Champions

Champions, to my mind, is one of the best RP systems ever developed. According to the professionals in the field, it is certainly one of the 100 best games ever created. To be sure, there were attempts at creating superhero roleplaying systems before then, and after, but Champions captured the true spirit of superhero roleplaying mainly by being able to create just about every character the player wanted to create, from Superman and Batman to Spider-Man and Iron Man. Or their own characters, which was half the fun of creating the characters in the first place.

Plus, it was one of the first and most successful of what I consider the third generation of roleplaying games. The third generation was where the player creating the character was able to specify everything about the character, without artificial limitations such as character classes or random dice rolling. Instead, characters were built instead of rolled, and built to the player’s specification. Of course, that also made character creation all that harder but the benefits were worth the time.

I discovered Champions in 1980, when I found it at Lou Zocchi’s table at GenCon that year. By the next year, I was running a local campaign, and that year I ran the first official or otherwise GenCon Champions game, which I would do for the following two years. Over the following years, I ran and played in many Champions games and tournaments at GenCon and in the local campaigns. The GenCon tournaments are some of my most treasured memories of GenCon. I also created many, many Champions characters over the years, and the ones below are just some of the ones I created for my games.