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.