greypaladin_01

Whatever you're missing is also what I was missing, as I found the "buy it once for each element" model problematic at best.  The philosophy behind that ruling was unfathomable to me.
 
Under "transfer as a single power", I would go with the complex Advantage of Delayed Recovery (+1) (say, on 30 AP, so a cost of 30) Limited to only delay the Aid Recovery (for this example), so call that a -1 limitation on the Advantage.  Cost 30 + [30/2 =] 15 for a 45 point power.   But that assumes the Aid and Drain components have equal value.

I get what they were thinking: "what if you want a different fade rate on your drain than on your aid?" but to me  there could be other ways of handling it, such as an average of the two rates (1 hour and 5 minutes = 20 minutes average for the advantage cost, round up).  I just do not like breaking up stuff like Transfer, it was such a clear, easy-to-use power as it was.  I think they should have left it as-is, then let people do the Drain/Aid shuffle if they wanted really different modifiers on each power.

This very much seems to be the Rules As Intended concept for it.   You purchase Big Iron (RKA/OAF) then for 5 points you can get another Big Iron as a back up.  Either to use when first runs out of charges or if it was disarmed, dropped, etc.
 
However this is where the variance of HERO rules gets weird again and this should fall into the GM approval category.  Heroic level games often do not make you pay points for gear anyway, so it is pointless.  When playing Superheroic then you are facing weird abuse/logic failings.   (like the Ring example above, I cant think of any GM that would approve it..but RAW there is nothing saying no)   However I am pretty sure the 5 point doubling came about specifically for us in the Dark Champions / Action Hero game genre, where the game wanted to make people pay for gear but did not want to make characters 500 points to cover it all.   (In fact the option rules for Equipment Pools came from this as well)
 
If the doubling rule fits the game you are doing then great, if not then just say no,  or put limits to 1 copy only.   It is a system that is much more open to abuse than normal for HERO. 

I am not making it an open roll.  The way I do it. I am not making a roll at all.  Still, id I were to so it the book-given way, I would be making a roll.
 
There are two options: anticipate every single thing the PCs will try (Ha!) and predetermine every penalty number either by whim or roll for every possible contingency, or roll for what they actually _do_ try as they try it.
 
This has reasons as well:
 
I dont have a lot of time to prep a session.  I run three monthly, one bi-monthly, and one at the whim of the player's (the youth group, not all of whom are "driving age," making getting that group together quite sporadic).
 
I work a 72 hour week between two jobs. I still have Dad work, husband work, and homeowner work on top of that.  Frankly, they are lucky if I show up with a pre-drawn map instead of scratching them out while everyone is still getring settled in.
 
More importantly, at least to me, is that I one-hundred-percent expect my players to adhere to whims of the dice.  To me, if the rules say this is a dice off-- that the penalty the player faces is assigned by the whim of the dice, it is nothing less than bad faith to not hold myself to the same rules that I hold them.  
 
Sure; I can pick long-gone NPC's skill level out of my left ear: he can have a 2 or less; he can have a 20 or less.  But if I am going to hold the playera to a roll, then I am going to hold myself to one as well.
 
Over the years, I have recieved variohs comments-  both bad and good- about my GM style.  However, I can say with absolute honesty that I have never- not even once- had my "fairness" or impartiality questioned.
 
For the second part of the question, why _wouldn't_ I make this an open roll?  The only thinf the player knows is "this is your target number."  That tells him absolutely nothing about the character he is trying to defeat save how much he made his roll by, if I am doing it the book-straight way.   Oh yes-  there is a one-half of a percent chance that he rolled "3", resulting in his maximum possible penalty, but-  well, if that maximum is still "4," the player doesnt get the information people are worried about him getting.  We wont go into why we are worried about them knowing it, because that isn't this conversation, and because I have never seen the problem with the players knowing their opponent is good or bad at something.  It's not like they wouldn't figure it out it in short order just from the narrative anyway.
 
 

To me, the "doubling for 5 points" rule was meant to provide a backup focus if the original were lost, damaged, etc.  It was not intended to mean you had multiple devices all usable simultaneously.  That has never made its way into the rules explicitly, though, leaving the door open for MultiArm Ring Man.

Fixed that to Transfer.
 
The issues with Transfer started in prior editions.  A Transfer is a Drain with a linked Aid, self only, costs END.  When we started getting rulings like the Drain part would fail if the Aid part was maxed out, or the Drain had to be divided among the targets within an AoE rather than affecting them all, or needing to buy delayed recovery or expanded effect twice if you wanted it to affect both parts...well, let's just say my thinking was not complimentary.
 
