My Favorite Game I NEVER Get to Play
RPGaDAY Day 6
My Favorite Game I Never Get to Play
DC Heroes is the the game that helped me hit my stride as a Gamemaster. I was an undergraduate in college at the time I ran that game and Ihad just finished playing in a couple of remarkably well gamemastered role playing campaigns.
There was Roger Frederick's GURPS Riverworld extravaganza that was a wonderful role playing experience and set us at odds with Horatio Herbert Kitchener. Roger passed away a couple of years ago, likely due to complications from an bus related accident he had been involved in. There’s a lot to the story of the accident and what it says about how our society treats people that aren’t what the mainstream deem as normal, but that is a story for another time. Let’s just say that Roger Frederick was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known and one of the best game masters ever. His ability to make the Riverworld campaign engaging for a group of players with very different role playing preferences, was a master class in the practice. We had people who wanted highly tactical combat situtations (it was GURPS after all), those who wanted challenging puzzles, players who wanted engaging narratives and dialog, and me who enjoyed all the above. Roger accommodated us all with a vivid imagination that had the capability to combine existing ideas in new and interesting ways. He was a master of high concept.
Then there was the D&D (Advanced) campaign in which Rob Faust's character and mine were half-brothers, one human and the other half-elven. My half-elven character had an exceptional Strength score (18/23 or so) and the GM created the running gag that he was "so strong he carried hemp rope."
I also played in a fun Amber game that demonstrated both how well that system could be run and how lame it could turnout -- all due to the diceless mechanic. Roger was a player in that game and is one of the reasons it worked as well as it did.
Prior to running the DC Heroes campaign, I read a couple of books that discussed role playing games and how to run them. The best of these were Aaron Allston's Strike Force for the Champions RPG and the stuff in The Fantasy Role Playing Gamer's Bible based on Robin Laws' writings on player types that you can also read in Robin’s Rules of Good Game Mastering.
With a couple of excellent campaigns and after reading some good advice, I was ready to run a role playing campaign and I’d been eager to play a super hero game for a long time. I had recently hunted down a used copy of the 2nd Edition of the DC Heroes RPG and the sheer toy factor of that boxed set convinced me that this was the super hero game I wanted to play. That and the fact that TSR's FASERIP Marvel game didn’t quite vibe with me mechanically at the time and there was no way I was going to get my current group to try out the Marvel SAGA game (with all the cards).
So I wanted to use the DC Heroes system, but I wanted to use it in a manner that was "comic universe neutral" and drew characters from both the DC and Marvel universes. I didn’t have time, between work and school, to build a bunch of villains, so having a deep catalog was a must. Thus my DC Heroes Earth had both Marvel New York and DC Metropolis. Captain America and the Invaders joined Sandman and the Justice Society in their quest to bash Nazis around. Conversion between TSR's Marvel to the DC Heroes system was a cinch since - in my view -DC Heroes APs correlate 1:1 with Champions DCs. Using this guideline the Hulk had either a 12 Strength or a 20 depending on whether I adhered to TSR's "carrying capacity" or just converted Strength 1:1 to Champions. I did the latter and my "DC" Hulk has a 20 Strength. Using the DC system, there is little need to give him the "grows as he gets mad" mechanics one might build into a Champions character. DC's "hero points" mechanic has that covered, as do the various “maneuvers” you can use in combat. If the Hulk needs to hold up a mountain - ala Secret Wars- he can push his Strength and spend the points. This had the effect that some of DC's more epic heroes were slightly more powerful than their Marvel counterparts, but close enough for government work. A battle between my "DC" Hulk and Superman wouldn't be without significant collateral damage, but it wouldn't be a cake walk for Supes.
What do/did I like most about DC Heroes? What makes it special? Most of these come down to Greg Gorden's design work on the game. If you don't know Greg Gorden's name, you should. He worked on the James Bond 007 RPG,Torg, Earthdawn, DC Heroes, Deadlands, and a host of other games. The games he worked on seem to share an ability to capture "cinematic awesomeness." The Bond game has areas of expertise where the PC is so good at stuff he/she doesn't have to roll to succeed. DC Heroes has the Hero Point mechanic and open ended die rolls on doubles. Hero Points can be spent to "push" abilities, but they can also be spent to "alter the environment" and are an early example of player agency mechanics. Did Hawkman drop his mace and desperately needs a replacement? Spend X number of Hero Points and there might just be a crowbar on the counter. DC Heroes pushes the players to become active narrators in the game play. DC even rewarded players for creating and playing out purely narrative sub-plots, this is very much like TSR Marvels use of Karma rewards for having Peter Parker pick up the laundry. I interviewed Greg in 2019 and you can listen to that episode using the link below.
