Mayfair's DC Heroes RPG was the only RPG my sister ever bought stuff for and maybe we even played it a session or two. I loved the boxed game with three booklets and lots of big-index-sized cards each detailing a hero or villain with picture in front and stats in back.

After Champions and Marvel Super Heroes, what DCH brought was elegance. Three category of attributes for physical, mental and magical spheres and each category had an attack attribute, a defense attribute, and a hit point attribute.

The number system takes some getting used to. Every +1 AP (attribute point) doubles the real-world measurement. For example AP 0 distance is 10 feet (or whatever), AP 1 = 20 feet, AP 2 = 40 feet, AP 3 = 80 feet, AP 4 = 160 feet and so forth. It was great that pre-Crisis Superman had a 50-something strength (normal person is AP 2) which is paradoxically more sensical than a human with STR 10 and Superman with STR 50000.

DCH uses two charts to determine success level and final effect level. And the charts are not quite linear -- they're designed to make larger AP levels less granular (at low levels one to three APs shift a column while at high levels it's five APs). When I ran my DCH campaign I eventually to a simple mathematical formula which matches the charts at low and mid APs and was significantly off at high APs.

Anyways, eventually I acquired a pretty much complete DCH collection. There were some 40+ supplements, mostly adventures. I like how the adventures were set up. Each chapter had a scene and what happens and at the end are the Hero Point rewards (you can't just succeed, you need to do it heroically).

Which reminds me, I also loved the Subplots system. Players and GMs collaborate on subplots which give PCs some extra Hero Points and are also great roleplaying opportunities. Champions is an old-school system written at a time when such a concept didn't need to be written down. MSH I don't remember what they had for that if anything. I like DCH because mechanically you could go "this subplot has a certain danger level and there's a certain consequence level so it's worth this many points".

One thing I didn't like about DCH is that Hero Points are used for improving characters or for adjusting die rolls in game play. I really hate that system because that means my players never use Hero Points in game play because they're so used to improving characters. I don't remember what I did about that.

I did eventually run a 50 or so session DCH campaign. The campaign was designed to use as many modules as I could and since the modules are very varied the campaign was designed to run in three eras: World War 2, then reboot to 1980's, and finally reboot to Legion of Super Heroes far future era.

I created a few adventures but mostly ran the modules, sometimes just as a guideline. My style back then was one session adventures so if things were moving slowly I'd skip chapters to get to the end. I liked that because it was a bit improvisational which I hadn't done before. I had to run the game, keep an eye on the clock and estimate length of future scenes and what needed to be cut out on the fly.

Overall one of my favorite campaigns.