Break them into their two components and they work fine again.
 
That's not to say we could not make a baseline Transfer that combines the two with neither having modifiers, for a simpler purchase option, but it should not be markedly more expensive to do the same thing with Transfer as with a Linked Aid and Drain.

You left out the part where in order to use this, you have to actually violate the Transform rule into which it was unnecessarily shoved:
 
Transform cannot be used on self.
 
 

I am not entirely certain what your asking (sorry; I had some students this morning, so part of my mind is preoccupied with listing motorcylce repairs that will have to be made before the next round of "practical labs."), so I will try to cover everything I can think of right now:
 
Yes; it is just skill versus skill; the attack roll is skill versus skill.  The attack roll can be broken into a pair of skill rolls:
 
Attacker rolls (11 plus OCV) or less and notes,his "level of success:"
 
Woo-hoo!  Made it by six!
 
Defender rolls (11 plus DCV) or less and notes his success:
 
Too bad; I made it by eight!  You missed me!
 
This is perfectly valid as a replacement for the current to-hit system, and is bases on the current guidelines for contested skill usage that are in the book.
 
We don't do that.  Why wouldn't we?  It "eliminates an orphan mechanic," so that might be worth considering.
 
Well, for one, it is not an orphan mechanic.  It is a mathematical shortcut that resloves two rolls at once.  When the attack roll is "missed,"  the defender made,his roll roll (enjoyed a higher level of success) than did the attacker.
 
As another reason, it puts the dice in the player's hands.  That is, everything related to his attack is all right there in the roll that he makes.
 
How does it speed things up?  Well, there is only one roll.  Using the given contested skill guidelines, there are _at a minimum_, two rolls.
 
I say at a minimum, bevause under the current system, this is possible (and I offer anecdotally that it _does_ actually happen, and quite often in heroic-level skill-heavy games):
 
I made my roll by four!
 
Uhm...  I _also_ made my roll by four.  Who won?
 
Well, let's see....  I suppose we can go with the character who has the higher skill level...
(The player who's character has the lower skill level will almost _always_ balk at this).  Okay, who has the higher base characteristic for this skill?  (Not all skills have base characteristics, amd when they do, the player who's character has the lower base  characteristic tends to balk:  I paid more to get my skill up there; my character studied harder and practiced more to be at the same level!  It isn't right!
 
Okay, fine;  just re-roll.
 
Uh....  Mr GM, Sir...?  You are not going to belive this......
 
Okay, reroll again.  Finally!  We have an answer!
 
In this scenario, it would have saved five rolls.
 
And finally:  you have never seen an attack roll end in a draw.  Not once.  One player succeeds against the other every single time.  It completely eliminates ties.
 
Don'r get me wrong: I have nothing against the idea of a tie.  It suggests that the narrative should reflect an,extended amount of time or an increased difficulty resolving the task, but that is still possible via the attack roll mechanic (which, for us, is the "contested skill mechanic."  Simply see how well or poorly the character succeeded by checking his roll against his target number, just as you would have done to determine a die roll penalty in the first place.  
 
If his target number was 13 and,he rolled a 6, he had no difficulty at all finding the thing-- "even a rank amature should have taken a moment to position the couch so that the legs were pressed into same divots in the carpet!  This was too easy!"
 
If he made it by one, then,took some time, and was impressively well-concealed.  If he just did hit his target, then he was really puzzled or taxed, and only,a tiny clue finally,led him to locate hising place.
 
See, this is what happens _anyway_.  When ties are rolled, or when successes are compared and,very close, we express that in the narrative.  The narrative takes a few moments to describe the difficulty of the search, wxplaining away the ties or close levels of success (as it should), but becoming longer amd taking up more session time,in,the progress.
 
And that is on top of the time taken up by the re-roll and sidebar on the breakers.
 
The net result is a bit of time savings, and players getting to do their favorite thing: be in control of the dice (psychologically, anyway).
 
 
I hope that answered whatever it was you were asking.  If not, please, feel free to rephrase amd ask again.    
 
 

To that end, I will re-state something I do for contested rolls:
 
Many years ago we kind of figured out that this is the basis of the attack roll: one using his CV to attack, opposed by one using his CV to not hey attacked.
 
Using Concelament as an example:
 
By the rules, the concealer rolls his skill when he hides the thing,  then the seeker rolls his skill when he seeks for it, with his roll being modified by the hider's success.
 
 
Alternate:
 
Roll (11 plus hider's concealment  skill) minus (finder's concealment skill) or less.
 
