Chris Goodwin

I believe the official rule from HERO games is that the world is a construct of the GM.  How the GM arbitrates the world is how the world functions.  So we should not argue whether the official rules should do something or not in every world.  Just on the merits of the house rule that's being suggested.  After all, the GM can make a game in a teletubby world where light is intelligent and that in order to see in the darkness, one needs to make an Presence attack or a Persuasion roll for any area to be visible or to affect how many modifiers to your perception rolls exists.

This again?
 
My mistake; I apologize profusely.  I did not realize that all these other voices in this thread and all the "how to make light" threads before were actually just you talking to you.
 
Forgive me.
 
 
 
 
You didn't get any further than "we?"
 
 
 
Clearly.  The number of different solutions, ideas (and now down votes; can't forget that.  Nothing classier than down voting.  Don't support your ideas; shit on everyone else's.  It's elegant) in this thread,--
 
Anyway, given that only one solution has ever been offered, and it gets offered by everyone every time this comes up, I suppose we all --
 
dammit.  "we" again.  
 
"We" is a word used when referring to more than one person.  This kind of word is commonly called a collective pronoun.  Sometimes these are tricky, and you have to use what Mrs. Elmore used call "context clues" to figure out just who is in the group to which the pronoun is being applied.  If it's a group conversation, it generally refers to those in the conversation, and often includes the speaker and any direct addressees as well--
 
double-dammit!:
 
Addressee:
 
A person for whom something-- physical, tangible, intangible; it doesn't matter: it can be a nice custard, or it can be a question.  So long as it's intended for someone or a specific group, that someone or group is the addressee.   When referring to shipping or mailing physical goods, or in modern days, sending e-mails, "addressee" is used to indicate the precise location physical goods should be sent, and the specific server and account to which electronic mail is to be routed.  In almost every case, it's different from "we" unless the group includes a speaker who is talking to a group in which he includes himself, or at least does not separate himself as not being the intended recipient of the point of the communication.
 
 
"Recipient:"  similar to addressee, but it doesn't require forethought regarding where something is to be sent, or two whom.  It does not exclude such forethought, and in fact a recipient can be an addressee.  When mailing or shipping goes exactly as planned, an addressee will become a recipient.  The word is derived from "receive," and indicates that the person who is the recipient as been given ownership or charged with some sort of property or item, physical, intellectual, or otherwise.  It should be noted that there may be confusion, but "we" can also be recipients, but if we is used to refer to a recipient, then "recipients" will always be plural (American English) or either plural or coming from someone considered to be "royal" in British English, in which case it's still singular, and referred to as "the royal 'we'."
 
Anyway, yes: clearly this is not hard at all.  Especially when you were once trying to enjoy civil conversations with people who, when they disagree with you, suddenly pretend they don't understand a language the mastery of which they have spent years demonstrating.  Smooth.  Damned smooth.  Makes it even less harder-er.
 
 
 
What the hell, Dude?  Do you know who "we" is or don't you?
 
 
So:  can we agree to put the nonsense aside now and continue the discussion?
 
If we can, I would like to back up a bit and address  some of your points:
 
 
You are absolutely right.  I cannot say with any degree of expertise as I own fewer of the 5e books than I would like, and I have the only one 6e genre book I wanted, but I am willing to bet that this is because it isn't discussed _at all_ in any of those books.   I think I've seen a couple of scenarios in adventures of the years of "-3 PER because it's dark out" or something along those lines, but even then: pretty vague.  How much is "-3 worth of darkness," ultimately?
 
 
 
 
 
I tried doing the "quote in a quote" thing and botched that up pretty badly; sorry.  At any rate, let me re-state the point I was trying to express there:
 
First, this was related _specifically_ to the build "Images: creating light."   Images has a clearly defined area.  At no point does it roll off (apparently Killer Shrike and I both do an explosion-style decreasing effectiveness on light; I imagine others do as well, in which case the area is not so clearly defined, instead); it has a clear and distinct edge.  Additionally, if we may revisit the sniper example someone suggested above:  the one thing that works relatively spot-on with the Images build is that so long as I am within a normal line of sight, I will see the illuminated area.  I will see everyone in it as if it were well-lit, etc.
 
There is nothing there for intensifying shadows.  A flashlight in a dark warehouse does _not_ illuminate everything in front of it;  it will illuminate only those parts facing it, and will indirectly light some parts catching scatter off of nearby illuminated suffices, all of which serve to make many of the shadows much, much darker.  Images by default does not do that.
 
