And Sok–Fuzion was ‘Champions: New Millenium’, an experimental hybrid between Hero and R. Talsorian’s Interlock system that…didn’t work too well, partly because they used Interlock as the base and added Hero features, rather than the other way around. (Mekton fan here, so I saw both sides of the thing. :-) ) ‘Real’ Champs is in 5th edition now.

Frankly, the major part of the problem is that CO (like CoX before) has basically gone with, for lack of a better description, hack-and-slash superheroes. You want to do a concept that’s not primarily a combat build of some sort, and you’re pretty much SOL, unlike what you could do in the Hero RPG system.

No, really. They wrote a book. The Book of Destroyer.
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Destroyer-Champions-Steven-Long/dp/1583661158

It and Monster Island are post-MMO revisions of the game.

Not to mention the probable coding insanity involved in implementing the thing.

I’m also mulling over the distinction between “setting” and “system” here. The problem with the LotRO Runekeepers (based solely on blog posts – never played the game) is that they don’t fit into the setting as established by Tolkien. With Champions Online, the setting itself can withstand just about any rule system as long as it allows for superheroes. Matter of fact… I never really thought of a Champions “setting”, but then I played back when you got the game in a sky-blue cardboard box. The NPCs and groups were just there to drop into my campaign system — I never considered that a Champions ‘Greyhawk’ existed anywhere.

In that sense Champions *is* The Hero System, and so I think I get what you’re saying. If you’re dropping the game system, why call it Champions?

I suppose it’s the difference between creating a old-school Vampire the Masquerade game and dropping the Skills/Talents/Abilities system for something simpler, vs. making Malkavians the healers because, hey, it’s an MMORPG and we need a healer for our Brujah tank…

Dangit, now I miss tabletop RPGs.

I did have a poor reaction to LOTRO when I first tried the beta before it released. I balked at Turbine’s version of Middle-Earth and I was horrified at the game’s performance on my PC besides.

That, I would guess, does correlate.

Here’s a separate question though, I’m not super familiar with the Hero system (flipped through some books a few years ago): Would it work well in an online game? This may be naive, but I’m guessing it would be very easy to exploit into something impossible to balance. Hold back points in short term to double-up on the big goodies min/maxing later, that sort of thing.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have adapted it, or at least gone with a point-based system. This routes back to the question of licensing tho if they’d done something close.

2) I agree completely: I was incredibly excited by the idea of an online implementation of the completely point-based Hero system, and proportionally dismayed when I discovered that they weren’t implementing that system.

1. In EQOA, Erudites look like normal dark skinned humans. Necromancers and Shadowknights start in the same city as other erudite classes. And you can actually go an visit Erud in the new erudite colony on the island where Erud and Paineel will eventually be. In EQ, erudites have elongated foreheads and have been riven into two separate societies. I assume the elongated foreheads come from the effects of long interaction with magical forces. In EQ II, Erudites have become so infused with magic that they resemble alien beings.

2. In EQ, if you head to the PoK, you can read about how trolls largely worshipped the god of fear in the past, and how the main troll alter to that god is now underwater. In EQOA, trolls worhship the god of fear for the most part. In your starting town, most of the class quest chains lead you through the alter of the god of fear. Some even have you commune with him.

The better example to LOTRO would be how Turbine doesn’t have a license to the rest of Tolkien’s works.

It’s more of an inclusion problem / situation than an exclusion one.

And on the subject of PnP games about tights, to my mind Marvel Basic (not Advanced…it added arbitrary layers of complexity that utterly failed to make the mechanics any more believable than the Basic system) was the most playable. Just enough rules to get the job done without standing in the way of the narrative.