Joe Walsh

I'm not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, but Carter is, to me, an example of what a good Christian should be.

I don't recall if you're familiar with it, but that's similar to how Supers! Revised Edition handles it. For anyone reading who may not know (and without getting stuck in the details), in Supers! Aptitudes are broad skill categories (like Academia, Athleticism, Investigation, Military, Occultism, and Technology) that characters can choose, and can gain proficiency in up to the third level of proficiency (out of seven). If they want to add proficiency above that, it can only be done through specialization. So for example, a character can't have Academia at the 4th level or above, but they can have Academia at the 3rd level (indicating broad competency across a range of academic subjects) and then, say, History at the 4th level.  The game includes 21 Aptitudes, each with a range of suggested Specializations, but adding Specializations and even whole Aptitudes is fully supported and expected.
 
On the other hand, Super Action Role-Play goes even further into broad skills with its Backgrounds (Arcane, Art, Athletics, Blue Collar, Business, Criminal, Espionage, Exploration, High Society, Journalist, etc.) Typically there are five levels of competency a player can distribute over up to five chosen Backgrounds. So, a player might assign 2 levels to one Background and 1 each to three others. Or however they want to distribute their five levels. Unlike HERO's Skills and Supers!' Aptitudes, Backgrounds basically function like old-school Traveller skills in that the value next to the Background indicates the die modifier to be applied to the task roll. Eighteen Backgrounds are included and, as with Supers!, adding new Backgrounds as needed is expected and fully supported by the game. Specialization isn't part of the game, but for those who want a more specific skill can choose one of the game's Boosts (which are similar to HERO's Talents): Super-Skill. It lets you add a significant bonus to your die throw for one appropriate non-combat characteristic check such as Disguise, Intimidation, Inventing, Swimming, Tracking, etc.
 
I like both of those systems, and prefer such systems to the totally freeform ones ("Tell me two things your character is good at and one they struggle with") and the ones with giant lists of skills.
 
 
Me, too. Because of him, I tend to think, "Given that we have Characteristics we can base rolls on, what do we need Skills to do for this campaign?"

I hesitate to say it, but would something like an EC for skills fix a lot of the cost issue?

The effective difference is that when recovering on Phase 4 rather than during a held action, then from Phase 4 until your next phase (which could be Phase 8 if you're SPD 3) you're at half DCV (with Placed Shots modifiers being halved as well) and any Constant powers that cost END (even if only to activate) are turned off while you're recovering, possibly making you a bit of a sitting duck.  (Which, to be fair, you'd have instead been a sitting duck until Phase 4 if you recovered on the prior Phase rather than holding your action, doing a non-recovery action on Phase 3, and then recovering on Phase 4.) 
 
Whereas if you could use your held action to recover, you'd only be a sitting duck for that fraction of a second at the very end of Phase 3 when nobody can attack you.  Hence, the rules not allowing you to do that.  

Agreed, but the Goodman School of Cost Effectiveness wasn't about reason so much as finding mechanics that could be lightly abused. 
 
Lightly. 
 
 

My instinct is to agree with you but in game terms, what difference do those things make to those characters?  In the comics they are geniuses and all fill the same space in stories. 
 
It feels to me like the science skills are almost equivalent to the special effects that we give to powers, they don't cost extra but they give small context-specific bonuses or penalties.
 
I think they are most useful at deciding which PC might be the one who notices the important information or makes a conceptual link in the adventure.
 
Also, while there is indeed a difference between superhero and heroic genres, I still think we should be looking at ways to use skills to flesh out the characters rather than bleed them of points.
 
Doc

I encountered GURPS 2nd a matter of weeks before being introduced to Fantasy Hero 1E, and the Hero skills list seemed very short, elegant and concise to me. (At the time I had never before seen another skill based game.) Things got a little bloated after 4th edition; i don't really need all the science skills broken out, or really even need to distinguish science skills from KS/PS.
 
I've recently come to realize Hero has an awful lot of needless distinction; not nearly as much as GURPS, but they still clutter up the system. Forensic Medicine and Animal Handler could both just be PS, no need to these odd professional skills to be called out separately. User defined is fine; if the writers feel that it is REALLY important for the reader to think about forensic medicine as a skill, just provide a list of genre-appropriate PS ideas. (I do love the way user-defined skills are dynamic in breadth, it is amazingly elegant.) And why do we have both EB and RKA, when we could have a single Attack power that costs 5/DC, and just let the player decide which kind it is? The powers are virtually identical otherwise. These are only a couple of very obvious iceberg-tips... I feel the system really needs an editor, and obviously I'm the best guy to do it... 😇
 
I think the skill costs for heroic games are pretty reasonably. If you are spending 150 points in a fantasy warrior, he needs something to soak all those points. Wizards mostly take KS and can cheapen those with Scholar.

