Aberrant: Ba'alt - Re: DC Heroes Review

[Narrator]

found this recently adn thought I'd share it for those with a few minutes to read.

<!--coloro:darkred--><span style="color:darkred"><!--/coloro-->The following review has been submitted by Landon W. Schurtz:<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->

To date the best system for high-flying 'four color' superheroics. The much crunchier Champions always has been better for getting a particular concept exactly right, but it hails from an era when roleplaying games were still to some degree an extension of miniatures-combat systems, as can be seen from the 'inch-based' scale and the preoccupation with hexes and hex-sides. DC Heroes will have none of that.

Just from the aesthetic point of view, characters look clean and simple - nine stats, arranged in a nice block denoting, by their position, what function they serve in the game. Powers, advantages, drawbacks, and so on are concisely stated and rated in 'APs' (more on those in a moment). A whole character could easily fit on one side of a piece of notebook paper, and a gamemaster could easily 'eyeball' an NPC from scratch, using helpful scaling charts, in a few minutes. I've been running superhero games for twenty years now, and I have not found a system in which I can more swiftly and surely produce an off-the-cuff character than DC Heroes.

APs were the great triumph of the system, though, and the key to making it all possible. Champions has always used a logarithmic progression for Strength - every 5 points of STR doubles the character's lifting ability. The designers of that system rightly saw that such a solution would be necessary if they wanted to fit normal human characters on anything approaching the same scale as guys who could move planets (as was often done in comics of those days). Oddly enough, they never tumbled to the idea that such an approach might be useful, in a superhero genre, for *all* aspects of the character. Fortunately for us, Greg Gorden did have just such an idea. Every AP doubles the 'value' of the previous AP. Now, this can lead to some silly comparisons (Batman is 1024 times smarter than an average human) and some pointless comparisons (he's also 256 times 'more agile'), but fundamentally, the mechanic works.

Plus, by measuring everything in the game in APs, Mr. Gorden handed us a positively brilliant system for quickly determining things like how long it takes to get from point A to point B. How do you figure it? Simple! Subtract the APs of Distance being traveled from the APs of Speed the character has, and that is the APs of Time it takes! How far can a character throw something? Subtract the APs of Weight from his APs of Strength to find the APs of Distance! Need to know how many miles-per-hour a character can fly? Add the APs of Speed to the APs of Time for one hour (10 APs)! I nearly wet myself when I discovered this system. Try figuring out, quickly, how fast in m.p.h. a character can move in Champions. I dare you.

Everything in the game was considered a contest of APs, an Acting Value versus an Opposing Value to see if you can 'hit,' and an Effect Value versus a Resistance Value to see how much 'effect' you accumulate. The rolls are resolved on 2d10 with a nice little open-ended mechanic to allow for truly comic-bookish feats, supported by the presence of Hero Points that characters can use to make success more likely, but never guaranteed (the fundamental flaw of Marvel's Karma system). This simple, robust system, combined with one of the better GM screens in the history of gaming, means that much of the game can be run right off the screen with little reference to the books once you have the basics down pat. Plus, it's hard to actually die or kill someone, a very 'comic-bookish' touch that seems to have escaped the designers of Marvel and Champions.

Furthermore, the system logically lends itself to expansion; when a new situation crops up, not covered by the rules, there's a clear and easy procedure to follow that will produce consistent results. Whatever it is, from Wealth, to Speed, to Weight, to Distance, to Time, to Information, it can be rated in APs. And if it can be rated in APs, by golly, we can stick it on that chart and roll with/against it. A nice side effect of this was that the game was able to give us character interaction mechanics - using your 'Spiritual' stats like Influence and Aura - that were as robust as the combat mechanics; and no wonder, because they were the same as the combat mechanics. Influence took the place of Dexterity, Aura of Strength, and Spirit of Body. Instead of punching a guy and knocking him out, you can scare him into submission. A stroke of genius in game design, and vitally important to characters like Batman who live (or die) by the 'presence attack.' I use the Champions term because, as the grandaddy superhero game, it did inaugurate the concept, but the mechanic in that game has always been an oddball, never as effective as it should be for the points invested, and functioning awkwardly. DC Heroes Intimidation checks blew past Champions Presence Attacks like a F-15 dusting a Wright Brothers machine.

