Tywyll

At the end of the day, I don't think Combined Attack would really be a thing in a Heroic game because you don't (usually) buy your attacks. As such, you can't link them together per (my understanding) of the Combined Attack rule. 
 
I think that's why Sweep/Multiple Attack exists and has such limitations...one rule is primarily for superheroic games and the other is for heroic. 

I sure don't, but apparently it's in the Advanced Player's Guide on page 113 these days. 

My response to that was the same as yours. "WTF? 4e, p 154 says, 'This is basically an all-out punch, and takes an extra segment to execute.' In what world does that imply that it can be used for lightning bolts, etc.??" And then, on reflection, "Well, the risk/reward is the same either way, so I guess extending it makes sense."
 
Like you, we still don't play it that way, but accept it as valid.
 
And that's one of the hardest things about being online: accepting that your ways aren't the only ways, and that others doing things in other ways that work for them is fine.  

All good ideas. I might quibble with a couple on my list.  Seriously. I took an already trimmed list and trimmed and condensed it even more. Some skills, like Cramming, Defense Maneuver and Rapid Attack, might fall better into the Talents category than Skills. Streetwise in an outlier. It functions almost like a combination of Expertise and Diplomacy. Might drop that altogether and require both of the previous skills for a street smart character. So yeah, no list begins with perfection. I was merely tinkering with the idea for the purpose of contribution.
 
I have no arguments against your Everyman and Skill Level points. 

That's a good looking list of skills right there. I might quibble over one or two of them, but overall, I think they look good.
 
I don't know that everman skills need much changing. Honestly, anyone who is taking the 'adventuring' life ought to be broadly capable, so most of the above skill probably should count as everyman I would think (with some obvious exceptions like language, the combat ones, crafts, etc). 
 
I think I would probably drop the 3 point skill levels, but otherwise leave the structure as is.

Hunh. 
 
You're beating my drum. 
 
 
The problem for me is that while I really dislike the micro-specific nature of Skills that has developed over the years, it is ultimately the fault of the system itself, as it encourages you to come up with your own skills for things not listed in the book. 
 
However, there is another way to look it, and it's the direction I personally tend to prefer:
 
The skill list gets broader and broader as the specificity you deman in your game increases. 
 
So back up.  Back up until you (and your players) are happy. 
 
Think of skill specificity as a one of those "switches" or "dials" we talk about throwing when you are designing your campaign. 
 
Are you okay with "I can save him; I'm a doctor!", or would you prefer "I can save him; I'm a surgeon!"?  Maybe you insist on "I can save him; I'm a cardio-thoracic surgeon!" 
 
Now if you go even deeper that that, you end up with something along the lines of "if someone can tell me specifically what's wrong him, and if it means he needs cardio-thoracic surgery, and someone call tell me what needs removal or repair, and it's not tto near a nerve bundle, then I can save him, because I am a caedi-thoracic surgeon, but not a neurologist or diagnostician! "
 
At that point, who can tell him what's wrong?  A" doctor? "
 
Or a GP? 
 
Or a cardio-pulmonary specialist?  Or a straight-up" I only know about hearts-and-blood-vessels super-specialized cardiologist? 
 
How specific do you need your campaign to be?  For me, it's not particularly "heroic" - - or even remotely fun for me or my players-- to be able to save a man with an intercranial bleed because when I demanded specifics, they rolled the dice on nephrology...
 
How sciencey do you want your scientists?  Do you want the guy from fantastic four, who can build giz. Is to open dimensional rifts and whip up nuclear bazooka and instinctively recognize a fleck of a shiny new element in a fallen stone and explain to natives of a savage lost land about keystone arches and calculating loads and designing suspensions for a rope bridge to carry them to cleaner water?  How to turn those worthless river reeds into cloth? 
 
Or will you require six degrees and two specialties to get there? 
 
It's a dial.  Call it "breadth of skills" if you want.  And why not? Try to isolate every little thing that you know how to do into familiarities, professional skills, etc. 
Take what's left-- things you just knoe- and buy _all_ relevant Knowledge Skills. 
 
We're not done yet! Now take all the things that you know _about_--- all of them, Sir!  No cheating! - - and buy your familiarities.  Don't forget the useless crap like Fantasy Football and the history of the NFL, all the various RPG rules stuck in your head, etc. 
 
Now take what's left of that 75 points and build your larger than life adventurer.  Or your indentured servant, hoping to live long enough to pay off that massive EP mortgage he took out to buy the skills that you're non-larger-than-life-adventurer self already has. 
 
