Cantriped

The values I listed are in addition to the Space Marine described above (so 23 STR & CON, 25 BODY, etc).

Regarding the Space Marine: I would give him +3 Str, +3 Con, +1 SPD, +5 BODY, +10 STUN, and +40 END. With genetically engineered muscles he should he stronger than a normal human can be, but only by enough to get an extra DC out it the heaviest melee weapons. Pretty much everybody has at least a 3 SPD (it is the suggested default value even if you choose to ignore the SPD Chart), and the extra END is because your Marine could easily spend 18 END per Turn (or -9 END per Turn after free Recoveries) just moving and attacking, and they should be able to last for at least a couple Minutes at that pace if they are supposed to be able to fight for hours. Either way, taking the occasional extra recovery (instead of moving and attacking that Phase) would let a 'marine fight almost forever, but LTE Rules will eventually wear them down... but less than a normal human thanks to that superior END and REC) You've omited what TFs Space Marines have (they get a 1-point TF free with Combat Driving).

I was mostly thinking of the eighteen buttons you don't press because your great-grandfather warned you one of them speaks in High Gothic. I've never played WH40K, or read any of the literature, so my familiarity is entirely second-hand.

At the highest end of difficulty, equipment can start Requiring Rolls to activate. For example, the Heavy Missile Rifle could have half a dozen different modes (multipower slots). Changing modes requires a Missile Rifle Familiarity Roll (bought as a Power Skill), and if you fail the roll the slot changes randomly (a Minor Side Effect I think; roll 1d6 to determine slot)... In some cases, if you fail excessively you trigger the self destruct mechanism (an additional Side Effect that triggers if you fail by a given value, such as 4 or more, and causes an AoE Attack centered on the weapon.

I'm not especially familiar with the setting, but what I mean is that a given weapon (lets call it the Heavy Missile Rifle) could take a severe Side Effect (or other Limitation) that normally makes the weapon practically useless unless the character has more than just familiarity with the weapon. For example, the Heavy Missile Rifle has a built-in targeting computer that makes the weapon very difficult to learn how to operate; it takes a side effect imposing an additional OCV penalty, and the character "learns how to operate the weapon properly" by buying off the OCV penalty with PSLs. Yes this too.

Consider them, but I wouldn't bother detailing them. I figure sumptuary laws have a lot to do with the costs of magical items and spellcasting & alchemical services. They most certainly should figure in to the costs of exotic materials like dragon-hide, mithril, or adamantine. Otherwise I'd use them as a plot element to explain why the players can't have an item they can otherwise afford.

Using Armor Piercing and Hardened is a good way to establish an "Arms Race" without actually increasing the lethality of these weapons against unarmored opponents. There is also a per-point version of Armor Piercing (called Piercing in Dark Champions, but I think it reprinted in one of the APGs). Relative CV modifiers are also a good way to differenciate between gear. Then most powerful could even have excessive penalties commonly bought off by experienced users to make the weapons feel more specialized.

Flight is inherently Inobvious... so you can either save a few points or make the Flight Imperceptible for the same cost. All of these powers can and should be made Obvious (which happens to save points).

A Dancing Sword is an Automaton (while it is Dancing at least). I think it will be easier to build an Automaton that can be used as a Sword* than it will be to build a Sword that can become an Automaton. To limit it's active time you could link all of it's characteristics related to action (STR, DEX, SPD, Flight, etc) to a shared Fuel Charge. * (built more or less as a Weapon, but with Usable by Other and without Focus) A more easily built and understood, but technically very illegal solution would be to use a Multipower Reserve. The first slot would be an Automaton Follower (which is blatently illegal and abusively cost effective); to limit its active time use a Fuel Charge on the entire slot. The second slot and subsequent slots would be its characteristics as a wielded weapon (HKA and HA for melee attacks, Blast if it shoots energy blasts like the Master Sword, etc). Obviously the automaton would also have to pay for any attacks it could perform while animate, but they could be different from its wielded attacks.

Working from that perspective, the items could generally be represented as Mind Control; Inobvious*, No Range, and Variable Limitation (Incantations or Gestures)**, IIF Expendable (Very Difficult To Obtain) Unbreakable Restricted Universal* * As opposed to Imperceptible because someone might recognize it. ** Because you have to offer them the item, and hand it to them yourself. *** Inobvious because it should not be obvious that the item is the source of the power, and Inaccessible because you cannot take the power away from the user easily unless you know the trick to it. Expendible because you lose the item when you "use" it, and very difficult to obtain to represent that you'd have to take the item back (or acquire another) to use that power again. The victim cannot discard the item willingly, so you have to know to either Dispel or steal the item(s). Restricted Universal because anybody that has come into possession of the item(s), and is not currently a victim of them, can give them to someone else to trigger the effect.