In a note similar to what GM Joe said, the skill system many of you are looking for kind of exists in the Mutants & Masterminds, Third Edition system. The Expertise skill there is a catch all that allows characters to include a profession, specialized knowledge, or a catch-all for a skill that everything else doesn't cover. In the example of the PS: Policeman skill above, you'd use the Expertise: Policeman in basically the same way. 
 
Personally, I enjoy the more inflated skill system that Hero has had since 4th ed. I realize I may be in the minority in this thread, but the skill list has been something that's helped me define characters better. What's the skill differences between Reed Richards, Hank Pym, Tony Stark, and Bruce Banner? Depending on the system, not much. Using a more broad skill list, they'd all have science/scientist. In Hero, however, it's more specific and leans into the individual skills better. SS: Quantum Physics, SS: Physics, SS: Engineering, SS: Robotics, etc. For me, it works better. 

were I on my computer, I could move that to where I wanted to group it, but... 
 
Anyway, there are some interesting thoughts coming up from folks that shows a bit of concensus here for this idea. 
 
 
 
 
You and me both.  Though for what it's worth, it is easy enough to add back in.  Yes; I know that you know that, and that your complaint refers more to it being officially axed, and I know that you can't get Hero Designer to accept it for a 6e build, but I always hope there is a new guy out there reading these threads....  That was more for him.   
 
My own "issue" (I can't say complaint because I still use both of these things the way that I believe they were meant to be used) with Elemental Control was the interpretation that the community took and ran with for both Elemental Control and Multipower. 
 
You remember the early days: we had nothing.  No settings, no modules, just the rules books.  Eventually we got an adventure or two (honesty time: the original Island of Dr D was _terrible_, and we all know it.  Christopher's rework of that piece is a billion miles ahead of the original-not just for the update, but because it is an RPG adventure and not just a war game capture-the-flag scenario.) and we got an enemies book.   We didn't even have Adventurers club or a third-party rag with any interest in us in the early days. Best of all, we didn't have an internet.  We could do whatever made us feel right about the game and not have to check in to make sure that remote faceless strangers agreed with us, and us remote faceless strangers couldn't get our kicks telling you that you were completely wrong, and therefore were not having a good time correctly. 
 
All we had were the examples in the rules, and by dribbles, in latter supplemental works. 
 
From those examples - the 'how-to' bits in the rules and the actual characters that we would come across, I got the distinct understanding that Elemental Control was more of a theme thing-- like Spiderman had a spider theme, and all of his wall crawling, leaping, and strength would fit into that, _and so could his web shooters _. 
 
Multipower, however, seemed to be reserved for characters who had single power source that they could use multiple ways:  my command of gravity waves let's me fly, repel objects, create strength-sapping zones of heavy gravity, and generate concussive waves of tightly-mixed variable gravities, doing massive damage to whatever I strike. 
 
I can use my ability to create and manipulate heat to loft myself on tightly-controlled thermals, generate blasts of white-hot flame, and create a wall of heat so intense projectiles are vaporized before they get near me. 
 
All of these are _super cool_, right? 
 
And they are _one power_.  The very nature of Multipower demonstrates that:  I buy a control, which has the bulk of my 'stored geavity' or whatever, and slots, each of which represents things that I can do with that gravity. 
 
In fact, because I can only generate so much intense heat, if I raise my forcefield to it's maximum, I have to sort of hover, because there is barely enough left over to fly; blasting someone is just out of the question.  (anyone else remember turning off Flight in mid-air, using a held action to attack full-force, and then turning Flight back on?  Anyone?  Okay; it's just me.) 
 
If you went with ultra slots, it was _painfully_ obvious that you were manipulating a single power source. 
 
The idea held for guns, too- a perinnial favorite build of the Multipower because then you could take that sweet Focus limitation as well (as you do when you are building 'the most expensive way'    ).  You have six slots, (usually Ultras) representing different ammo or different features of the gun. 
 
This holds up as evidence that you really have only a single power: Gun.  If Arkelos the Mage casts "Dispell: Gun," you are _screwed.  If the GM decides it is time for that Focus limitation to bite you just a bit, you do not have any of your slots because you lost the only one power you had: Gun. 
 
