Mayfair Games took the opportunity of the film release to drop The Batman Roleplaying Game. A small, cut-down version of the DC Heroes RPG, this is sort of a .5 edition, between the boxed first (1985) and second edition (1990). It is a complete, playable RPG for street-level heroes. All you need for a campaign of heroes around the Batman, Robin, Batgirl power levels. I bought my first copy at Hasting's right after seeing the film, and many years later Half Price Books had many copies for $1 each, and I bought a dozen. I still have 3 of those, but I've given away others to gamers over the years.
Batman uses the Mayfair Exponential Game System, or MEGS. In this innovative system, each value is (roughly) double the earlier value. For example, a character with the human average AP (Attribute Points) of 2 in Strength can lift 200lbs. A 3 Strength would life 400lbs, and a 4 800lbs. This makes the game a bit low-resolution at normal human ability levels, which does have an effect in the kind of characters players will likely create in Batman, but the system has a way of making numbers easier to handle once you get used to it.
I'll admit as a kid, I had some issues grokking MEGS as a system for the first few games, but as an adult I realize it's pretty slick. I still lean towards the Marvel FASERIP system, but that's probably because I had more experience with it back in the day. Today, I appreciate MEGS overall, and specifically the Batman Roleplaying Game. Why? Two reasons- it wraps up DC Heroes into a neat, portable package, and it's directly associated in my head with those wonderful years of the late 80s and early 90s when I was really hitting my stride as a person, and as a gamer.
Time to slide down the bat-pole and create a character for the Batman RPG. And while I'm doing it, I've put on the '89 Batman film- the opening Danny Elfman music still sends chills down my spine.
Character Creation
Step 1 in the Batman RPG is to think carefully about the character you want to create. This is important, since this game uses a point-buy system. In many of the games we've seen in this series, stats are rolled or generated before choosing other details. But unlike random games, the character is tailor-made to be what it is before points are spent.
So, our hero will be a martial artist in keeping with the fisticuffs style of most of the Bat-family. No guns, and rarely lethal weaponry. Hey, there's an idea. This character will be the (die roll...) niece of Alexander Knox, the reporter portrayed by Robert Wuhl in the '89 film. This young lady has followed her uncle's stories in the paper about The Batman, and once it became apparent he was a defender of Gotham at the end of the film, she decided to become a crime-fighting detective in her own right. The issue being, she's young, not a billionaire, and has no access to all of Batman's "wonderful toys" and vehicles.
So, her physical attributes will be above average, as she trains and works out, but not so high as to be outside the realm of possibility. Her gear will be rudimentary, maybe what she can construct herself with her obsession-enhanced education, but that education means she has quite a bit of book knowledge on the things she thinks are important to fighting crime. So, let's give her a bit of gadgeteer, as she uses her head and her research to make up for her stature.
Step 2 is purchase attributes. There are nine basic attributes in this system, divided into three areas, Physical, Mental, and Spiritual. Within each are three individual attributes- one controls how much power a character can exert in that area, one how much control the character has over that power, and one how resistant the character is in that area. For example, in Physical, Strength determines damage out put, Dexterity the accuracy of that damage, and Body the resistance to physical damage. So, we'll giver her a DEX of 5, really good but not superhuman. STR and BOXY will be 3, above average but not ridiculously so, she's a young woman who works out, but she's no body builder (yet). Her mental attribues, INT, WILL, and MIND will all be 5, equivalent to scientist Dr. Kirk Langstrom, higher than a Mob Boss, but still with room to grow to get to the level of seasoned heroes like Nightwing or The Batman himself. This costs 232 of our 450 points.
Step 3 is purchasing powers and skills. She won't have any powers, per se, but skills- absolutely. She'll have Actor, Charisma, Detective, Gadgetry, Martial Artist, and Thief.
Skills are purchased by paying Base Cost, plus a cost associated with the number of APs of skill you wish to have. Our character is better than average at the things she does, but again, not in the same league as an experienced hero. So let's give her a rating of 4APs in each skill. Better than a Thug or Henchman, but not super badass. We're now at 417 points out of 450.
For Advantages, we take City Knowledge, a Connection (Uncle Alex), and a Gadget. The Gadget is a device to make getaways or stun opponents - like a camera strobe on steroids. It has a Body of 4 (21 points), the Flash power with 5APs (44 points), can only work 4 times before recharging (-10 points) and has a Reliability of 5. This totals to 55, divided by 2 since it's a Gadget, for a final cost of 28.
We're now overbudget by 25 points, so we'll need some Disadvantages. Age is an obvious one, our heroine is still a teenager. We'll also grab Secret Identity. These two together net us the -25 we needed. Our heroine is ready to play!