DC Heroes is a great game. It has clean mechanics. It's easy to learn to play and run. But it's out of print. None of the players in my group own a copy and while it is easy to learn the basics there are some maneuvers available in combat and non-combat that are more complex in concept. They are all easy in implementation, but you have to become familiar with them. The game also has a point based build component, that means homework for the players or a PC generation day and my players don't tend to like those. Oh, and they also suffer analysis paralysis with questions like "How smart are you compared to Hank Pym or Batman?"
Because the of those reasons, and the fact that the game is so old, I don’t get to play the game right now. That's okay. There are some other great superhero games out there. And I have memories of that fantastic GMing experience.
A Glimpse into that Old Campaign.
As I mentioned above, I ran the DC Heroes campaign when I was and undergraduate at the University of Nevada, Reno. Amazingly, this one campaign lasted for a couple of years. It is the most successful superhero campaign I've run, and second most successful campaign of any role playing game I’ve ever run. It’s hard to beat an 8 year 3rd edition game that transitioned into 5 more years of 4e.
In the campaing, I had the luck to have a great group of gamers who were willing to cut loose and have a great time with the genre and who felt free to push the limits of the DC Heroes game system. This campaign is one of the reasons that I think DC Heroes is the best set of rules to play a superhero game, though Marvel Saga System and Tiny Supers come close and I’m really liking what Matt Forbeck has done in the new Marvel Multiverse Role Playing Game.
The premise of my campaign was pretty simple. I wanted to run a game where the characters were on the same power level as the Justice League, minus Superman and Wonder Woman, and I wanted the game play to have a touch of the feel generated by the Giffen/Maguire/DeMatteis run in the Justice League books. I wanted a mix of action and comedy. To be honest, based on my experience in running RPGs, I knew the comedy would come whether I wanted it or not. It's is the DM's Lament to want to run a game that captures the epic tales of the Eddas and Beowulf only to end up with Monte Python's Holy Grail. Instead of fighting that tendency, I decided to roll with it. The title of the campaign was Justice League: Auxiliary. The premise being that the characters were members of the Justice League, as then managed by Maxwell Lord, but where the second string of the team.
What a team it was too. The membership included an interesting mix of characters about whom my wife (girlfriend at the time) drew a couple of cartoon strips that ran in the school paper The Sagebrush. That brief strip was called "Meet the Crusaders."
I’d like to share those comics with you now and introduce some of the team.
GABRIEL: ARCH-ANGEL
Gabriel was character who believed himself to be the Archangel Gabriel (but probably wasn’t) and who exacted swift justice on any he viewed to be in violation of his very strict code of morality. During a battle with the god Ares, he attempted to use his Aura of Fear power and ended up not only succeeding at cowing Ares but in causing the entire continent of Europe to quiver in fear as his pushing of the power extended the aura over the entire geographic area. The character was played by my good friend, and best man at my wedding, Matt.
AQUARIUS
One of the great things about the DC Heroes system was it's ability to make almost any superhero and my friend Robert's character Aquarius was one that really demonstrated the strength of the rules. Robert wanted to play a super strong character who was a living water elemental and who could transform his hands into any weapon he imagined. In this particular case, the powers were called Omni-Arm, Density Increase, Dispersal, and Water Control powers. Robert was a relatively new gamer at the time, and had never played a superhero game before, so in the early sessions he tended to limit his use of Omni-Arm to turning his hands into sledge hammers. That changed soon enough.
This is just a glimpse at two of the members of the team. I’ll share some of the others with you at other times, so you will be seeing more of these characters as well as strips for Jynx, Vanguard, Spirit, and perhaps the most bizarre superhero ever made...Jody's beloved "Less" who was a character inspired by John Carpenter's THE THING and Larry Cohen's THE STUFF. Who is Less? Why is Less called Less? You'll have to wait for that comic, but he fit right in and Jody’s portrayal of him helped make that campaign one of the best ever.
Man, your wife is a super-talented artist! Those comic strips are amazing.