The most telling thing- to me, I mean-- was the rebate.  The rebate was _huge_ (still is) for Multipower, which suggested some significant drawbacks.  In modern discussions, when someone prooeses a 'not in the presence of X' type build where they cannot use one power when using another, or the two are somehow scaled, we recommend 'lockout' and similar limitations, which are fine, of course, but they don't offer the rebate value of Multipower. 
 
Finally, and this one goes all the way back to 1e: Multipower did not start out listed as a power framework.  It was listed as a power. (as was Elemental Control, actually).  I know a lot of you that never played 1e bought the Bundle of Holding when it popped up.  Go check it out: Multipower was listed as a power that allowed one set of points to feed multiple abilities.  Much like today; the wording really hasn't changed much at all. One set of points rolling from one power to another, or being split amongst the slots-- a single power : a multi-use power; a power that can be tapped and expressed multiple ways. 
 
So from the earliest days of Power Drain, we applied those Drains to _the whole multipower_.  We treated it as one power.  To this day, those are the types of builds for which I encourage Multipower (assuming the player is willing to accept the inherent drawbacks, of course). 
 
Now until I got online, I had no idea people bagged on Elemental Control so badly.  (I also had no idea how many people were using incorrectly, and over-discounting the powers within, but that's another story.  Well, a couple of examples: pay full price for your most expensive power and all others are half price.  Pay full points for your first power, and all others are half price.  How many people, do you suppose, had Instant Change or +1 STR as their first power at _that_ table?!). 
 
From chat rooms, then to Red October, and finally to these boards, people were constantly trashing Elemental Control.  (I would like to point out that, much like "Killing Attack is broken!"  the complaints almost always seemed to come from the "points are for game balance" camp.  I do not know if that is significant, but the possibility is strong enough that it seems worth mentioning.  Ironically, when used properly, the discount for EC didn't outweigh that of Multipower until you got up to eight or more powers, possibly more depending on how you built (you could over-pay on your control and end up paying too much for a slot with a low-cost power in it, or underpay your control cost and end up paying additional full-cost points far too often.  You want my honest ooinion?  People bagged on EC because it was complicated. )
 
Then along came- was it 4e or 5e?  I seem to remember it was 5e, but that may just be the first time I noticed it- the declaration that Elemental Control was, in fact, one single power with Multiple aspects, and that adjustment powers that affected any EC power affected all EC powers, etc. 
 
Now I have read everything 4e, just as many of you have.  I am pretty certain that I own everything 4e up on the bookshelves, including the dual-stat ICE stuff, because if you wanted a module for anything that wasn't Champions, then you had best be playing Fantasy HERO.  (For those who did not venture into the world of Kulthea, it could be a bit dark.  It could also be a bit murder-hobo ish, if you weren't careful.) 
 
Anyway, I have read it.  Yes; I saw the same trends as everyone else: Multipower popping up on lots of places I would have gone with EC, and a few the other way around.  My only thoughts at the time where, the construct doesn't really seem abusive, and Multipower _is_ easier to use, but the limitations..... 
 
Anyway we got to a point where the official rules stated that EC now has all the drawbacks that you assumed MP had, and MP does not. 
 
And I just kinda moped right out of that.  Well, there commentary.  So much commentary.  So very much overly-colorful commentary.... 
 
Some of the less colorful was "yes; this make sense.  Because Peter Parker got bitten by a radioactive spider who came back a week later and handed him some sweet web-shooting bracelets.  That is just how these things go.  Because draining his web"-shooters should automatically reduce his vertical leap. 
 
 
Anyway, as has been suggested before, "Unified Power," applied to enough slots, will eventually get you to the rebate point that Elemental Control used to get you, but it removes all the hoops, so now you can apply it to two powers.   Not gonna stop using EC, though, and you aren't going to get all of your powers modified because one got adjusted. You will with Multipower, though. 
 
 
Gid dinged right it is!  More than anything, this is the biggest use I have for it these days. 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
Agreed again! 
 
Dude, even an inch of stretching, held as a surprise, can totally change a tactical situation, plus the fun things you can do: ersatz Swinging, climbing, grabs and holds.  By far, though, my favorite use of just a small amount of Stretching is "Surprise! Looks like _one of us_ is in melee range!" 
 
 
 
That!  That right there!  Cascade skills are the thing for heroic or realistic type games, and I heartily encourage someone who does not write the rules (because I cannot imagine anyone thinking we need a longer rule book) to give this a try.  You might go around and gather your players' skills and create your own lists for them to have when playing, though I would recommend asking your players something like "pick 5 skills that fall under that heading that you want at that level, then pick either two each from each of those that you want at (some lower level)" or even  "then pick ten skills under that main heading you want at (some lower level), and possibly go to 15 total on a tertiary level. 
 
