A neon sign of +2 against nostalgia

I was recently in Richmond, Virginia, and, wandering up Cary Street looking for record stores and bookstores, ran across a game store called One Eyed Jacques. They are mostly board games and card games, but apparently at one time they specialized in RPGs. I’m guessing this from the non-lit Mayfair Games neon light in their display window.¹

I have a few Mayfair game books from back in the day, and picked up a few more during my eBay spree several years ago. I played in one of their Role-Aids adventures, about a Clockwork Mage, back in college. It was a wacky adventure involving magical clockwork androids and the missing wizard who created them.

They made their own games, too, however, and were especially known for their Chill horror role-playing game and for the DC Heroes superhero role-playing game licensed from DC. DC Heroes was a bit of mathematical genius, where all numbers were interchangeable and within any scale +1 meant twice as big, bad, or whatever. This allowed relatively similar numbers to model everyone from Superman to Robin.

But it also meant the numbers across measurements could be compared: a 7 strength could throw a 5 truck for a distance of 2. A 5 speed would take 2 units of time to go a distance of 3, and so forth. It was an impressive mechanic.