James Nicoll Reviews

Greg Gordon and Bryan Nystul’s 1993 DC Heroes Third Edition is (I know this will astonish readers) the third edition of the venerable superhero tabletop roleplaying game, DC Heroes Roleplaying Game.

Yes, I too am astounded that the tie-in game for one of the two comic book companies that claimed the trademark on ​‘superhero’ did not have the word ​‘superhero’ in the title of their superhero tabletop roleplaying game.

DC Heroes First Edition was an overstuffed, slender box.

DC Heroes Second Edition was a somewhat larger box.

Third Edition was a perfect-bound¹ 184-page trade paperback. On the minus side, this meant that 3^rd came with no extras. On the plus side, books were not subject to the same Canadian import duties as boxed games.

Just as Ray Winninger and Thomas Cook’s Second Edition addressed certain design issues in First, Third was an incremental improvement over Second.

The game has a lot of whirling gears that the text takes pains to explain clearly, but there was a unified mechanism at its core. Every quantity — distance, time, mass, damage, information — was measured in Attribute Points or APs. Attribute points were logarithmic: each additional AP signified a doubling of value. Thus, 0 AP of weight was 50 pounds, 1 AP was 100 pounds, 2 AP was 200 pounds, and so on. Logarithmic scaling wasn’t original to DC Heroes (Champions got there first²), but DC Heroes was unusual in that it applied a logarithmic scaling system to everything.

In addition to scaling, DC Heroes opted for many of the same essential solutions as Champions. DC Heroes used a points-based system in which players were given a limited number of character points with which to buy improved values for nine attributes, as well as skills, powers, advantages and so on. Players might well find they need more points than they have, and again like Champions, DC Heroes allowed players to acquire more points at the cost of long-term complications.

A personal quirk: I am not crazy about table-reliant TTRPGs. DC Heroes is very much table-reliant, as combat requires checking two charts to determine results. As well, the index has a slight design flaw in that there is no index for the book as a whole. There are cross-references that could have worked wonderfully in a pdf if those had existed back then, also what amount to sub-indexes.

Looking at the system after a brief interregnum of thirty years, some details I either forgot or never noticed jump out at me.

• For one thing, there’s a whole economic side of the game we ignored. Just as well, as characters have a 1% chance of bankruptcy each month.
• Like some other games I could mention, the text defaults to he/him but feels the need to justify that choice. The advantage attractive only works on members of the opposite sex: hard luck for non-gendered aliens and all the gay people the DC universe generally didn’t acknowledge existing³.
• The gadget rules… were an improvement over previous iterations without actually being something I’d want to use.

Why would a consumer opt for DC Heroes over Champions?

1. The combat system was much, much faster than Champions.
2. Character design, while requiring a certain amount of math, as well as cost-benefit analysis, was simpler than Champions and characters were more easily understood at a glance.
3. DC Heroes did a fine job of simulating DC superbeings in particular.
4. DC Heroes, being tied as it was to the DC comics universe, came with an existing setting with which the consumer would be familiar⁴. In theory, players could opt to play an established character without the bother of character design.

My regular gaming group played DC Heroes long enough to establish that it performed satisfactorily. Couldn’t say how it compared to the TSR Marvel SHTTRPG because I never played that, but DC Heroes was on par with Champions for an enjoyable gaming experience. The AP system in particular was elegant.

Where tabletop roleplaying game rules are concerned, I prefer books over boxed sets. Most of the time. In this case I missed all the extras that came with 1E and 2E. In fact, the transition of the core rules from a box crammed with goodies to a slender, less expensive to produce rulebook was a harbinger whose import I failed to grasp. The entire line was cancelled on August 31, 1994.

Good news, however! DC Heroes is coming back into print, courtesy of a Kickstarter.

Now about the contents.

Read This First

An explanation of the concept of roleplaying games and notes on this edition in particular.

Unlike some games I could mention, DC Heroes did its best to ensure that editions were backward compatible, so customers didn’t have to keep rebuying the same material over and over.

Chapter One: An Introduction to DC Heroes

The eight core concepts of the game, explained in brief. These are

1. Attribute Points

2. Attributes

3. How to Use the Dice

4. The Action Table

S. The Result Table

6. Powers, Skills, Advantages, Drawbacks

7. Hero Points

8. Automatic Actions

Lazy players willing to settle for pre-generated characters could probably play DC Heroes using the information in this chapter.

