Chris Goodwin

Normally in Hero, Images (light/sound) can't do damage while Mental Illusions (all in the mind, but usually against one target) can.  However, you could write up an "illusionary monster" and then make the spell Summon Illusionary Monster.  You can add Variable Effect to summon other kinds of creatures.  
 
To fill a hex with fire, use a Blast or Killing Attack with Area of Effect and Constant or Continuous and either Uncontrolled (to feed END into it at the start and have it run off of that) or Time Limit (to have it expire on its own). 

I don't like them because to me it seems to turn characters into superheroes with swords.  That's not the power level I like running or playing at. 
 
If you're fighting opponents that are slightly too hard for you to affect, the answer isn't supposed to be Moar DC!!!  Figure something else out.  Research its weaknesses.  Use the environment.  Lead it into a pit or off a cliff.  Tie it up with ropes.  Or run away and live to fight another day!  Come back with a dozen mercenaries.  It's not like you get XP per kill... And if you have ordinary  Combat Skill Levels, you can put two of them into +1 DC anyway.  
 
I don't believe that Combat Luck is overpowered, because even three levels is more or less within the range of heavy armor or a wizard's defensive spell, but it just doesn't seem to fit into the power level I like to play or run at.  
 
I also feel similarly about Penalty Skill Levels or any Skill Levels bought with "only for (X)" Limitations.  If your special effect is "I'm so good with a sword that I can do more damage with it," buy more CSLs.  You can also use those CSLs to make it easier to perform a called shot, either to a Hit Location with higher damage multiples or one that has less armor.  
 
Edit to add:  Take a look at my Low Heroic Protocols document, which might give you some ideas.

My apologies for taking so long to respond to questions — real life snuck up on me and got in a Surprise attacking, Knocking me Out for several Segments until I could recover.  I can't promise it won't happen again, but I'll try to Dive For Cover next time.

Fantasy Hero Complete in fact includes, electronically at least, 18 sample PCs (in PDF, RTF, and HDC formats!), a starter adventure (the Val of Stalla), 24 monsters, the Kingdom of Grishun setting, and five maps (kingdom, city, town, countryside, and dungeon).  So we pretty much have the Fantasy Hero starter set!  The only thing it doesn't include is the dice.  $20 for book + PDF, $10 for PDF only; both of those include the adventure, setting, PCs, monsters, etc.
 
We pretty much have the Fantasy Hero starter set! 

To start out the campaign, I'd give the players a rough idea of power level and setting, and then build the rest of the world through the choices they make with their characters.  The Marvel movies did that.
 
For instance, in the first Iron Man movie, they introduce the "arc reactor" technology.  This is really what sets the Marvel world apart from our world.  Tony Stark invents some really awesome stuff, and the "super" tech that we see all comes from him.  Of course his dad was brilliant too, and so if we need to have some existing supertech that Tony didn't invent, it probably came from his dad.  Then we get the Incredible Hulk, and we know that there's this serum the government has been messing with for decades, and if you do it wrong it produces monsters.  Then we get Thor, and we learn there are aliens who have been messing around on Earth for eons, and a lot of our old myths probably come from their exploits.  They've got advanced technology that looks like magic to us, and they aren't big on explaining themselves to humans.  Finally we get Captain America, and we not only see what the super-soldier serum does when it works right, but we also see the glowing cube thingy that (among other things) gives Nazis supertech.  This all comes together with the Avengers movie, where we get glowing cube thingy, brainwashing staff, alien armies, super-agents, and a flying helicarrier.
 
Everything we see in the early Marvel movies has its origins in something tied in with the "PCs" of that world.  Look at the origins of the main characters, and that gives you your villains.
 
So say you've got 5 players.  Bob wants to be a ninja.  Dave insists on playing a chain-smoking Scottish wizard who wears a trench coat and fights demonic creatures.  Ricky has designed a power armor character who spent all his points on the cool armor, and doesn't have any skills or wealth.  When forced to come up with an explanation, he says he's a military pilot and was given the armor for this special assignment.  Frank plays an alien from another world who gets his powers from Earth's reflected moonlight or something.  And Sarah wants to play an anime character she really likes.  She's got a teenage girl who changes into a super teenage girl and shoots rainbow beams of power.  She does this to fight off the evil queen from Planet X.
 