 
Now if you back that up a bit-- or even a lot-- it becomes a lot more reasonable: KS:football, period.  It covers all that.  Or even KS:sports.  It covers all that. You even know how to play, if you want, and a few game-related tactics, why not?  Let the GM assign modifiers for popular or obscure bits as he sees fit. 
 
Does an architect just figure loads and draw stuff, or does he have a chance to Find Weakness versus ancient cathedrals and the like on a really good roll?  Does he know how to hew stone and stack it because he's a damned good architect? 
 
It's your call, and it boils down to how helpless your characters should be in a related-but-not-the-same situation. 
 
Honestly, we have _two_ skills books now, and _two_ character creation manuals, and I have yet to see a really thorough discussion of this aspect of skills. 
 
 
Anyway:
 
Special dial: Breadth of Skills.  How good are you're characters supposed to be when it falls just to the left of center? 
 
Enjoy. 

 

There was a few magic items, but not a lot. Most magic users were innate, with a magic rolls required. 
 
The software used was the original Heromakr.exe that released nearly simultaneously with the 4th edition BBB, but was the character generator for then never released Champions PC Game. It was so much easier than HDC is now.

So what does an experienced Fantasy Hero character look like. here's my example. The following Character is Lord Morvath Broadwing. I was a member of L, Douglas Garrett's Fantasy Hero Play test, that ran for years at his house in Sunnyvale  CA at the time. In the first cycle I played Shiro the Samurai, for about a year. When the rules were finally released, there was a time jump of about 15-20 years campaign time.  As it was, the world was, by necessity a "Kitchen Sink" world. However, being an L. D. G. campaign the geopolitics, and power dynamics were intricate.  The game at the time was anywhere between 12, to 22 Players, usually around 18, and consisted of several of the Hero Games  employees at the time.
 
Because of the efforts of one of the players in the first cycle of the game, his God, Keoshin,  had become a large popular movement, and had wiped out a couple of the monarchies  in the northern reaches, one specifically Davria, which had been an early thorn in the side in the early parts of phase one of the campaign. So in the early part of the Second phase, the Party  headed east into the desert lands of Caliphistan. I had recently lost a character in a fight, but came up with an idea of playing a notorious Daviran noble expat, living in far distant Caliphistan, and working as a gunsmith. But he had more than a few secrets. I discussed with Doug one of those secrets, shape shifter. Doug thought it was interesting, but said that I could not buy the full amount, and would have to use XP to finish building it out. This is the original sheet:
 
https://i.imgur.com/e8cU7CW.png
 
 This is the basic character, and the Multiform was at 67 of it's required 79 points.  The sheet shows 18 XP,  At this point, Morvath was brought into the party as a line fighter, and a gunsmith.
 
Later he was able to purchase his Multiform , and the party realized "Oh.... he was that dragon..."(See his disads, and had a rep of massive destruction against Davria's enemies).  But since he was still useful to the party's goals he continued with them, as they moved Eastward.  The Dragon got a lot of work out as the party's goals expanded into the politics of the region.  here's the Dragon:
 
https://i.imgur.com/TGOJuj2.png
 
 So after a few years the character bought off some disads, bought a lot of skills and levels, validating the observation that High Level Fantasy Hero characters tend to progress like Champions Martial Artists. This is the latest sheet of the character. 
 
https://i.imgur.com/myln8zy.png
 
I had way too much fun with this character, and I have used him as an NPC in my FH campaigns. Hopefully this character has been a useful example.
 
 
 
 

I have a binder full of old Hero characters, the a Majority of them FH characters. I am busy tomorrow, Friday I will scan and upload a couple of characters as examples. What I would do is to keep everything of that character in the same sheet protector, so that progress can be compared, and I had a lower point total version of the character for convention games. Character sketches as well. ( one side was the character sheet and the other was character art. ) 

Well I had to invest in a Questionite coffee table after my No Conscious Control +30 Str buy with XP and unfortunately somebody built it as a Penetrating Damage Shield so....

Not definitive and not even strongly held but...no, for Stunned, I would not have them fall off the horse. I wouldn't even have them roll Riding or Dex or anything.
 
They're just Stunned and not unconscious and a phase\round\segment is only a couple seconds. You get hit, you hunch over in pain (half DCV), you recover. All in a couple seconds.
 
Stunned (5e) specifies that characters "typically" (why is this only one sentence?! Surely the rules should be MUCH more explicit! ;D) don't drop anything they are holding (eg, reins) and while they are stunned they don't go limp, drop prone, or anything else along those lines. They just (IMO) spend a couple moments in the pain cave thinking about what they've done. Just like if I crack my shin on the coffee table in the dark. Am I at full CV? No! I'm in pain! But did I go limp, fall to the ground, and totally lose awareness of my surroundings? Also no.
 