Although some have had issue with the Gadgetry rules, they weren't really worse than anything else in the First Editon character design rules, which were somewhat undercooked but cleaned up by the Second Edition, and they were far and away better than the mess over at Marvel Super Heroes RPG. Champions still held the edge, as it always will, in precision, but DC Heroes Gadgets were almost as easy to eyeball as the characters themselves. The mechanic worked in the context of being a game mechanic, as long as you didn't think too long about the literal interpretation of how much some of these things should cost in terms of money, not Hero Points.

The game wasn't perfect. They never did get the Recall power (which gives someone a photographic memory) right, and the measurement of information in APs was always a bit bogus. Money was handled about as gracefully as in Marvel, which is to say, not bad but not wonderful, but much better than the handwaving it receives in Champions. But by the Second Edition, the form and function of character creation was set and solid; the game had a smooth and robust combat system that could be used to resolve pretty much any noncombat situation you could think of; the gadgetry rules worked, which is more than at least one other superhero game could say; and - if you like DC - there were loads of characters ready to be used. A I mean LOADS. Third Edition really didn't change the game at all, except to add a few new powers and advantages and so forth - fiddly bits - that had been published here and there along the way, and to update a few of the characters.

Sadly, Mayfair, for some reason, lost the license to produce the game, and went out of business shortly thereafter. The replacement property, DC Universe by West End, was a horrid mess that should be avoided at all costs. The WEG folks unwisely decided that their already idiosyncratic and not-especially-robust d6 system should be put into the crucible of giving life to a superhero game, and the results were not pretty. The basic system of DC Heroes, however, now knows as the Mayfair Exponential Game Systems, lived (lives?) on in Blood of Heroes from Pulsar Games.

Pulsar did us the favor of taking some stuff that was allegedly planned for the never-published DC Heroes 4th edition, as well as some of the more popular material from the DC Heroes mailing list, and combining it with the 3rd Edition rules for what you might call the most complete set of rules the engine has ever seen in print. They unfortunately decided to kill who-knows-how-many trees inflicting upon us their godawful universe populated with the most ridiculous cast of munchkin characters seen this side of a 4th grade AD&D game. Let's put it this way - one character has a 'sidekick' who is built on roughly twice the starting points of the average hero. I say 'average hero' only in reference to the average starting point value specified in the rules, not in reference to 'average heroes' in their universe, the vast majority of whom are built on enough points to easily recreate Superman or the Green Lantern.

However, the utter badness of the crapola bundled into the Blood of Heroes game underscores the fundamental point about DC Heroes once made by Allen Varney in a Dragon magazine review. I don't recall his exact words, but I remember he urged people to buy the game for the system, and not the characters, I believe mainly because, at the time, DC was in Post-Crisis cleanup phase and many of the characters were still in flux. Still, it's a remarkable accomplishment - a system written for a license that doesn't need the license to sell itself. No one has ever copped the old MSH RPG system for another game. I played MSH RPG for a long time, suffering under bad mechanics that we had largely rewritten, mainly because of the catalog of heroes readily available and statted out. I wanted to play in the Marvel world - that simple. Too bad TSR, in its hubris of the mid nineties, forgot that the main draw of MSH was the Marvel characters, when it started pumping out half-assed write-ups that were often blatantly contradictory of earlier information published. In the end, the write-ups weren't good enough to keep me playing a system that our homemade rules-patches couldn't hold together, and I converted the whole thing to... you guessed, DC Heroes.

DC Heroes was a great system that remains one of my top two choices for running or playing a superhero game (Champions is the other, and the one I favor for games with a slightly more realistic tone. The choice is a very, very close one). If you like DC, you have no excuse whatsoever for not buying it (drop the WEG crap RIGHT NOW), but even if you don't know who Superman is, this is still a top-notch game. I recommend either the Second Edition boxed set, if you can find one intact, or the Blood of Heroes edition. Though the art in the latter will make you want to claw out your own eyeballs, the updated rules are worth it. The Third Edition doesn't have *enough* new material to make it worth the lack of a screen, roster book, etc, unless you can find it cheap (REAL cheap).