A Game A Day (For A Year)—Finale

I came to roleplaying games in 1979, when the salesclerk at a hobby store noticed I was buying a lot of miniatures, and wanted to know if I played Dungeons & Dragons. I'd heard the term before—James Dallas Egbert was in the news quite a bit that spring—and knew it was a game, but that was about it. I picked up Basic Dungeons & Dragons the following week, and a few weeks later I was playing every chance I got. It became an obsession with me for years to come, and eventually led me to working for the company that produced it, and starting a company of my own to produce material for it.

That makes it sound as though I played D&D more or less continuously for the last three decades. Not at all. I've quit the game a few times—I haven't played since Pathfinder came out, for example; and I mostly skipped D&D’s second edition years. But while it was my single driving obsession for what seemed like years on end, in truth, by 1981, just a few years after I started, I was already looking around for other games to try.

All of my friends were. I don't think it was necessarily because D&D had lost its luster—we still played quite a bit—but more because some of us had sort of staked out D&D as “our territory,” and we had to be the first and only ones to buy the next adventure or sourcebook. We were the Dungeon Masters, and we had appointed ourselves the guardians of the sacred lore, and woe be unto those who would look upon the pages of the Monster Manual, lest they retain that knowledge and commit the sin of metagaming.

Okay, just me. I was the one who did that. I really liked being the Dungeon Master, okay? Don’t judge me.

Really, though, what’s not to like? Being the Dungeon Master made you part of a special club of insiders, so it was only natural that the people who couldn't be a D&D insider wanted to get in on the ground floor of some hot new game.

And we tried a lot of them, scouring the game store shelves week after week, looking for the new hotness. Gamma World. Top Secret. Stormbringer. Aftermath. Villains & Vigilantes. And then someone bought Champions.

It only took one session for me to get hooked—and that session was mostly devoted to making my first character.

Champions had what seemed like at the time a revolutionary character generation system: point-buy, meaning you had a certain number of points to use to purchase powers and abilities. But what made it truly awesome in our eyes was that you could get more points by taking disadvantages or placing limitations on your powers. You could have an anger-management problem, and the points you got for that would let you be incredibly strong. You could declare that your ability to fly was only applicable when you were wearing your invincible armor. You could have an unbreakable skeleton and metal claws, but be hunted by a fraternity of evil mutants. You get the idea.

My first character was named Nighthawk, and like so many of our early characters, he was a complete rip-off of a Marvel Comics character: a blind martial artist with a sonar-like sense and a cane that converted into a billy club and a grappling wire. And in addition to my Daredevil knock-off, we had non-knock-off versions of Spider-Man, Ghost Rider, Wolverine…and those were just the ones we played regularly. At one point or another, we created every character, major or minor, who appeared in Marvel Comics in the 70s and 80s—in addition to the ones we made up from whole cloth. I can remember spending long hours sitting at the table in my family’s den (where I did most of my gaming for the better part of a decade), either statting up characters or sketching the ones I'd already created. I got pretty good at freehand drawing, but I was better at modifying the blank character sketches that Hero Games provided on their character sheets.

I wish I could show you some of those old character sheets. I had hundreds of them, and I was pretty proud of a few. But when I moved from Seattle to San Diego in 2005, someone broke into my storage locker and took the expanding folder I kept them all in, among other things. To this day, my most bittersweet fantasy is that I'll find it again, that it will just miraculously reappear in my possessions, somehow simply unnoticed for all these years. But I know that it's far more likely that it all got chucked in a dumpster somewhere, within hours of being stolen, as soon as the thief realized that it contained nothing of value. I'm sure that the miniatures I'd painted and kept in a tool box probably went in that same dumpster.

After that, I didn't play Champions for a long, long time. I could barely stand to look at the books, because they just served to remind me how many years’ work and entertainment I'd lost. But then, in 2008, I found myself working on the Versus System for Upper Deck (a superhero trading card game, with separate versions based on the Marvel and DC universes), and between that and City of Heroes, the nostalgia finally got to me. I tried running Mutants and Masterminds, but it just felt too tedious. So I got out my old books, and I started running a one-on-one Champions campaign for my wife.

Keri was new to the Hero System, and it had been years since I'd run it. I had to do a great deal of research on the game to get back up to speed, but the fact that she'd never played actually helped that: I focused on relearning what I would have to teach her. But rather than trying to teach her the whole system in one big info dump, I decided to use an old trick we had tried a few times when I'd first played, back in the 80s: the “secret superpowers” method.

