|
What a fun and welcoming box set! This is the second edition of DC Heroes (1989) from Mayfair games. I’ve never encountered the first edition, but my impression of this box is as an attempt to make a fairly tricky system as welcoming and accessible as possible without, you know, tossing out the original system. Which is a clever system, based on logarithms — the same thing is under the hood of Underground. I understood it for a brief moment in time despite my deficiencies in math (but lordy, no, I did not retain it, nor do I wish to re-learn), and it struck me as a clever way to handle the divergent power levels present in a superhero game. It is, however, clearly not as user-friendly as, for instance, TSR’s Marvel RPG.
There’s a lot in the box — a brief intro pamphlet with a solo adventure, a rulebook for the GM, a player’s guide, a screen, a group adventure featuring the Justice League International, a little wheel that makes resolving rolls much easier (not quite so easy as the Universal Table in Marvel, but close). There’s a beefy dossier of characters accompanied by a stack of full-color character cards, which are a nifty, fidgety addition that doesn’t really add much to play.
The 15-page chapter on running games has some of the best advice I’ve encountered from the period — focused on collaborative play, encouraging roleplay and generally putting fun ahead of rules. One section has the header “You are the Player’s Senses” and I think that might be one of the best summaries of the GM’s role I’ve ever read. It certainly feels miles ahead of just about anything else from the period that comes to mind, with the possible exception of Rolemaster’s Campaign Law.
This box wants so desperately to be a game anyone can play. I don’t think it quite gets there, but I think the way it tried was influential — over the course of the ’90s, we’d start to see more and more supportive text in RPG books that sound like they spin right out of this GM’s section. |