Not only do I find this to be faster-  there is only one roll, and no pressure to pregenerate a bunch of skill rolls for all the hidden whatever's on the map, the dice are in the Player'a hands and not mine.  It doesn't seem like much, but there is a noticeable change in both morale and ability to cope with a "blown roll" when all the rolls belong to the Player.
 
Most importantly to me, unlike a pregenerated penalty number based on a skill roll you threw two days prior while planning the scenario, way more of the rolls are out in the open.
 
So: Players are "in charge" of more rolls, more rolls are in the open, things go a bit faster, it is not a new mechanic to cobbled on top of everything else, and it keeps the attack roll from feeling like an orphan-  Players have less quesrions about "why is this one thing like this" when the see more uses of it as a skill-versus-skill concept.
 
Things going just a tiny bit faster is just a nice bonus.
 
 

I agree 100% that not every Talent / Skill / Perk / Power is appropriate for every genre, at least not without major GM/Player coordination.  But that does not mean that codifying everything, very clunkily often, makes things any better.  HERO has fully committed to the Toolkit approach for the bulk of it's history now, but has lost much of it's ease-of-use in the process.   My Instant Change example above, how Transform was altered from a single power into Linked Drain/Aid and if I pulled my books out I could probably find dozens more examples.   Most of these changes took simple and straightforward ideas and changed them in to huge word blocks of bloated mess that will make any player's eyes glaze over trying to parse.
 
I mean if you look at Espionage fiction, they do have 'quick-change' outfits and who is to say there is not Fantasy Fashion magics or Hats of Disguise, but those are just a case of finding the right special effects to fit the situation.
 
The toolkits already have places that point out how certain abilities may not be appropriate to all genres, I think mostly in skill/talent/perks sections, but they could have just as easily left something like Instant Change alone and given it a similar warning.   
 
I mean all of us like having options and detail on the characters but the bloat of the game is extremely visible when you compare the two Strike Force books.   The original (3e) pretty much every character sheet takes up less than one page, allowing you to look over the character in a glance.   The updated version (6e) now characters are taking 2-3 pages and are much harder to interpret at a quick glance.    This is most obviously apparent when looking at the "Start of Career" sheets for characters that are in both books.

See, that is where I think Complete books should diverge from the toolkit books.
 
Instant change should be a talent presented as a "thing" in Champions.  Pay the cost, here us what it does, in text, not gamespeak.  Each genre should gave a chunk of things like that which are just given a cost and an explanation in the rulebook.  There can be an annex showing how it was put together (for the toolkit-interested).
 
Doc
 

I think this is also partly an outgrowth of moving from "game" to "system".  How valuable is such an ability in an espionage game? Wouldn't it be nice if the scruffy fantasy game adventurer could instantly have clothing appropriate for the Royal Court, fit in with the townsfolk or duck around a corner and suddenly be dressed like the city watch?
 
This seems like the type of ability best suited to be a Talent in a specific genre.  That is likely the way to handle many genre tropes.

This continues to be fascinating to see your approach.  Especially pulling in elements from so many sources!

Points lost to Power Destruction were specified as coming back at the same rate as BODY, and it was further specified that Regeneration helped them come back at Regeneration's improved rate. 
 
 

To the OP:  I think it's brilliant that you've enumerated a few roll types.  It's made a light bulb go off in my head...
      For a future reprint of 6E I think all of these dice throwing variations should all be enumerated, named, and given little icons to be used used throughout the book so that the commonalities would be clear.  This is a serious aspect which throws off new players until they get a deeper feel of the system.  New players don't know there is a finite number of rolling mechanisms, and get the feeling it's arbitrary and infinite. 
     I routinely bring new players into hero system with good success.  As a GM I'm often pointing out patterns and deeper reasoning to which players respond well.  It would be GREAT if these patterns were put at the forefront in future publications.  Systematized.  Would help expose exactly how consistent and simple the system actually is under the hood.  They are not random, each has different mathematical characteristics which were well chosen by the game designers for each situation
 
     Now, I didn't see anyone mention that Chracteristics and Skill rolls are already identical.  Nobody needs to learn anything new in this example, and using contest rolls with no opponent - for example making a dex roll to avoid slipping and falling on ice, kind of breaks things and leads to less consistency not more.
     Everyone i'm sure knows but just in case, the Characteristic roll is already beautiful and elegant.  The 9+ (CHAR/5) is simply designed to put average vanilla base 10 characters at 11- or less, like a low level skill roll.  Spending character points to raise skils or characteristics helps there respective rolls and all of the mechanics stay essentially identical.
 
