Champion

I was just wondering - for a being who's devoted literally billions of years to unarmed combat, shouldn't his Fighting be higher? Unearthly is nothing to sneeze at, but I would imagine that it would be greater, possibly even up to Shift-Y or Shift-Z. Other Elders have FASERIP scores in that range, so it's not beyond the realm of possibility.
Also, shouldn't he know every martial art talent? Why should people like Captain America, Iron Fist and Shang Chi know more about the martial arts than a guy who's been practicing them since before their home planet was formed from cosmic dust?

Here here!



"Stand and face your better, lapdog"

Absolutely! I think it is written somewhere that he has mastered something like 20,000 martial arts from all sorts of planets, and being an Elder he has been honing his skills for eons. How can he NOT have Class range Fighting? We all have our nitpicks about certain stats here and there, but the Champion's official write-up is just plain wrong, wrong on the level of someone letting their poodle type up the sheet. Class 1000 Fighting and every empty hand Talent ever mentioned. Period!



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Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a night. Set a man on fire, and he will be warm the rest of his life

I have a couple of takes on this one.
1.) He could have ShZ Fighting. No need for talents since you cannot shift above ShZ. So it is a role-playing note that he knows all hand-to-hand fighting maneuvers. This would put him in league with some of the other Elders that have Shift ranks in their primary stat. Or you could keep the Talents so that he can use their non-shifting effects, like bonus to initiative and slamming despite body armor.

2.) He could have UN Fighting along with UN (or higher) Martial Supremacy with all Martial Arts Talents as well as all of the other fighting Talents. This route has the potential to be as powerful than my option 1. It would also give him a higher initiative roll.

I'm not sure that he needs to have the Agility and Strength as high as he does. He's a melee fighter so I would lower these two stats, raise his Fighting and keep his Endurance. I realize that wrestling relies on Strength so maybe it needs to remain but having it lower would account for him losing to Thing though. I'm not sure how much lower. Maybe AM each or something.



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Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur. (Translation: Everything said in Latin
sounds profound.)

I don't think he lost to Thing. I think instead that Thing just lasted longer than other people out of sheer intestinal fortitude - three rounds in a ring with the Champion as opposed to one.
In the same issue (which I've never seen, so correct me if I'm wrong) Champion also worked over Colossus, Sasquatch and Wonder Man. Plus, his Marvel Universe entry indicates he has Class 100 strength. So I think Unearthly strength is appropriate for the Champion.

I would actually put his strength higher than Unearthly based on what I've just read in the SHe-Hulk comic! :-o

Why? What did he do?

You guys might want to track down an ep of Dexters lab, they did a homage to Contest of Champions using Monkey and the superheroes from Dexters world. Randy Savage did the voice of Champion.


OOOOOOh Yeah.

When he came to Earth the first time we know of, the Champion hosted a boxing tournament and seemed to be a very very skilled boxer. But in the Infinity Gauntlet story, we found that despite his supposed mastery of unarmed combat styles he fights like any other super-musclebound thug. That was one of the reasons Thanos cleaned his clock. Also, in the boxing tourney, he refused to fight the Hulk despite the fact that with his terrific strength and supposed skill he should have found the Hulk a challenge, something he claimed he was seeking.

All totaled, my take is that the Champion is more of a bodybuilder who relies on great strength to defeat opponents he has screened as being less powerful than he is.

One more aside - Champion doesn't know 20,000 fighting styles (by my estimation he only knows one, and he doesn't use it often,) he has won "50,000 fights on 20,000 worlds." That may be where that number, from another post here, comes from.

I believe the Champion wouldn't fight Thor because he considered his hammer, as a weapon, "cheating" and he wouldn't fight the Hulk because he felt he was too savage (guess he never heard of Mike Tyson).

What evidence do we have that the Champion is the greatest fighter in the universe other than his boasting and the general credibilty of an Elder.

We know that Elders, desite having millions of years experience, DO have weaknesses with their chosen field of study. Just look at the Grandmaster and the number of games and gambits he has lost.

Would someone with CL1000 fighting need 3 rounds to knockout the thing? Not tha the Thing is a slouch but he's not in the Thor Class.