I think even Knocked Out specifies that at -1 through -10 Stun the character isn't fully unconscious Knocked Out, just...uh...mostly KO'd?
 
In any case, to me, Stunned is (very) momentary pain effecting combat\other performance. Not a total loss of all ability to do anything (still have half DCV suggests to me they are at least a bit capable of duckin' and dodgin').
 
 
 
 
 
 

Has anybody running a Champions game that allows Combined Attacks found them to be overpowered? I run one and haven't, although I must admit, they don't crop up perhaps as often as they could/should mainly because my players or I forget that this is a thing from 5E onwards - despite me having reminded them. 
 
I would like to thank Tywll for pointing out the 'claw, claw bite' routine above. I haven't run FH for a good while (since 4th) and the Combined Attack makes perfect sense.
 
Chris, in regards to Western Hero for 6E, maybe make some kind of statement that Combined Attacks (no penalty) are only really appropriate for inclusion in Highly Cinematic Campaigns?
 
(I'm currently running Aces & Eights: Reloaded. Very nitty-gritty and extremely lethal once the guns come out).

This may have been covered elsewhere in this thread, but as I understand it, one of the big limiting factors of combined attacks was that the powers had to be bought seperately. So for example you couldn't do a combined attack that was based on Strength with another attack based on strength (like hitting someone with a kick and a weapon) unless the GM allowed it. I don't recall where that rule is, whether it was a board clarification or actually in the rules. Like you, Combined attacks have always thrown me.  
 
The best example I can think of is those rare times Superman really cut loose, flying into someone with his fists while also blasting them with his eyebeams. That would be a combined attack. 
 
In a fantasy context, it does allow monsters to do the claw,claw,bite routine of DND, as usually their claws and bite are seperate power constructs. Though not necessarily at full strength, unless you are okay with that. 
 
I suppose the risk, the why you don't do it all the time, is that you are (potentially) gambling a lot of END on a single throw of the dice. But if built properly, there is no reason not to do it all the time...however, attacks build with reduced END and all that are probably going to be less effective than those that are full strength so you would end up with less effect. 

Thank you very much for the concise breakdown of the differences! That was extremely educational! Makes me think I'll pull my 3rd edition off the shelf and give it a closer read. I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of the baked in assumptions of 3rd edition FH magic (I much prefer the later versions), but I can certainly see the advantage for a supers game. 
 
Though, as someone living in Scotland, I have to say I don't understand your remark about speaking to Scottish people! I mean, okay, sure, you go to the wilds of Glasgow or even some parts of Edinburgh and yeah, it's like listening to someone gargling marbles, but it's mostly english in there...  

Thanks for that. Good to know I wasn't wrong. I was looking at the FH book with all the villains in it (Nobles, Necromancers and something I think?) and thinking, each of these characters have 2-4 magic items. If my players defeated a team of them, that's 10-12 items to split. It seems like a wild jump in power and of course has the problem of making a lot of opposition just pointless. Unlike OSR games, I don't feel like I can throw a lot of wandering encounters at the group because fights take so long to play out, I really only want to run the meaningful ones. but that's a tricky balance...you also want the players to feel awesome occasionally by steamrolling a group of goons. 

Nothing set in stone yet.  My Saturday group is pretty tolerant of my systems tinkering so we're trying to get the right feel while maintaining a good balance between characters.
 
Stats converted pretty much directly.  The only tricky stat from PoE is Perception which contributes to Accuracy (OCV) and Reflex (DEX Rolls).
Characters get 5 CP per level for Stats and Skills along with their level up active/passive ability choices.
Weapon conversion turned out to be very easy.  PoE max weapon damage is 200% of max weapon damage in HERO. 
Ex:  Saber max damage (prior to skill / STR bonuses) is 18 points.  Cut that in half and max damage 9 = 1.5d6 K.  I tested several weapons and the formula works pretty consistently.
PoE weapons with +5 Accuracy are +1 OCV in HERO.
I brought back the older FH edition power of Piercing.  Rather than making weapons armor piercing they get a flat piercing amount based 2/3rds of their DR bypass rating.
Armor in PoE is 50%  higher than HERO system values so as an example they have Plate Armor as DR 12 where HERO would have 8 rPD/rED.
 
So far we're using the "per encounter" resource system of PoE 2 since limiting spell casters to a very small number of daily casts would require those spells to have very large effects on combat outcome.
 
So far so good.  If the players are amenable I'll upload some character sheets in the near future.
 

