Vanguard

I would assign more faith in setting, if-  well:
Millennium City
Vibora Bay
That college Steve has up in the store
Atlantean Age
Valdorian Age
Turakian Age
Tuala Morn
Hidden Lands
Stronghold
Terran Empire 
Meriquai Falls
Johlros
Hell's Half Acre
Kazei 5
Widening Gyre
Monster Island
The Mystic World
Hudson City
Worlds of Empire
 
And I can't remember how many other setting books from even further back- 
 
Had attracted an audience larger than _us_.  By that I mean people already big into HERO. 
 
A setting is a picture of a place that you use as a backdrop for your story.  Yes; you need one.  But you don't need two-hundred-odd pages of a setting to sit down and play a game, or to even be interested in playing.  I started playing Traveller with the little black box.  There really wasn't much in there for setting. 
 
I started playing D&D with box whose color I don't remember, but I remember that the rules were thinner than the 1e Champions book (though it would be a year or two before I learned that), and the highest level listed in the book was _three_.   Yep.  Third level.  It didn't have _crap_ for setting, not even the vague inferences that having to join a service made about the Traveller universe.  The closest thing we had to "setting" for D&D was pencil and ink lines on graph paper. 
 
The list goes on, or course: Star Frontiers:  we don't like these worm-looking guys.  Have fun. 
 
Gamma World:  there was an appoclypse, maybe nuclear, not sure.  Anyway, mutants. 
 
Aftermath:  something really horrible has happened that has brought about the end of the world.  You decide what it was. 
 
Twilight 2000:  the war's over, and you're stranded in Poland.  No; there are no maps.  You don't have orders anymore, so....   Well, it's Poland.  Do what you ordinarily do in Poland, but with guns and maybe a Humvee.  A green one. 
 
Seriously.  And some of those games have launched legacies. 
 
Even Champions-- the game that we come here regularly to celebrate and discuss, had _no_ setting. 
 
First edition was published in '81. Seriously, damned near all of it: rules, Enemies 1, Escape from Stronghold (Hillariously subtitled "Adventure #1 for Champions" ) , and Island of Doctor Destroyer.   That was.... Setting, I guess? 
 
Even wieder was that all the published adventures throughout 2 and 3e were totally unrelated to each other.  I think Circle and M.E.T.E appeared in the same book, but had no relation to each other.  Same with Blood and Dr. McQuark:  neither was filled out enough to make a 24 page book on thier own,  UT if we combine them..... 
Scourge From the Deep was just _nuts_ if you wanted to work it into any cohesive setting (though it did give us the drowning rules). 
 
To be honest, that campaign book that came with Justice, Inc?  Dude, that was positively _decadent_ in terms of setting for the games then.  But we still play it. 
 
 
It was forty years ago, and we are still in love, so I'm thinking that "setting is nice" might be more appropriate. 
 
The problem with setting is best illustrated with the current HERO books, and that classic example of setring: World of Darkness (or Vampire, for those looking for a short handle). 
 
Yes, it blew up _tremendously_ huge, and some of that can be contributed to setting.  Timing and topic had a lot to do with it, but the setting was undeniably very popular.  There was tons of it!  The just kept pumping it out.  Hell, why add new races and new monsters?  Think of a monster?  Build a damned game around it and toss it in World of Darkness!
 
But it's gone now.  Sure: there are, just like HERO, some diehards still plugging along.  But for the most part, it's just as dead as HERO.   But how, with that amazing setting? 
 
Too damned much of it.  Too much setting, too much restriction imposed by the setting, too much sameness.  In short, people gobbled up every little thing they could read about it, and after the information overload, they just got tired of it. 
 
Why was Lugosi the best Dracula?  You didn't see anything!  You knew there was the monster.  You _saw_ the monster as he stalked his victim.  Then there was a close up on his grotesque and lurid grin, he hunched and dove--
 
And the scene cut, or his cape obscured eveything-  his directors knew that nothing was better than what the audience would invent in their own minds.  There was enough setting to get you moving, and nowhere near enough to mire you down. 
 
Complete?  Give me an adventure, or enough setting that I can make something appropriate to what's been give.  Don't give me two hundred pages of an entire world:  the party isn't going to walk too terribly far from the starting point, anyway, not for months.  Don't bother me with what I don't need. 
 