An observer in the dark staring into a lighted area has a very easy job indeed.  An observer in a well-light area staring out into the dark has one of the hardest jobs there is.  Images doesn't really model this, either.  
 
 
There.  That's not screaming, yelling, or pretending I don't know what certain words mean.  If a word above is used incorrectly, then it's either a typo, or it's my personal "_IN_con_CIEVABLE_!" and it does not mean what I think it means.    What that is, though, is what I was talking about.   I gather from your response suggesting range penalties were the answer to this that I was not as clear as I could have been.
 
 
For the sake of the discussion, I will accept this.  I don't agree that we have to do this at all, personally, but for the sake of the discussion,  [EDIT for God-awful grammar] accept this, however, I believe that it is precisely trying to game mechanics applied to this real-world phenomenon that is the crux of the problem for a large chunk of the suggestions regarding suppress, dispel, or penalties versus penalty skill levels.
 
Entropy: the absolute resting state of everything.  Cold cannot be added; heat must be removed.  You have a similar problem with dark: Darkness cannot be added; light must be applied.
 
There's the real world.  On the surface, that seems fairly easy to simulate: "You can still use the Dispel darkness mechanic to represent countering darkness penalties, etc," and _YES!_  Yes; you are absolutely right!  You _can_ do that!
 
But unless they've changed in 6e (read it when it came out, and haven't had that much free time since, so it ain't getting re-read anytime soon), neither a dispel nor a suppress can remove penalties, etc.    You've got to handwave or add other builds.    But I'm getting onto other problems; forgive me.  Using the power Darkness as a model for "the night has fallen with a particularly sickening thud" on a starless night deep in a cave in the bottom of a ravine, what's the appropriate amount of negative modifier?   Darkness (and philosophically, Light as well) is an absolute.  You hit a point of "No PER roll is possible."  Doesn't matter who you are: infrared, ultraviolet, whatever, they are all light spectrums, and we have tools to allow us to pretend we can see in those spectrums, but we can't.  And even then, enough darkness, and those spectrums aren't available to the equipment, either.
 
Which poses another problem:
 
I'm not readily familiar with the limits of starlight scopes, etc.  Perhaps Shrike or some other person with backgrounds that include the modern military can enlighten us, but I'm willing to bet that there are damned few-- if any-- light conditions in the modern world that render this equipment blind.
 
But if we're going to define normal darkness (lower case d) in terms of Darkness (capital d) for purposes of assigning penalties, etc, then we kind of need to know what the difference is between "normal vision is rendered useless" and "modern tech is rendered useless."  We need to know that so that we can assess the proper penalties to, as suggested, simulate the real world.  We also need to create a few benchmarks.  I think "daylight on the prairie," "just after the last bit of the sun drops below the horizon," "moon bright," "starless light with no distant city lights reflected on clouds," "normal vision completely useless," "modern tech completely useless," and "one-hundred-percent-absolute darkness: the point at which light no longer exists in the universe" are reasonable benchmarks.  I will also admit that "normal tech is completely useless" is going to be a hard call, because, as we all know human beings _radiate_ light in the infrared spectrum.  So let's be a bit more specific on the modern tech benchmark and speak only of that equipment which amplifies ambient light and rule out anything that uses gimmicks light IR projectors (back-up cameras, security cameras, etc).  We will concern ourselves with the spectrums that "real world" people can see.
 
No matter what scale we develop, we will forever be hampered by the jump from "light doesn't exist" to "human eyes are useless."  In truth, we can't get to a point where human eyes are useless using pure game mechanics because were we to assign a -230 to the PER roll, a natural 3 will always succeed.  If all the matter in the universe were spontaneously converted to energy and burned itself out in the most radiant glory imaginable and all the energy radiated until it lost all excitement and fell apart into its component photons (or other relevant particles), which were then burned up again, ten minutes later, the single bit of matter left in the universe-- one lone human and his tiny pocket of warm oxygen-- will make his PER roll on a 3.  Not that it matters much: there is _nothing_ left to perceive.     (which brings up another question about just how that's going to play out, if neither can be destroyed: will there be infinite reversals from one state to another?  Yes; I am layman-familiar with many of the theories, but it's not like we've actually _seen_ the end of our universe before.)
 
