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Originally posted to rec.games.frp.super-heroes on May 21, 1997
A moderately interesting campaign background in a rulebook that is obviously the first edition. Slick production values make it look good but the copyediting is poor. The layout often makes it harder to find information than it should be. There's no index. If you've stayed away from superhero RPGs because you didn't want to buy GURPS (2 books) or Hero (one book and a reputation for complexity) and you couldn't find V&V, or if you want a comic-book universe without building your own, you might want to look at it.
My background (aside from 15 years of roleplaying) is in technical writing, so I can offer a different view of the rules than has been put forth so far. Any rulebook for roleplaying games has three conflicting goals:
A rulebook that teaches may not be a good reference. A reference document may be incomprehensible to the new player. (This is why computer documentation often comes in user guides and reference documents.) An attractive document may not serve either of the other purposes.
I'm looking at this as a stand-alone game, not as a supplement to Champions, 4th Ed. I believe that's how it's meant to be marketed, and the fact that it can be used with Champions is just nice.
Champions: The New Millennium is the new superhero roleplaying game put out jointly by Hero Games (Champions and the Hero System), and R. Talsorian Games (Cyberpunk and the Interlock System). It's built around the Fuzion rules.
Champions: The New Millennium is an attractive package. It's 200 pages describing a revamped Champions (superhero) background, including about 50 pages of rules and 16 glossy comic pages. Fans of Image-style comic books may well pick it up. I'm not a fan of the artwork -- it's not to my taste -- but it is eye-catching. (Although from internal evidence Lady Blue must be in her 50s by now, she's certainly not drawn that way.)
The colour pages are already falling out of mine; this problem with the binding is probably not true of all print runs.
Most of the book is a sourcebook describing the "new" Champions universe. It's a revision of the old Champions universe, streamlined and made internally consistent. (Many items in the old Champions universe were lifted directly from the comics with the serial numbers filed off -- Mechanon, for example.) The number of alien races has been reduced, the history has been made consistent, and the options for character origins have been clarified. Almost every character has been changed in some way. The style of the "old" Champions Universe was always very much the X-Men; the style of the new one resembles some of the Image studios.
The core rules for Champions: The New Millennium are the Fuzion rules, which take up 50 pages. In these 50 pages, C:TNM looks like a first edition. (I think there's nothing wrong with looking like a first edition if all of your competition also looks like a first edition. When your competition is mature games, you are competing at that level.)
The campaign setting is (probably) the year 2003 or later (other internal hints indicate that the current year is 2000 or maybe 1996). An apocalyptic battle with a cosmic foe (The Proprietor) has destroyed most of the old heroes, and the PCs are new up-and-coming heroes. The setting is not a bad one. It manages to provide most of the traditional superhero origins (trauma, accident, mutation, or magic). It's less generic than many, which is good.
If I were running a campaign and I didn't have a campaign setting I had created myself, the C:TNM background has most of what I require.
The problem with all published campaign settings is that the campaign can quickly get out of synch with the publisher. If I write an adventure in which (for example) the Andes Mountains hideout of Dr. Destroyer is uncovered, I'm at odds with any future supplement that features that hideout. All GMs must deal with this; it's simply the price of writing your own adventures in someone else's universe.
The text is organized into chapters; within each chapter, the text is organized into one- and two-page chunks, called keypages. This is similar to the style pioneered by Hughes Aircraft for technical manuals; the big proponent of this style of documentation is Edmond Weiss.
The keypage style is very useful for skimming and for presenting information on procedures. Its major drawback is that the hierarchy of the document is obscured, and it depends entirely on how well the chunks are defined. Information that doesn't easily break down into one- and two- page chunks isn't conveyed as well. There's pressure to fill every page, because pages cost money, so there's a tendency to combine chunks of information that aren't conceptually related.
It's also important to keep conceptually-related items together -- so the two pages of Actions: Basic and Advanced should be on facing pages, not on opposite sides of the same leaf.
