[Warning!] Blood of Heroes: Special Edition [Warning!]

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Gabriel said:
I get the same feeling. Not that they're from Wizard, but that the art is the same kind of thing I used to see in independent comics of the very late 80s and early 90s.

In the early 90s I was a regular attendee of the comic shop, and it was the age of Diamond Previews. After you got past Marvel, DC, Valiant, and merch, Previews was absolutely packed with listings for b&w comics with art like Blood of Heroes had.

Plus, my partner had a thing for the cheap comic racks back then. One store had a back room with a rack and bin with 4 comics for 25 cents, while another just had a bin where each comic was ten cents or something. He'd trawl through those all the time. He discovered so much strange comic stuff, and an amazing amount of it looked just like Blood of Heroes.

The art in Blood of Heroes isn't to my taste, but I'm sure I've seen worse or at least stuff I've liked less.

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As someone who is just getting into DC Heroes via 1e, I'm a bit impressed how the chart doesn't bother me at all. The read-this-first book explains it well, and took what initially seemed a clustermess and instead made me feel it was a really slick and intuitive way of doing things. I'll have to see how I feel after a bit of play. I mean, after years of MSH play I sometimes want to do away with the color chart. But time will tell.
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It’s overstated by some just how long the chart holds up play. I can look up results in a couple seconds and I’m not a genius by any measure.
 
I remember seeing that Batman RPG displayed as a shipper at a Waldenbooks back in 1989 but I didn’t purchase it. I flipped through it, thought it was cool and put it back down. When I saw the second edition boxed set on a shelf at Waldenbooks (I bought a lot of my RPG stuff there back then) I was ecstatic and bought it right away. Probably my favorite RPG purchase ever.
 
Gabriel said:
As someone who is just getting into DC Heroes via 1e, I'm a bit impressed how the chart doesn't bother me at all. The read-this-first book explains it well, and took what initially seemed a clustermess and instead made me feel it was a really slick and intuitive way of doing things. I'll have to see how I feel after a bit of play. I mean, after years of MSH play I sometimes want to do away with the color chart. But time will tell.
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I agree with you about the table and the only reason I ditched it was because I needed something even easier and faster (it is to my mind because I've been doing it for years now) for my play by post game. 1e is really very good but 2e is the sweet spot and more relevant as its post crisis so no Superman juggling Mt Everest etc. As someone mentioned it's easier to list what you don't get in the box (1e did this too - how did they make any money???). Simply superb and I don't think we'll ever see the like again. The one book inches thick approach seems to have been the rage for decades now and countless additional splatbooks + new editions of bullet stopping tomes make games less approachable for new players than the old pamphlet/paperback 30-60 page books from the 80s.

When comparing the hefty tomes of today I usually think back to the 80s and figure that they did the same thing (provide countless hours of fun/RPing) in a far smaller package and if approaching it with an older players 'can I be arsed to learn a new system' approach I'd much prefer the paper bound books of yesteryear to the tomes of today. My shelves would appreciate it more too, and probably my floorboards...
 
I certainly wouldn't call this art "good," but I do like the enthusiasm of it. It looks like something a 12-year old drew in the back of their notebook while bored in math class, just thinking, "What's awesome?" while giving zero fucks what anyone else thinks.
 
Outside of completeness if I have BoH 2E is there any reason to buy 1E?
 
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2e includes the 1e rules, sidekick sourcebook and cleaned up typos/errata so pass on that if you don't need it to run a game.

I get the hate for the look of the game - the art is poor/terrible/tasteless in places and the covers don't scream four colour comic books more 'we weren't sure what to go with so went with this'.

In its defence I think Blood of Heroes 2nd Edition is a better game than that which it is based on - DC Heroes 3rd Edition. it comes with extra powers, skills, advantages etc and otherwise is compatible with the DC Heroes writeups.

3e DCH was a let down for me after the highs of 1e and 2e. It cost the same (because of inflation I guess) as both previous editions but came with barely any characters in it and not much in the way of supporting materials before the game was canned.

In contrast 1e and 2e have dozens of modules and supplements and aside from having to re-stat the characters in the 12-50AP range down to 3e/Blood of Heroes 2e levels (which tend to peak at 30 with highs of 25 or so for the biggest hitters) you can pretty much run the modules as is but need to bear in mind the changes to powers/skills from 1e to 2e onwards.

As for Blood of Heroes 2e, I think that with the rules re-laid out with better art (get Storn Cook on board, his stuff appears everywhere) and ditching the homebrew game world stuff (which I ignore completely) this game would Kickstart successfully and get back in print. The legal quagmire over DC owning the system I think would be a non-issue as systems can't be copyrighted, only the expression of them (as far as I can tell). Whether there would be appetite for another newer version of the game without the DC Heroes characters is another issue. Oh, and change the name from Blood of Heroes to some thing - anything - else. When the game is mentioned the art is the first topic of conversation (I must admit it's bad) and 'Blood of Heroes 3e' would crash and burn before anyone even asked "What is the art like...?" I guess.

Edit: Just had a thought. Marvel should have gone with this out of print/defunct system for their new game which looks like a clunky mess so far.
 
Jenx said:
The legal quagmire over DC owning the system I think would be a non-issue as systems can't be copyrighted, only the expression of them (as far as I can tell).
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Mechanics can’t be copyrighted but their expression can be. That is a problem with you have a game with charts, as DC does. You would not be able to use the Action and Result tables as is, but you probably wouldn’t want to make a clone without tables, as it wouldn’t really be a replica any longer. Therein lies the problem. Changes have to be made but where do you make them.
 
I find it really weird that Ray Winninger designed DC Heroes 3E and is now in charge of D&D. Is eBay the only place to find BoH 2e?
 
Torque2100 said:
I love old school RPG art. It's such a grab bag of genuine talent, passionate amateurs who are just not quite there and "JESUS CHRIST, WHAT THE FUCK AM I LOOKING AT?" aka anything by John Blanche.
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I recall an anecdote from a GW staff artist where he sat down and drew his first space marine and he was pretty proud of his space marine but in the meantime, John Blanche had drawn the entire siege of Terra with hundreds of space marines and dozens of titans.
 
Cross Planes said:
I find it really weird that Ray Winninger designed DC Heroes 3E and is now in charge of D&D. Is eBay the only place to find BoH 2e?
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To my knowledge that is correct, there is no legal PDF that I know of. I just spent twice the cover price for a copy to finish my DC Heroes collection of core rules.
 
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