This seems as good a place as any to mention an interesting mechanical feature. Tests involved rolling two ten-sided dice and adding the results to see if they exceeded a target number. Double ones were automatic failures. Any other doubles, the dice were re-rolled and the new results added to the previous results⁵. This was open-ended, continuing until the player stopped rolling doubles, opted to stop rolling, or rolled double ones. This meant that even characters with dismal stats had a chance, even if only a very very small chance, to create nigh-godlike characters. The idea that Jimmy Olsen could under the right circumstances knock out Superman greatly offended one of my customers, something he reminded me of many times over the course of years.

The attribute system is also worth noting. The three-by-three array presents in concise form crucial information about characters.

Chapter Two: Character Design

Just what it says. DC Heroes provides a pool of free points that can be exchanged for attributes, powers, skills, advantages and such, as well as the means to acquire more points. The resulting characters would be on par with the Teen Titans.

Chapter Three: The Rules

A more in-depth discussion of the game mechanics.

Chapter Four: APs and the World

An in-depth discussion of how Attribute Points work.

I think it’s hilarious that DC Heroes invented a universal measuring system for the game, a system that allows convenient comparison of quite dissimilar quantities, while sticking with the good old American traditional measuring system.

Chapter Five: Combat

An in-depth discussion of how to hurt people, avoid being hurt, and the consequences of succeeding at the first and failing at the second.

DC Heroes mostly embraces Silver Age sensibilities. Combat is for the most part non-lethal, unless players choose to make it lethal⁶. Generally speaking, the mechanics discourage killing people.

Chapter Six: Character Interaction

What it says on the tin.

Chapter Seven: Gadgetry

How to build cool toys.

Chapter Eight: Wealth

The DC Heroes economic system, something I completely overlooked in 1993. Because dice rolls are involved, and double ones are always failures, everyone goes bankrupt one month out of every hundred.

Chapter Nine: Gamemastering

Detailed advice on how to administer the game.

Chapter Ten: Subplots

More gamemastering advice.

Appendix A: The DC Universe

A short discourse on the history of the DCU, after Crisis but before Zero Hour. Honest, you don’t want me to explain those. Also included, a small assortment of DC characters, heroes from Aquaman to Wonder Woman, villains from Blackfire to Two Face, and characters from the Death of Superman from Superman to Superboy.

Appendix B: Animals

The obligatory bestiary.

Appendix C: Genres

A discussion of how to adjust the rules to suit specific genres.

Appendix D: Character Design Summary

What it says on the tin.

Charts and Tables

All the charts and tables in one convenient place. This, by the way, is one of the places where the spine is beginning to go.

Batman

A detailed write-up for Batman, for some reason. I’d have used the space for an index.

1: I regret to report that the binding on my copy of this book is beginning to fall apart. However, that does mean it held together roughly sixty times as long as the infamous Champions 4^th Edition hardcovers.

2: Champions is by no means a perfect game, but the reason it has stayed in print for close to forty-five years is that its designers hit on what turn out to be optimum methods to simulate superhero comics. Many other games have emulated those solutions.

This seems as good a place to mention another detail DC Heroes shared with Champions: the logarithmic scale was granular at low power levels. Characters like Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen were mechanically indistinguishable. 

3: Yeah, yeah, Maggie Sawyer. The writers made it very clear Sawyer was gay, while the editors did their damnedest to ensure that stayed subtext (albeit obvious).

4: Although DC comics continuity was a moving target. 3^rd Edition, for example, is set during the window of time in which Superman was dead, which is to say between December 1992 and October 1993. Actually, not even that full range as certain revelations about some of the characters involved are withheld.

5: For example, if a player rolled two 4s for a total of 8, they would roll again. Let’s say they rolled a 4 and a 5. The result would be 8 + 9 for a total of 17.

6: Some powers are inherently lethal. It is impossible to non-fatally dissolve people in acid. As well, some combat results, knock-back being one, can be inadvertently lethal. Yes, the good old ​“Great Scott! *Choke* He stumbled into his own atomic generator of doom and was instantly incinerated!” is an event the game mechanics can plausibly deliver.