Ruin Explorer
Legend
Yeah I think Champions/HERO doesn't really get enough credit for how profoundly it influenced the genre. Reading accounts of people playing RPGs in the mid '80s, at university clubs and so on, including some from people who went on to be quite influential designers (though I struggle to remember who, and most of these accounts are long gone as places like Angelfire shut down or became unsearchable), Champions/HERO came up over and over and over again. And the campaigns people describe sound more or less exactly the same as campaigns people would run now, full of character drama, elaborate RP and exciting combat rather than the procedural dungeon crawling, TPKs, Monty Hauling and/or adversarial DMing, and brutal ambushes of most (but not all) descriptions of D&D from the same era.One of the big shifts here is genre, so it makes sense that Champions helps lead the way. As a superhero genre game, death is (and should be) pretty rare or you’re not following the genre conventions.
People talk about the whole "OC" thing with Neotrad, and act like it was some sort of post-internet thing, formed free-form RP on IRC and the like, and there's some truth in that, but if you look back at that stuff, people making up their own heroes in Champions, or for that matter, their own characters in Toon (1984) were essentially creating "OCs" in exactly the same way.
Seems likely, yeah.I'd even argue this was already appearing in the early 80s.
I will say thought that at my first high school, which I went to from 10-16, there was a distinct "generation gap" between the two groups of guys who played AD&D who were 2-4 years older than us, and the three groups who were about of an age with me (including my one), who also played AD&D. It was very clear that the older people were treating AD&D what we'd now perhaps see as a much more videogame-like way, where they had a DM who was trying to kill their PCs, but they were also getting really powerful magic items really easily, gaining boatloads of XP, and not roleplaying their characters at all except in a very teenage boy wish-fulfilment kind of way. But my cousin from Canada who taught me AD&D already taught me how to play it in a more modern way, more like Neotrad, in 1989 - and I know she'd played other RPGs than AD&D as well. And the other groups my age also generally had a more "heroic fantasy" attitude, a more positive attitude to RP, and so on. One guy my age I played with was taught by his older brother and initially had very "adversarial DMing is the only way to DM", and generally played in a very old-skool no RP, lots of meta, way. He did change over time though.
So I think I think it took a while to filter through.