Shoot me, but I think that as an exercise, it would be _awesome_!  Of course, I forgot to take all of my blood pressure and heart meds today, so I am feeling much better than I have in months, with energy and excitement to spare, so bear with my enthusiasm, please. 
 
I think it would be fun to do; seriously.  I also think it would be a pain the rear to play, because there will be some aspect of police work that you or the player did not consider, and now he doesn't know how to do that. 
 
So here is an alternative:  pick X amount of skills that believe comprise your specialty in 'police work.'. Pick Y amount that you are only passingly familiar with.  The first set will be at the level of your Police work skill; the second set will be at 8 or less; all other aspects will be at (some agreeable midpoint).  This way, the player gets to specify both his strengths and his weaknesses, but he won't necessarily come up shot in the clutch because he had to create a specific list of everything he knows. 
 
When Police work goes up, they all go up by the same amount, or, just to keep it lively, all but one from each group goes up with it (players choice, of course).  You get a degree of granularity (possibly with increasing variation), and you are still reasonably close to Hero-normal. 
 
Just thoughts, and I would love to see someone try them.  I likely won't, because I took a lot of inspiration from Marc Miller and don't often play a skills-heavy game: buy skills for things that you do exceptionally well, and we will do characteristics rolls or what-have-you for things that you just know or know about.  (in supers, anyway). 
 
 
 
 
Right up until you are looked in a windowless room, anyway. 
 

 
I  agree with the sentiment, thought, that skills are priced a bit high, at least for a superhero game.  That is why I tend to (see above). 
 
For heroic games, I find them to be about right, and I don't go o super-granular (like that guy that wants me to tell him what five parts of my job I suck at).   I run them tighter than I do in supers, but I also keep in mind that for normals, skills kind of _are_ their "special powers," so the pricing seems more fair.  Besides, I fold a few things into them, 
 
Even then, though, this is a conversation about value for your points, and points balance because costs are similar and values are not.  It doesn't make one of them wrongly"-costed, though.  Still, because the skill system in Hero is so fascinatingly devoid of explanation, the best thing I can suggest is selecting a level of breadth that you are comfortable with: woodcraft instead of survival, msybe: I can survive, build a fire, hunt game, skin it and tan the hide, and build a log cabin.  I can dig a well, read the seasons in tree bark, and the weather by the turn of the leaves.  I can walk without leaving a trail, and am unimpeded by underbrush.  I can craft a jug from tree bark and a canoe from deerskin.
 
That sort of thing. 
 
 
 
 
Sorry; wrong quote. 
 
 
 
That's the quote.  And honestly, I feel that stating precisely that would be far, far better that saying "use the most expensive build" and then demonstrably violating it a few dozen times in the rules ever was. 
 
It encourages the new player or GM to get comfortable with the rules-comfortable enough to identify a 'cheaty build' - and provides actionable advice: you make a build that does the thing, but it should have a reasonable price tag.  It also doesn't say hat this price tag has to be the most expensive option.  It just works better all around. 
 
Still, there is one more thought,  but not right here. 
 
 
 
Right here. 
 
I think we should _encourage _ chesty builds, at least for a while.  We _all_ did it during our learning phase.  We did it because it was _fun_!  We all _loved_ coming up with something outlandish (I once wiped out all my friends with a super I had built on eighty-eight points.   It was _awesome_!) 
 
I can one-hundred percent truthfully say that if it wasn't for various challenges from Jim like 'we are doing a free for all tonight.  You have one hundred fifty points to make a character, and we start fighting in twenty minutes, " that there is very little chance that I would know this system the way I do, or that I would have even been interested in learning it so deeply.  (I have to say that we never really appreciated Jim as the GM he was.  So much of what he did that we thought of as silly, or copping out because he had forgotten to prepare something, or tons of other things-- he had been gone for over a decade before I really understood how much he had taught me about not just learning a gsmr, but understanding it and running it in a way that worked for everyone-players and characters-at the table that nihht- about not just _knowing_ the rules, but totally _underdstanding_ them-- not as instructions, but as a favorite piece of fiction, to be enjoyed over and over.  Jim was awesome, and I didn't know it in time to properly thank him. 
 
 
Anyway, you can't really _see_ some of the more clever "cheaty builds" until you know exactly what you are looking for.  Or, as my gransfather once said, you don't look anywhere you don't already know a fella could hide. 
 
There are a number of reasons-famiarity with the system being topmost-that I feel we should _encoursge_ cheaty builds, even if only as a fun exercise with which one could do a battle Royale and show off to his friends. 
 