The concept is actually very simple. I asked Keri to describe her character’s basics—age, gender, interests, and so on—and we together we defined her character as just an ordinary person with no superpowers: a high school student with a keen interest in kendo.

Next, I asked her to give me a short list of superheroes or superpowers that she thought would be cool to play, and I chose one of them—but didn't tell her which one. I statted up a character with a similar set of powers. I then created a duplicate character sheet for her use—one that only included what her character would know. In effect, I gave her the stats for a normal, relatively athletic human, with a few mundane flaws like “Rivalry” (with her stepmother) and “Dependent NPC” (her father) to help offset the costs of her kendo skills.

We then ran through a brief scenario where she became involved in a bank robbery (Scenario 1A in the Champions Gamemaster’s toolbox), and her discovery of her superpowers: specifically, that she could turn her practice kendo sword into a kind of energy katana, and that she was protected from harm by a sort of “phantom armor” that resembled her kendo gear. She knocked out the muscle-bound superviillain robbing the bank and persuaded his thugs to surrender, then ran off so that no one would get a good look at her face.

And then we didn't play again for four years.

Not that we didn't want to. We moved across the country, got busy with work, played in (and ran) a weekly D&D game, moved across the country again, started another job, moved again, started another job, and moved again. Then, Marvel Studios started releasing movie after movie, and our interest in superheroes suddenly surged. So we played again, at last. Keri’s character did a bunch of research on superheroes, particularly local supers, and tried to work out how she might've gotten her powers.

And then we didn't play again for another two years.

Again, not that we didn't want to. There was work, a more or less regular Ars Magica game, lots of Skyrim, a regular Pathfinder game, school, A Game A Day—but I found time to not only develop my campaign’s roster of characters, but to paint miniatures for the ones Keri was likely to encounter. And I was determined to run at least one RPG session before this year was out, and Champions was the easiest to put together.

I think that was always part of the appeal of Champions for us, back when we first started playing back in the 80s. Without doing a whole lot of prep work, you and a few friends could sit down, pull out your character sheets, and be playing a scenario in minutes. We had never quite been able to pull that off with Dungeons & Dragons; you generally had to plan out not just one battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil—you had to plan out an entire dungeon’s worth of them. And if you didn't spend time doing that planning (or even just reading the adventure cover to cover), it showed.

There is a lot to be said for any game that lets you play more or less at will, particularly as you get older and your spare time dwindles away to that few hours when you can actually sit down with your friends and start gaming. I know that I can remember devoting what seemed like every waking hour to prepping for one game or another—including all those hours I spent working on Champions villains so that I'd have more surprises for those players who had already read the same sourcebooks I had—and I can also recall putting all my books on a shelf when I realized they had been sitting in my desk, more or less untouched, for months, because I no longer had time to do all the work involved in running a game. Hell, I've watched my wife, when she decided to run a Pathfinder campaign, spend long hours of her spare time sitting at her computer, statting up NPCs and coming up with scenarios that she wouldn't actually run until weeks later.

I just don’t have the free time that I had when I was twenty years old and Champions was new. This probably explains my affinity for games like the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game and Sentinels of the Multiverse, which have very short setup times—and console and mobile games, which rarely have any setup time at all. And I don't think I'm alone in that regard. We live in an era where free time is more and more at a premium, and technology is advancing to meet our need for instant gratification. And as it does, it becomes harder and harder to justify spending even an hour a day working on my D&D campaign, or painting miniatures, or even just gathering with friends for a few hours to actually play the games we spend so many long hours prepping for.

I want to see more games with quick setup times, for those of us who aren't still living with our parents, for those of us who do our own laundry and cook our own meals. I can derive enjoyment from the prep work, sure, but my lack of free time often means putting in hours of work on a game session I don’t play for two months, or two years—if ever. It's kind of like spending every evening for a month rehearsing for a play…and then perpetually pushing back opening night. Who's got time for that?

So while I'll continue playing games like Pathfinder and Ars Magica and the like, I'll keep an eye out for games that have a better than 1:1 ratio of play time to prep time—more along the lines of 10:1 or even 20:1, if I can manage it.

Games for me and my generation. I know they're out there. And I intend to keep looking.

Maybe that can be my project for 2015.

12/28/14: * Shadows of Brimstone: Swamps of Death (Flying Frog Productions)

12/29/14: * untitled playtest

12/30/14: * Borderlands (2K)

12/31/14: * Shadows of Brimstone: Swamps of Death (Flying Frog Productions)

* Champions RPG (Hero Games)