    That said, there are lots of opportunities to add a contest roll into the game to spice things up.  I once had a character haggling and turned it into an INT based contest roll, giving them an extra die for some kind of merchant related background profession they had.
 
     So I encourage taking any pcvpc or pcvnpc situation which makes sense and making it a contest roll !!  But please don't break things by fixing them. 

The way I see it is that you use a contested roll (3d6) on things that are not a direct completion.  Both characters could succeed but what you are looking for is who did the better job.  These types of rolls are often using different skills to oppose each other or use different aspect of the same thing.  For example, a character is using his perception to spot a character using stealth, or a computer programmer trying to hack into system that someone else setup.   One programmer is looking for flaws, where the other is trying to fix the flaws.  Often these contests have a lot of modifiers.  The programmer may take extra time or have special equipment he uses.  

A BODY roll is used for more direct completions.  In these types of contests, you have a winner and a loser.  You are also using the same thing to directly oppose the other character's ability.  These are usually contests where you are using raw ability without many modifiers.  The arm wrestler is pitting his raw STR vs the opposing character.  Outside of Duke's suggestion not much else besides the characters STR matter. 
 
Having both methods available allows the GM to have more flexibility in running his game.  
 

While I agree that Hero taken as a whole raw and slammed into your face is a bit much to take, so is every other game system.  AD&D was full of rules that most DM's just ignored like Psionics and the unarmed combat system jammed into the back of the book.  But it was beloved, played for years, and considered a simple, easy to learn system.
 
The approach the GM takes makes a huge difference, and so does presentation which is why we all worked on the Champions Begins project.  We need more pre-packaged, easy to digest stuff for Hero, I agree.  But I suspect the problem is much less the complexity of Hero rules than it is the attitude and capacity for reading of modern players.

I dont think anyone here would disagree with you but reputations are not gained through untruths.  HERO, at the very best, appears complex and difficult to enough people that it has a reputation for complexity.
 
As you say, there is probably more complexity in D&D but, as a player, you do not need to deal with that and, if the group is not a hardcore one, it probably does not hugely impact your gameplay experience.  The questions you are asked are steeped in the flavour of the game or setting rather than system.  Do you want to be an elf, dwarf or human? A fighter, rogue or magic-user? Will you be good, evil or neutral? Your choices put flesh on the skeleton these big choices provide.
 
In HERO, the skeleton needs to be built from scratch, you dont roll your dice, you choose everything and you are having to do that when you have no appreciation of what is good or bad.  The player needs to engage with what, for many, is overwhelming detail, all upfront.
 
It is not about how much, it is when the complexity is faced, the detail being asked for and the sheer quantity of it all.
 
Doc

Surprise kiss on the mouth?
 
It works for me, usually.

Most of the time when different methods are used it is because the circumstances are different.  In some cases you want to have a chance of a character with a lesser stat being able to win the contest, in others you want to give the advantage to the character with the greater stat.  
 
When you are making an opposed characteristic or skill roll the character with a lesser stat has a better chance to succeed.  The character with the greater roll still has the advantage, but the character with the lesser roll has a chance to succeed.  A character with  30 STR has a 15 or less STR roll.  95% of the time I will make my roll, but I still fail it about 5% of the time.  The character with a 10 STR has a 62 % chance to make his roll.  So 3% of the time the character with a 10 STR can beat the character with a 30 STR.  If I am rolling dice and counting body the overwhelming advantage goes to the character with the greater number of dice.  The chance of a 10 STR character beating a 30 STR character by rolling more BODY is .1%.   The larger the spread of dice the worst the results become.
 
Characteristic rolls will give you more variance in who wins the contest.   BODY rolls will heavily favor the stronger character.   To me this is a good situation because it gives more chance of the player succeeding out of combat, but still gives the advantage to the stronger character in combat.  
 

I think that a big problem HERO poses for new players is the hidden fixed variables. It's all well and good to present the game as a toolbox that let's you finetune it for your own purposes, but there are some factors in the design that do need to be accomodated. Often I find that once you identify these factors you can appreciate the underlying structure of the game even more, as I did when I bumped up against low-DC Mental powers in another thread, but without the proper guidance or experience these hidden assumptions can derail a game before it's even begun.
 
So I'm all in favour of specialised presentations of HERO, that don't change the fundamental mechanics but just put some guidelines on the game for new players, to help us avoid traps and pitfalls that more experienced players would know to avoid.