I also think it might be helpful to explain that this type of build can be harmful to a campaign, where not every player is going to be as savy as any other player, and mention that learning to "cheat" on a legendary scale can both demonstrate the problems with such builds, and help lewnr how to look for them.  Whatever else we might do, I think we should encourage it as a 'special ourpose' sort of event that is catahrticc every now and again. 
 
I still enjoy doing it once in a while, and I have ebeen playing a long time.  I learned so many things that way: Crain End (old rules) was stupid cheap; drain Recovery was more brutal than Driain Body, and for the same price.  Nothing goes with T-form like a nice round of Drain: Bidy, though.  Desolid: usable as Attack takes anyone completely out of combat, instantly.  +10 Recovery usable as attack makes you everyone's favorite teammate. 
 
These aren't particularly cheaty, mind you.  They re just a list of some of my favorites from way back when. 
 
 
 
Exactly. 
 
 
 
You're welcome, Sir. 
 
Always delighted to make an OG Champions playtester happy.   
 
 
 
 
Well, you know I didn't.   
 
Hinestly, I would have loved to see the new ideas keep coming in the Champions II and Champions III type format.    You know: here are a few new ideas, and we have some revamps if you have found X to be too troublesme.  A few disads, and we thought you might like these new disadvantages.  That sort of thing.
 
Maybe one a year, and after 5 of them, release a new core rules that is the original rules with the new material worked in.  I know me well enough to tell you that I would buy bith: I couldn't wait five years for the new edition, so I would buy the updates as they came about, then I would buy the new edition to have it all organized so I wouldn't be flipping throu so many books to find what I want.  Your core system wouldn't change: you would just have more powers, Disadvantages, limitations, and such to play with.
 
4e got some mileage like that out of Hero System Almanac, but it hasn't really been done since.  One could say the APGs were kind of like that, but I read them essentially as 'here are some pre-built powers you might like" with some light advice scattered about. 
 
 
 
 
Oh, I agree.  I very much agree.  But as I said: it was an example of something that we have all seen right here.  I chose this example specifically because I was confident it didn't involve anyone here; I wasn't trying to call anyone out. 
 
Barely related note: has anyone seen Filksinger since Red October shut down?  I miss that guy. 
 
 
 
 
 
This isn't even an edition complaint.  This happened in the age of chat rooms!  When we all had free internet because those AOL disks just kept coming.... 
 
At the very latest, they could have been playing 4e.  This was a the game is the mechanics / the game is what you do debate: which is more important?  Creatively solving the problem with the resources and mechanics at hand, or mandating every mechanic be adhered to at the expense of a creative solution debate.  This was the birth of 'Powe skill' kind of debate, where we created a catch-all to make certain that no possible action goes uncharged for. 
 
 
 
 
That is because it _is_ clever.  It is players using their skull meat to plumb the depths of possibility, and teaching themselves how the elements of the game can be combined to interesting effect.  I cannot discourage that practice as an exercise because it has too much value as a method of learning. 
 
 
 
 
Also agreed.  It should not be allowed in a "regular" game, but I still think a nice throw-away munchkins cage match can inspire a lot of self-directed learning. 
 
 
 
Ditto on most counts. 
 
 
 
There is a guy on this board who might want to compare notes with you.  He is currently running a HERO Star Wars game.
 
 
 
 
You still remember how much fun it was at the time, though, right?  Who are we to suggest depriving new players of those sensations when there is so much to be learned from the doing? 
 
 
 
You lost me there, Sir. 
 
 
 
Really?  You never at any point saw character creation as its own game, and sat down to see how much you could get for some minimal amount of points?  Not once?  Or wondered about a particular combination of powers or moddlifiers- never wondered enough to just try it and see what happened? 
 
 
 
Similar here, but that is primarily because I am browsing for things I might want to add to my already-extant game; I have zero quibbles about just ignoring rules changes or new constructs with which I disagree. 
 
 
 
Agreed completely. 
 
 
 

Interesting question.  My instinct was to say, of course I have, but on reflection, I think the answer is no (to the end part).
 
I spent INORDINATE numbers of hours building things but the design was always how I could make the system do something I had seen or thought about, concept-driven tinkering (hmm, wouldn't this wild west themed villain be great with Guys and Gals minions? What if the Gals had a garter they could throw that choked you!  How would I build that?).  I can honestly say I never looked at a mechanic, or limitation and wondered how they would work in combination...
 
