- x-fire wrote:
- Was just wondering if anyone has played / tried the pen and paper version and how accurate the mmo is compared to it? I read that Champions is due to be releasing a 6th edition soon (11 September I think) and surely based on that the mmo should have a plethora of new stuff and ingame content coming up?
I was one of the guys to order the 1st edition champions, and I kept up with the game a bit thereafter.
Here is how it worked.
Your game master would determine a power level for the campaign, and you would get a starting number of points (100 for example). You would then go out and 'buy' powers with those points to create your character. Powers were very basic effects like blast, which could be increased in price by advantages (eg add explosion to your blast) or decreased by limitations (eg blast only works underwater). There were no 'power sets' like there are in Champions Online. For instance you have a lot of blast type powers that are only slightly different between sets, and things like energy builders are all pretty generic except for flavor side effects.
Players could then, if they wished, take on disadvantages (eg 10pts for public identity) to go higher in point total, and there was a cap. So you would see people fleshing out their heros by giving them weaknesses and hunteds etc.
I was really hoping that this would be the first MMO that would adopt that Champions power model, where you could design from the ground level a power and pick and choose which advantages. What we have in Champions Online is an incremental step forward from City of Heros, in which you can pick and choose across sets, and decide which advantages you want to buy with each power. BUT, it is the devs that developed the sets, not the players, and the advantages are power specific. So I can not say buy a chill effect for my rocket launcher, I only have that option on ice powers.
The second huge difference is in the transparency of the game mechanics. In Champions, exactly how combat worked was spelled out in fine detail so you knew exactly how everything worked, and proceeded with full knowledge through character design. Champions Online has proceeded down the well trodden path of poor game documentation pioneered by Blizzard with Diablo. However, unlike their Blizzard counterpart, Cryptic has not put up a web page with details on the combat system that you have at say The Arreat Summit to support the game. As a result we all flounder around here in ignorance as to exactly what offense buys you, or how much strength really boosts damage etc. Some devs claim that keeping players ignorant of game mechanics aids in the immersion and is desirable; I have always found this practice annoying and lazy.
The third huge difference is in experience. In Champions you would go out, complete a mission, and earn character points that you could spend as you like. In Champions Online they have yet another incremental step up from CoH in which on some levels you can buy attributes, on others advantages, and others talents. They could have done more and let a player pump attributes each and every level if they wanted; instead they opted for something familiar and less.
As far as the world of Champions, they do have things like Stronghold and Foxbat that appeared in game support literature for Champions. But they also have things like the McKenzie brothers from the 1980s comic duo. So were this purely a Champions world, there wouldn't be so many inside jokes with no basis in the Champions world. I personally prefer the lighter touch and like the humor, as the game doesn't take itself too seriously.
I had been waiting for a game to come along and either do the Champions rule system, or maybe the GURP system (the generalized ruleset that came out of the Champions system) go online. I expected more, and Cryptic fell short. We have made progress with increasing player control over what their heroes can do, but we still have not really hit that gold standard Champions did by assigning point values to all powers and letting players mix and match whatever they wanted from the point balanced options.
Yeah it took a while to make your hero. But it was worth it. Usually one game night was character generation, then after that you would play. Those were the early days of computers, and I remember getting excited when a friend made a basic program to handle combat timing (they worked on a phase system, where high speed characters got to act more times during a 12 segment arc). Making bad guys took a while, but as a GM you knew exactly how powerful your villain was because he had a point total, and you had a well defined system for creating any power you wanted. Usually after making your hero, you would take the time to sketch him too. All of the other rulesets before Champions paled in comparison to the power of that game...D&D, Palladium, whatever...nothing came close. I remember avidly getting Fantasy Hero when it came out, then having my buds show me GURP.
