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During a lull in our long running D&D (3.5e) game, we tried a playtest session of DC Heroes to see how it held up in comparison to my fond memories of it.
We created characters with the base 450 points (with 75 points of disadvantages) as suggested by the rulebook. Not being familiar with the system, I picked Project Prometheus a pre-written adventure by Greg Gordon and lee Maniloff as the starting adventure.
2 of the PCs created their own characters, a mystic called Wraith, a tank-like genetic experiment on the run called the Brick, and the last player picked one of the pre-generated PCs called Morning Star.
The initial encounter had the players attending a night-time football game while a kidnapping took place when the lights went out. Wraith and Brick gave chase while the Morning Star went to take care of the saboteurs. At this point, the two players who'd created their characters realized that not having a lot of hero points left over after character creation might cost them, since the kidnapper could fly faster than they could and they had no chance of "pushing" their flight powers enough to catch the kidnapper.
Morning Star encountered 5 saboteurs along with a security guard, and proceeded right into combat. At this point, the lack of an index started to bug us as we hunted for the multi-attack rules, but once they were found Morning Star quickly dispatched the mooks.
At this point, the plot was set and the players were hooked. They were contacted by an agent of the U.S. intelligence explaining who the kidnapper was and dispatching them to Crete to investigate. The PCs tried to investigate on the way, but their lack of formal connections among all the PCs hampered the investigation, though they did find a few leads I threw at them to reward their efforts.
The plot deepened as the PCs visited Crete and was greeted by the ruler and were given a tour of the facilities by various folks, making enemies and gaining allies. They were then given a choice --- turn their backs on the U.S. intelligence services and help the Minoans in a just cause, or ignore the Minoans and let their project be dismantled. The PCs worked hard and through a combination of roleplaying and quick thinking managed to defer an invasion of the island.
On a hunch, they followed the trail of one of their enemies and found her doing dastardly deeds, leading to the big combat of the evening. This was where I discovered the flaws of the combat system. First of all, having to cross reference two tables on every combat roll was time consuming and error prone. I had the tables pre-printed and printed on both sides of my screen, so the players and I could cross-check each other, but it still time, since unless you pre-computed every possible combination of the characters attacking each other you'd have to look up the tables on the fly.
Secondly, until we found the special combat rules (critical blow and devastating attacks), it seemed as though combat was going to take many rounds, as the characters wore down each other's hero points, since hero points could be used to both boost resistance attributes and take away damage (as a last ditch defense). Since the villains had a significant amount of hero points while two of the PCs had next to none, the combat took awhile and the villains ended up victorious. This final combat took 1.5 hours to run.
Ultimately, I was both satisfied and disappointed. First of all, combat took longer to run than with Mutants and Masterminds, where no lookups were needed and all the numbers that needed to be rolled were pre-computed. Secondly, hero points were a big buffer and the big combat would seem to suck lots of them from both the PCs and the villains, which would seem to make combat drag out more than necessary. Perhaps one thing to do would be to reduce the number of hero points villains could use, but that does seem to be somewhat unbalancing. Thirdly, the lack of an index in the rulebook made rules lookup a chore, and after awhile I simply gave up and made the PCs roll Int/Int type rolls for a number of things. Finally, the point-based character creation drove PCs to over-specialized, which means certain critical skills such as Scientist and Detective could easily end up missing from the group.
My primary satisfaction, ironically, came from the pre-written adventure. I enjoyed how the characters actually had to face a real moral dilemma, and had to think hard about how to get out of the position they were in. I have to wonder if the other adventures for DC Heroes are as good --- there might be great material there to mine for other games.
Ultimately, however, I'm afraid I have to conclude that Mutants and Masterminds is the better RPG for superheroes today. I still like DC Heroes as a system, but it will take more time to learn and master than M&M, which took no time for gamers who were already familiar with d20.