Regardless of optional rules, any attack which causes enough damage to the target's head to kill them outright could be called a decapitation. I would include the caveat that certain weapons just might not be able to cause the right kind of injuries to actually sever limbs even when they do cause enough damage (like a shiv). I'm familiar with the Impairing/Disabling rules, which are fine but don't really represent severing limbs well (or decapitation at all). I could have sworn there was a 6th Edition optional rule for Severing Limbs which triggered upon taking BODY Damage equal to your BODY Score (before or after Hit Locations). Which meant decapitation was always lethal, but you could probably survive having both of your legs chopped off (assuming you aren't left to bleed to death). However I cannot find it now...

I would make the first item a Fully Invisible Suppress EGO, and/or CE (-X to Ego-Based Rolls). The second and third items both sound like Mind Control. The second item is simply very weak. Meanwhile the third item would be a huge boost to the mind control effect Linked to the first and second item's powers (making it have no effect unless all three items are worn). Personally I would suggest giving each item their own seperate minor effect (such as penalties imposed using CE). Then I'd build the Mind Control effect like a set bonus in an ARPG; such that having any one item functions like Suggestion, but if you have the entire set they function as a much more powerful spell. The set bonus could be built as one large, partially limited Mind Control; with every 4 or so dice being Linked to a particular item's minor effect so that you only get the full effect if all three items are operational.

You could call it a "No Call Zone" (Calling being a common synonym for conjuring). Though most such urban locations are likely to restrict or prohibit the use of all sorts of spells. Flight spells would be restricted to given airspaces to (hopefully) prevent crashes and dropped objects from causing excessive property damage. Fire and Illusion spells would almost universally be banned.

I use CC remember? Its only 240 pages and describes almost exactly the same system... the fact the 6e 1&2 were poorly written isn't relevent to a point made regarding how the material is typically used. My point had to do with how the example material is written and presented. For example, even though both modifiers are described in 6e2, neither Real Fire, nor Real Electricity pop up in examples (such as in Champions Powers, or the Hero System Grimoire) of Fire or Electricity powers very often. Likewise, the system uses a fairly simplified, arbitrary template for Equipment (and ignores even that in superheroic campaigns) that purposfully cuts corners just to reduce the amount of line-space used on any given example. You are also putting words in my mouth. I never said that 1 Charge (a -2 Limitation even with Zero END included) was insignificant, however I would agree they are related as both pertain to the power's resource expenditure schema. What I said was that Cannot Be Pushed is typically considered too insignificant to be worth a whole -1/4 by itself. Ergo why it typically bundles with Beam, Charges and Zero END... just like needing to be maintained is too insignificant to be a limitarion by itself, which is why both Real Weapon and Armor include other restrictions.

1) Because only powers that cost END can be pushed... the Charged equivalent is Boostable-Charges. It is just the nature of the mechanics for Pushing that they only apply to END costing powers. Trying to apply pushing to charges will only create confusion and the need for even more, and more convoluted rules. Mostly because there is no set conversion rate for how much END 1 Charge is worth... it could have almost any value. However note that it isn't because of Charges that the power cannot be pushed... it is the included Zero END... so if you place Costs END on a charged power, you can spend additional END to push the power, but doing so will still only use up 1 Charge. It isn't like Novaman is impossible to build under the current rules. Throw Costs END and Increased END (or Costs LTE) on his Nova and boom-done; you've got a power usable once per day that also exhausts you. 2) Technically, you can if the weapon doesn't have Beam, but it still uses up the whole charge instead of a portion of a charge. 3) Again, you can, but Cannot Be Pushed/Reduced has generally not been considered worth even -1/4 by itself... and the pricing model gets skewed if you apply to many limitations co powers (even ones they might deserve like Cannot Be Pushed). Bundling insignificant or related modifiers is just one of the many methods that have been employed to keepbthe number of game elements used to a minimum. As a point of user experience... in almost 20 years of working with the HERO System on a daily basis: I have built exactly one powersuite that might have benefited from the proposed rule change (a Novaman-like character; at the time I used Lockout to prevent his other powers from working while his Nova recharged). Meanwhile the default rule has saved me from having to include Zero END in hundreds (perhaps even thousands by now) of power suites... Because I prefer to show my work, especially with regard to how I build Equipment.

Sharn: City of Towers (a supplement for 3.5 D&D you might be able to find online) explicitly discusses the issue of ATC because the city sits in a magical field that enhances flight magic, making it exceptionally common there (and also allowing the city to be built-up until its towers rose thousands of feet in the air). Eberron (the setting it comes from) has airships, many of which dock in Sharn. It goes into lots of little details, like that wizards are paid a reward for casting Feather Fall on a someone falling. There is also a world-building guide written by Gary Gygax that goes into the legal systems of a magical medieval society.

The compelling cases have already been made, you are just choosing to ignore them in favor of pressing your argument. The most compelling reason is that it actually is consistent. The philosophy at play is ease of use (for both player and GM), the rules are written to encourage you to use as few game elements as possible in its examples*, and with the exception of heroic campaigns using lots of projectile weapons, characters don't generally have to track two resources to perform an action. *This is also partially why we don't get full write-ups for heroic equipment and talents, that and a combination of laziness and frugality (they had to save page-space for all those example callouts). Frankly, the small benefits of changing the rule are far outweighed by the much more common array situations where it just adds more work (and modifiers) to achieve the same results.