The most popular setting book of all time, according to some, was Greyhawk.  I owned it, as I am sure many of you did.  What was that little miniature staple-bound book, anyway?  Maybe 40 pages?  Sure, it grew, but it grew over time; it didn't beat the zeal out of me with six chapters on political intrigue and four more on tax-funded infrastructure.  I don't want to play Phantom Menace; I'll call you if I get bored. 
 
A setting is a backdrop for your adventures; it's nice scenery, and names for the places in the distance.  Other than that, at least for the first few months, it's an oil painting.  Stunning, if done well.  But no matter how well it's done, you can't play it.  Not even a little bit. 
 
So: nice, but _almost_ optional. 
 

You remind me of an anecdote:
 
I got into roleplaying quite by accident.   I love dice.  I mean I _love_ dice.  I had a rather extensive dice collection at one time (no; not just the pillow sack full; I mean an actual collection: dice whittle from bone certified back to the 1700s; iron dice cast and beaten into shape, actual bone "dice"  from hip bones of deer, etc.  They appear in every culture, every period.  Surely no one person travelled the globe and introduced them to everyone else.  There is something that draws us instinctively to the randomness of dice.
 
I guess it's the "randomizing" element of dice that... well, Hell; I'm too damned old to care what anyone thinks of me at this point,  I never cared much at any other point, so let me just say it:  there is something mysterious about dice.  We can predict and average and graph, but we can't tell what any individual throw is going to do.  Combine that with the history of dice-- dice-based fortune telling and even gambling seem to predate recorded history-- and you get people deciding their fortunes-- even their fates-- on one unguessable roll.  On purpose!  People who have made a decision to let the random action of the universe decide what their lives will be---
 
It's...  well, it's more than "romantic;" it's _haunting_.  I've been fascinated with them since I was just a little kid-- I mean that first board game with the colored die: move to the next space with that color.  It was spellbinding-- I controlled everything.  I could pick the die up-- I could pick it up the same exact way every time; shake it the same exact way every time.  Throw it onto the board and it was _different_.  Nothing I could do would control the result.  I had complete control of everything right up until I tossed it into the air
 
and the universe took over....
 
 
I never got away from it.  To this day, rolling dice is just the greatest mystery, and as an adult, and understanding the math-- the averages, the graphs, the potentials, the tilt of this and that and the angle or roundness of the vertices and weight and size of the die---- 
 
and knowing that when I throw them, it's all meaningless.
 
When I think about it too hard, it's scary, in a humbling "we are but specks in an infinite cosmos" sort of way.
 
When I just enjoy waiting for the next roll, guessing what it will be, and waiting-- over and over again-- until I'm right....   There's a childish joy; my joy, from the child in me that still remembers how exciting that first colored die was---   and I _love_ it.
 
 
 
At any rate, I had a rather extensive dice collection by the time 77 or 78 rolled about.  I had moved, made new friends, and had dice randomly displayed here and there.  "Oh, cool!  You must really love games!"
 
Well, I like dice.
 
"Dude, you have a _lot_ of dice!  Have you ever role played?"
 
I did a couple of stage productions in school.
 
"No; I mean like where you and your friends-- have you ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons?"
 
Ehhh...  _sort of_....?  Nothing great.  I don't really think that's my thing.  I'm not really into hobbits and elves and crap.
 
"No; I mean the way you play: you make up a character and act out like what that character would do or say of how he would react; have you ever done that?"
 
I did a couple of stage productions in school.
 
"No; Dude; you are not getting this.  It's like making up an adventure movie, only you come up with your own lines and stuff as you go."
 
So...  like a party game?
 
"Kinda; yeah.  But then you want to do something, right?  So you can't just decide that you _do_ it; you just say you _want_ to do it, then you check your skill level"
 
My what, now?
 
"You have like skill levels and things that tell you kinda how good you are at stuff.  If something is sort of easy, then you get bonuses; if it's hard, then you get penalties."
 
Penalties?  You lost me.  If I'm good at it, why are there penalties?
 
"Because you need a target number."
 
And what's that?
 
"Well you have to roll that number or better on the dice--"
 
Dice?
 
"Right.  When you want to try to do something, you roll the dice, and they will tell you if you can do it or not."
 
The dice decide?
 