What do you do?  Well, you've got two characters with asian themes, so that'll probably feature heavily.  We know that ninjas are real.  You've also got two different alien races (Planet X people and also Frank's character, though you might tie them together somehow).  The government has advanced enough tech to hand out a power suit to Corporal Moron.  And we've got shadowy demon creatures running around in the background thanks to our cynical mage, Harry Trainspotter.  That gives you a lot of possible enemies for these guys.  Then you can gradually build out the world based on what happens with these characters.  Just go with the logical conclusions of their actions and how they describe their backgrounds.  It sounds to me like evil cults should be a thing, maybe they hire ninja clans to guard their meeting places?  And if the governments of the world know that aliens are real, perhaps they are trying to use their super-suits to prevent possible invasion.  That sounds like a good reason for them to build a lot of different experimental units, many of which can get stolen.  And then sometimes Planet X could send some advanced scouts to Earth, and maybe they get captured or they drop an important alien tech thingy  (and somebody else finds it).
 
Anyway, when you introduce a new villain, it can help to tie it to one of the characters.  Sorry Bob, but the cyber-ninja that tried to kill the mayor seems very familiar to you -- he reminds you of a dead man, someone you once killed.  You're honor bound to investigate.  And Ricky, that laser sword he used looks like something you saw in the testing center when they gave you your armor.  You're almost afraid to ask your superiors where it came from.  Something is definitely up.  You don't have to resolve the problem immediately, in fact it may be better if you just let it linger for a while.  Bob can get revenge and knock the villain off a building into the river (where he disappears), but Ricky is still left wondering who he can trust within his own organization.  Each game session, you might have a villain that is related to a different hero, or maybe multiple heroes at once.  The players end up being tied together by circumstances, because all the villains link back to their own backgrounds.

<Nod> Very true!
 
In prepping for "Keystone Konjurors," I *deliberately asked* for players to give their PCs "plot breaker" mystical powers such as Telepathy, Retrocognition, EDM and Astral Form. What you can look back in time to see how something was done? You can go anywhere in the world, at will, invisibly and intangibly? You can vanish to another dimension when things get hairy? How can a GM possibly run excition scenarios under such conditions?
 
Well, you do it by accepting that the PCs have these abilities -- and you build scenarios that not only *accept* these abilities, they *require* them. Like, yes, the PCs *will* look back in time and find the next plot coupon. Oh, and occasionally give them chances to be cool by using their powers to effortlessly solve problems that other people find impossible. (A good story technique to keep in mind for any Champions campaign. The PCs are super, so let them show it off!)
 
Dean Shomshak

Well some significant changes this release.
 

 
The player combat records are now detachable, multiple are visible on screen at the same time and remotely trigger the dice roller. So you do not need to leave the action at any time. You can use the bars above your characters head to adjust Body, Stun and Endurance live on the model also. If needed you can add other bars as you want for charges etc.
 
Whilst talking about the combat records, all players can have them active on the screen, but not see each others. The GM in theory can have a significant number and that leads to the next change I am working on, which will be the ability to shrink them to just the "Title Bar" until clicked on. 
 
There are some minor visual bugs (spacing etc) that need fixing too.
 
Overall it will not be long till a beta release on the steam marketplace.
 
 

Working on the interface for the Floating Combat Record (seen above). I am breaking it into sections to enable parts of the combat record to be hidden. This should reduce on-screen space, currently the title bar can be clicked to hide everything but the title bar, but I want more flexibility.
 

 

I don't like them because to me it seems to turn characters into superheroes with swords.  That's not the power level I like running or playing at. 
 
If you're fighting opponents that are slightly too hard for you to affect, the answer isn't supposed to be Moar DC!!!  Figure something else out.  Research its weaknesses.  Use the environment.  Lead it into a pit or off a cliff.  Tie it up with ropes.  Or run away and live to fight another day!  Come back with a dozen mercenaries.  It's not like you get XP per kill... And if you have ordinary  Combat Skill Levels, you can put two of them into +1 DC anyway.  
 
I don't believe that Combat Luck is overpowered, because even three levels is more or less within the range of heavy armor or a wizard's defensive spell, but it just doesn't seem to fit into the power level I like to play or run at.  
 