It is true that the original source has been warped quite a bit. The Vorpal Sword as described by C.S. Lewis could easily have just been an Armor Piercing HKA (or even Penetrating).

First off, the only time a power currently costs both END and Charges in an official build is for Heroic Projectile Weapons, and even then it is as a result of the STR Minimum rules and not because the weapon itself costs END to use. I don't know of any official build for anything that actually exists that uses both Charges and Costs END (either Personal or Reserve). Building a default rule around a non-existant condition seems counter-productive. As for book-keeping: It is really very simple, using a non-charged power requires tracking one resource; using a charged power is the same but requires knowing one modifier. Meanwhile, using a charged, END-costing power requires the tracking of two resources and also requires knowing three modifiers (beause now you have to know to check for Zero END and Increased END Cost). For a GM in a superheroic campaign such a rule would significantly increase the amount of paperwork required to run the game. Either during play having to track the END and Charges expended by half a dozen mooks using two or three different kinds of firearms. Then there is also the added clusterfuck of how confusing heroic weapons would look on paper (which admittedly is true of the inverse as well, but Charged, END-Costing Powers are not so common). Irrelevent, as this is still true under the actual rules. Any Charged power can potentially be made even cheaper by adding Costs END (-1/2) and Increased END Cost. Changing the default won't make those powers any cheaper if the modifiers are recalculated. No it doesn't. It does change the APs of some of those constructs though, making melee weapons easier to Drain/Dispel, and ranged weapons harder (as a result of the shift in advantage placement) for example.

Because the alternative means additional, largely unnecessary book-keeping. However the default is largely irrelevent as you can still just as easily build powers that cost both Charges and END. All that would change with the default is the pricing model... the costs will likely be much the same (since the value of charges currently accounts for the fact that it also grants the Zero END advantage). I bet your NovaBurst would be cheaper as a power that cost x10 or more END from an excessively large reserve that powered all your abilities... but then you might be screwed if you pop your NovaBurst and it fails to win the day... The advantage of NovaBurst using a Charge to represent all of "Novaman's excess Nova Energy" and his other abilities using his normal END is that he is not being hamstrung if his best ability is countered... yet he is still appropriately prevented from using it over and over. The problem with using END to represent the expenditure of massive amounts of power is that END is designed to recover quickly (and hurt you if too much is spent too fast), making it a poor system for preventing a given power from being used repeatedly.

It is noteworthy as well that the Vorpal Sword was written for a system that lacked the ability to make called shots. Which HERO is not. Even just a sword that deals a few extra DCs of damage to hit locations 3-5 is going to be a lot more unbalancing than it first appears. In D&D there is pretty much nothing you can do to raise the chance of Vorpal triggering above 5% (because of the nature of Critical confirmation rules). In HERO Called Shot PSLs are cheap enough that you could easily build a warrior that can trigger a Vorpal weapon at-will, and decapitate any opponent with less than a given amount of DEF+BODY. Add to that the fact that warriors in fiction rarely wear helms (and thus have no DEF vs. a vorpal sword in HERO) and you've got the recipe for lots of dead mooks.

The point totals from the 5th Ed books are generally accurate... however there are numerous inconsistancies in how bonuses to OCV and RMod were typically built, and how it was recommended that they be built. Plus there are components that are simply illegal. You can find the rules I am refering to in Dark Champions 5th 200, and Fantasy Hero 5th 177. For example both Dark Champions and Fantasy Hero 5th suggest placing Required Hands and Real Weapon CSLs/PSLs representing bonuses on weapons (Required Hands is blatently inapplicable as the power lacks a STR Minimum and isn't an Attack Power). Regarding calculating the costs by hand: Bonuses to OCV/RMod are seperate components of the compound power. As such their APs and RPs are calculated independantly. The tables in the book are supposed to include the sum total of it's point costs. However in practice it is common for Reach to be miscalculated (and given an RP value equal to its AP value) or even ommited from the A/R Cost field entirely. Also note that OCV/RMod penalties are built as a single side effect (With a flat value regardless of the degree of penalty.)

You can build a Vorpal Sword in Hero... but it won't have the Absolute Effect that it has in D&D. A durable enough enemy might resist or survive attempted beheadment (even by a Vorpal Sword). Massey's suggestion of Limited bonus HKA is gonna be the easiest and fairest to implement.

IIRC, a partially limited, compound construct where each step uses a greater increment of Extra Time is the official model for "Charging Powers" (powers that get stronger the longer you hold them). So I second Eepjr24's suggestion. IIRC this method is also noted as a specific exception to the rules which indicate you are actually supposed to choose to Activate (and pay END for) all of the components of the compound power you want to potentially benefit from at the very beginning, and that the END spent on increments you wind up not waiting long enough to finish activating is simply wasted.

As a side note, I'm fairly sure I've run across articles discussing the mechanics of destroying worlds in a more official capacity in supplements such as Star Hero and Champions for 6th edition.