Champions Online Powers Interview #1

Ten Ton Hammer has published the first of several power-related interviews they conducted with Champions Online design director and executive producer Bill Roper. This one dabbles into the territory of “Munitions, Archery, and Gadgeteering”:

Ten Ton Hammer: Out of the three, I was going to mention that Gadgeteering seemed the least focused of the odd man out. Are you planning on splitting off additional powers from this power set similar to what you did with Archery?

Roper: Probably not, because in the Champions pen-and-paper game, Gadgeteering is really a giant pool of powers. In the tabletop version, anything that your hero constructs it’s dubbed a (gadget.) Even something like Iron Man’s armor would have been considered a (gadget,) so the depth of the power set was enormous. The pen-and-paper game is much more complex in that players actually have to build their powers from scratch; it’d be like us giving players the dev power tool.

But that required a lot of number crunching and was too complex for our game. So instead of having everything fall under Gadgeteering, we pulled out some of the more thematic parts of the set like power armor and Archery but we stil wanted to have that large pool of powers for players to draw from. The things we left in were pretty broad based and didn’t really have a separate theme that we wanted to flesh out.