Eyeballing an old pen-and-paper favorite lately...

[tripthicket]

I've been having ideas for superpowered/magical beings ever since I was too young to shave. Long before MMOs and City of Heroes, I tried crafting and shaping these ideas into detailed descriptions using Pen-and-Paper (PnP) RPGs. Superhero 2044 was the very first I tried. Villains & Vigilantes, the first DC and Marvel RPGs, Champions (the real Champions, using the Hero System), GURPS Supers, Heroes Unlimited, maybe a few others that I've long since forgotten about.

The Hero System has its detractors, and I have to mainly agree with many of their points, but it's always been my favorite PnP game. Shaping characters, tweaking them, playing them -- I'm sure I easily spent at least twice the amount of time playing Champions than I did with City of Heroes.

But of course City of Heroes also allowed me to create dozens and hundreds of my ideas, and play them in a completely different and very satisfying fashion. Altoholics Unite!

Not having the inclination (and, more importantly, the required computer specs) to try some of the newer MMOs, such as The Secret World, I've sorta drifted, the many hours a day once filled with CoH now filled with a bunch of boring stuff. We have the Icon program we can play with (thank you so much for that!), but my mind is once again turning over new ideas (and reshaping old ones). Lately I've been looking at my huge stack of Hero System books with a growing surge of interest. I've been checking out the Hero Games forums to see if they have any new books I might be interested in. And yesterday I bought a box of legal pads, a dozen pens, and a new calculator. Now where did I put my dice...?

I can't be the only one. Anyone else trying to fill the void by going back to PnP RPGs?

[Sailboat]

Bitterly, after years of waiting to find a campaign, we had a brand-new Champions (Hero System) campaign up and running when the GM decided to move away and quit running it...at the same time COH/V sunsetted.

Just to compound the loss, ya know?

I am now playing Mutants & Masterminds with a different GM whose style doesn't entirely mesh with mine.  There are some things to like about M&M even for a Hero System junkie, but it has some significant weirdnesses.

[AlphaFerret]

My tabletop group is currently running a Wild West GURPS campaign.  Pretty entertaining.  For super hero gaming, I suggest you check out Silver Age Sentinels.  I have not run it yet, but it "reads" like it would be fantastic.

[Brightfires]

'Old-school tabletop Champions player here, too... Several of the guys in my university gaming group loved the system, and since a lot of us in that crew were comic book geeks as well as RPG players, playing our own little groups of heroes (And villains, humorously enough. We had one game based on what could only be described as a group of Rogues. XD) was a popular passtime.

I don't have a tabletop group at the moment, but I still picked up a copy of HERO 6th and the Champions book when they came out. (We played 3rd and 4th ed back-in-the-day), and it was fun reading through them... remembering the six-hours-to-resolve "short" battles, the math-geek tricks of building a good Power Pool, and wracking our brains to come up with the special effects associated with our powers.

And, of course, grinning over that most time-honored of Brick traditions.

Bowling
With
Busses

 

[Mistress Urd]

I have a love/hate relationship with Champions RPG. At this point 5th ed was the last book from them I would get. The last con I was at I saw 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th ed being played. While it easy to play with 3rd, 4th and 5th in the same game, they made several changes with 6th. I certainly understand the need of "must generate sales" but the PnP playerbase can say NO to "patches" unlike MMOs. Pity they had to go in the direction they did and unlike D&D the playerbase is just too small to handle a split like that.

I played the game system for many years and many of my gaming friends I met because of Champions and its why I played City of Heroes.

[Aggelakis]

I'm technically playing a 2nd ed D&D game with my husband and some friends, but I honestly would rather play superheroes. More flamboyant and awesome. I am all about the crazy shit going down. More options for that when you have super people with super powers or super tech or super whatevers. Fewer options when you are a squishy dude in a robe that can only call on a couple spells before you have to take a nap...

[Crazyleo]

Where I live, it's mostly army combat that people tend to play; not a PnP RPG.

Most time; when I get together with my friends, we play Munchkin. 

[Minotaur]

A friend ran a couple of sessions of modified 4th ed D&D (using the psionics rules to add the concept of endurance) CoH. Worked pretty well but he had to take the characters and manually pick some feature powers to convert into encounter/at will powers.

[Adelante]

I have really missed playing Warhammer Fantasy lately.  Partly because I played it with my then-fiancee (and now ex), but mostly because it was just a lot of fun.