When you think hard enough about it, superheroes are probably one of the goofiest concepts to come out of the 20th century. The backstories are usually extremely implausible. Continuity is oftentimes a perplexing mess. And who in their right mind would wear yellow spandex in public, let alone into battle? But all of this doesn’t change the fact that the superhero genre is fun. When it’s done well, there’s something strangely compelling about over-muscled titans punching each other through walls and smacking each other with telephone poles. It may not be art, and it may not be great literature, but it’s still tremendously entertaining. Therefore, it makes sense that so many role-playing games have been based upon the exploits of superheroes. There have been Champions, Heroes Unlimited, Brave New World, GURPS Supers, The Marvel Universe RPG, and most recently, White Wolf’s Abberant game. Now, one more superhero title enters the market with the release of West End Games/Yeti’s DC Universe Role-Playing Game.
For your $28.95 you get a 254-page book, with a player’s section in color and a GM’s section in black-and-white. Although some of the artwork is uninspired, by and large I think it is excellent. Some of the full-page spreads are particularly good, with my particular favorite being a picture of Superman battling an army of crazy skeleton-people.
The basic rules are based on a modified version of the D6 system from the Star Wars game. To perform a skill, you roll a number of dice equal to your attribute plus a number of dice equal to your skill rating against a target number and then count the number of successes. If you got enough successes, you succeed in your task. If not, you fail. There is also a ‘Wild Die’ which can cause critical successes or failures. WEG makes special ‘Hero Dice’ especially for the game, but I don’t see any particular need for them.
The combat system is probably the wonkiest part of the game. Let’s say that Batman wants to punch a thug. First, he has to roll a number of dice equal to his martial arts or brawling skill against the bad guy’s Passive Defense Value stat. Assuming he doesn’t flub up the roll and miss, he subtracts his enemy’s PDV from the number of successes he got on his attack roll, and adds any bonuses he might have from his high strength. Then, he rolls his damage dice against the goon’s PDV. The number of successes on this roll, plus the earlier total of his attack successes and strength bonuses, is the amount of damage that he does to the villain. Considering how often people get punched in comic books, this seems like a lot of math and dice rolling, and this example doesn’t even use any of the special modifiers for armor or martial arts manuevers. These difficulties are especially pronounced for high-powered characters. Somebody playing Superman, for example, has to roll a bare minimum of 22 dice in order to kick Brainiac. You’d better have a whole lot of six-siders lying around if you want to play a cosmic-level campaign. Although I realize that a certain amount of complexity is necessary when dealing with characters who can knock down brick walls with a well-timed sneeze, this still seems over-the-top.
Character creation is done by points allocation, and is relatively fast and simple. Because of the way that powers can be tweaked and specialized, even weird character concepts are not too difficult. For example, I had no problems whipping up a sample hero named the Mayor of Television, who had the ability to bring televisions to life and command them. There are five different ‘power levels’ for starting characters, so it’s relatively easy to create parties in which every hero is on equal ground in terms of abilities. My one complaint about this system is that even if you use the highest power level, starting characters will probably be weak by comic-book standards, due to the high cost of good attributes and powers. GMs should be aware that if they’re looking for a high-powered campaign with original characters, they’re going to have to monkey with the points allocation system. Although there are some issues of balance (a creative player with an open-ended power like Matter Manipulation or Magic could cause a lot of trouble for an unprepared GM), a certain level of this is to be expected in superhero games. GMs can always fight fire with fire if they want to.
If you want to play with existing DC characters, there are about thirty pages of statistics for major heroes and villains such as Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Lex Luthor, the Joker, etc. Fans of the Superfriends will be dismayed to learn that the Wonder-twins and Gleek are not included.
For gamers who don’t know a lot about comics, the book has a history of the DC Universe starting ten years ago, as well as brief descriptions of some of the major places, like Gotham City and the prison-planet Apokolips, and supporting NPC characters, like Commissioner Gordon and Jimmy Olsen. I consider myself to be moderately familiar with the DC Universe, but still found this information to be very helpful. Anyone with a bit of experience playing RPGs and a big ol’ dice collection should be able to get right into the swing of things. However, comics fans trying out a role-playing game for the first time may be in for a bit of trouble. Its starting adventures are fine and its description of what an RPG is is adequate, but the complexity of some of the rules mechanisms might throw newbies off balance.
Overall, I think that the DCU RPG (how’s that for an acronym?) is a pretty decent addition to the hero genre. It’s not the type of game that you can instantly pick up and have the hang of, but I didn’t see any problems that couldn’t be minimized with practice. I liked the character creation system a lot, and the DC Universe is full of great characters and adventure potential. It’s definitely worth a look for anyone who gets a kick out of brightly colored tights, huge muscles, or gigantic killer robots.