Sorry to disappoint, but I don't think I have that kind of time tonight!  
 
 
 
 
 
 
Not at all; go right ahead.  
 
Okay, assuming that you did:
 
First off: 4e isn't too terribly different from three and pre-three: it's essentially all the supplemental and additional rules from all the related non-Champions games published by HERO games up to that point.  It's a neat idea, but in the end, required a lot of shaving and cobbling to push it all together.  It worked, at least as a game system, but in rendering them all "part of a single universal system," it took a lot of the genre or setting-specific "feel" away from these rules, as well as crowding them into places that we had never really needed them before.  It's a bit long-winded, and--  well, let's move on for a bit.
 
First and apparently most-importantly, at least in terms of brevity, is that they weren't written by lawyers.
 
Yeah....   that's going to get some hate, so let me add more (in my opinion, totally unnecessary save for the touchiness of people these days) to that sentiment:
 
I have _never_ met any of the Holy Legions of Champions authors.  (and to be fair, the one I regret not meeting the most is probably Aaron Alston; his writings and the mythos around him suggest to me that I would have _loved_ hanging out and discussing things with him, rolling dice, etc).  Never.  Not once.  Why?  Well, there was no Champions when I was growing up in Alaska, and when there _was_ Champions, I lived in Georgia.  Not a lot of those folks from this area. Until Steve, none of them lived within two days of me, and the only Con around here is Dragon Con, which I think we have _all_ boycotted since "The Revelation."  (Proudly, I might add)
 
I have not met people who have met these people.
 
However, I _have_ spoken repeatedly with people who have met a lot of these folks, and I have had my suspicions confirmed:  these are great guys.  These are (as I always suspected) _real human beings_ who do real things, one of which is "enjoy playing (or at least playing with) games."  So when I condemn the "written by lawyers," it is not the people who are lawyers I am condemning.  It is the writing of lawyers I am condemning.
 
Look up the Constitution of the United States and _read_ it.  I _dare_ you!  Not that part we all had to memorize in grade school; the hand-written stuff is _easy_!  Get to the stuff added in later years.  Keep going.  I'll come back in a couple of years and check on you.
 
Which part was easy?  Which part was unnecessarily over-verbose, ponderously painful to read, required breaking down and diagraming sentences to make sure you followed and understood what was what and which was where and about who?  Oddly, all of this deeply-detailed over-specificity is done in the name of clarity.
 
Fine.  So Power descriptions go from one or two paragraphs to a full column, to one or two pages for each subsequent edition.  Does that add anything?
 
Nope.
 
Each new edition gets better and better indexing, sections, sub-sub-subtitles, etc.  Does that add anything?
 
Nope.
 
 
How can I say these horrible things?!
 
For one, it's been my experience that people who enjoy role-playing games tend to be readers, and it's been my experience that readers aren't really stupid.  We can be curmudgeons, disagreeable, opinionated, and bastardly, but not generally stupid.  When given an outline, we can fill in enough details to make it all work.  Best part of that?  We tend to bias those filled in blanks with things that we like.  When something _seems_ to conflict, we will either read and reread until we get what we missed, or we will re-interpret it in such a way that it doesn't conflict anymore.  
 
So let's publish new, more intricate, more complex rules:  We will fill in the blanks for you.  Now each power seems to have a long list of how every other power _must_ interact with this power, and how each advantage works with every power-- literally broken down by power!
 
There are a lot of reasons I disagree with that, the two foremost being this goes against the grain of advantages being fixed mechanics and pushes more toward the "typical" RPG model of telling you precisely how your power works, period.  We are moving away from "Blast" and toward "Ice Blast," "Laser Vision," "Heat Ray, Normal," and "Heat Ray, Gun."  Yes, a bit hyperbolic, but still:  this level of specificity _denies_ "the generic, do-anything system!" mantra we use to support it.
 
The additional verbiage doesn't help:  Define each Advantage-- go into great detail there, if you want-- even list out powers that you shouldn't apply it to if you're obsessed about making sure everyone is playing it your way,  but leave it to the groups or the GMs to determine how they affect the Powers.  Personally, I've always felt that if an Advantage can't be applied to every Power, then it should be an adder for the powers to which they can be applied, but you don't see me trying to force that on people, do you?
 
Where does all this stuff fit?  Where is it written?  Okay, I wish to alter my Skill Levels mid-combat: a situation that I missed but was told to me yesterday: can skill levels be altered when you abort?  Well, let's check under Combat.  Nope.  Aborting?  Nope.  Here it is, under Skill Levels!  
 