I also feel similarly about Penalty Skill Levels or any Skill Levels bought with "only for (X)" Limitations.  If your special effect is "I'm so good with a sword that I can do more damage with it," buy more CSLs.  You can also use those CSLs to make it easier to perform a called shot, either to a Hit Location with higher damage multiples or one that has less armor.  
 
Edit to add:  Take a look at my Low Heroic Protocols document, which might give you some ideas.

Damn, this is A LOT of excellent advice, and not only for HERO games either, most of it is actually applicable to my D&D games, thanks a thousand times guys! 
 
I'll try to give Strike Force a look, and I'll follow your advice, Spence and start writing plot lines. 
 
Since this has been asked multiple times, I generally have more combat-focused campaigns in D&D, but combats that matter. I'm also a sucker for very personal motivations, generally the foes are very close to the characters, or the characters have a DNPC on the line. I also like more mundane, less flashy and more nuanced campaigns, and my current HERO setting kinda reflects that (I'll probably post a thread about it shortly, because I might need a more expert opinion).
 
My first campaign ever (also the only one I've finished so far) was in a completely homemade setting, where the party was a group of people who hunted a dragon cult for a while. As they fought the Gold Tooth, the lieutenant they encountered again and again, they started discovering that the Dragon Cult was working with alien technology. The final fight was against the Gold Tooth, in a wrecked spaceship that he was aiming at the planet to completely glass it.
 
My current D&D campaign is set in a fantasy China, a world set on the skin of a huge sleeping dragon. The dragon is covered in mist that is made of his dreams and filled with spirits, and humans disperse the mist as they build and bring civilization. About ten years ago, the big human empire collapsed (a collapse that was at least 30 years in the making) and now it's a world of petty wars. The party is a duo (I have just two players) of "demon warriors", warriors that have a shard of evil spirit in them and exist to hunt demons and monsters, but were used like super soldiers during the collapse war. 

I agree; I believe there is some confusion here.  I'd like to touch on that in a moment, but to do so, I would first like to go over a couple of points I think might be creating some of that confusion.  If you will put up with it, I'm going to attempt to manufacture quote boxes for clarity.
 
 
 
From 1e:

I've got a guess, and I'm coming at this from a different direction than my usual "unofficial Hero System historian" one. 
 
I once wrote a retro-clone of Steve Jackson's The Fantasy Trip.  I was doing very little design, mostly trying to re-express the original game in my own terms, with enough rules changes that it wouldn't trigger any copyright issues.  (I know, you can't copyright rules, only the text.)  
 
I was doing a good bit of reorganizing, and a lot of seeing everything that was in TFT.  I discovered something pretty neat in the process.  Not just superficially, but at the DNA level, TFT is a direct ancestor to Champions and the Hero System.  I mean, superficially, sure, but not just that.  
 
The other parent was, of course, Superhero 2044 and Wayne Shaw's house rules for designing powers in there.  (Thanks, Wayne.)  
 
Looking at those two games together, I can almost mentally hear how the conversations went.  "We're playing on hexes, so of course we're going to use hexes."  "I think TFT has not quite enough stats; S2044 has a number of... weird ones.  Let's organize this, see what we've got, and what we need."  "Hey, superhero comics mostly do a lot of punching and blasting, but not a lot of slicing and dicing" (and here someone is looking over their glasses at Wolverine).  "Yeah, but I still can't figure out Superhero 2044, so let's start with TFT."  
 
TFT's stat scale is more or less on a par with that of GURPS, probably closer to Hero's Characteristic Rolls than the stat values themselves.  
 
The very basic six stats pulled from D&D, of course.  Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, Charisma, back in the day, but since we're organizing the system, let's organize them so the groupings make sense.  Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma.  
 
Hit points?  Yeah, let's look at those.  We'll scale our hit points to the same level as the other stats.  
 
Playtesting shows that if we use hit points at this scale, and weapons or other attacks that do 1-3d6 of damage, we're seeing results all over the place.  
 
All right then.  How about some form of nonlethal damage?  Let's tweak numbers.  
 
If we scale our nonlethal damage at something like Strength + Constitution, and use Hit Points for lethal damage, how does that look?  
 
Easy.  The Hulk and The Thing will be almost impossible to put down.  So let's tweak those.  Half Strength + Half Constitution?  Too low.  Basic Hit Points should probably figure into that somehow...
 