So, when I am struggling to make something work, I go rummaging through the rules, and I may have done that so much I have attained a level of mastery but, even at the start of the 1980s, I found it almost impossible to sit down and read a rulebook without falling asleep.
 
Doc

Ah!  But we are talking held phases, not aborted ones.
 
The character has waited to see what is happening and whether they need to react to a situation but they didn't and so they recovered their breath a bit...
 
Sounds reasonable to me...

The difference is that you have gained options and flexibility.  There is a school of thought that all assets, like options and flexibility need to be accounted for and you should not be allowed to gain advantage in this way.
 
I think it is second generation old-school thinking, and I think that it reduces fun at the table by removing a bit of agency from the players and, for me, takes away from the tactical game of combat and utilising the peccadilloes of the speed chart...

The "you have to pay for everything" approach is what kept me away from online HERO discussions for years. It was just so far removed from my way of doing things, and would make the game into such a chore to me, that I just stayed out of online HERO discussions entirely. Showing up with my minimalist designs just didn't seem worthwhile in the face of giant, detailed character postings that seemed to be the standard everyone adhered to. (Whereas with Traveller I just needed to stay away from the gearheads and their starship design discussions. 😦 )
 
Some of that did come in with 4th Edition, and then more with the later 4e products when character statblocks started getting bigger and more detailed, but to me it really showed itself with the removal of Package Bonuses with the release of 5e, and then it accelerated into 6e with the removal of Elemental Controls. The system moved steadily away from trusting the GM and players and toward trusting the official rules as The Final Word which could only be altered with great care by your local professional Authorized HERO System Service Technician. (I kid, but sometimes the fans' discussions and many of the questions to Steve Long sure seemed to spring from that viewpoint even moreso than the rules changes.)
 
 
Great example! Until I encountered the online HERO fanbase, I'd thought it was normal to use the bits of the HERO System that you felt were right for your game and leave the rest behind. So, if it made sense for your campaign not to use the Skills System in a detailed way, and instead rely mostly on PS:whatever that was fine and certainly in the spirit of Champions 1e-3e. 🤷‍♂️
 
Obviously, it's always been perfectly fine to me when a user of the rules takes a maximalist view of things and designs incredibly detailed character statblocks. I admire the thought and cleverness that goes into those designs. It's just nice to see a more relaxed approach make a return as a legitimate and accepted choice. It'd be great if someday the published materials made it clear that either way of doing things is equally good and equally supported.

Hopefully it'll just die in committee.  The only saving grace is, lots and lots of really terrible bills get introduced.  It's if they get *any* traction that one really has to worry.

The "you have to pay for everything" approach is what kept me away from online HERO discussions for years. It was just so far removed from my way of doing things, and would make the game into such a chore to me, that I just stayed out of online HERO discussions entirely. Showing up with my minimalist designs just didn't seem worthwhile in the face of giant, detailed character postings that seemed to be the standard everyone adhered to. (Whereas with Traveller I just needed to stay away from the gearheads and their starship design discussions. 😦 )
 
Some of that did come in with 4th Edition, and then more with the later 4e products when character statblocks started getting bigger and more detailed, but to me it really showed itself with the removal of Package Bonuses with the release of 5e, and then it accelerated into 6e with the removal of Elemental Controls. The system moved steadily away from trusting the GM and players and toward trusting the official rules as The Final Word which could only be altered with great care by your local professional Authorized HERO System Service Technician. (I kid, but sometimes the fans' discussions and many of the questions to Steve Long sure seemed to spring from that viewpoint even moreso than the rules changes.)
 
 
Great example! Until I encountered the online HERO fanbase, I'd thought it was normal to use the bits of the HERO System that you felt were right for your game and leave the rest behind. So, if it made sense for your campaign not to use the Skills System in a detailed way, and instead rely mostly on PS:whatever that was fine and certainly in the spirit of Champions 1e-3e. 🤷‍♂️
 
Obviously, it's always been perfectly fine to me when a user of the rules takes a maximalist view of things and designs incredibly detailed character statblocks. I admire the thought and cleverness that goes into those designs. It's just nice to see a more relaxed approach make a return as a legitimate and accepted choice. It'd be great if someday the published materials made it clear that either way of doing things is equally good and equally supported.

Steve Goodman gave us Bulldozer, amongst other characters.