Why?!
 
Sure, it's a good thing we have an index, but an eighty-page rulebook was even better: check this three-page section.  Nope.  Check this half-column.  Nope.  Check this column on Skill levels.  
 
But why?  Why would you put the combat particulars for a skill under the skill description when all other skills simply have "what this does and how it works," and all other "here's your combat options" are under "combat?"   Why put this one thing in an entirely _separate book_?  We have an index now, so I suppose searching through 800 pages must now be easier than searching through 80 (or fifty-six).
 
Reading non-lawyer text is easier.  I totally grant that whoever wrote 4e (the name escapes me; Bell, wasn't it?) was unusually "not dry" for a lawyer, and even Steve tends to be less dry with the setting books and genre books (more "not dry" with the settings than the genre), but rules?  Straight to the lawyer speak (with jarringly "not dry" examples, because I assume he gets tired of lawyer speak, too).
 
 
Each new addition adds new Powers / Skills / Whozi-Whatsits!
 
Does it?
 
I have no idea how many, but I know that there are members still active on this board (besides me) who have been playing since 1e, or 2e or 3e (which seemed to have the largest number of "my first Champions," presumably because it was more successful and wide-spread by then)-- well, let's just say who have been playing since the early to mid eighties.  4e pulled stuff from all the 3e sources, and it added "Multi-Form" and EDM and T-form (though I swear, I _think_ T-form was a fall-out from Fantasy Hero.  My daughter has my FH books right now, so I can't check).  It also added "Talents" and changed some pricing for this or that.   Oh, and Desolid officially lost its granularity, resulting in it ending up being used pretty regularly as "immune to damage."
 
Or, as I have always been privately amused to notice:  it added the things we argued about the most!    That's not better, in my own opinion, but your mileage etc.  Math fanatics seem to have been the happiest by the costing changes; I was disappointed by the loss of 1/4 END cost the loss of the extreme cost of 0 END on high-dollar powers.  Damn balancing the friggin' _math_; I'm trying to balance characters against each other in actual _play_.
 
Put another way: it became less expensive to become way more "effective" if you were mathy enough, and not all my players are that mathy.  Further, I do math all damned day for money; I don't want to come home and do it again for "fun!"  It's not my bag, but suddenly I'm having to do all sorts of it for my less math-inclinded players who are desperately trying to keep up with the point-shaving pros.  Yeah, that's not a new thing, but with eight-dozen new options, it became much more prominent.  Today, it is the most _famously renowned part of the system" to outsiders, totally killing any other attraction the game may have to the majority of people who just want to pick up and play something.
 
But I questioned if the new stuff added anything; I should address that.
 
(Hey!  You were right, Amorcka!  Seems there _is_ a wall of text coming!)
 
1) There were no Hulk Clones before 4e.
 
2) There were no Doctor Strange Clones before 4e.
 
3) There were no Shape Shifters before 5e.
 
4) There are new things like "MegaScale"
 
5) All of the above are bull snuckles.
 
 
Why Multiform when we already had "Only in Hero ID?"  It was pretty easy to extrapolate that into "only in Hulk ID."  And we did.  I mean, it made a lot of sense for "Accidental Change."  Certainly that limitation couldn't apply only to people who had bought "Instant Change?" If that was the case, Instant Change could be more-than-free if you were willing to take a chance on the dice; effectively free if you stuck with 8 or less.
 
I am willing to bet most inter dimensional travel was handled by tweaking Teleport.  Most of the groups (man, I miss the 80s with their "game stores and game groups _everywhere_" golden good times!  Yeah, I'm not Australian enough to be able to fully commit to that joke) I encountered were doing it as a -0 Limitation: only for interdimensional travel, but again: mileage varied, and people tended to do _what they liked_.
 
Shape Shifters?  Hell, I _still_ ignore the disaster that 5e gave us: the biggest reason you shape shift is to gain some sort of advantage:  certain powers, disguise, whatever--  the fact that you changed shapes is just a special effect.  You don't even need multiform for this; do it the original way:  A list of powers with "only in appropriate ID / form."  Decide with your players which forms are appropriate and cost it accordingly.  Certain forms won't have +15 STR; certain forms won't have 3 levels of Shrinking, either.  
 
Was one better than the other?
 
Well, go through the history of the board.  Use the Wayback Machine to find as much of the old Red October as you can.  Which one generated the most disagreement?  Spurred the most complaints, confusion, and discussion?
 
