Champions (role-playing game)
tabletop role-playing game
Champions is a role-playing game published by Hero Games designed to simulate a superhero comic book world. It was originally created in 1981 by George MacDonald and Steve Peterson in collaboration with Rob Bell, Bruce Harlick and Ray Greer.
The latest 2010 edition uses the sixth edition of the Hero System, as revised by Steve Long, and was written by Aaron Allston.
Description
Champions, first published in 1981, was inspired by Superhero: 2044 and The Fantasy Trip as one of the first published role-playing games in which character generation was based on a point-buy system instead of random dice rolls. A player decides what kind of character to play, and designs the character using a set number of "character points," often abbreviated as "CP." The limited number of character points generally defines how powerful the character will be. Points can be used in many ways: to increase personal characteristics, such as strength or intelligence; to buy special skills, such as martial arts or computer programming; or to build superpowers, such as supersonic flight or telepathy. This point system was praised by reviewers for the balance it gave character generation over random dice rolls. The stats in Champions are Strength, Constitution, Body, Dexterity, Intelligence, Ego, and Presence.
Players are required not only to design a hero's powers, but also the hero's skills, disadvantages, and other traits. Thus, Champions characters are built with friends, enemies, and weaknesses, along with powers and abilities with varying scales of character point value for each.
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