Now let's look at that first (or last, depending on which way you're going) step:  From "no sight PER roll is possible" to the very next step up: we have to determine precisely what that modifier is.  Assuming we have overcome the "a 3 always nails it" problem, what's the next little baby step just under infinite?  Ha!  I won't lie:  I just had a vision of my player's faces rolling dice:  "What's my penalty?"  "Infinite minus one."   "What?!"        Yes; I know, and I apologize for the digression, but Dude!  It was _hillarious_!  
 
We need these benchmarks so that we know how much light it takes to counteract them, and so we can build a more accurate model of the real-world in game terms:  just how many minuses of darkness is under the live oak in Partin Park at midnight?  How about if the street and park lights failed?  We can't list every possibility, but some detailed guidelines would help.
 
It's all just a thought exercise anyway, because of the 3 problem: we can't eliminate that without handwaving: there are no hard rules for "no PER roll is possible."  Ooops: rephrase:  While I have seen instances of "no roll possible," there are no published rules for this of which I am currently aware.  Do feel free to point them out if any of you are aware of them.  No: not snarky: I'd like to see them.
 
 
We need this benchmark because we already know that there is more dark in the cosmos than there is light.  (Again: it terms of the unaided normal human eye).  That's why outer space is dark: there isn't enough light available to remove the penalties for all the darkness.  It might actually help if could calculate the amount of light released if all the matter in the universe were suddenly converted to useful light (without using the Flash mechanic, of course, because we could then simply determine that the inverse of that number, the penalty level at which we overcome the 3 problem, is the point of "ultimate darkness" and build upward from there.
 
 
Another problem, at least as I see it, with using the Darkness mechanic and basing darkness off penalties to PER rolls is that somethings are two feet away from you.  We could assign a sight PER penalty of two thousand if we were so inclined, but even the bulb from one of those old rubber "squeeze to use" key fob flashlights would illuminate that thing two feet in front of you.  That is to say that it would effectively remove all two-thousand penalty levels in a single squeeze.  Not over a great area; no.  Not at much distance, either.  But in it's tiny little area, no matter how many darkness penalties you apply, once you squeeze that bulb, the only penalties you're affected by are those induced by the glare on your glasses or any pre-existing sight-related conditions.  One light beats infinite dark.
 
Problematically, infinite dark loses to the most finite of light.  That little teeny-tiny pool of light on the little squeeze fob above has the power to overcome infinite PER penalties and to be seen by a sniper a mile away, but won't illuminate more than a two-foot-square of area at not much more than two or three feet away.  two-thousand penalty skill levels for sight PER, no range?    Images gives you a meter, but this light won't.  Change Environment gives you a meter, but this light won't.  A candle gives you a _huge_ radius (or, more realistically, a dome) compared to that thing, but not a lot of.... Intensity is the wrong word, because if you're close enough, you can read perfectly fine (presuming an angle conducive to getting candlelight on the page and a distance close enough to catch said light before it scatters), but visual acuity more than just a couple of feet away from the candle _sucks_.  Perhaps the candle is only minus one thousand to a sight PER?  That being the case, then you'd still pretty much need a 3 to see anything, but those of us who have used candles during blackouts know that we don't.  We can't see as far, and after more than a few feet we can't really see in color, but we can see.  Not as good as that much smaller area offered by the illuminates-way-less-area flashlight, but we can still see more and further.
 
 
If we are modeling real world, I submit that we need a whole different mechanic; one that as-yet does not exist in the game.  Something that deals with what, for lack of a better term, I will for the moment name Light Mass.  We need something that defines the volume of the light, and how that mass is affected by focus and distribution.  We will need that same mechanic to figure out the "volume" of the darkness so that we can determine how much light is being pumped into how much darkness, using mechanics for determining decompression of that light as it is distributed.   If the intent is to truly model the real world, then we have to accept that there is a heck of a lot more going on here than just some PER mods: it's not a bream struggle or anything like that.  
 
And because those concepts do not (yet, anyway.  We can always hope that 8e has a few textbooks on the subject.    ) exist in the game, yet GMs seem to have a general understanding that there is more at play than a few penalties, I feel that this is, at least under every rules set thus far, best left for individual GMs to resolve.  And getting into things like the above example of Robin wearing night vision gizmos of some sort while Batmunch simply looked around with his unaided eyes?  That's just another thing best left to the GM: if that works for you, then by al means, so long as you're having fun.  For me?  You'd better be rolling a hell of a lot of threes.     Unless we're not playing supers (and I'm usually not).  If we're not playing supers, "no sight PER roll is possible."
 
