Whew –

We have a playgroup that are long time Champs/Hero players. Myself, Storn, Eric, Rick and Joe. (Their personalities and play styles are important to these play-test notes.) I've been playing since '81 first edition, and Storn Cook (who you might know from art he has done for the game) and I have been playing together since '92-ish. The others have joined over the years, with Joe, only having known him for 15 years, being the newbie.

My Champions Now alpha play is concluded, and I’m moving into Beta. You’ll see a lot of things in the Defiants game which I decided needed to be revised heavily: Mind Scan, Desolid, assisting, and plenty of others which in the past I accepted as “well, that’s just Champions,” all hit the butcher shop for the first version of something I can genuinely call mine.

When Champions was first published, most people involved in role-playing accepted, or even expected, to put in extensive effort before play. Today, plug-and-play is widely recognized as a virtue, whether justified by playing in convention situations or by citing friends who reasonably do not commit to complex nonsense before doing the thing they want to do.