely that my mind is changed about what roleplaying can be. Few games do that, and they have to be these "random start" games like this, DCC, and a few others. Goodman Games is far enough away from the OSR now that they are their own thing, and the dedication they put into preserving the classic era and artwork continues to amaze me. They also have a robust convention ground crew game, which keeps them popular and relevant in the hobby.

If you want to see what the OSR could be, and the new ideas that could be injected into the hobby, DCC is a great place to start. What I love is that the classes have "built-in fun" without adding too many rules, and the mechanical design feels strong and gives everyone a reason to be in the party. There isn't a class or race-as-class choice in here that I wouldn't be happy to have along, and that says a lot.

Palladium and my Goodman Games books are staying out; these are either solid memories for me or expressions of myself that replace today's mainstream power-fantasy games and challenge me. Palladium is still a great system, overly confused and page-flippy when it comes to character design, but they have some of the best and most flavorful non-D&D classes in gaming, and the entire game is an answer to AD&D, sort of saying, "we can do this better," and they pull it off wonderfully. Each system of magic is different, not commoditized into a bland, flavorless, and generic framework - but each system of magic in Palladium is its own mini-set of rules and spells. Some are not "combat casters," yet they still fit into the framework. The game lets bards be bards, and doesn't force them to be killers.

Palladium is a great system, a completely different viewpoint and philosophy on gaming, fantasy, and magic. When D&D gets stale, come here and experience a new point of view on fantasy gaming. Too many games copy D&D to the point where modern fantasy feels like the same freeway in a different state. If a game just copies D&D and its assumptions, I'll play the original and not have to learn anything new or have my assumptions challenged. I am not interested in big-box commercial games that restate others, outside of open and community gaming where preservation and sharing are why we play.