 
And I apologize (yet again) for the misleading use of the phrase "we need" in the discussion of this proposed new mechanic.  Personally, I don't think we need it.  It's a game.  I don't believe having all this will make the game any more enjoyable, and therefore see zero payoff in the extra work building this effect for every poorly-lit scenario will require.  However, I do see it as a much better direction from which to approach the idea of modeling light versus dark.
 
 
 
I can't speak for all, but I _do_ agree.  However, I also believe that it doesn't work anything akin to the Darkness mechanic, either.   Sorry-- that's all above: I jumped the gun a bit, I'm afraid.
 
 
 
 
Thank you for the venting, the patience, and I _hope_ the agreement to keep a civil conversation going.
 
I am now going to sit here quietly and wait for Gnome Body (important) to award me my down vote for daring to have an opinion.
 
 
No; I lie.  I'm going to take a trip around the board then go to bed.  
 
Good night, All!
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

My group back in the 80's got a ridiculous number of campaigns out of DI.  Modern military, modern conspiracy, a paranoid "government vs. UFOs" game, hard SF ("Near Earth Orbit", a homebrew campaign), hard SF (based on Chaosium's Ringworld RPG), squishier far future comedy SF (the prison ship "Uncle Louie"), Battletech Hero (at least five, probably more, different campaigns of this), a Twilight 2000 Hero campaign, a couple of ridiculous over-the-top military action campaigns ("Real Men", followed up by the Soviet "Real Men"), an SF game based on Aliens, a western game (with help from JI), a number of low-point PVP games ("Death Wish").  
 
Granted, some of them went one to two sessions, but probably a third of them of them went a year or more.  
 
There were a few that never happened: the Bureau 13 Hero game, an Autoduel Hero (using Autoduel Champions, but with DI), "Weekly World News: the RPG".  Probably some others that I'm forgetting.  
 
(I might point out: in not a single one of those games did anyone have any Powers.)
 
At least a dozen different Fantasy Hero campaigns, again some of which went a few sessions (one of which was my Myth Adventures based campaign), some of which went on for a year or more (the "October Game", the Bushido Hero campaign).  
 
At least three different Robot Warriors campaigns, one of which mutated from one of the above mentioned Battletech Hero campaigns, one of which was a sequel to one of them, and at least two of which went on a year or more.  
 
I would say there weren't more than half a dozen Champions campaigns throughout that time.  I don't think any of them went longer than a year.
 
Oddly, not more than one or two Justice Inc. games while I was part of the group; there may have been more before I joined.  
 
(My group back then was prolific.  A Friday night session, two Saturday sessions, one to two Sunday sessions, every week.   225+ sessions a year.  I was part of that group for about three years.  They'd been going for at least a year or two before I came along.  I was in high school, a couple of others were as well, at least half of the group were adult men.  There wasn't anything weird going on, except the table talk would get pretty foul at times; at least four were former military, and at least a couple of others including me would go on to join the military after.)  
 
Sometimes adulthood really sucks.  I'm sure I haven't had that many sessions, combined, in the 31 years since my time with that group ended.  

During the run-up to 6th edition discussions, the whole "What do *you* want to see?" set of threads, an idea I had and suggested (not taken, but oh well) was Light Levels.  The same way we have Temperature Levels and wind speeds, you define what is essentially a comfortable base light level.  At that level you're at standard sight PER, more than a level above or below is a penalty due to either it being too bright or too dark, and then you could manipulate that with Change Environment as you could with the other leveled environmental effects.

During the run-up to 6th edition discussions, the whole "What do *you* want to see?" set of threads, an idea I had and suggested (not taken, but oh well) was Light Levels.  The same way we have Temperature Levels and wind speeds, you define what is essentially a comfortable base light level.  At that level you're at standard sight PER, more than a level above or below is a penalty due to either it being too bright or too dark, and then you could manipulate that with Change Environment as you could with the other leveled environmental effects.

During the run-up to 6th edition discussions, the whole "What do *you* want to see?" set of threads, an idea I had and suggested (not taken, but oh well) was Light Levels.  The same way we have Temperature Levels and wind speeds, you define what is essentially a comfortable base light level.  At that level you're at standard sight PER, more than a level above or below is a penalty due to either it being too bright or too dark, and then you could manipulate that with Change Environment as you could with the other leveled environmental effects.

