The Joys And Frustrations Of Dead Games
Oct. 19th, 2009 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theron(First off, a disclaimer: No game is truly dead unless no one plays it. That having been said, when a title is long out of print, the license has lapsed, and even the old mailing list archives are lost to the aether, it's a pretty near thing.)
Lately, I've been delving into my stack of superhero games. I'm still only about 100 pages into Hero 6th, but my overall familiarity with the system is bogging me down. It's a problem I have when I'm reading rules that cover ground I've trod many times before: I start glossing over because it's all so familiar. Mutants & Masterminds keeps trying to convince me to take another serious crack at it. The rules-light games like Truth & Justice and Supergang cry out for actual play. Heck, the other night, I got my Marvel Universe RPG books out of the garage, because I realized I'd never really given them an honest read-through.
But the game I spent the most time looking at this weekend was Mayfair's DC Heroes. In doing so, I'm struck by two things: First, how slick the system is. Yes, it's table-based and granularity is definitely not its strong suit, but it does what it does and it does it well. The second, is how frustrating it is to read across the editions.
The first edition of the game (1985) had all sorts of problems, mostly in the gadget rules, but also in that the game was written prior to DC Comics' massive "Crisis on Infinite Earths" reboot, which altered the power scale in the DCU quite substantially. But mostly, it was the gadget rules. They sucked. Still, the first edition box was so chock full of goodies (beautiful maps of the Titans tower, character stand-ups, tons of character write-ups), that it's easy to overlook this just for the cool stuff value. Besides, most of my frustrations have to do with the second and third editions of the game.
The second edition (1989) was magnificently put together. It came in a larger/heavier box than the first edition, with three books (Rules, Character Creation, and Background/Roster) and tons of cards with character write-ups on them. I think the game included stats on something like 200 characters all in all. There was also a neat and cheesy calculator wheel to use for quickly handling task resolution. I'm pretty sure today we'd just knock out an Excel macro, but it's fun to play with.
The second edition also made significant changes to character creation and completely revamped the gadgets rules. But best of all, it presented the information in a clear and clean fashion. The rules are simple, and the elaborations make sense. It's a little light on complete examples, and there's an alarming late 80s use of he/she instead of a less clumsy personal pronoun, but the overall writing style and organization is wonderfully clear while conveying enthusiasm for the game. Quite simply, it makes me want to play this game.
Then there's the third edition (1993), which is, in my opinion, rather a bit of let-down. The changes it incorporates from second edition are quite small, largely incorporating material from second edition supplements and altering a few other bits here and there. The summary of changes I found on the internet doesn't even fill two complete pages. This is all well and good. My issue with the book (and it's just a book, not a boxed set like before), is how poorly it is organized and how stingy it is with supplemental information. To me, the bigger issue is the first. Rather than following the very efficient model of second edition, it's like the editors of the third simply pulled out the individual chapters and slapped them together at random. Why else would you get the rather involved and lengthy character creation section before the rules? Granted, there is a decent ten page introductory chapter right at the beginning, but this is followed by 65 pages of character creation rules. It just seems like a very unfriendly way to organize the product.
As to stinginess, that's largely in terms of character write-ups. Unlike the earlier versions of the game that spilled the beans on hundreds of published characters, third edition gave us twenty nine. And four of those were the alternate Supermen from "The Death of Superman" storyline. And only four such characters were female (Wonder Woman, Starfire, Blackfire, and Catwoman). When you consider a DC Heroes character can be written up in the space of a playing card, it's a terribly paltry selection.
I wasn't as involved in internet doings when DCH 3e came out, so I don't know how it was received by the fans. I remember looking at it and feeling like the fun had been stripped out of the game in some intangible way. Reading over it now, I still can't quite put my finger on it and it may just be that my feelings about comics in general were pretty much at an all-time low during that period and it wouldn't be until '96 or so that I started getting my old enthusiasm back.
Which leads to the biggest frustration of dead games: the loss of resources. Even a bit of cursory searching shows there was once a flourishing online fanbase for this game. But where vast depositories of character write-ups and rules clarifications once dwelt, there is only 404 errors. 'Tis a cruel fate for such a noble system.
(And don't get me started on the ignominy of "Blood of Heroes." The less said of that abomination, the better.)
But this is more about the joys of rediscovering this old gem of a game. I only remember playing DCH a handful of times, but I bought the supplements religiously because they shed so much light on the DC Universe. I'm sorely tempted to slight all the other games in my library to give it a shot, maybe creating my own fourth season of "Justice League Unlimited" or something. I think the game would handle the animated DCU quite well.