"Right.  You take your target number and your bonuses or penalties and then you let the dice decide---"
 
Tell me more.  No; wait!  _Show_ me......
 
"Sure!  My buddies Kevin and Jim have been itching to get a Traveller game up, but we haven't finished the D&D module yet--- Hey!  Do you like science fiction?  Like spaceships and aliens and stuff?"
 
 
And that did it.  Right there.  I didn't sit down because I wanted to be the next Conan or Legolas; I didn't want to be the next Magic Space Wizard.  I wanted to let the dice decide my fate.....
 
 
And I've never regretted it.  
 
 
Now over the years-- between friends, family, nieces and nephews, moving, giving things away, -- life in general, very little of my once-prized dice collection remains (I have a couple of hammered iron dice, a couple of antler dice, and a very few others still left), but it's amazing how many _more_ dice I have now than ever before!  
 
I just _love_ dice.  
 
This only seems to apply to dice, though.  Card games suck the blue ones on a donkey.  >:(   They freakin' _wish_ they were dice!
 
 
Dude, I am _really_ sorry about that.  I may have to erase all of it and just start here, at the actual anecdote:
 
I once had (and still have most of) a set of about two-dozen bright yellow dice with oversized black pips.  When I was teaching new players, I would insist they use these dice, as they were _much_ easier to read, meaning that I or any of the other players could help them determine their successes and failures until they got the hang of it.  One player jokingly referred to these dice arranged in a neat rectangle as "the school bus," and the name has just stuck, given that they were used mostly for the purposes of education (no one picked them on purpose:  they were called "the school bus;" that should tell you immediately just how damned unpleasant they were to look at!    ).
 
 
I had a problem player many years ago-- you may have heard me mention Davien a time or two.  It was absolutely _astounding_  how phenomenally well he rolled, and how his success always seemed to be proportionally to both the smallness of his dice and his distance away from other players.  (Weird, right?!).  I got sick to death of it, and one day I stumbled across a set of twelve dice in "school bus" colors---  30mm dice.  
 
"Here, Davien.  You wanna play; you use these dice.  Period."
 
It took about fifteen minutes before someone coined the phrase "the short bus."    
 
 
 
{EDIT}:  Thread Tax:
 
What makes a game "complete?"
 
Damned if I know.  But I know when it ain't!  
 
 
seriously though:  having everything you need to play a game:  An understanding of the world-- mood, attitude, grimness--- Look at HERO 6e: all the talk about having a hundred dials and switches you can throw and twist and boom!  Instant game!
 
Well a "complete game" is one that has _done_ that already:  It has all the switches thrown and dials set to create a defined world and a defined tone and gives you enough setting and background to place yourself _in_ that world, at least enough to feel like you are a part of it.  There is enough "here is how the world works" to get you going (I really don't need every single detail; just give me enough to get the feel for it; I can wing the rest), preferably some sample characters and information on them; enough NPCs to people at least one adventure, and ... well, _at least one adventure_.  Two or three is better, even if they are short and simple, because they tend to reinforce what the world is.  Sure, if there's only one adventure, it's better to be a bit more detailed, and preferably open-ended so I can just sort of bump along continuing it until I can get something together on my own.
 
Instead of fifteen optional ways to do something, I want something that says "in this world, it's done this way."  Less generic; more specific.  If HERO core rules get any more "universal and generic," they won't need cover art; they will need a white cover with black letters that says "Game Rules."  Package it in white box labeled "Game; boxed set" and include a 36x48 sheet of white paper that says "Map" and white-covered book of Mad Libs that says "Scenario."
 

Given how much Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, and DC have changed their own universes I don't think there is any real harm in using any of them, or all of them combined, for your own campaign.  Lets say you're going to set one in the DC Universe, but which one?  One based on Batman/Superman/Justice League Animated series, or the DC Extended Universe, or the Dark Night, etc.  For Star Trek what time period would you be playing, the original series, the Next Generation/DS9/Voyager, Discovery, or the Kelvan timelines?    
 
Of  course if you're doing an Agents of SHIELD campaign I recommend using the Horror Hero campaign book.

I think the biggest barrier to most Sci-Fi games is having rules all the players understand.  Not game mechanics, but universe rules like
Are there Transporters?
If so, can we just beam explosives over to enemy ships?
Why Not?
Do we have FTL?
can we rig captured ships do FTL rams into the big enemy stations?
Why Not?
 