So now our nonlethal damage works pretty well... we roll dice, subtract that from nonlethal damage capacity, and maybe roll this different set of dice to subtract from hit points... 
 
(Cue a lot of discussion, a lot of late night pizza and beer, a lot of waking up at night in a cold sweat...  I mean, we only got a small dose of this in SETAC.  They were staring into the unfiltered abyss of balancing Normal and Killing Attacks...) 
 
Okay, but shouldn't nonlethal attacks do some hit points?  How about one per die?  
 
Okay, but hey look, I just rolled a bunch of 6's on this damage roll.  Shouldn't those hit harder?  
 
Yeah, okay, but then 1's ought to not hit as hard.  
 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
The above imagined conversation happened in my head at first over about ten seconds, then over about the two months or so I was writing the retro-clone.  I mean, the first thing I wanted to do was add nonlethal damage, and there are only so many ways to do that.  
 
Later, on the Facebook group (when I was still on Facebook), Bruce Harlick more or less confirmed to me that yes, they were playing a lot of TFT in those days.  I don't imagine there were direct lifts, but I mean, when you're playing a lot of one game, and designing another, it's pretty natural that there's going to be some filtration.  

Most of them.
 
Years worth of them.  It's my favorite genre.
 
If you recall, I lamented the lack of the book in PDF so much that I destroyed three of them and hired professional help to restore the art just to create the PDF that is currently in the site store.
 
I was questioned a good bit about my extremely passionate (and long) tirade on the loss of the western and the -- in my highly-opinionated opinion-- detrimental effects that has had on our culture and social expectations of each other.  My computer is sitting against a wall, the other side of which is a bookshelf that runs the entirety of the "spare room."  That book shelf contains my entire HERO collection (except the adventurer's club magazines, which are on the stand on the computer, where they were originally to be sacrificed to create PDFs for the store on this site until Jason suggested I "hold off and wait for an upcoming BOH.").  There is the three-novel Starrigger series by John DeChancie, a couple of Mercedes Lackey books that were foist upon me, Turtledove's "The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump," "Good Omens: the Nife and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch," and Gaiman book whose title I can't recall at the moment but features a baby stroller ("pram," if you speak that "other" english) with a skeletal child sitting up and shaking a rattle, and a four-foot shelf of dictionaries and medical reference books I couldn't quite part with when I finished school (including a dangerously out-of-date pharmaceutical reference.  The remains of that twenty-two foot wall are westerns.  Collected over a lifetime, most of them re-read repeatedly, all of them loved (except the "Sacketts" books.  I enjoy L'amour, but I didn't like the Sacketts.)
 
I don't collect videos, but I am thinking I could rattle off a list of them long enough to bore you, from the old musical westerns to the spaghetti westerns to the handful of 80s deconstructive westerns (I am one of those rare people that didn't like Silverado, though I _loved_ that Louis Gosset, Jr. western (whose name escapes me):
"You shot that man in the back!"
"Well his back was to me!"
 
  
 
even down to Django. (which was hard to watch)
 
My most successful fantasy campaign was an occult western (didn't plan it; it just sort of happened that way.  You know how that goes    )
 
Easily half of my space opera stuff ends up with strong western vibes, just because I like the vibe.  (Again, I don't plan it; it just ends up that way)
 
I can comfortably state that about 2/3 of my HERO gaming has been an dead-even mix of western and cyberpunk (my other favorite genre).
 
But there _is_ a damned good chance that I don't know a stinking thing about the genre.
 
 
 
I don't think I've ever made a big secret that I don't care for the Supers genre.  I played it initially because that's what the GM was running.  I run it now periodically, mostly for youth groups; I do occasional short campaigns with my regular groups when we just want to do something different for a bit-- take a breather, if you will.  I wasn't really a comic book kid, and like most non-comic kids, I grew into a non-comic adult.  There is a reason that just... yesterday?  Day before?-- in a thread in which we both participated I commented that "by the time non-supers HERO games began to be published, we were already playing them, using Champions as the engine, and because of that, we kept a few Champions bits even after adapting the other rules (notably Fantasy HERO, as I was the first of us to actually own Espionage, and I bought it last year).  Not as fully into the whole Spandex Commando scene the way a lot of my contemporaries are.  I discuss it here because 1) I do have some knowledge as it relates to the game and 2) I come here to be social, and waiting for an extended "other genres" conversation gets might dull and dry out here anymore.
 
