I listen to a whole lot of podcasts and one that appears regularly on my iPod is This Modern Death. It’s a podcast “about Modern Horror and Dark Future role-playing games.” In their latest episode, Shaun, Kristin and that other guy discuss media properties in role-playing games. They talk a great deal about some recent entries into the market, such as the Serenity and Battlestar Galactica rpgs.
The hosts regard these games as failures since the systems utilized do not capture the spirit of the setting.
Which got me to thinking…
The system that totally nailed the feel of its setting was the DC Heroes Role-Playing Game (you were wondering what this had to do with comics, right?). From 1985 to 1993, the now-defunct Mayfair Games published DC Heroes. It was a system that fully integrated massively powerful characters such as Superman and less powerful guys like Batman in the same game world. Truly, it allowed players to duplicate the experience of the DC Universe around the table.
The system, the Mayfair Exponential Game System (or MEGS), utilized a logarithmic scale to measure the characters’ skills, attributes and powers. It was an easy system to learn, yet it beautifully expressed the action and feel of the setting.
The game came out right after Crisis on the Infinite Earths. It captured a lot of that Man of Steel re-work in the game as well as other post-Crisis changes.
I am still using the system for my supers games.
While DC Heroes is no longer in print, it is widely available on eBay.
September 10th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
You can still get copies of “Blood of Heroes : Special Edition” on Amazon. It revised MEGS.
September 10th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Hands down, the best superhero rpg ever made. I loved (and still love) this system.
September 10th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Owned it. Just could never find enough people interested in playing a super-hero pen & paper RPG. My friend and I created a bunch of characters and I think I tried to GM for him once, but that’s as far as it got.
September 10th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
I liked DC Heroes okay, but I prefer Champions.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:20 am
When Mayfair lost the license, they started giving huge discounts to get rid of the inventory. I ended up buying a huge stack of books at about 75% off. Even though I never played the game, they were good reading material. A few of source books were even written by their respective character’s writers. Roger Stern wrote the Superman book. Most famously the Bierbaums wrote the Legion book, which had a bunch of background information not found in the comics.
September 16th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Hey, thanks for the mention. I’ll have to take a look at this system if I can find the books. I was never a big comic book guy, so supers games sort of fly under my radar.