Trebuchet

If it's so unimportant, then why not just leave it in place for those players to whom it does mean something? A given character is always welcome to just keep the baseline 8 or 10 COM. But being attractive is a standard part of comics and adventure stories. Why remove the fun a player gets by being the biggest hunk/hottest babe in a group of people? I've never built a PC or major NPC that didn't have a higher than average COM (or a really low one if they are a monster). I don't have any problem with COM being humanocentric; after all the vast majority of HERO players are probably human.

Just out of curiosity, what do you feel were the positive effects of removing COM? I can see where not having it wouldn't make any real difference, but I can't see actual benefits.

Yes. Full Life Support.

If I may, I'd like to point out that it is hardly necessary to be of the same species to consider another being attractive. I think all cats, be they mere pets or tigers in the wild, are beautiful animals. A feline humanoid might well have a high COM. COM does not have to be about sex, it is a characteristic of beauty. Yamo's "living tetrahedron" might not be sexy, but it could still be beautiful just as the Hope diamond and orchids are beautiful. Just as I can appreciate artwork, I can consider another creature's beauty and grace noteworthy. Let's not get too narrow in our definition of Comeliness.

The longer barrels on rifles provide considerably more energy to even the same round, so an HK MP5 could very plausibly do more damage than a Glock 19 even using the same ammunition. Pistols are handguns. Did you mean rifles rather than hand guns?

350 point characters tend to be better rounded. More non-combat skills, more Perks, a better selection of Powers with greater flexibility. 250 point characters tend to be almost exclusively combat-oriented. When we jumped our 250 point game up to 350 points in our 10-year-old campaign, everybody's characters got a lot more versatile. We picked up languages (Everybody on our team now speaks three or more languages), oddball Skills such as Riding and Piloting, one player had his character pay 15 points for Filthy Rich. All in all, it's a better group of characters. Nobody's defenses in our group increased at all, and only one character's attack increased and that only because of GM request (We wanted the team's brick to hit harder.). Nothing wrong with 250. 350 is better IMHO.

Rules raping is a flaw of the players and GM, not the rules themselves. Without MPs and ECs, there are many common concepts that would be difficult or impossible to create. I'm not going to force the rules to be rewritten because I'm an inadequate GM and can't bring myself to tell a player "No." It's the GM's responsibility to enforce the genre, not the game system's. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Any GM is free to forbid anything in his campaign he so chooses. I just can't see any reason to prefer forbidding Power Frameworks outright instead of simply treating them on a case by case basis. I happen to like Power Frameworks; I think they add a useful element to the game. YMMV.

The very fact that so many characters are built without Elemental Controls is pretty good evidence in my mind that ECs are not inherently over-efficient. If they were abusive or unbalanced every character would have one; it's not hard to rationalize a theme. {"Ninja abilities? Powered Armor? Sure, go ahead.") Any character construction can be abusive. As Crosshair Collie pointed out, it is quite possible to build a 250 point character that can deck Dr. D in a couple of shots and still be "legal" by the rules. I prefer to examine the overall concept. I think ECs are a reward for a tight concept. Of course they can be abused, but so can anything else in an open ended game. It's up to the GM to say yes or no.

I ran a scenario there once dealing with witchcraft and an ancient evil living in the old sewer system. (Did you know Salem of witch trial fame is now a suburb of greater Boston?) Harvard and MIT are also just across the river. So it's a very rich environment for Champions scenarios.

My primary character, Zl'f, is built with an EC: Enhanced Reflexes that includes DEX, SPD and Running. My co-GMs thought it was fine, and felt it was enough of a Limitation since anyone doing either a SPD Drain or a DEX Drain on her would drain the other as well. (In fact, since her MP is also Linked to her EC it can get really ugly). She has never been unbalanced in our game; in fact she spends more time unconscious than the rest of the team combined. Heightened reflexes do not translate into high defenses; at least not in my mind. So she has a 12 PD/ED and an 18 CON. Just for the heck of it I designed a "cross-linked" version without the EC, such as i3ullseye suggested above, of her using Hero Designer a couple of months ago. The cost differential was 1 point out of a 364 point character (The EC version actually cost more). Hardly a powerful indictment of the overefficiency and unbalancing nature of Elemental Controls.

What exactly are they considering HERO to be cheating in regard to? If they say having a superior game system is somehow "cheating", then I guess they've got us cold.

One more vote confirmed.

Are you sure you're not really the Joker? I would wire an abandoned warehouse with lots of explosives, broadcast a fake sighting report on the police radio, wait until occult-batman arrives to search said warehouse, and blow it.

Hey, where else can you go to ask questions where the game designer himself will answer your questions? Steve Long and the guys from HERO are the best.!

The only problem I see with your method (and there is much to recommend it) is that buying Combat Luck as a variation of Damage Reduction instead of Resistant Hardened PF/ED is that it's very expensive that way. (Half of my character's 12 PD is already Combat Luck, so her PD just hanging around is only 6.) What values do you assign to the Limitations? I don't want my character to have higher defenses than she has currently (As of this moment she has 9 unspent Experiene Points, enough to purchase considerably better defenses if I wanted them.).

I agree with Yamo's method. This weakness is almost an exact inverse of the Advantage "Based on ECV", so you might consider this as a Limitation on his defenses as well.