The Character
Uncle Allie should have won his Pulitzer for the events in Gotham City, Kari told herself for the fifteenth time as she re-read the carefully clipped articles he'd written on The Batman. It was still so unbelievable, the whole thing, that some... what... caped crusader was sneaking through the city beating up criminals? The Gotham syndicates had gone underground, the police seemed to be getting a handle on crime, and suddenly Gotham wasn't such a bad place to live.
She smiled as she clicked the last piece of plastic into place over her new bracer gauntlet thing. She hadn't decided what to call it yet. But it was the hottest camera strobes she could lift from the storeroom at the newspaper with some of the most powerful batteries she could get her hands on at Radio Shack. This thing should be able to blind just about anyone looking in it's direction when it goes off. She'd better remember to look away and shut her eyes. Maybe her next project would be protective goggles.
Tonight would be her first patrol, her first opportunity to help, like Batman. She was sure that with her dark costume, her flash device, and her other skills she could lend a hand and do some good for people. And in the process, maybe she'd run across Batman herself. Maybe she could get him to show her a few things. Maybe Batman needed an understudy? Maybe she could talk him into giving Uncle Allie an exclusive interview...
Oh! There was her alarm, time to go to Karate Class. She had to keep perfecting her fighting form if she was going to beat up criminals. After class, when mom thought she'd be at the library, then it'd be time to patrol. She really needed to come up with a hero name...
(The Batman RPG did not have its own character sheet, so the character is presented below in the format in which it would have appeared in the Batman The Roleplaying Game book.)
| Kari Knox | |||||
| DEX: | 5 | STR: | 3 | BODY: | 3 |
| INT: | 5 | WILL: | 5 | MIND: | 5 |
| INFL: | 5 | AURA: | 4 | SPIRIT: | 4 |
| INITIATIVE: | HERO PTS: | 450 | |||
| ● Powers | |||||
| None. | |||||
| ● Skills | |||||
| Actor:4, Charisma:4, Detective:4 | |||||
| Gadgetry:4, Martial Arts: 4 | |||||
| Thief: 4 | |||||
| ● Advantages | |||||
| City Knowledge (Gotham) | |||||
| Connection (Alexander Knox) | |||||
| Gadget: Flash Gauntlet (BODY 4, | |||||
| Flash:5, Ammo:4) | |||||
| ● Disadvantages | |||||
| Age, Secret Identity | |||||
| ● Wealth: | 3 | ||||
| ● Alter Ego: Unnamed Vigilante | |||||
My Thoughts
I haven't gotten to play this game in literal decades. It is a frequent bedtime read because I have an extra copy in my bedside bookshelf, and because the book has a pretty good sourcebook worth of Batman information inside it. It's been ages, but making this character has taken me back to Freshman year of High School when Tim Burton's film had just come out. Batman for me before that point had always been Adam West, or the Superfriends portrayal. I mean, he'd even guest-starred on Scooby-Doo. Sure, I'd read a couple of Batman comics, but I was really a Marvel kid growing up save for DC's run of Star Trek. I was far more likely to read X-Men, Spider-Man, GI Joe, Transformers, What If?, What The?!?, and things like that. It wasn't a conscious decision, just kinda how it was. Oh! Wait, Forgotten Realms was DC, too... I had a few of those, come to think of it.
Anyway, the Batman film had a profound effect on me and how I thought about superheroes. It also changed how we played superheroes. In The Marvel Superheroes Roleplaying Game by TSR a hero would lose all their accumulated Karma if they killed or allowed someone to be killed. In the Burton Batman, it's pretty clear Batman kills or allows some of Joker's henchmen to die. And what about Johnnie Gobbs? Yes, this was out of character for the Dark Knight Detective, and I became more aware of that as I got older and learned more about the character than I'd known from the campy (but fun) 60s series and the animated shows of the 70s. All of a sudden, a superhero game could be gritty, and dark, and street-level. And then we got the brilliant and groundbreaking Batman: The Animated Series.
This game, though I've not played it since those heady days of High School, and then only a few times, holds a special place in my heart for the place and time in which it came into my life. It is a reminder of that year of Batmania, of starting High School, of being a young adult but still hanging on to a vestige of childhood. I fondly remember the RPG section at our Hastings, and seeing this book there, and knowing I had to have it. It was the final year of the 1980s, the decade that continues to define me thirty years later. Now I'm in my 40s, with kids of my own, and I can take the time to collect these old games and reflect on them. To paraphrase Alexander Knox "You know why grognards are so nostalgic for old games? Because they can afford to be."
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