Sci Fi covers a *lot* of ground and you need everyone in the group to be on the same page for the game to work.  Most established universes have rules about what actions do and don't work, and they are very different from universe to universe.  Without a common consensus on how this universe works you get players expecting Firefly and getting Chronicles of Riddick.  Then people are unhappy because they aren't playing the game they expected too.  Or worse, a player who made a Babylon 5 style military guy, a player who made a Starship Troopers military guy and a player who made a Battlestar Galactica military guy all showing up for a Stargate Universe campaign.  Now the party doesn't even gel.
 
If you just declare "we are playing Star Trek Next Gen" and then enforce the rules of that setting onto the game you avoid lots of weird arguments.  Making impassioned speeches works, because it's TNG.  No, you can't beam the side of the Klingon antimatter container out into space and make them explode.  Why?  Because they never do so you can't.  You solve your problems with klingons by appealing to their Honor or by arming Photon Torpedoes, you don't release Nanite Bombs from a shuttle you converted into a fighter even though they totally have Nanites because of episode XX.
 
Or do that.  But then the whole game becomes about the players and the GM out-gambiting each other by exploring the poorly thought through implications of most popular Sci-Fi Franchises.

RPGs are a communal experience and need to be experienced and enjoyed by the players.  Without good rules about tone and what's possible in universe things get really frustrating.  If you obey the rules of a universe everyone is familiar with you will be fine, if you homebrew a universe or jumble one up you end up with players who either are confused or have to read 40 pages of campaign notes before they make characters.

Whatever game I'm playing in, whatever the genre, I want it to feel like the sort of media that contains the same genre of stories.  I want the characters to do, and to be able to do, the kinds of things the characters in those stories do, with the same rationales and for the same motivations.  
 
Besides genre, there's also tone and feel.  I don't need or want all of my games to have the same tone and feel.  With Hero, I know they don't need to, because I've played in Hero games with tone and feel covering the entire range of the poll options.  
 
I can't therefore chose any single option.  I vote "Any and all of the above." 

Is he willing to shatter his weapon as he exceeds the bounds of mere mortals?  Then I'm on-board and he can exceed the cap and say farewell to his baseball bat.
 
Granted a maxed out baseball bat swing (8d6?) would kill a normie in 2 hits.  Exceeding that could easily lead to the bat breaking.

Why was the character built with 200 tons of lifting but only 2d6 of damage?  What's the SFX?  That's a deliberate decision that needs explaining! 

This is one of the reasons I feel STR should be decoupled from damage.  Lifting has to scale exponentially for comicbookery to be possible on a sane point budget, but if damage scales with lifting then you get the exact problem you describe. 

What this fine fellow said. 
 
And more than that, I don't actually want realism.  I want verisimilitude.  I want that genre-appropriate veneer of realism, but without all the headaches that accompany actually being realistic.  Faux-realism, if you will. 
I don't care what the relationship between volume and jumping height is, I want halflings to jump worse than humans.  Yes, I know that cats are much smaller than but easily outjump humans I don't care.  Bilbo can't bunnyhop. 
I don't care if assault rifle shots should be able to penetrate that brick wall we're hiding behind.  I've seen enough action movies to know that what should happen is the wall trembling and chips flying as the heroes figure out how to deal with the situation. 
I don't care what sort of fuel efficiency my spaceship gets or what transfer orbit makes the most sense or how the engine works.  I just want to know how much I have to pay for enough space-fuel to get from Earth to Mars.  The physics aren't important to the story, we just need a consistent number. 

What genre and theme?  That makes a _huge_ difference, at least for me. 
 
I like my supers and my space opera to be like the comics of the the sixties and eighties, with a bit more drama but supers-are-super. 
 
I like my westerns to be realistically lethal- everything short of hit locations is on the table, and nobody catches three bullets and keeps running. 
 
My cyberpunk and pulp are action movie, and the rest of my space-related sci-fi is either Traveller or Atomic Age. 
 
My fantasy swings from gruesome to action movie, depending on the campaign in question. 
 
Everything else falls into the cracks.  Honestly, it depends on the tropes we want to play with at the time. 
 
