To the Locker Room! Away!
I’ve mentioned PS238 before; it’s a black-and-white comic book about a secret school designed to educate super-powered children, buried beneath an ordinary-looking grade school in an ordinary town. The kids have to come to terms with their powers right alongside the tribulations of childhood. Unlike the angst-ridden tales of superheroic adolescence Marvel is so fond of, the PS238 kids do so in a fairly friendly and forgiving environment, with plenty of adult supervision. It’s much more fun. Like Aaron Williams’s earlier Nodwick, the comic relies heavily on sardonic humor, specifically directed at the kind of unthinking enthusiasm required to live by the tropes of adventure fiction. I’m deeply into sardonic humor, so the comic is right up my alley. I particularly love the character of Zodon, self-described future master of the world, who mocks the pre-adolescent heroes for their heroic naivete while living with his own, very similar, villainous blinders. You know: the habits of mind that lead Bond villains to employ over-elaborate death traps, or that cause Doctor Doom to announce that nothing can stop his evil machinations just before the Fantastic Four stop him.
I bring this all up because Hero Games is creating a PS238 roleplaying game, and I’m dying to read it. I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for Hero Games ever since playing Champions in my college days. Champions is an early superhero-themed RPG, and the only one I’ve seen to date that I would trust to depict that genre in an RPG milieu.
The heart of the system is the brilliant separation of every superpower’s outward appearance, which the game calls its “special effect,” from its game effect. Where other superhero RPGs might allow you to select a power for shooting laser beams out of your eyes, or another to hurl lightning bolts from your fingers, or another to fire jets of flame from attachments on your power suit, Champions just has you purchase an “Energy Blast,” paying character points according to how much damage it does. If you want your jets of fire to behave differently from your superheroic buddy’s laser beam eyes, you decide how it behaves differently not by how it looks, but by how it performs differently as a game mechanic. Those jets of fire might be able to hit a small cluster of targets at once, or maybe they can only be used six times before the incendiary juice runs out, and they definitely won’t work if you aren’t wearing the power suit. All of these differences, and others, can be represented as power modifiers: “area effect,” “charges,” and “obvious, inaccessible focus.” Applying useful modifiers raises the cost of the power in character points, while inconvenient modifiers lower the cost. It’s an elegant way to represent just about any superpower you care to name without resorting to 500-page list of specific powers, and it avoids the inevitable questions of what to do if the power you want isn’t on the list, and what to do when your idea of how a lightning bolt works is different from the rules’ idea of how a lightning bolt works. It’s also the reason I’d only trust Champions with a superhero campaign.
That’s not to say that Champions itself was elegant. Oh, no. The turn sequencing, the attributes, the six or eight different ways to apply damage—all of that got plenty messy. That simplified list of basic superpowers still took up a whole page, and the rules describing those powers a lengthy chapter. The way the powers were priced made it possible, with painstaking attention, to combine powers in ways that created unstoppable superbeings who could wipe out their peers designed in a more straightforward fashion. It was a minimaxer’s wet dream, and a glorious tactical exercise, but not an elegant system. But since my Champions-playing friends were also MIT students, complexity wasn’t a problem, and we had loads of fun with it.
After I got out of college, Hero Games came out with a radical revision of the whole system. Not just one of those periodic, spurious “expansion and simplification” facelifts that Dungeons & Dragons gets, but a complete change of scale and mechanics that rendered characters in one edition unrecognizable in another. For various reasons, I never got the new edition, and thought it had gone out of print, retired to collectors’ bookshelves. The PS238 announcement proved me wrong, and, knowing I’ll buy the game, I can’t help but wonder how well the radically new rules work.
See, not only does PS238 strike me as a great place to run an RPG campaign, but I’ve had a hankering for returning to the superheroic glory days of college, because, for reasons only partially clear to me, our current GM has selected the d20 version of Mutants & Masterminds for his space opera campaign. He chose a superheroic system as a way to handle futuristic, technology-endowed abilities like genetically-modified supersenses, direct mind-to-computer links, and aliens with the ability to fly. Just because such things are possible doesn’t mean they’re the focus of the campaign, nor should they be. But looking over the rulebook, seeing what could be done, makes me daydream about superheroes for our next project. And, because I would never subject my math-challenged friends to the number-crunching intensity of the Champions I cut my teeth on, I find myself hoping that the newer edition will satisfy, matching passable simplicity to its original flexibility. Fingers are crossed.
Sadly, even if the current edition of Champions is everything I could ask for, we won’t be using PS238 for a setting. Our previous campaign before heading into space was my own “Prairie Mage” campaign, using a house-modified Mage system. The PCs were all adolescents in an unremarkable town somewhere in Nebraska. They had to come to terms with their newfound magical powers right alongside the tribulations of high school. Unlike the angst-ridden tone of the typical Mage game, the PCs operated in a fairly forgiving social environment, with not-too-stifling parental supervision. As a GM, I relied heavily on sardonic humor to highlight the PCs’ plight. Trying to put the same players through PS238 would be too much like a television spinoff, or, worse, a clone run by a competing network, the kind of program that spoils the fun by too obviously milking the original’s success.