Latest Roll20 game CHAMPIONS

 

A blast from the past, first tried this game back in the 80s, still have some of the old character sheets from back then. I have always had a soft spot for this game, but I have also had issues with the character design system and the character sheets. Designing  characters can be quite the task and can often lead one down a min/max rabbit hole! As for the character sheets they can be rather densely packed with information and yet at the same time lack a clear feeling of what powers they are trying to describe. In my opinion, they are a mess of plusses and minuses and often rob the character of flavour in favour of stats.

2nd edition, I also still have the first ed version

 

My work around is to not create original characters, at least at first. Far easier to select pre-generated characters for the players and for the NPCs. I have also taken care in reworking the character sheets to make clear what the powers are and how they are generated. A simple edit to ensure that the game jargon does not get in the way of the flavour. Also I have been selective in the choice of characters going for the straight forward rather than the convoluted min.max characters. I have also aimed to use low powered villains, around 250 points mostly drawn from the old Enemies book 1 & 2, while the heroes have been adjusted up from 250 points with added skills and minor power adjustments.

Roll20 has a number number of character sheets, I have selected a low tech version that is very much just a version of an old school paper based character sheet. I have created a number of macros to facilitate attack, skill, knock back and damage rolls that are attached to the avatars, but it is overall a rather simple and therefor fun version of the game.  

Now the challenge is to actually run  a super hero role playing game. It can be a challenge to make certain that it is not just a combat game. I want the non hero ID to be involved in the plots and sub plots. I really want it to be a game where there are events that happen in the secret ID that will impact on the heroes. So, for example, maybe modifiers to combat/skill rolls due to stress in the heroes personal life.

I am incorporating some of the Day Utility Phase (DUP) system from Golden Heroes,  to define the heroes and to leverage for systems to emulate the comics story lines. Right now with only 1 player it is easy to handle the non hero, non combat aspect of the game, but should another player join us it would be good to have some more abstract systems to handle 'downtime' activities that only impact on individual characters. So I am pondering the creation of charts to randomly generate events or to handle life events, dating, family, work etc. Simple charts that tie in to the DUP system so that players will indicate how much time their characters are spending on different aspects of their life. These charts would generate complications that characters will have to deal with either in downtime or during active game play.

Scarlet Heroes

 

 Our current favorite game to play, Scarlet Heroes! I originally was drawn to it as we tend to play 1 on 1 games and this game is geared to that type of play. We ll there are now two players and the system has held together well. It does tend to encourage the survival of characters but still has danger for those players.

I dread saying this but it does bring me back to the old days. You see my RPG life started out with the D&D white box. Back then we did not know quite what we were doing, What rules there were were pretty vague and for the most part we just made it up as we went along. Over the years the D&D rules added more and more detail and things became more codified. This is not a complaint, at the time that is just what I wanted. Eventually I moved away from D&D to Chivalry & Sorcery a system that had one of the most complex magick systems in role playing, but oddly lacked coherent  systems for other aspects of the game. After many, many years I looked around at other systems of varying complexity. Faves included Basic Role Playing, Legend, Barbarians of Lemuria, Warhammer 2nd edition and even a return to later editions of D&D (including the D20 Conan Game). All have their value and each work well for certain campaigns types. But recently I decided to run a classic Dungeon crawl so I figured Scarlet Heroes would be a good fit, it was.

Now a dungeon crawl is one of those stupid ideas that I get every now and then. For some reason I have fond memories of dungeon crawls and yet I really never ran that many of them. They always seem like a fun basic adventure and I understand that the vast majority of D&D players seem to like to play them. However for me it only takes a few session of one to remind me why I do not play them. They are a very nit picky style of play. Too much detail, too much me trying to challenge the players, me trying to kill them. Also all that keeping track of treasure, equipment expenditures, you know all the little details that add flavour but slow down the game to a, well, crawl.

Yes old school gaming had players keeping track of  how many spikes they had, they kept track of rations, time etc which really takes one out of the magic of the game and turned players into bean counters. So this current campaign we certainly started off with this classic style of play but the limitations of the dungeon crawl and my own desire to move beyond simple crawls quickly took over. After only a couple of sessions I started to inject sub plots into the game that had nothing to do ith the crawl but were there to set up other adventures. So now I am trying to get away from the book keeping style and move into a more broader role play style, in other words back to my typical style.

Long winded way to get to Scarlet Heroes. What I like about this game really is the lack of rules. I can play this game on the fly with little review of the rules prior to or during the game. It allows for a quick flowing game where I can just call out for checks without the dread question; Do you have that skill?  I am treating it almost like Barbarians of Lemuria, where I look at the background generated by the players, and also any recent accomplishments that they have achieved to see what bonus might apply to their 'skill' check. But these skill checks are just stat roles with modifiers, very easy and quick to do. 

As an example one of the players had briefly toyed with the idea of starting off the game as a cleric. after some though he elected to just be a warrior, but we filed that early concept away and even suggested that he had been a guard at a temple. Flash forward to a recent game session his companion found a religious medallion which he passed onto our warrior hero. Shortly thereafter they encountered a flock of skeleton warriors and in desperation our hero presented the medallion shouted out a prayer  and made a roll to turn the undead. Well in most cases this would  most likely not work, but the free form nature of our game, and the 'simple' rules and just me liking what he was doing meant he got to roll for it. He succeeded and now based on this and the early concept of the character it seems likely that he will soon become a multi class hero. 

Now Scarlet Heroes is not the sole reason for this happening, other game systems could encourage this, hell just GM ruling that this can happen regardless of the rule set, but the free form feeling of Scarlet Heroes certainly encourages and inspires such behavior. Oddly just last week I mused about switching over to Warhammer end edition (I am a fickle GM) and even went so far as to start converting the characters over to that rule set  but as I started to select the appropriate skills it made me take a serious look at what I was doing, so I stopped, put away the draft characters and quicly returned to Scarlet Heroes.