As you can probably tell from that, I have very little problems picking and choosing the rules I am using and the ones I am ignoring. 
 
 
 

No one actually wants realistic damage results. Truly realistic damage wouldn't make dramatic sense. Phineas Gage took a six foot tamping rod through his brain and lived. More than one soldier has been shot through the heart and recovered fully. On the other hand, people have died from shock after getting hit with a bullet that didn't penetrate into their thoracic cavity, people die from simple slips and falls on a routine basis, and sometimes people die of an aneurysm with no warning at all. All the crazy medical stories you've ever heard are 100% realistic, because they're actually real, but players would feel cheated if they happened in their games.
 
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t." -- Mark Twain

If we are talking realistic weapons then we are probably looking at a Heroic game and there are rules that allow for quite realistic damage, such as hit locations, disabling and bleeding rules.  Quite often gunshot or stab woulds are not instantly fatal but do kill because of bloodloss.  A bullet to the head is worth two to the chest (or something like that).
 
Massey points out that realism is a movable feast (I paraphrase), but most people would agree that a normal being shot or stabbed should have serious consequences, barring body armour.  On the flip-side, as Ninja-Bear points out, you don't want to have to rest up for a week every time there's a gunfight (I paraphrase).
 
The trick is to make the players feel their characters are genuinely threatened without requiring new character sheets every combat.  Unless, you know, they like that sort of thing.

I disagree with this. Nowadays, everyone knows HOW to use a computer; surf the net, play games, and whatnot. Not everyone knows how to actually program one.

Not necessarily.
 
A player may purchase a fringe bene with no thoughts of it being relevant to the game.  They're doing to just to round out and complete their character.  I've done that and my wife has too.  I know that those points I'm putting in X aren't going to be used but it's something the character should have so it goes on the character sheet.

I'm of the philosophy, the player can spend points where they like for whatever reason they like as long as it doesn't unbalance the game or concept.  Whether it makes it into play is another matter.  Just because you have a license to fly Battlestars and Vipers, doesn't mean there will be a Battlestar or Viper to fly.

Ok I keep seeing this phrase “if a player buys this that tells me as a GM....”.  That’s all well and good IF you have this understanding between you and the GM. I’m with the philosophy of (if you have enough points) to buy stuff that fleshes out a character and stuff that he “should” have. However I don’t actively think “oh I bought Thunderstorm detect storms (as color) I expect to come up.” I’ve bought for my martial artist Body only vs Disable element once. I knew that that would probably never come into play but I thought it was a neat ability to distinguish him.  So how many of you guys actually have this agreement or is it just an assumption?

If you'll allow it, I'm going to need to sort of re-arrange the answers and bundle them up a bit.  My apologies, but the answers are so closely related as to nearly duplicate themselves in places.
 
What does a character get for that spent point?
 
To be fair, recall that I said "might consider" charging a single point for the "bundle o' citizenship."  As a general rule, I don't.  I didn't read a lot of comics growing up, before, during or after.  I read a few, here and there, as friends had them or players deposited them around my house, but not much.  One thing that I recall, though, was that super teams-- at least, those with global reputations, could move about pretty much freely: they'd just jump into the team jet and a panel later they are talking to the police commissioner of Zambia, in his office, about the super-criminal hiding out in the whatever Zambia has to hide out in.  No one even _considered_ asking for their names or passports, or whatever.  A few panels later, and they've split into teams-- one group searching the sketchy parts of town while the other part has rented a car and gone to look out into the rest of the land.  Passports?  Driver's licenses?  Real names?  It just didn't freakin' come up.  Now maybe it does in comics today; I don't know.  I _do_ know that comics of today _suck_, and that's because they're the soap operas we were avoiding by reading comics, and filled with pages and pages of introspection, arguing, distrust, and getting your passports stamped.  Readers just eat that stuff up, I guess.  People complaining about the horrible dialogue in the Flash TV show?  Read a modern comic.  It's so authentic it's kind of spooky.....
 
 
Anyway-- my personal thought is that it doesn't, as a general rule, come up because over-all it adds _nothing_ to the story.  Nada.  bumpkiss.  In fact, I personally think it would seriously _detract_ from the story.  I want to play (or run) an adventurer, a hero, a two-fisted knight of justice.  I don't want to role play luggage claim at the airport or reading projections for social security or remembering the due dates on my library books  (except as a minor, trivial diversion for humor or plot-hooking, of course).
 