As for defense 2-3?  Yes.  We're fairly reasonable like that.  We might have a 4 for a trained boxer or even a former combat veteran, or even an unusually large man.  Highest we ever saw, so far as I can recall right now, was a 5.
 
As to a "mountain man:"
 
A bear (or a "bear-like animal," using the 3e book) has a PD of 9.  It weighs between 400 and 800 pounds (with reports of unusual specimens up to 1500 pounds).  A PD of _9_.  The 4e bestiary reels that in to an 8 (and up to a 10 for Polar Bears-- the coolest and most dangerous of marine mammals), but it also states that this high PD includes added-in bonuses from Density Increase.   No human specimens have been found with muscle mass or bone structure remotely comparable, or an amount of tissue density high enough to qualify as an actual power, no matter what mountain he comes from.
 
Now in all fairness, Western HERO was a 4e book, and the 4e HERO / Champions rules were the first exposure to official Normal Characteristics Maxima for a _lot_ of people.  Pulling from that book, it lists maximum human PD at 8.  Or, the way I look at it: the same as the bear with his Density Increase and thousand pound build.  Now there are endless threads out here about where NCM gets wonky or open to problems; I think we can agree on that.  Personally, I think it's because of its origins in Fantasy HERO, with more-than-human adventurers who could go toe to toe with a phalanx of men and emerge victorious.  High end fantasy is low-end supers.  However, I don't expect us to agree on that  (and that's okay.  We're different people with different ideas of what we want out of a game).
 
I would _like_ to think that we can agree that at no _realistic_ point will a 200-pound man _ever_ be as hard to hurt as a damned bear!  For what it's worth, I work with a four-hundred pound man.  He's physically stronger than me. Briefly.  Turns out he gets winded easily and his knees are for crap.  He's just a little bit taller than me, so I'd put him at about six-three.  No; he's not one bit harder to hurt than I am, and I don't claim to be anything more than average.
 
My choice for "mountain man" is a guy I am now working with again (worked him for years some time ago; I now do weekend work with him).  He's the same height I am (six-one), and I swear to you he's damned near twice as broad.  He's got calves the size of his head, and thighs that could easily be the torsos of smaller people.  Sure: he's got a belly, but the man under it is just short of a gorilla.  (PD 5, 4e HERO Bestiary).
 
For us, this gives us an expected range for what we can realistically expect to see in a sampling of the human race:  2 through 5.  
 
Perhaps that sounds outrageous to you.  Let me go just a bit further:
 
Westerns, and our rare Danger International games.  These are the genres in which we stick to this guideline.  Why?  Because these are the genres that we feel are the "most real."  That is, the genres in which the people were just people, using their wits and their tools to make their way through their adventures.  The stories are about _people_.  Real people.  Not Olympians, not mythic figures.
 
Fantasy?  Pulp?  Cyberpunk?  Sure.  those are just stylized supers, when you get down to it.  Run them how you want.
 
But if you're playing a western where a mountain man shrugs damage the way a bear does-- 
 
you _also_ have a compelling western-themed fantasy game going, and I hope you are enjoying it as much as I did mine.

I've got a guess, and I'm coming at this from a different direction than my usual "unofficial Hero System historian" one. 
 
I once wrote a retro-clone of Steve Jackson's The Fantasy Trip.  I was doing very little design, mostly trying to re-express the original game in my own terms, with enough rules changes that it wouldn't trigger any copyright issues.  (I know, you can't copyright rules, only the text.)  
 
I was doing a good bit of reorganizing, and a lot of seeing everything that was in TFT.  I discovered something pretty neat in the process.  Not just superficially, but at the DNA level, TFT is a direct ancestor to Champions and the Hero System.  I mean, superficially, sure, but not just that.  
 
The other parent was, of course, Superhero 2044 and Wayne Shaw's house rules for designing powers in there.  (Thanks, Wayne.)  
 