In the "we STILL gotta worry about the willfully ignorant" file...
 
https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/capitol-watch/idaho-lawmakers-introduce-legislation-to-criminalize-those-who-administer-covid-vaccines-legislature/277-2436a514-e7da-4b31-9762-f9be10300075

I just bash together rules systems from hero as I like. For instance in my 6th Ed star wars game to kinda imitate the way star wars characters have vague skill set defined more by drama then we'll defined skill trees I just have each player spend 10, 15, or 20 pts on one or two "professions"  or skill sets that covers the skills they could have. Examples A Doctor is 10 pts, a Spacer is 15 pts, and Jedi is 20 pts, based on how broad I think the profession will be. I usually allow 2 skill sets.
 
From there the character can use any skill that seems appropriate at the time for their character. This cover everything besides skill levels most skills are obvious some take a brief back and forth and then if I agree with the player I decide if it's an 8-, 11-, or a full skill with levels. There are some other granularity here but that less important right now. 
 
I have a player wanting to use sixth but wants to use ECs again, and I showed him how to fake it in Hero Designer even though I don't miss Elemental Controla. 
 
"Balance" doesn't mean much to me. The points give me a rough idea of how Powerful something will be, and that's all. I stopped capping active points in champions games at the tale end of 4th edition because I didn't like how samey everything always felt. I use a variety of magic systems that go way off the rails in terms of what players are actually "paying for". But the powers (spells/abilities) beneath those systems are built out of the various 6th edition tools.  
 
I enjoy using Hero as a means of building fun systems that lay over the underlying game rules. Especially since I don't run much champions anymore. I'd still probably run that mostly RAW. 
 
I have never felt terribly compelled to "buy everything" in any addition out side of champions, and even then only the core ideas of the character needed to be ironed out. I love for players to use powers creatively, I will get players to buy powers they clearly are trying to emulate but the one or two times, yeah use your swing line to tie people up, neat. If you want for that to be actually effective in a fight let's buy an entangle for you.
 
I also still call Complications Disads, and the PCs have inches on their sheets not meters. Those feel sort of arbitrary to me.
 
I feel less inhibited by hero's RAW then many others systems, which may be counter intuitive, but I think it's just decades of playing it through multiple editions.
 
PS crap now I'm writing essays on the topic.

Along the Goodman lines, specifically:
 
Add one more point to your DEX.  It can stave off tie breakers with folks who buy in blocks. 
 
Got a couple of points left from character creation?  You will never go wrong dropping them into Recovery. 
 
And not really Goodman, but from the things I have learned file:
 
_Always_ have a held action.  If you don't use it as a counter-attack, take a Recovery with it.  As soon as you use a held action, get another one as soon as you safely can. 
 
Saving up your experience points to buy something sweet?  You can store them on the back of your character sheet, but you can also store them in Endurance.  Sure, you can store them in any characteristic, especially in 6e, but that little extra. It of End in older editions can be surprisingly handy, and you don't miss it as much when it's time to cash it in.  If you are playing 6e, store them in Recovery. 
 
 
(related note:  had a player who was working toward saving thirty-two points for i-dont-even-remember-what-- this was right after the 'radiation accident' article came out. He stored his points in COM. 
 
Man we had fun with that, and twice as much after he spent them.) 

Yeah - the granularity of the skill system is something I have mostly body-swerved.  I liked the simple PS: policeman from the earliest editions.  I dont mind being more specific for some things as long as they make the character stand out but it is impossible to buy all the things that make a scientist a scientist in any kind of detail.  I think it might be cool to have lots of charts like the language chart that shows that 5 points in Medicine give 4 points in pharmacology, 3 in a variety of biological sciences, 2 in social work and 1 in a bunch of related stuff.  🙂

I never really "got" this logical train.  Every time I bought a new edition, I saw it as new suggestions on how to play.  I guess my approach to the game was never to know/master/follow the rules but to play the game. 
 
As such each new edition was additional possibility, not an increasingly heavy blanket on my creativity.
 
I have never talked about whether I play 2nd edition, or 4th edition or 6th edition, simply that I play Champions. 
 
As a player I would comply with all the rules of the table (I would tell the GM I intended to be book legal but they would need to check because I make so many assumptions in my head) and be content to adjust my character as the GM wanted.
 
Ultimately I will play my powers not the game mechanics.  If the GM focusses too heavily on the mechanics (of whatever edition) then we might not be a great match.
 
Doc

Yes, exactly. Thank you for this, Duke. This illustrates the problem of that legalistic mind set. Why going past 4th or even 3rd edition is getting pointless. 

Honestly? 
 
Quite possibly right here on this board. Browse around some old threads and see how many times some build or other is disagreed with because it doesn't include Chemical X, which it must have, because it can potentially do a thing that is entirely of the wheelhouse of Chemical X. 
 