Just assuming everyone has it (or doesn't need it) doesn't detract from your story: it helps keep it on track and avoids the bogging down that this reply is moving dangerously close to.      The airport or the DMV or whatever-- that's a _setting_ where story and conversation can occur, but its entirely acceptable to just _assume_ that all the standing in line and getting things stamped have already happened or are happening in the background.  Take a survey of your players, of course; they need to be on the same page you are.  Still, I'm willing to bet if you asked them if they felt that roleplaying talking your way out of a seatbelt ticket (you know-- my power armor's so bulky or whatever) or replacing yet lost Social Security card or whatever sounds _really exciting_ and seems to be just the kick your story needs, the answer is probably something along the lines of "if you have any of that left, I'd like a hit, too."  
 
Anyway-- what does he get for that point?  As far as I'm concerned, kinda screwed out of a point, _but_----  there are tiny little things you can add here and there for the guy who spent that one point when no one else did:
 
Maybe he _has_ to drive the team bus, because Razor Hawk has a license to drive as Razor Hawk instead of Timmothy Blaine.  Maybe he's the only one from whom the police will take a statement for the same reason, or perhaps the only one who won't be told "you can't testify because you have to give your real name and show your face, and since you were wearing a mask at the time, we can't prove it was really you in the first place."  Need to rent a vehicle?  No problem: Cheetah Man has Cheetah Man's driver's license and credit card.  Mark Parson's gonna have to provide Mark Parson's ID and use Mark Paron's credit card, and you can bet that knowing that Firefight is really Mark Parson is the sort of information that will spread fast-- or at least threaten to do so.  Let's not forget, no one gets police powers or other perks without actually being a real person.  So....  well, you know....  if you insist on it as the GM, then buying that costumed personhood might be a prerequisite to certain Perks (which I'm a bit opposed to doing, honestly: you've just raised the cost of certain Perks.  If that's your goal, just do that).
 
It's all tiny, inconsequential stuff, and in complete honesty, I'm perfectly happy letting a player decide if he is a legally-recognized person in costume or if he is not, but-- and this is a _big_ but-- _IF_ a player specifies that he wants to pay a single point to buy that personhood-- or perhaps you have decided to assume that's it's just free stuff for this campaign, and he wants to buy it for a _second_ or _third_ country-- or maybe you can spend that point to be a global person, ala Superman or whoever in Marvel has that kind of world-wide clout  (notice I didn't say "Reputation;" that's a different thing)---
 
if you have a guy who wants to go out of his way to buy it and someone else doesn't-- well, you've got to come up with some way it advantages him above the other players.  However, if you go with the suggestion, you've only got to give him a single point's worth of advantage.  That's not terribly hard-- I did it three times two paragraphs ago.  I'll even go you one more--
 
suppose his secret ID has some truly amazing professional skills-- he's the only surgeon in the world who has perfected the procedure for repairing a kidney or removing tonsils rectally or whatever--- perhaps that one point can include similar things for the costumed persona as well:  "You'll be okay, Jeff!  Doctor Speedster is here!"  And of course, 
Doc Speed could transport a critical patient to a hospital in the blink of an eye and yell "I need this man prepped for surgery!" and he would have access to the OR, etc.
 
 
Just thoughts, but only if you really want to charge for this sort of thing.
 

I'm gonna level with ya:
 
I'm pretty much like GB(i): I assume that everyone can have whatever credentials / permissions / papers come with being a citizen of where they're from.  If said item is a reasonably common thing-- driver's license, passport, Diploma, Social Security Card, big ol' stack of bills and random calls from telemarketers who are very much earning their place in Hell as we speak----  
 
You know what I love?  "This is X with the warranty department.  Your current motor vehicle warranty is about to run out."  Really?!  Oh, no!  Would that be warranty on the '01, the '99, the 98, the 86, or the '68?   Tell me!  Please!  I need your warranty coverage!"
 
Idiots.
 
Anyway, the only place I even _consider_ it might be appropriate to charge a single point is if the _costumed identity_ has these privileges, and even then, I don't see any need to break it down more than "Citizenship: 1pt."   Well, maybe you could put Zero Endurance on your citizenship, but that seems a little much.
 