 
Mega Scale, while never really written up as an advantage, has floated around many game groups-- those who were interested enough of had a strong enough need to build it-- since the very first edition, when the maps presented in The Island of Doctor Destoyer were spelled out as being displayed in Tactical Hexes, and the movement of the helicopters was given in Tactical Hexes.  No; no stats for that, but it's not hard to take the inspiration and extrapolate, or come up with it on your own, if you have a need.  (We called ours "UpScale," because in the eighties, "Tactical" was pretty much a buzzword used to sell absolute garbage on TV.  Come to think of it, that came around again in the mid oughts, with the new LED "Tactical Flashlights" and-- well, utter crap painted black.  Even today, calling something "tactical" makes me feel all Skeevy McFastbuck).
 

 Which one --
 
well, let's skip that.  The shorter approach to the discussion-- rather than rattling off example after example of differences-- is that the newer editions focus on minutiae; minutiae that wasn't really a problem for most people.  Yes: if you didn't have a group already, you didn't have anyone to bounce ideas off of to get an idea how something might or might not work, and I agree: that kind of sucked.  Still, it wasn't insurmountable.  You could still get an interpretation that worked for you, and if you finally found a group, that's how you played.  Once upon a time, we accepted with _any_ game that some people were going to play it differently, and you let it ride.  As a result of the steady push of "must play the same," when we offer up "house rules" or rules variants, there is endless discussion about the pros and cons (which I enjoy), and invariably there is at least one person taking major issue on the grounds that it is _not_ "The Rules as Written"  (there is more complaint here about drifting away from the letter of the rules than there is in church, for Pete's sake), and is therefore wrong.  Yeah; it's easy enough to ignore that, but still- what's the driving force?  Tighter and tighter bindings of the "must do this way" phrasings of the rules.
 
Today, the big control-freak push to make sure that everyone is playing the _exact_ _same_ _way_ is even more ridiculous: rather than make a call or an interpretation that works for everyone in your group, we can send a letter to the author (which, I do not deny, is _extremely_ gracious of him, and re-enforces all I've heard about him being a wonderful human being) to make sure we are playing a game correctly.
 
While there is a small resurgence for certain old classics, this isn't one of them.  As others have noticed, HERO is pretty much dead, at least for now and for the foreseeable future.  It was dead before 5e stopped pumping out books; it was dead before 6e came to exist.  Google it up, and you find us few diehards, and lots and lots of nostalgia about "this game that used to exist."  With the fan base at an all-time low and dwindling, sweet merciful Jesus on a stick, why does it matter that we are all playing the exact same way?!  The only single partially-justifiable reason for making calls that may counter your group's enjoyment of the game is the laughable idea of importing a character from one table to another.  Yes; I said it: laughable.  Allow me to recant that and rephrase as "Damned laughable."
 
Where does it happen?  Let's see...   Now I'm not playing favorites, here, but in my time on this board, I have had interest in playing with _many_ of the forum members, as I enjoy their takes on certain things.  In no particular order, if I were to select five at random, let's make a quick run-down:
 
Chris Goodwin:  lives, based on his posts, somewhere near Seattle.  Maybe some hours from it, but a damned sight closer to Seattle than Vidalia, Georgia.
 
Lord Liaden.  Trapped in the frozen wastes of Cannuckistan.  Same for Hugh-- though he's never stated it as such, he gives off a powerful vibe of having also been born and raised in the mystic lands of Canadia.
 
Doc Democracy:  Again, I'm not entirely certain, but I think Scotland or thereabouts.  If that's the case, I couldn't play there anyway, because while Scottish reads and writes enough like English to allow easy communication, it certainly doesn't translate as easily for spoken conversation.
 
Sean (Shawn?) who's last name fell from my mind even as I went to type it....   From England.  I think he's only popped up one time since I came back, though he used to be extremely active in rules and variants discussions.  Not only is it no less time and money-i-don't-actually-have consuming to visit--- WATERS!  Sean Waters!  -- him than it would be to game with Doc Democracy, but by Sean's own admissions, he doesn't actually _play_ the game.  Still, lots of neat ideas about tweaking rules.
 
Christopher Taylor:  he is extremely invested in his personal fantasy setting, which makes me believe that as a GM, he could really sell it, and even though it's Fantasy, I would probably have a great time.  I think he's in the US, but _where_?  And even if it were only a two-day drive, well-- that's a hell of a trip.
 
We are diverse and spread out enough (certainly there are lots and lots of players who aren't on this forum.  Or I'd like to believe so.  It's been my own experience that there are lots and lots of _former_ players who aren't on this forum because they're pretty sure HERO and Iron Crown both died some time in the 90s) that the odds of actually being able to _present_ a character to another group is in itself laughable.
 
