I have run Champions (Hero System) at conventions before and have managed to teach enough of the rules set and run an adventure within 4 hours. I am not of the opinon that Champions (HS) is difficult to understand; it hasn't really been written for the novice player yet.

Playing Champions isn't that hard to understand; it's a clean system with a straightforward mechanic for combat--sequence by SPD, roll to hit, roll damage, subtract defenses. It does bother me that it has different systems for resolving combat and noncombat skills--I prefer the GURPS approach where combat IS a set of skills--but that doesn't make it all that much harder to learn.

The point where Champions is difficult is in character construction. There's almost no way a new player can make really effective use of the system; it has a steep learning curve. It takes a long time to create a character, and a lot of that time is spent on arithmetic, not on character conception or history. There's no "easy path" inherent in the game system. These difficulties aren't inherent to Champions--almost any game system complex enough to create non-cookie-cutter characters will have some of them--but my experience has been that Champions has them in an unusual degree.

Basically, the only people who will ever figure out Champions character design are the people who love game mechanics for its own sake, enough to spend a lot of time thinking about it. Those people are often worthwhile to have as players. But there are other people who are worthwhile to have as players who just don't deal with that level of game mechanics, and may not be recruitable as players if they have to deal with it.

Champions is for games somewhat as James Joyce described Finnegans Wake as being for readers--a book for an ideal reader with an ideal insomnia.

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