Have we reached a consensus yet? 
 
Because we really need to be moving on to the precise mechanics for the air the characters are breathing. 

As we cast 2019 onto the dungheap of history, let me take a moment to wish everyone a Happy New Year.
 
I hope this New Year brings you peace, joy, and prosperity.
 
I hope the mountains you will have to climb in the coming year lead you to vistas that make your heart race with the thrill of achievement and fill your soul with a sense of wonder.
 
I hope the New Year brings our world a greater sense of community and hope for the future.
 
I hope we can all meet here again in 366 days and talk about how much better 2020 was than 2019.
 
Happy New Year, my friends.

I've been playing Champions in 6th edition, and at the table in play it's just as FUN as I remember Champions ever being.  If you didn't know which edition the GM was running you probably wouldn't know the difference among the second-gen games; you could tell between that and the first-gen editions if you were paying attention.  
 
I think I've said the above more than once even in this thread.  
 
Presentation has changed, for sure.  Rules have changed along the way; the 5th-6th changes are about as radical as the 3rd-4th changes.

It took me long enough to find this, and I overlooked it more than once.  
 

 
Champions III, p 24.  
 
Edit to add:  While it might have thrown additional gasoline on the Great Linked Debate fire back in the day, it also assumes that the Powers are designed to go off together.  Essentially, what Hero Designer refers to as a "compound Power".  X, plus Y, plus Z. 
 

No, no, no - the Dispel suppresses the Darkons!

I don't think Dispel against natural darkness is a thing, because there isn't anything there to dispel.  Natural darkness is a lack of light, not anything applied.

I don't think Dispel against natural darkness is a thing, because there isn't anything there to dispel.  Natural darkness is a lack of light, not anything applied.

The two big ones are Champions Now and the Hall of Champions (community content program at Drivethrurpg.com).

The two big ones are Champions Now and the Hall of Champions (community content program at Drivethrurpg.com).

If you recall, though, it wasn't all.  The Champions 1st-3rd edition corebooks were incomplete, even for Champions.  The Champions II and Champions III supplements added stuff: vehicles, bases, computers/AI, danger rooms, agents; additional Combat Maneuvers, Skills, Powers, Disadvantages.  For instance: Images (Light Illusions), Absorption, Reflection, Transform, Suppress (Neutralization), Damage Reduction, Multiform, Shapeshift, Variable Power Pools; Accidental Change, Dependency; Dive For Cover, Pulling your Punch, Roll With Punch, Coordinating Attacks; all of those appeared in the supplements, and not in any of the 1st-3rd ed core rules.  The corebooks had 12 Skills; Champions II added a bunch in from Espionage!, but not all of them, and the other standalone games had their own lists.  The standalone games used Hit Locations, Impairing/Disabling, advanced Bleeding, advanced firearms rules and lists (the Champions corebooks had things like "Light Pistol: 1d6 RKA, 6 shots, OAF; Heavy Pistol: 2d6 RKA, 8 shots, OAF).  
 
4th edition was the first one that contained all of the rules.  

I recently had a new player submit a character for my FH game that had been output from Hero Designer, and I was very confused reading several paragraphs that turned out to be a description of a heavy bow, sword, and shield in his equipment list. It made the first combat that he was in difficult as well, as he didn't have the simple, one-line reference for his weapons on his character sheet.
 
On a related topic, I came to the realization when I was doing a personal Traveller conversion a number of years ago that the only equipment that required Hero stats were the ones that would be directly used in personal combat (weapons and protective gear, mainly). Everything else could be a "black box". I didn't have to build starships in Hero, I could just use the standard ones from a Traveller supplement, and plug in the rules as needed*. I didn't need to build the communicators in Hero, as what really mattered with them was already defined in a simple description (range, mass, duration, price) in an equipment list.
 
 
*In this case, the ship combat rules from High Guard.

While this is absolutely true, I respectfully disagree with this part:
 
 
 
Hero needs a game.  A complete playable-out-of-the-box game that people can pick up, learn in- well, preferably a couple of hours, but no more than an evening or two-  and have up and running for the weekend. 
 
Thats the point Chris has made before about 3e: those complete games were not just genre books.  Benchmarks and an already built magic system,  some idea about the world around you, a Theme a tone, and pre-built equipment to buy or at least to model your custom stuff after. 
 