Then there's the absolute fact that the GM has guidelines for his campaigns (well, most of them do.  Mine are pretty damned lax, and I'm not changing that, which just reinforces where I'm going), particularly non-supers games where "no; my magic works _this_ way,"  or "no; I'm not willing to let your 35 STR adventurer in this game because that's above the level of realism I'm going for" or "no; you have to take 'real weapon' because that's how I want all equipment built' and on and on and on and on and on and on and on----
 
There is a _perceived_ need, at least among some people, that making sure we are playing lock-step with identical rules is a good thing.  Personally, I think it stifles creativity and results in characters-- and sometimes adventures-- that all have a certain sameness.  I don't view that as a good thing.  You know what?  Let's just stop.  Let's stop with the examples and the discussions and the complaints and even all the stuff I've just said.  It's stupid.
 
The point is, as many well-practiced individuals point out above, that the editions all play the same.  Granted, that's because you can pick and chose the rules you want to use from _any_ edition, and I expect that most of us are going to select only the "new stuff" that we like and are using only the rules that let us more or less play the way that we always have.  Granted, this is another point on the side of "why all the verbiage, then?", but remember that different people are going to like different new stuff, so there's that.  But still----
 
 
 
I can sum _all_ the differences between "old" and "new" with one word (and probably should have, about four thousand words ago  ):
 
"No."
 
There is a Hell of lot more "NO" in the newer editions than there were in the old ones.  The old ones are short, easy to read, learn, and teach, and extremely open to creativity and novel suggestions.  The new ones tell you precisely how you must use individual Advantages and Limitation and how that varies from Power to Power to Power to Power....
 
Each time you expressly say "this is how it's done," you are also saying "it cannot be done any other way," and I find that unconscionable next to the idea of "build anything you imagine."
 
So there you have it:  
 
The differences between the new editions and the old editions?  They are all personal problems. 
 
 
 
Enjoy.  
 
 
Duke
 
 
 

I recently wrapped up War for the Crown with my Fantasy HERO group.
 
They started off as 150 pt characters and wrapped up as 350 pt characters with a LOT of magic items.  They were easily on par with 450-500 point Champions characters by the end - at least in terms of offense / defense.
In the beginning they were all around 5 OCV/DCV and doing about 2d6K or 6d6N at SPD 3.  Most characters ended at SPD 4, but a couple ended at SPD 5.
My wife's Fire Witch was hitting 14-15 OCV and doing 4d6 RKA AP or 3d6 RKA AoE AP with her most common attacks.
The Witcher based character was around 15 OCV when maxed out (levels, martial arts, magic weapon bonuses) and doing 4d6 HKA while simultaneously only 5 DCV due to armor penalties (end-game magic plate 15 rPD/rED - hardened).
The Dwarven Sapper had an array of explosives and ammo-consuming gauntlets that allowed him to boomstick punch enemies for more than 10d6N.
 
When I compared them to my last Champions campaign they overall had puny defenses (7-15 rPD armor plus 5-7 PD) but much higher CVs (14-15 OCV/DCV depending on level allocation).
 
Your concern is well justified.  A character in 8 rPD/rED field plate cannot soak repeated hits of 5d6 KA from an ancient dragon.  They're mangled after 2 hits and dead or dying after the 3rd.
The way my group dealt with dragons and major demons and other end-game threats was to avoid damage as much as possible by way of blocking, dodging and diving for cover.  Action economy is how a Fantasy HERO group typically defeats a big bad.
 
Also, end game threats are great for thematic side quests to build anticipation.  "No living creature can survive the dragon fire.  You must bring me 3 fire orchids to brew you potions that will let you live long enough to fell this beast.".
Completing a couple such quests and then facing attacks that would have been certain death without the additional preparation work will make the characters feel like their extra work is paying off and that their opponent is truly deadly.
 
I'm at work, but when I get home I'll see if I can upload my combat calculator sheet for the end of that campaign.  I basically set a starting value and then intermittently bumped it 5 points to simulate D&D tiers.
 
 

In the world of the Arcana Practica, the Thaumic Age began some hundred to hundred and twenty years ago.  This was the beginning of systematized study of magic.  Before that time, "wizards" (charlatans) would ply their trades, often getting hired on into official positions.  Some of these wizards had some actual power, by means of knacks (magical talents that some people, then and now, possessed), but being a wizard was as much about putting on a show as it was about working actual magic.  Often, wizards would take on apprentices, some of which had knacks of their own, many of which did not.  Their training methods were as much flim-flammery as their wizardry.  There was a big scandal, as most kingdoms, governments, etc., gave their wizards the choice of hanging or beheading (sometimes even burning at the stake was offered), but one group (a confederation of duchies) instead commissioned a study on why some wizards could actually do real magic and some couldn't.  It turned into a long running study on magic in general, that began the Thaumic Age.  
 