This kind of post always puzzles me, maybe I'm just too old and too much a grognard to really understand.  People are learning to play stuff like D&D every day, young people.  They do not seem to have a difficult time learning how to use the skills, or the characteristic rolls, or the saving throws, or the combat system even though each is different.  Yet somehow when it comes to Hero all this stuff is too hard?

Because it comes on top of everything else and all of the scaffolding is showing.
 
HERO out of the box does no hand holding demands system rather than game or setting based questions to be answered and the does not even have the decency to look cool once it is all over.

It can be a 'new' game that is being put forward by Critical Role, which has almost unprecedented name recognition with the most recent generation of gamers.

That coupled with the recent Foot-In-Mouth disease that Hasbro seems to suffer from, can go a long way for it to get a foot hold.
 
While you are right that it is likely that the older games might be just as good or even better, they are also "old" or unknown to a vast percentage of the current gaming population.

I remember Horror HERO book existing, but it is not one that I ever managed to pick up.   I think I see what you are going with here, but I think we might be veering off into the more detailed world of Specific Genre Emulation and outside just straight PRE attacks as they are RAW.
 
To clarify:  Horror HERO could be many things and all of them will change how PCs interact with the world.   Cthullu, Bram Stoker, Freddy or Jason films, The Mummy (any film version)... and if you are being liberal enough with definiations, even something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Scooby-Doo.    In all of these how the PCs interact with the world would be extremely different and you would need player buy-in even more than raw mechanics.  In my experience it is a rare group of players that doesn't rankle, at least a little, at dice telling them what their character believe.   Much like how using Bluff type skills on PCs when the players know the truth doesn't always go well.
 
Can you tell us a little more about the Style of Horror game you are trying to go for?  That might help with trying to figure out how to tailor the mechanics to try and support it?
 
For example.   Someone it trying to run a Cthullu type game and wants PRE attacks to be used to show how the unnatural horror and dread of magic and these alien creatures will break the minds of characters over time.   Instead of trying to create a Sanity-Saving Throw roll off defense mechanic, perhaps as part of the game all characters get 100 points of Sanity Stat.  Whenever a PRE attack happens, any amount of the roll over their PRE/EGO stats reduces Sanity and there is no fast means to recover it.   You could even say that once they get to half levels they start to get new Complications/Disadvantages based around the things that have been affecting them, let the players pick the new ones or GM could assign something.    (sure this is probably really close to just Call of Cthullu's system... but there is no reason that this cannot be grafted to HERO.  Basically as part of the Genre for the Campaign, the characters have a 3rd 'health' track to add to Body and Stun and it just is how the game operates.   You can then tailor things so that most "normal" Horrors have PRE attacks that should on average chip always at least 5-10 Sanity and work with your players to let them RP the effects of it.

If more mechanical effects are needed then perhaps at lower levels of Sanity say.. 33 or less, it causes a long term Drain on the PRE/EGO stats for characters to show that not only are they running out of Sanity... but also their hold on reality is starting to break.  Even just a few points reduction would have noticeable effect... I feel a little goes a long way on that.   Going from 20 to 18 or something like that would be more than enough.
 
--
 
All of that being said PRE attacks are very one sided by their nature, the danger of changing that element of the mechanic is it certainly will slow down gameplay which might be detrimental to the tension of the moment.  A static defense system (probably with some form of ablative limitation would be the smoothest way to keep the game flowing.   Each PRE attach chips away at the characters stoicism until they are down to just baseline PRE/EGO going forward.   The only other thing I could think of is just to allow Mental Defense to help protect against PRE attacks.... but then you run the risk of needing HUGE dice pools of PRE attacks to get any effects at all.   
 
Finally, how common are the PRE attacks against players going to happen in the game?   If it is just one or two per session then being at the mercy of what the DM rolls is not that different than getting hit with and NND or other exotic power type.  However if they are much more common, then I would expect players will buy more PRE/EGO naturally to help protect themselves more... and also keep in mind that each successive PRE attack against a target gets less and less dice each time.     That FIRST zombie that burst through the door really scares and shocks the players but the 2nd and 3rd following it?  Well... they are still scary for sure, but the adrenaline is already pumping at that point and Fight/Flight responses already are in swing.... so they get less and less dice against the PCs....   but that crashed Ghoul leading them is a fresh horror.. so would get full attack when it shows up.      (at least I think this is how the mechanics work still in 6e...  can't recall fully off hand.  Either way, in my experience PRE attacks were usually PCs vs NPCs/Enemies and often only done once at the start or end of encounters... not repeatedly)