Looking at those two games together, I can almost mentally hear how the conversations went.  "We're playing on hexes, so of course we're going to use hexes."  "I think TFT has not quite enough stats; S2044 has a number of... weird ones.  Let's organize this, see what we've got, and what we need."  "Hey, superhero comics mostly do a lot of punching and blasting, but not a lot of slicing and dicing" (and here someone is looking over their glasses at Wolverine).  "Yeah, but I still can't figure out Superhero 2044, so let's start with TFT."  
 
TFT's stat scale is more or less on a par with that of GURPS, probably closer to Hero's Characteristic Rolls than the stat values themselves.  
 
The very basic six stats pulled from D&D, of course.  Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, Charisma, back in the day, but since we're organizing the system, let's organize them so the groupings make sense.  Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma.  
 
Hit points?  Yeah, let's look at those.  We'll scale our hit points to the same level as the other stats.  
 
Playtesting shows that if we use hit points at this scale, and weapons or other attacks that do 1-3d6 of damage, we're seeing results all over the place.  
 
All right then.  How about some form of nonlethal damage?  Let's tweak numbers.  
 
If we scale our nonlethal damage at something like Strength + Constitution, and use Hit Points for lethal damage, how does that look?  
 
Easy.  The Hulk and The Thing will be almost impossible to put down.  So let's tweak those.  Half Strength + Half Constitution?  Too low.  Basic Hit Points should probably figure into that somehow...
 
So now our nonlethal damage works pretty well... we roll dice, subtract that from nonlethal damage capacity, and maybe roll this different set of dice to subtract from hit points... 
 
(Cue a lot of discussion, a lot of late night pizza and beer, a lot of waking up at night in a cold sweat...  I mean, we only got a small dose of this in SETAC.  They were staring into the unfiltered abyss of balancing Normal and Killing Attacks...) 
 
Okay, but shouldn't nonlethal attacks do some hit points?  How about one per die?  
 
Okay, but hey look, I just rolled a bunch of 6's on this damage roll.  Shouldn't those hit harder?  
 
Yeah, okay, but then 1's ought to not hit as hard.  
 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
The above imagined conversation happened in my head at first over about ten seconds, then over about the two months or so I was writing the retro-clone.  I mean, the first thing I wanted to do was add nonlethal damage, and there are only so many ways to do that.  
 
Later, on the Facebook group (when I was still on Facebook), Bruce Harlick more or less confirmed to me that yes, they were playing a lot of TFT in those days.  I don't imagine there were direct lifts, but I mean, when you're playing a lot of one game, and designing another, it's pretty natural that there's going to be some filtration.  

Well I had something I wanted to put in here, but apparently the gang is ready to play.
 
Perhaps later.
 
Y'all have fun!

It totally is Zen. 🙂  It's theory wank, but designers and tinkerers love theory wank!
 
GURPS is a hybrid of a "details matter" and "reason from effect" game. Equipment, the physics of actions and the world, the skills. Tons of details (differentiations). The "Powers" system of ads/disads, etc. starts with moderate details but allows you to customize with the "reason from effect" paradigm. You can take some power constructs and bend them to things you want to accomplish that don't necessarily fit the name of the power. GURPS seems more fiddly than it is because of the hybrid. Sometimes you are constructing a power that obviously the power you want. Other times you end up in a fog trying to file the rough edges of something where the details are not helping.
 
HERO is mostly all "reason from effect". It's about creating a generic framework of system bits that then cover the majority of "things you can do, things you are made of, things that can happen to you". It forgoes lots of the differentiation of similar things for flexibility. All these powers are basically building blocks you use to construct "all the things". There is a consistency then to those things. Sometimes however, these things can get "weird". So, a gun being set up as a "beam"... I'm like "that's not a beam! it's a projectile!" and HERO is like "dude, relax, it's just a mechanic. Describe it how you want to." 😄 
 
The truth is they are both great games with savvy design and TONS of thought put into them. I own tons of GURPS 4e and GM'd it for a long time (and played/GM'd a ton of HERO 5er before that!). I've moved back towards HERO because it focuses on the details I want. I love magic, powers and the like. I want the ability to customize those the most. I don't care so much for equipment lists, skill lists, or even physics emulators. HERO leans more "story-based" in this regard. In my opinion it has less calculations or laser-specific rules that just fits how I GM.
 
It comes down to preferences. Each person is going to find the parts in one of these systems they prefer over the over; and then likely choose it because it fits them. The rest of the debate is just theory, highly subjective and difficult to measure.
 