Arcana, singular arcanum, refers to a type of magic: air, fire, light, lightning, animals, etc.  Practica, singular practicum, refers to a magical technique: create, sense, bind, conjure, dismiss, cloak, etc.  Together, these are a spell's Arcanum and Practicum (often abbreviated as "A and P"), and the overall organized body of magical knowledge and pedagogy is referred to as the Arcana Practica.  The incidence of knacks has gone down in the general population as the Arcana Practica has taken hold; no one is sure exactly why, but there are a number of competing theories.  
 
Learning a number of spells that share a common practicum allows you to buy a Skill (PS) with that practicum, which you can roll as a complementary skill roll to your Magic Skill Roll.  Some individuals have an "affinity" with an arcanum, which in game terms is a few Skill Levels that apply to magical and mundane manifestations.  So, for instance, an affinity with fire would help you with casting spells of the arcanum of fire, as well as with building fires mundanely; an affinity with animals would improve your spellcasting on animals, as well as your Animal Handling and other animal related Skills.  Spells would initially be bought for full point cost, though as the game progresses you can work your way into Multipowers and potentially a VPP (based on arcana).  
 
Characters can also buy knacks, which are just a magical power with an A and P.  Sufficient study of thaumatology and Metamagic can help you turn your knack into an arcanum.  
 
Finally, spells are divided into tiers, based solely on the prerequisites required.  Tier 0 spells require no prerequisites; anyone who is not "athaumic" (nonmagical) can learn them, and none of them require a skill roll.  Tier 1 spells have a basic level of prerequisites; some might have a particular tier 0 spell, others might require a minimum skill in a practicum, or an affinity, or a knack.  Tier 2 spells have more extensive lists of prerequisites; higher levels in various related Skills, demonstrated minimum ability to cast certain tier 1 spells, possibly certain knacks or other magical talents.  There are no tier 3 spells, unless you are a disgruntled wannabee who has barely passed their basic Arcana Practica and thinks that there's some kind of conspiracy keeping you from learning tier 2 spells.  

It also doesn't seem fair to downvote just because you disagree with someone … or because you feel offended by something someone wrote when that wasn't the person's intent.  The fact that this was done, suggests fairness isn't part of the equation that was used by some people when conducting their downvotes. Thus, it seems a bit unreasonable to hold others to a standard of fairness when it comes to downvoting.  (I believe there's a term/word for holding others to a standard to which one does not, oneself, conform/adhere.  Hypo...something.  Hrm, if I could only remember the rest of it...)

As someone who has self-published on DTRPG (I have a stable of OSR products), I'd say your pricing is fairly low (beyond the $1 offering, which I agree with).
 
If I were getting only half through a program like this, instead of the usual 70%, my pricing would more likely be something like:
$1 for one pages
$5 for a short adventures
$9.99 for a long one/source book
$15 for a major adventure/enemies book
$20-30 for a campaign book.
 
In part this would depend on how much I can source the art for, pay someone to do the lay out (if I want something fancy) etc. 
 
As for DT sales, luckily the author gets to decide whether their products are included in those. I assume even under this program an author would still have that level of control?

If you want to pull your downvotes, I'll be happy to discuss it. It doesn't seem fair to downvote for something when you didn't understand the complaint. 

No, that was the other guy who complained you should use Gm's common sense and not also make rules by Fiat. Which is silly. 
 
 
Agreed.
 
Yes, I would prefer that there were rules to cover it.  Which was why I went with the house rule I mentioned earlier.
 
However, the other guy refused to let it drop and kept exclaiming the the rules as written were 100% fine with no need to make a house rule. 
 
 
 
Which seems totally cool by me. I wanted to start this game in 4th edition, but Hero Designer is just too easy to use and without something comparable for 4th, I couldn't justify the time I'd spend statting out everything on paper. 

That seems unneccesary. 
 
Of course I can use the rule from 6E, but it doesn't fix the problem. It just takes away the benefit of running around someone in a circle, it doesn't actually remove the ability to do it. It doesn't remove the ability to run past combatants and ignore them to get behind something or someone they are defending which are additional concerns about the spinning dance mechanic. 

I'll have to disagree, as I feel several crossed the line. 
 
 
Sadly, the other guy just went through and hit a bunch of posts of mine with Downvotes, even those that had nothing to do with him. So, there's your target audience.