Now, how to go about selling it to my player base?
Lately, I've been delving into my stack of superhero games. I'm still only about 100 pages into Hero 6th, but my overall familiarity with the system is bogging me down. It's a problem I have when I'm reading rules that cover ground I've trod many times before: I start glossing over because it's all so familiar. Mutants & Masterminds keeps trying to convince me to take another serious crack at it. The rules-light games like Truth & Justice and Supergang cry out for actual play. Heck, the other night, I got my Marvel Universe RPG books out of the garage, because I realized I'd never really given them an honest read-through.
But the game I spent the most time looking at this weekend was Mayfair's DC Heroes. In doing so, I'm struck by two things: First, how slick the system is. Yes, it's table-based and granularity is definitely not its strong suit, but it does what it does and it does it well. The second, is how frustrating it is to read across the editions.
The first edition of the game (1985) had all sorts of problems, mostly in the gadget rules, but also in that the game was written prior to DC Comics' massive "Crisis on Infinite Earths" reboot, which altered the power scale in the DCU quite substantially. But mostly, it was the gadget rules. They sucked. Still, the first edition box was so chock full of goodies (beautiful maps of the Titans tower, character stand-ups, tons of character write-ups), that it's easy to overlook this just for the cool stuff value. Besides, most of my frustrations have to do with the second and third editions of the game.
The second edition (1989) was magnificently put together. It came in a larger/heavier box than the first edition, with three books (Rules, Character Creation, and Background/Roster) and tons of cards with character write-ups on them. I think the game included stats on something like 200 characters all in all. There was also a neat and cheesy calculator wheel to use for quickly handling task resolution. I'm pretty sure today we'd just knock out an Excel macro, but it's fun to play with.
The second edition also made significant changes to character creation and completely revamped the gadgets rules. But best of all, it presented the information in a clear and clean fashion. The rules are simple, and the elaborations make sense. It's a little light on complete examples, and there's an alarming late 80s use of he/she instead of a less clumsy personal pronoun, but the overall writing style and organization is wonderfully clear while conveying enthusiasm for the game. Quite simply, it makes me want to play this game.
Then there's the third edition (1993), which is, in my opinion, rather a bit of let-down. The changes it incorporates from second edition are quite small, largely incorporating material from second edition supplements and altering a few other bits here and there. The summary of changes I found on the internet doesn't even fill two complete pages. This is all well and good. My issue with the book (and it's just a book, not a boxed set like before), is how poorly it is organized and how stingy it is with supplemental information. To me, the bigger issue is the first. Rather than following the very efficient model of second edition, it's like the editors of the third simply pulled out the individual chapters and slapped them together at random. Why else would you get the rather involved and lengthy character creation section before the rules? Granted, there is a decent ten page introductory chapter right at the beginning, but this is followed by 65 pages of character creation rules. It just seems like a very unfriendly way to organize the product.
As to stinginess, that's largely in terms of character write-ups. Unlike the earlier versions of the game that spilled the beans on hundreds of published characters, third edition gave us twenty nine. And four of those were the alternate Supermen from "The Death of Superman" storyline. And only four such characters were female (Wonder Woman, Starfire, Blackfire, and Catwoman). When you consider a DC Heroes character can be written up in the space of a playing card, it's a terribly paltry selection.
I wasn't as involved in internet doings when DCH 3e came out, so I don't know how it was received by the fans. I remember looking at it and feeling like the fun had been stripped out of the game in some intangible way. Reading over it now, I still can't quite put my finger on it and it may just be that my feelings about comics in general were pretty much at an all-time low during that period and it wouldn't be until '96 or so that I started getting my old enthusiasm back.
Which leads to the biggest frustration of dead games: the loss of resources. Even a bit of cursory searching shows there was once a flourishing online fanbase for this game. But where vast depositories of character write-ups and rules clarifications once dwelt, there is only 404 errors. 'Tis a cruel fate for such a noble system.
(And don't get me started on the ignominy of "Blood of Heroes." The less said of that abomination, the better.)
But this is more about the joys of rediscovering this old gem of a game. I only remember playing DCH a handful of times, but I bought the supplements religiously because they shed so much light on the DC Universe. I'm sorely tempted to slight all the other games in my library to give it a shot, maybe creating my own fourth season of "Justice League Unlimited" or something. I think the game would handle the animated DCU quite well.
Now, how to go about selling it to my player base?
Hell, You Know I'm Up For It
Date: 2009-10-21 03:08 am (UTC)(There's no way to phrase the above without sounding unpleasant, so apologies all around.)
--J_In_Question