Just my two cents...

For the most part, in Hero, we don't really care whether our target dies, as much as we care whether our target is "out".  Whether that's dead, unconscious in GM-discretionland, unconscious by 1 and staying down, whatever.  For genres where the primary attack type is Killing, we can pretty much get all of that from Hit Locations plus sectional defenses.  It's not laid out for you right in front, and it's not a Champions-style or even D&D-style slugfest.  You have to take advantage of cover, you have to Brace & Set when you can, you have to use CSLs, and most importantly you have to have a team.  
 
I'm aware of how... vociferously... IRL gun enthusiasts discuss the... vast differences between, let's say, a 10mm round and a .40 S&W... and, I mean, is there really?  

I am somewhat okay with the concept of these two powers, just not as officially written up talents.  When its a "pick from" list, it becomes a matter of people grabbing them just because "dude, this is powerful!" rather than "I have an idea for my character..."  When they have to come up with the build or work with the GM to make it, its going to usually be more character and concept- based rather than going down a list and getting the broken parts to make your l337 Goblin Pwner

For the most part, in Hero, we don't really care whether our target dies, as much as we care whether our target is "out".  Whether that's dead, unconscious in GM-discretionland, unconscious by 1 and staying down, whatever.  For genres where the primary attack type is Killing, we can pretty much get all of that from Hit Locations plus sectional defenses.  It's not laid out for you right in front, and it's not a Champions-style or even D&D-style slugfest.  You have to take advantage of cover, you have to Brace & Set when you can, you have to use CSLs, and most importantly you have to have a team.  
 
I'm aware of how... vociferously... IRL gun enthusiasts discuss the... vast differences between, let's say, a 10mm round and a .40 S&W... and, I mean, is there really?  

I'm not quite sure what you're asking, but I'll give it a shot.  (No pun intended...)
 
Why aren't the guns in Western Hero built with Powers?
 
In Western Hero, and most "heroic" level campaigns (Fantasy Hero, Pulp Hero, etc.), "mundane" equipment for the setting doesn't cost points.  It's treated more or less like equipment in any other game.  There's no edition change; really, it's more of a power level toggle.  All the way back to the first non-superheroic Hero System game (Espionage!) in fact. 
 
If it was something special within the setting -- for instance, a magic item in a fantasy game -- it's very probable that it would cost points and would be built with Powers.  
 
We've got at least two threads going on in other parts of the forums talking about almost this very issue, and some participants (meaning me) can't seem to make up their minds about it.  Except not really, it just gets into deep theoretical system discussion.  
 
The general rule, though, is that in non-superheroic genres, mundane equipment doesn't cost points and often isn't statted up with Powers.

For the most part, in Hero, we don't really care whether our target dies, as much as we care whether our target is "out".  Whether that's dead, unconscious in GM-discretionland, unconscious by 1 and staying down, whatever.  For genres where the primary attack type is Killing, we can pretty much get all of that from Hit Locations plus sectional defenses.  It's not laid out for you right in front, and it's not a Champions-style or even D&D-style slugfest.  You have to take advantage of cover, you have to Brace & Set when you can, you have to use CSLs, and most importantly you have to have a team.  
 
I'm aware of how... vociferously... IRL gun enthusiasts discuss the... vast differences between, let's say, a 10mm round and a .40 S&W... and, I mean, is there really?  

Just because it is bought as a focus, doesn't mean it will return magically at some later date. It just mean the GM should provide a means for returning it to the player. T\his may include a raid on an enemy base or a quest to find the magical components required to recreate it. What it won't require is that the player respend points.

They're using them in the afterlife, obviously.  And I suspect the newly dead are a bit jealous of the long-dead characters with their COM.  (   )
 
 
 
 
 
    
 
For the record, I was trying to take a drink when I read that.  I think I herniated my esophagus....  
 
 
 
OH!  I mean--  No; I have no idea what you're talking about!
 
 

GOOD GOD, THANK YOU!!!
 
I had to do it this way because I've hit the campaign cap on passing out reactions today.  
 
 

Here it is...
 
With the Usable On Others with Differing Modifiers rules, it's possible for characters to have Powers that no one has paid points for!  
 