Hero doesn't have anything like that.  The last one they had was MHI, which _vanished_.  One day people are bad mouthing the author of the source material while there are 660 copies in the store, the next minute they are _gone_. (I bought myself one to support my favorite game system and my views on "one thin book".  I liked it.  I decided to order my brother one (he's a fan of the source material; I am not), and dude: they were _gone_.) 
 
You can pick up MHI and be up and running in a couple of evenings.  You can't do that with Basic.   Sure: you can if you already know the system and a setting and campaign limits and style, but nothing has to offer will give you more than a place to play and some mechanics.  There is no complete game. 
 
A prebuilt D&D conversion is not my idea of a good time, but I am willing to bet I could read it and play a game from it, if I wanted, with no prior understanding of D&D or Champions. 
 
Look here:
 
 
 
Yet another "how to build a power" thread.  Fine: they're fun, right? 
 
Having a few known-up-front suppositions about the game itself would make it a lot less confusing.  I mean, Scott reached all the way back to campaign material published for an actual complete game (4e champions) to get an answer. 
 
Now if this was for a spell in Fantasy Hero, a pre built magic system might have pointed right at the answer; a pre-built spell list might have made the question superfluous. 
 
Hero bills itself as a toolkit from which any game can be built.  What hero needs is to sit down and prove it. 

The point is, after all, to play the game.  
 
Quoted for agreement.

I am pretty sure you own it.
 
Though I guess the official one could be Considered abridged (what powers are missing, anyway?  I haven't cared enough to crawl through the books again.)
 
 
 
I am going to rephrase that:
 
You were playing a very specific game. 
 
I also want to look at it from another angle:
.you were playing a _complete_ game.  You weren't playing just a set of mechanics.  "playing the game the way they want you to play it" is no different from "playing the campaign I have built." 
 
It's also something that you _cannot do_ with the most recent itterations of the syatem: they are raw mechanics, presented with oodles of optional mechanics.   But there is no game there. 
 
I roll three dice and if I roll under a modified 11, I hit my target!  Oh, cool!  Here's an option that let's me roll over some some kind of number and I will know who I hit that way! 
 
Why am I hitting them?  Are they bad guys?  Am I a bad guy?  Is there some reason other method of dealing with them other than thwacking him with stone hammer?  Can I have a stone hammer?  How did I get a stone hammer, anyway? 
 
Wait a minute: you said fantasy!  Why aren't there any dwarves?  Can I be a spell jammer?  For now?  What do you mean for now?!    What's a good strength for my dwarf substitute?  No, really: what does a typical one-of-us look like, stay-wise?  What do you mean that's up to me?  Okay, well can you tell me if that's a good CV?  Well of course I bought them both up high!  That's combat value!  I'm a warrior; I should be good at all types of combat, right?  Suppose I get into an e-fight?  Be pretty bad for a warrior to suck at that, right? 
 
 
The game.  The game itself.   There isn't one. We've got setting books.  We've got geren books.  We got mechanics.  But we don't have an actual game: we don't have "this is how it fits together if you want to make adventures from the 30; here's how it fits together if you want to make a WWII tank combat miniatures game.  Here's how it fits together - what is and isn't permissible in a simply cowboys game. 
 
MHI for 6e and Lucha Libre HERO for 5e and I _think_ PS238?  Those are actual games.  No generic "martial arts," but _soecific_ martial arts, hie to use them, how to. Uy them _for this game_.  Honestly, the biggest reason LL is my favorite 5e book is t even the luchas (and luchas are always cool!) but because it was the first and only 5e product to step up to Hero's promise that this is a toolkit from which you can build a game.  It built a setting, characters, benchmarks, chose what rules were going to be used and which ones were t, and it ran with it. 
 
One can certainly argue the that playing LL HERO is nithi g more that "playing Champions, but being forced to do it Darren's way," but you'd be wrong.  Like everything else from HERO, there is the familiar "see the big book to change what you don't like" reference.  But Lucha and MHI do something no other 5 or 6 product does:  it _makes_ some decisions, and some assumptions, and puts its foot down that certain things are going to be done a certain way. 
 
This doesn't make it heavy handed; the makes it the o ly complete game to come out of 5e.  The "system" gives you a hundred-fifty switches and options and tells you to throw them yourself and make your own coherent game without bothering to give so much as inviolable benchmarks for normal. Humans. 
 
