Remembering DC Heroes

I've just been browsing through an old copy of the DC Heroes boxed set, as I continue to organise my library. Who remembers this?

Used to play this a fair bit, but it's been a long while. My recollection is that it was designed to favor playing existing superheroes over making your own, but even that's pretty fuzzy.

I had this game and I actually liked it quite a bit. The character creation system was very well done, with a point budget used to buy abilities and powers. You could control costs by taking limitations on powers or general drawbacks.

My group never played as much of this as I would have liked because ultimately, the core mechanic wasn’t as simple as the Marvel FASERIP system fron TSR, so we spent most of our time playing that.

Yeah, I could never get the group to play it. We played a lot of TSRs Marvel though.

Never tried it OR its Marvel counterpart.

I remember thinking it had an elegant way of depicting such a wide range of power levels available for different DC characters . . . but I may be looking back through rose tinted spectacles!

My favorite superhero game as a youth, I had 1e and still have the 2e books I think. A much better system than FASERIP Marvel but I was always more of a Marvel fan back then. Could handle Superman and Robin pretty easily. 3rd Ed was the same but slightly tweaked. Between this and AMSH we played more super heroes than D&D for a few yars.

The system definitely had a wide range of power levels, and the game mostly worked regardless of relative power level. It also had exploding dice, so that if you rolled a 10, you rolled again. That allowed for certain rolls to "break" the rules a bit, which seems to always come up in superhero comics. It woudl allow for a character like Batman to be able to affect a bad guy who had armor or some form of defense that would normally be beyond Batman's Strength. So that was good. However, it also had the side effect that some random thug off the street could deck Superman and hurt him...as long as he kept rolling 10 on a d10. So a bit of pro/con type of situation.

I always liked mechanics that would allow for such a possibility. In the Marvel game, things were a bit more static. By the book, Spider-Man could never hurt Titania; her Body Armor power was a higher rank than his Strength score. But in the comics, he was able to beat the crap out of her by relying on speed and hitting her so often that it overwhelmed her. She actually developed a fear of him as a result in the comics. In the game, she wouldn't have taken a point of damage.