Things I Learned From Champions: Maximum Movement Determines The Limits of Your Sandbox

In my early days of RPG play, the limits of where you could go were defined by the walls of the corridors and rooms of the dungeon map. You often had a handful of choices at most in any given room, when you wanted to decide where to go next.

Eventually, after leveling up in power and stature, the edges of the adventuring world were pushed back -- flight and dimension doors allowed you to break out of dungeon edges. Wilderness adventures allowed you to choose any direction in which to travel -- though you were limited by how far you could travel in a turn, or an hour, or a day. But eventually, with the right equipment, the right spells, the right artifacts, you could break through these limits too.

But in Champions, you can pour a lot of your points into movement as a beginning character and already push back the edges of the gaming sandbox to a degree that might stun some beginning GMs.

A Staggering Selection of Movement

Even if you forego pumping points into a single movement power, the type of movement power can already chip away at those sandbox borders:

• Jump can allow you to hurdle impassable crevasses or leap out of a deep gladiator arena (much to the surprise of whichever would-be emperor is maligning your heroes);
• Tunneling will allow you to make your own corridors (and even close them up after you, if you pay the points);
• Flight allows you to not only overcome nasty traps like pitfalls or slides, it also allows you overcome barriers like mountains and impassable rivers;
• Teleport obviously allows you to bypass innumerable types of barriers without traveling through the intervening space (which could be filled with gas, invisible traps, monsters, etc.)

In fact, if you think about iconic heroes, a great part of their character is associated with a given movement power: Superman has flight, the Flash has running, Aquaman has swimming, Spider-man has swinging from a web, and so on. This freedom of movement is one of the defining aspects of super-heroism.

Faster than a Speeding Bullet

But overloading points into a single movement power also grants freedom of movement. Putting enough points into running will allow you to go anywhere on the hexgrid map in a single phase. Adding MegaScale to your flight or your teleport will allow you to go anywhere in the world (at the cost of a little / a lot of accuracy.

In other words, enough points in the right movement power will shatter the walls of your sandbox:

• "The only other person who knows the secret is halfway around the world."
• "We'll never get this kidney to the East Coast on time -- we have to find another way!"
• "How will we check the entire northern border of the state for the lost child?"

Control for Control's Sake?

Of course, we're all familiar with the frustrations of a DM who didn't allow you to go beyond the edges of the sandbox because of a weak reason. We all know the human limits on all GMs that prevent them from creating an infinitely detailed, fractal world -- but we don't like it when the borders of reality are so obviously arbitrary. We want some kind of consistent level of verisimilitude before we'll agree to the edges of a super-hero sandbox.

So we learned to talk to our GMs about the types of games they wanted to us to be able to play. We'd accept in-game, temporary reasons to nerf our powers for a single session (happens in comics anyway). We'd not play certain characters for certain adventure types -- all for the fun of the game.

But we'd never permanently allow that movement power to be taken away, as it was central to the character's concept.