Not the most beginner-friendly scenario I can imagine, mostly because it is not- even when combined with a genre book, a complete game.  Certainly us antique hero fans can make something of it, but we are using how many decades of context to get it done? 
 
No: I have to toss myself into the corner for daring to expect there to be more than one complete game to come out of your ten-book "toolkit." 
 
 
 
 

Well, actually you are on the Hero boards and that thought is sacrilege
 
Years ago I and others made the same arguments we were subjected to the BBS version of “shouted down”.    
My version was to create the equivalent of a D&D starter with prebuilt everything for a small standard fantasy game through the 3rd “level”. 
All the lists shortened to just the basic delving needs.  Not details for builds in the “lists”.  Just what it does and the final point cost.  For example:
Spell: Fire Bolt, does 4d6 Normal Flame damage. Cost ## char points.
Weapon: Broadsword, 1d6+1.  Cost ## gold.
 
Just enough information to make 3-5 basic heroes that can go into a small dungeon and kill some goblins. 
And then “level up” a little.
The entire point to to simplify the initial character build by pre-packaging as much as possible which allows new FH players to exercise the game system before having to learn the build system.
An appendix in the “Fantasy Hero” starter would list everything that had been provided, weapons, spells, etc. and their point builds for the players after they have run through a few games and want to “customize”.  Being able to compare a build they have actually played in a game to the rulebook is very helpful.  Especially if they are self-teaching.
Take a humdrum “standard” or “typical” party of PC’s
1st level Human Fighter
1st level Elf Ranger
1st level Human Wizard
1st level Halfling Thief
1st level Human Cleric
There is practically no difference for these basic builds in D&D, Pathfinder, 13th Age, etc.  A thief is a thief.  A fighter is a fighter.  And so on.
The world they are placed into are also virtually identical, just bearing different sounding made up names/labels.  I have personally mixed and matched adventures between the systems. 
 
The point is not to present a unique and exciting all-encompassing world. 
The point to quickly and easily present a few stereotypical PC’s and run them through a small number of learning/practice games.
They can then use that experience to give them a perspective on the full rules. 
 
The difference between Hero and many other RPG’s is that most popular RPG rules give the players prepackaged options but do not actually release the underlying structure that was used to build the options.  They give you the rules to play and build PC’s, but not the rules to make the rules.
 
Hero plops the underlining rules needed to build everything and then expects everyone to simply understand with no frame of reference.   With each edition of Hero, any intuitive understanding of the game concepts was drowned in the unbelievably verbose walls of text. 
 
At least in my opinion. 

Absolutely! Rulewise O much much prefer 4, 5, 5r and 6 to anything that came before it...
 
..but the toolkit approach does not have to exclude the complete game approach. Once you have given me the toolkit (you could never take 6E1 and 6E2 away from me), be bold. Use the toolkit and give me games.
Give me a Fantasy Hero where the secondary characteristics are figured
Reattach CVs. Drop characteristics you dont need. Change the way skills are calculated from characteristics. Change the skill list and give me new talents. Don't give me a power system, give me equipment, vehicles and magic! Stop writing everything as +1/2 and -3/4. Give me the writer's vision!
You know what? If I dont like something I will use the toolkit and change it.

My own personal bias...
 
 
3E, DI, and FH 1st ed... a fair number of the games I played in while using them, we started without having characters in hand, and an hour later we were getting into the first adventure.  
 
By contrast... if I have 6e1, 6e2, Fantasy Hero for 6th edition... or even Fantasy Hero Complete... and let's say Turakian Age... I still have to figure it out for myself.  
 
The title of this thread is, "What happened to HERO?"  Point A, point B, draw your own conclusions.

My own personal bias...
 
 
3E, DI, and FH 1st ed... a fair number of the games I played in while using them, we started without having characters in hand, and an hour later we were getting into the first adventure.  
 
By contrast... if I have 6e1, 6e2, Fantasy Hero for 6th edition... or even Fantasy Hero Complete... and let's say Turakian Age... I still have to figure it out for myself.  
 
The title of this thread is, "What happened to HERO?"  Point A, point B, draw your own conclusions.

I don't see that as a problem.  They were different games that shared a "house system", not genre books.  
 
In Fantasy Hero for 6th edition, the GM can essentially set point costs for magic however they want.  Pay full price for spells individually, pay 1/3 the real cost, buy them in a Multipower... a fighter type might pay full price for a Power that a caster would pay 1/3 for as a spell, for instance.