bb@lanl-a.UUCP (11/15/83)
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I am considering moving to superhero FRPlaying after Xmas and am looking
for voices of experience to help me out. The people at my Wargames store
all suggested Champions as the best system. I remember someone posted
an article about his/her suprhero game; was that a Champions game? Are
there any advocates of Villians and Vigilantes or other SHFRP systems?
I am most interested in reading tales of adventures, that helps me
understand the flavor of the game. Since the discussion of net.games.frp.chron
seems to have died of apathy I urge all gamers with tall tales to tell them
to us now while the telling is good!
b2 ...ucbvax!lbl-csam!lanl-a!bb
{purdue,cmcl2}!lanl-a!bbtim@unc.UUCP (Tim Maroney) (11/17/83)
I have run SuperWorld, the superhero role-playing game from Chaosium, but I have not played it. Nor have I run or played Champions, Villains and Vigilantes, Superhero 2044, or any other superhero role-playing game. Therefore, I can't provide much in the way of comparisons. However, I am willing to wager that the people who told you that Champions is the best superhero RPG are longtime players, and therefore not to be trusted to give a fair appraisal. What they were probably saying was that they had characters in Champions that they are very attached to, and were so familiar with the rules that they were able to play fast and efficiently, so they would probably not play any other superhero RPG. The same phenomenon can be observed with FRPGs; people who have never played any other system extensively are often quite adamant about their insistence that D&D is the absolutely best system around. About SuperWorld: The game is fairly new, and, as Steven Maurer recently showed, the rules are not yet as well organized as they could be. Before running this game, you should read every word of the Superheroes' Book, including the tables and glossary. However, such minor details aside, the game system itself is quite good, being based on Chaosium's generic RPG, Basic Role-Playing. If you have played RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, or any other game of this type, you will pick up SuperWorld very quickly; otherwise, learning SuperWorld will help you to pick up other Chaosium RPGs, which is well worth the effort -- I have not seen them issue a bad one yet. I like Basic Role-Playing based games because they are easy to play, having as few rules as possible, yet maintaining generality and detail, and being easy for the referee to extend if desired. SuperWorld's superpowers are quite general, and it woud be difficult to come up with a superpower that is suitable for RPGs that cannot be simulated well by some SuperWorld power, possibly with power advantages and disadvantages thrown in. (I did Rom's Neutralizer and Nightcrawler's teleport-punch- teleport-punch-etc. routine as test cases, since they're fairly weird, and they didn't require much trouble.) Adding new powers would be easy, but usually is not necessary. I know that the number of powers and power modifiers is greater than that of Champions. The combat system is amusing, but a bit slow for us here as yet, since we haven't been playing for very long. Knockback rules are fun. The last game we played, the Mighty Mauler threw Kinetic Kid through a window, across the street, through another window, across a table in a conference room, and through the next interior wall of that building before he came to rest against the next interior wall. The really peculiar part was that Kinetic Kid felt BETTER after this experience, since he has Kinetic Absorption that goes to his hit points. Bad points: I really find running SuperWorld to be a pain in the butt, what with all the operative stats and superpowers to keep up with. No doubt this will become easier with experience, but it is still a pain. I would be interested to know how bad this problem is with other superhero RPGs. In any case, I would much rather play this game than run it. ________________________________________________________ Tim Maroney, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill duke!unc!tim (USENET), tim.unc@csnet-relay (ARPA)