I compare things-- apples to oranges is really the only way to get a feel for how ludicrous something can get:
 
if I charge a single point for each of the following:
 
Citizenship
Driver's License
Bank account / ATM card (or should I charge a point each?)
Social Security card
Passport
Library card
cell phone
 
 
well, let's stop there, because as a player, I flat ain't doin' it.  I mean _screw_ that!  Seven points already?   That's more than a die of energy blast, and halfway to a die of Killing Attack.  Or Flight.  Sure, seven points of Flight isn't _much_ flight, but it's a _Hell of a lot_ more than _no_ points of Flight, I think.
 
If bookkeeping and accounting are your thing, then go for it, but even a point each, so much of this stuff just _isn't_ going to happen.
 
Another way of looking at it:
 
If your particular campaign _requires_ such ....  heck, these aren't even "perklets."  These are just taxes if you're buying them one at a time.  Anyway, if your game _requires_ them, then you should just _give_ them to one or more players (and if it isn't all players, prepare for some sulking).
 
I say this because if you look at it the other way around, what are you getting for that point?  I mean, what are you getting that Joe Average doesn't have just for being a reasonably productive member of society?  How badly will it break your game if someone _does_ have these things?  The best one up there, I think, is probably the legal right to drive a car with a mask on, but that's just not really a huge deal, at least in my games.
 
 
 
So...  you know....   One point means you have a separate, legally-recognized personhood for your costumed alter-ego.  And why shouldn't you?  Your business probably has one already.
 
 

"To a degree." = One or more characters of your choice?
 
I mean, sure...completely blank/empty will revert to the default writeup, but that's hardly limiting.

I am a huge advocate of build sheets and play sheets.  The vast majority of information on a character sheet is useful only during creation and in edge cases in play.

This!  Most of the changes between editions have been in design or clarification, not actual game play.  With a few exceptions, such as "is END 1/5 or 1/10 Active Points?", "is range -1/x" or -2 per distance doubling?", "is it 2xEGO or EGO +10?".
 
And we do like to debate design (I know *I* do!), but actual play hasn't changed that much.
 
When I ran Pulp Hero at cons, I had the weapons play specifications on the character sheets that I handed out.  I had the builds  on my side of the GM screen, just in case it mattered, but it wasn't generally relevant to the players.  Also it was easy to describe in words what they did to someone not familiar with Hero System.  "This is a big-game rifle.  You get two shots, then need to take time to reload.  Whatever it hits tends to go down and stay down.  You may want to make sure the two chances you get before reloading hit the target."  Someone with Hero System experience can read 3d6 RKA, +1 STUN, +2 RMod, 2 Charges, Extra Time (1 Phase) to reload.  It worked well.
 
And of course I have my own preferences, but at the end of the day I'll play whatever Hero edition game is out there, with whatever house rules.  If I'm running, then I'll run my own preferences.  But IMHO the edition holy wars are a BAD thing for Hero Games, especially given the relative scarcity of players.

IMO, regressing to EGOx1, EGOx2, EGOx3 rather than EGO, EGO+10, EGO+20, etc. and the old Reduced Endurance cost structure is a Very Bad Idea. That's why I don't endorse a 2nd edition re-issue. Too many things were fixed after 2e that shouldn't be re-introduced into anyone's game today, even in the name of "simplifying" it for newcomers (which I do think is a laudable goal, depending on how you go about it).

I might let him get away with it once, on the basis of Special Effects, but if he keeps doing it, he has to pay points, meaning Multiform.

The big question is "Will this character take advantage of their energy being nature by leaving the suit?". 
If he will, it's a Multiform.  If he won't, it's a Physical Limitation: Assumes weaker alternate form when suit damaged/destroyed.  If he says he won't but then demonstrates he will, fill a spray bottle with cold water and aim for the face while saying "No!  Bad player!" in a firm but calm tone of voice. 

Cheesy player construct, meet cheesy GM ruling:
 
"Grond strikes you with his mighty fists.  Immediately before taking the damage, you Teleport 2 meters away.  On materializing, [clatter of dice] you take 65 STUN, 19 BOD and 24 meters of knockback from Grond's attack."
 
Hey, if you don't take the damage, then the Teleport isn't triggered - it's triggered immediately before taking damage, remember?