The page layout is attractive but not necessarily useful. (In particular, I look at page 141, Taking Action, and feel overwhelmed. The page looks cluttered to me, and the largest visual block is in the lower left corner.)
Much of the sourcebook text is a fictional collection of articles and database entries, a technique at least as old as the epistolary novel but one that can be used to good effect to intrigue the reader. We must assume that all of the narrators we're given are reliable, and the information they present is sometimes more than they can plausibly know. (Does Firefist now know about Team Defender? Probably not.)
I have some complaints:
My biggest complaint is that much of the fiction writing is mediocre.
The worst excesses belong to the character descriptions. An example sentence: "It is not well-met that a discussion of the golden age of Atlantis, so named after her founder, should occur alongside the Destroyer." (But, I hear you say, comics talk like that. Not the good ones. Besides which, this is not a comic book, it is a rulebook. It only needs to give the flavour of a comic book, and in this instance, less is more.)
I object to two and a half pages describing Dr. Destroyer in pseudo-epic terms when it could be done in one and a half pages of straight-forward prose. The information could be more easily understood and found. I think the flavour could have been preserved. (I'd have been even happier if that saved page had been turned over to an index.)
The editing/writing problems exist in other parts of the rulebook, too. Internal cross-references are inconsistent (Transform and Mental Attack based on CON are referred to but don't exist). Terms are used inconsistently or not defined (all occurrences of the Entangle power refer to PD, which is never defined). Items are not defined in the glossary or the glossary is inconsistently written. (Why is NCM not defined? Why is EKD not defined with KD, if ED is defined with SD?)
I think some of the text is smug. For example:
Hey, it sure beats the old "GM: Okay, let's get started..." thing we used to do.I dislike that sort of comment; it adds nothing and can alienate gamers who are familiar with the older game. The discussion of hero origins has the same tone.
Some of the rules are unclear. The meaning is never as clear to the reader as to the writer (as I'm sure I'll discover (again) after I post this), which is why blind-testing is so important. For example, on the Throwing page, there's reference to your Throw (which has not been defined so far), which is STR+4. Is that the paid-for-strength or the lifting-ability-adjusted-by-the-Strength-dial STR? And the description of Ramming is unclear, as another example.
Some of the character creation rules are presented only on the character example pages. Other information is in unexpected places -- Gadgets can be Complications; this is not mentioned on either the Gadgets page or on the Complications page, it's mentioned on the Origin Lifepath page.
The powers list is a reasonable 80% of powers -- but it's only 80%. I have the same feelings I had with first edition DC Heroes -- how do I do X? For example, what about area-effect flash? (Incidentally, of all the powers, the redesign of Flash and Flash Defense seems most disproportionate to me. One power point of Flash Defense counteracts 30 power points of Flash.)
The oddest thing was that once I began creating characters, they seemed flatter -- to have less variation that characters created in the Hero System. I don't know whether that reflects my long experience with the Hero System (though I haven't played much Hero for the last three years -- I've played CORPS and DC Heroes instead) or whether that reflects something intrinsic in the game system.
I don't see anything particularly new or innovative in the rules. (I don't claim to be a game-design maven.) There are a number of incremental improvements (or simplifications) over Hero, which may be worthwhile. As soon as I began trying to create new characters (as opposed to converting old Hero characters) I ran into problems finding information, which made it frustrating.
I think Champions: The New Millennium is as usable as second-edition Champions, to provide a comparison, and I gamed quite happily with that for years. It certainly provides more background.
But I'm disappointed because the designers are old pros. I had been hoping for something more mature and more polished rather than something glossier, even if only on the minor technical aspects of spell-checking and internal cross-referencing.
The Fuzion rules are available free of charge at http://www.sabram.com/rtalsoriangames/site/fuzion/index.html. The rulebook claims they are available at http://www.herogames.com, but that's a link back to R. Talsorian.
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