That's true; I was primarily talking about Champions combat. I've always just subsumed minor cuts and bruises into STUN taken by a character in a fight. After all, a bloody nose or fat lip hurts, but it doesn't really effect a character's combat ability. We seldom use Hit Locations in our superhero campaign, but we do occasionally when it adds an element of drama or extra difficulty to a situation. In a recent adventure, my character Zl'f was able to target the inside of the arm (-8 to hit) of a supervillain holding a hostage by the throat and knock his hand away so the hostage could be rescued. My character was not actually capable of injuring the villain with a puny little 8d6 attack (especially on an extremity), but she moved his arm just enough to save the hostage. My character, with her 15 OCV, was the only person on the team who could have plausibly pulled that off, especially after a half move. The hostage was the research assistant (and DNPC) of a teammate who was a close friend, so my character knew the hostage personally. He wasn't just some guy off the street, so success was critical.

Combat with Killing Attacks between characters without Armor or other Resistant defenses are going to be very bloody. That's why you use combat maneuvers, and if you can buy armor. Even historically, fights of this nature were usually quick. Unfortunately, HERO does not really have a method to represent the little nicks and cuts that go with such a fight before one of the antagonists is finally killed. You think "most characters [have] a 15 BODY"? Jeez, I have superheroes with less BODY than that (My current superheroine Zl'f has only 12 BODY. Of course with her 38 DEX, your typical samurai facing her would be unconscious before his katana got halfway out of it's scabbard even if he had Fast Draw, so that's OK.), much less "normals" in a martial arts campaign. Of course, if I were playing a character in such a game, I would buy as much BODY as I could afford.

Correct, but not simultaneously. Of course, if you have several 5 point combat levels you may assign them as you see fit each Phase. My character with two levels in Hand-to-Hand combat often splits them +1 OCV/+1 DCV. There is a free basic Dodge maneuver which gives a +3 bonus to Defensive Combat Value, and which any character may use. Characters with martial arts may purchase the superior Martial Dodge manuever which provides a +5 to DCV. So far there is no specific campaign book which covers cyberpunk, but there is plenty of cyberpunk information in Star Hero. Star Hero is really "Science Fiction Hero". And welcome to Hero.

I agree with Ghost Archer. There is something useful in almost everything HERO puts out. I bought Star Hero recently not because I ever expect to run a space game, but because there was just too much useful material. Star Hero could have more accurately been called "Science Fiction Hero", and it covers everything from nanotechnology and cyberpunk to interstellar drives and time travel. If you run a Champions campaign with "cutting edge" technology in it (Like powered armor or AI supercomputers), Star Hero is a tremendous resource. The thing that sold me was the lovely writeups for Star Trek-type phasers (including the classic "heat the rocks to stay warm" setting and of course Star Wars-type light sabers.

The medieval Cathars of southern France were a Christian heresy that practiced many of those concepts. Priests were expected to support themselves through their own labor, so they were often noted craftsmen and herbalists. Because they did not acknowledge the primacy of the Roman Catholic church in Rome, they were exterminated in a series of "crusades" between 1209 and 1244 AD authorized by pope Innocent III. They were often falsely accused of many of the same atrocities as the Jews were: Consorting with Satan, witchcraft, etc. It's interesting that many of their religious concepts were "rediscovered" and used by the Protestants. Nowadays, if the Cathars still existed, they would probably be considered a moderate mainstream Protestant denomination. An excellent book on the subject is The Perfect Heresy by Stephen O'Shea.

I think it's a neat idea. Given the name, Seraphim would almost have to be Christian. But it could be a very generic Christian. ("Bless you, my son. God will heal you.") The superweapon idea sounds cool, sorta like an order of monks hiding King Arthur's sword Excaliber until a sufficient crisis looms. (Perhaps it's the one weapon that can stop an alien invasion in your campaign.) Introduce him in a very minor way, and just have him show up once in a while when a hero or villain gets seriously injured. You can reveal more each time he pops up. Perhaps a PC taken underground to be healed accidentally sees the Ultimate Weaponâ„¢ while he's convalescing, but doesn't realize what it is.

If you discussed this player with your other players and they are OK with him staying, then that is a different situation. I think player compatability is the most important thing for a good game. In my current 4-color superhero campaign of 12 years, I am the primary GM. I was the one who drew up the "universe" and set the initial parameters for the characters. We now have 2 other active GMs as well. I have "override" powers, but I don't make major changes in the game without first discussing them with my co-GMs. I also solicit input from both co-GMs before I make changes to my own character. If one of them doesn't really care one way or another about a proposed change I might do it, but if one REALLY disliked the change I would not do it even if I really liked the proposed change. No change to house rules is worth aggravating one of my co-GMs/players. I have enough respect for them to realize they might see something I missed. (Like when I proposed using Long Term END rules in the campaign. Oy vey!)

Well said. COM is as useful as you make it.

I can only admire your patience (and even more so the patience of your players). After such a player had killed my second character, my new characters would all be built with the sole purpose of killing his characters. I'd shove him off every high cliff we came near, or cut his throat in his sleep. (Perhaps an entire clan of assassins devoted to avenging a character slain by this imbecile...) You do realize, KS, that there is also a good chance he will never improve? Sometimes a sow's ear remains so.