The transition from high school to college is a big one for most people. You meet a whole new circle of friends. You live on your own for the first time. You probably try a lot of new things. It's a chance to "reinvent" yourself.
And if you're a huge geek who plays roleplaying games, it means you have to assemble a new gaming group.
In my case the college was the University of Chicago, and the new gaming group consisted of five or six of my fellow residents in stately Hitchcock Hall. We played a couple of different roleplaying games, but the one that we returned to most often was Champions, published by Hero Games.
Champions was (and still is), a superhero roleplaying game. It wasn't the first game to tackle the four-color world of comic-book superheroes, but it was the most successful, and remains in print to this day with only minor changes in mechanics.
Until I played Champions, all the games I had played used random character generation: you "rolled up" a character using dice to determine what that character's attributes were. That usually created an interesting mix of above and below average abilities.
Champions didn't do that. It allowed players to design their characters. If you wanted to play a super-strong indestructible hero, you didn't have to sit around rolling dice hoping for the result you wanted; instead you allocated points to the abilities you wanted the character to have. You could get extra points by taking "disadvantages" — which were typical comic-book problems like "Secret Identity" or "Hunted" or a "Dependent Non-Player Character."
Not only that, you could even design and fine-tune the powers your superhero had. The points bought actual game mechanical results, but the "special effects" were up to the player. So I might have a fiery superhero with a "flame blast" which I defined as a straightforward "Energy Blast" effect doing 1 die of damage per 5 points in the power (I still remember that without having to look it up). A different player might have a character with a "flame blast" ability, but define it as a physical attack. A third person might decide his character's "flame blast" was an explosion. And so on.
There were "frameworks" to allow characters to have several closely-linked powers without having to buy all of them at full price. My "flame powers" Multipower might include the aforementioned "flame blast" plus fire-powered flight, the ability to control fires, and maybe a "heat flash" capable of stunning foes without harming them.
All of this required a lot of calculation. Champions had a highly non-intuitive and fiddly way of calculating the cost of powers, involving a string of multiplying factors. Recall that this was all back in the middle 1980s, when personal computers were still bulky and expensive and most college students didn't have one. Instead of cranking it out on a spreadsheet we all did this by hand on endless sheets of scrap paper, with lots of erasing and scratching-out as one tried to squeeze out a precious few extra points by clever rounding off and "min-maxing." I typically reserved my weekends for game-geekery, but some of my acquaintances spent considerably more time at it. (One member of a different gaming group devoted so much time to designing Champions characters that his grades suffered and he had to transfer to another school.)
I learned a lot about game design from Champions. The process of designing characters clarified the distinction between game mechanics and "chrome" — the aesthetic component of a game which are not embedded in the mechanics. That led me to think about game mechanics in general, and to appreciate the value of having a consistent underlying logic to the game rules.
Champions's effect-based set of game mechanics proved relatively easy to adapt to other genres and settings. Instead of superheroes you could use the Hero Games system to run futuristic cyberpunk detective characters, or fantasy wizards.
This was an idea whose time had definitely come by the middle of the Eighties. Everyone was jumping on the "multipurpose game system" bandwagon: Hero System, GURPS, Torg, Basic Role-Playing, Dream Park, Rolemaster, doubtless many others I'm forgetting. All were based on the same seductive idea of building one robust but flexible game system (or adapting an existing system to have the necessary flexibility), and then churning out an endless supply of "genre supplements" for specific campaign types. The advantages were obvious: players would only have to learn one set of rules, once, and publishers would be able to sell many times more games.
Problems with the model appeared a few years later — I'll go into that issue more in some future post, but the short summary is that "realism" means different things in different game settings. But the idea has never gone away completely. The HERO system remains in print, and I've even written some books for it.
Champions also completed my transition to fully-plotted adventures. A comic-book style story has to have a villain, and that villain has to have a plan, and ideally there should be some fun set-piece action sequences. These are not the sort of things one can throw together on the fly by rolling some dice on a random-encounter table. Especially not when designing that master villain and all his henchmen requires as much fiddly number-crunching as creating a new player character. I never sat down to run a Champs game without a fully-prepared scenario.
Perhaps because I had already spent a couple of years playing Call of Cthulhu, my superhero adventures had more of a Batman feel than, say, Superman or the X-Men. There was always a mystery to be solved, which in turn led the heroes to the villain's sinister plan and then a final showdown.
The combination of painstakingly designed characters and painstakingly designed adventures made this phase of my gaming life the most "story-like" of all, I think. In hindsight, I wonder if my adventures didn't get a little constraining and "railroady" out of the need to fit the comic-book model. Another problem I noticed was that as the point-based heroes gained character points through experience, they tended to converge, buying up optimum attacks, shedding inconvenient disadvantages, and trading quirky individuality for game-mechanical effectiveness. (Since my Champions days I've noticed this problem with other games; another topic for another time.)
Being a college student meant I didn't do as much gaming as I did in high school. The academic workload was heavier, I had to do things like buy groceries and cook dinner, and gaming had to compete with all the other entertainment options available on a university campus in a major megapolis.* All of those factors meant I didn't play as much Champions as I did D&D, Traveller, or Call of Cthulhu. But I had fun with Champions, and I'm proud to have written some products for that game system. Excelsior!
*Also: girls.
For two examples of thrilling adventures which could have been Champions adventures if I'd put superheroes in them, you can buy my new ebook!
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