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. 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.
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