Remember the old Swinging power, before it got folded into a more annoying version of Flight?  Remember how it said 'character is assumed to have an appropriate swingline'?  Not on this board, but way back when chat rooms were still a thing, I watched a five-way argument amongst GMs as one GM was recounting something a particularly quick-witted player had done.  I don't remember all the details (just that I found the detractors really annoying), but rather than focus on the clever thing, they siezed on the part where the character cut his swingline to drop onto a trio of mooks, finished them off with some knuckles, and then proceeded to use the cut length of the swingline to tie up the mooks as he radioed his teammates. 
 
These guys argued for over an hour before I got sick of it and left- if any of those guys was one of you guys, please do tell me how it ended. 
 
The argument was that it was impossible for this character to do that because he did not have entangle. 
 
It was impossible to use a bit of rope to tie up mooks because that would be entangle, and he did not buy entangle. 
 
I believe we have all seen similar stuff here on this very board.  This is exactly the mindset that lead to the creation of the Power Skill, when you get down to it.  "well, it makes sense that his inferno cone _would_ set the hay bales on fire, but dang it, that's a Transform, and he didn't buy that.  I've got to make sure he pays _something_ to do things like this...." 
 
When you look for official answers, you are often referred to specific skills or powers-- let's face it, you can't go wrong by the book if you can find something in the book that you can specifically point towards, right? 
 
All of that reinforces the idea that every ability must be paid for, and that off-label useage is completely forbidden.  
 
In the long run, this is hurting the game: it is leading to more and more hyper-specificity and more and more "can't must never only always" in the rules. 
 
Worst of all, it is just another thing to point out from the outside as more 'proof' that this game is too complex, to precision, too demanding to be worth picking up. 
 

Yes!
 
Sure, Champions needs adventures and promotion, but it also needs more support for GMs and players new to the system. The game would benefit from less specificity and more guidelines, advice, and examples of play, IMO.
 
Champions Begins is a good start that deserves to be built upon with more about what I'd call the "philosophy of play" and a broader examination of successful strategies for running HERO in different ways to support specific campaign types, playstyles, etc.
 
I wonder if we could pull some of the great stuff from Champions Now, Strikeforce, old issues of AC/Haymaker/Digital Hero, the existing advice in the various core rulesets, etc. and assemble a reasonable guide for running the game that would help out those new to it.
 
How to make a gritty street campaign feel like a gritty street campaign. How to do the same for golden age, silver age, bronze age, underground, indie, etc. campaigns.
 
"How I learned to stop wearing out the rulebook at the table and rediscovered the joy of running a great session for my friends."
 
"One weird trick to shrink those unsightly two-page character statblocks down to a georgeous index card that's ready for sun and fun at the beach!"
Or, for a more modern take, "One weird trick that lets you slim your character down to a single phone screen, ready to adventure anywhere!"
 

At the start of each of my Champions campaigns, I offer my players 5 free XP if they provide me with 5 NPCs (note:  *not* DNPCs) to flesh out their personal world.  They can be family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, acquaintances, what have you.  I promise them that they won't be used as DNPCs, nor can they really be used as Contacts (unless the PC want to pay for them), though I've been known to use them to move the story along or help the PC in small ways.  That doesn't mean that nothing bad ever happens to them - hey, life can get messy sometimes - it's just that it's stuff that doesn't involve the PC.  (I don't kill any of them off, though they might have been witness to a bank robbery or get in a car accident or something similar.)  But mostly, they're just there for day-to-day stuff.  
 
 
Without fail, one or two players go overboard - for example, the player of Eddy / Escudar (the PC martial artist in my current game) gave me a list of 20 people - most are family members, though some are neighbors and friends.  In those cases, I generally concentrate on a handful of them, and maybe bring in other individuals at odd points along the way, or just mention them in passing.  Last time I ran, Eddy's great-grandmother had her 93rd birthday, and Eddy's mom decided to throw a big party for her.  A few individuals got mentioned in passing (one of Eddy's cousins was flirting with a friend / bandmate of Eddy's, and Eddy's sister was crushing on Escudar's teammate Jack Frost, who was at the party in secret ID playing in Eddy's band.
 
I've found such NPCs can really add depth to the game world and be a lot of fun for the players.
 
I do have a few players who take the 5 free XP bu fail to provide me with NPCs, or only give me one or two - out of laziness, rather than malice.  In those cases, I create NPCs for them... and mine aren't always as easygoing as those the players come up with.  These might be the nosy neighbor, or the obnoxious coworker, or the cop with an attitude who keeps pulling the PC over for piddly stuff.  You'd think they'd learn...