Back in the late 1980s, like a lot of other geeks, I really got into comics books.  For me, it was Matt Wagner’s Grendel that really pulled me in, and other indie titles like Fusion, Albedo, Airboy were my real delights.  I also was a fan of the big two, depending on the book.  So it was only logical that my roommate and I would begin role playing superheroes.

The big boy on the block was Champions, with a character creation process than made GURPS look quick and easy.  Not have all day to crunch numbers, I looked for a simpler system.  We tried Marvel Superheroes, but the system was too quirky and seemed a bit abstract.  Finally, we settled on DC Heroes, by Mayfair.

Character creation was still very open, allowing the player to customize his character by buying his attributes, powers, and skills.  Attributes were broken into physical, mental, and spiritual aspects, each with a specific attribute to attack/defend, a “strength”, and a rating that was used as damage.  After than powers and their levels were bought, then skills (which were secondary, in many ways, to the powers.)

The best part of the system was the AP idea:  ratings in attributes and powers equated to weight, time, distance measurements, allowing the GM to be able to easily know how far the knockback of a punch might take a character, or how far one could fly in a certain instance of time.  The scale was exponential:  each level was double the amount a person could lift, distance they could run/fly, etc.  It made for a very easy system to run, and allowed for running almost any power level.

The weakest part of DC Heroes was the gadget and gadget construction rules, which were kludged at best.

There is still a decently large following of the game online, and I got my set out of a used bookstore for $6.  If you are looking for asupers game that isn’t d20, and doesn’t require a Cray supercomputer to build a character, DC Heroes might fit the bill.