Usable On Others with Differing Modifiers is a GM option to start with, but it works really well for certain builds.  Someone pays for the ability to grant the Power, but that's not the same as the Power itself. The Power would have its own writeup as it is used, which would have its own -- implied -- point cost, but no one actually pays that cost -- and if they did, they wouldn't have the ability to grant the Power, only the ability to use it!  (I once asked a rules question of Steve Long whether the recipient of a granted Power could pay the points for it and keep the power; his response was, essentially, "That's up to the GM.")  
 
The Differing Modifiers rules as a modification to Usable On Others came about in the 4th edition supplement, HERO System Almanac.  But their origin?
 
First edition Fantasy Hero, in the form of the Create effect.  
 
Admittedly, the Create effect specified that the created effect had to be a magic item with the Independent Limitation.  
 
But no such requirement exists as part of the Differing Modifiers rules.  In fact, Independent is gone from 6th edition entirely as a Limitation. Differing Modifiers is also given as an option in FH 6e (maybe 5e as well) for creating magic items, explicitly to be specified for magic items by the GM for no Limitation value.  (For disclosure's sake I should point out that FH 6e doesn't state that the Usable On Others rules are used when creating magic items, only that they are "similar to" the Differing Modifiers rules on 6e1 p. 359.  Which was a slight misconception on my part in earlier threads, but that doesn't invalidate my point.)
 
There's no specific requirement for a Differing Modifiers granted effect to be built with a Focus.  If it is built in this way, and if the granting process meets a certain set of GM-specified parameters, then it's a magic item.  
 
The wording of Independent has been pretty sloppy over the editions, but the thing it uniquely does is makes the points spent on it a permanent investment.  (In FH 1e, and 4th and 5th editions, it also specifies that an Independent effect need not be bought through a Focus or magic item, that it can be tied to person or a place.)  In most of its appearances it specifies that using it disconnects the effect from its creator, and that the effect can continue working while the creator is unconscious or dead.  But! We already have a Modifier that allows an effect to continue while the originator is unconscious… that being Persistent. (We have a Limitation that has been worth -1 to -2, depending on the edition, and it automatically grants Persistent?)
 
By the way, there's nothing in Independent that prevents Dispel from working on the Independent Powers, nor Drain nor Suppress...
 
I'm going to digress slightly.  Consider the lowly firearm. Whichever make, model, caliber, and so on, that you want, but at its simplest let's say 2d6 RKA, OAF, 10 shots.  In most Champions campaigns, in any edition, you can find a generic "thug" writeup that has that on its list of Powers; in most modern, non-superheroic campaigns, you can find it on the list of mundane equipment for which PCs don't pay points.  (Substitute a mundane 1d6 HKA, OAF sword, in fantasy campaigns.)  
 
Either way… who created that OAF Firearm?  The factory, yeah, but it would be ridiculous to claim that the "creator" or originator of the firearm had to invest points in it (unless that was specified in Limitations), or that its RKA is somehow tied to the points in it.  It can certainly be used after its last wielder's, or creator's death, regardless of whether they paid points for it or not. (I haven't ever seen a writeup of any firearm that used the Independent Limitation.)
 
Getting back on target (no pun intended), I'm going to throw out a statement that may very well be heretical.
 
The "connection" between a caster and their spell, or an enchanter and their created magic items, is no more inherent than that of the thug's OAF firearm, to… anyone.
 
It's certainly a reasonable conclusion to come to, and it was certainly implicit and in some cases explicit in the way FH 1st edition presented it, but that's also where Persistent first appeared.  The FH 1e supplements Magic Items and The Spell Book both suggested a GM-permission Advantage called Permanency (which would be Inherent, in current editions), for items that are truly permanent, as in things like the One Ring, Mjolnir, and the like -- anything handed down by the gods or whoever. 

In conclusion: 
It's possible for someone to have a Power for which no one has paid points (through UOO with Differing Modifiers). There's nothing inherent about any Focus (regardless of genre) that causes it to stop working when its creator dies.   There's nothing inherent to a Focus (regardless of genre) that ties it to its creator except by implication and GM decision. The GM should specify, in any Fantasy Hero campaign, whether and how a spell is connected to its caster, whether and how a magic item is connected to its creator, and whether or not characters pay points for their magic items (and, if so, whether they pay permanently or not).   Don't worry, Duke, I'll have more to say about Independent in another post.