Amorkca

While I am 100% behind picking up the books like the Hero System Bestiary, Martial Arts and so on. 
I would advise limiting yourself to only the core book of choice for the first campaign.  Hero 5th, Hero 6th and Champions complete all have a few examples you can use if needed such as Karate and so on. 
 
Keep it simple and accessible in the same rulebook the players are using/own. 
Once they are onboard and able to build their own stuff, go to town. 

When I take over the world, my first plan is to buy DOJ and start producing boxes of the different HERO games again! And lots of adventures.

Clever. Mind you, in the original story of Solomon nothing was actually split.

I'd suggest telling your GM your frustrations and asking for his assistance in making/playing a character who feels less fragile. 
And if he's an arse about it, plagiarize the numbers off the sheet of another player who's having better luck surviving. 

I plan on writing up the Player's Guide for my fantasy campaign setting as simple and direct as possible stripped down to the minimum.  Then I want to put the guts of the game with the more complicated stuff in the Master Guide for the GM to use, and this is the kind of thing I've been studying on, to try to think of what is the least a player really need to know.

Got this at half price books in Appleton Wisconsin

This is horrible advice. Also, both formulas have explicitly existed since 5th (5E p244, 5RT p371), and even when I learned under 4th Edition 25 years ago it was taught to me as 11+OCV-Die Roll because that's all on Your Sheet. It's not some magical "new fangled 6th edition" thing.
 
I recommend doing it this way: Attack Skill, this is calculated by adding your OCV to 11. Write it down. Do not do the math Every. Single. Attack. (whch, BTW, the old standard has you doing, it slows down play considerably. it's just bad.)
Just, have an Attack Roll. How much they make the roll by is the Target Number, which is the DCV. Know the target number, don't know it, doesn't matter. Add your modifiers to the result. Simple.
 
This makes Attack Rolls just another type of Skill Roll. So you've taught them how to do two things at the same time. Present Skill Rolls not as "succeed or fail" but as Target Numbers: to do an Acrobatic Check to use the flag pole to spin off of you just need to success by 1 or more, it's an easy task for you. But to slide between the bank robbers legs and come up standing behind him, you need to succeed by 3 or more... (because you, as the GM, gave them a -2 penalty for the task, meaning Rolling a 10 on an 11- means they actually failed by 2, so if they roll an 8 on a 11- Acrobatics Roll they actually succeed.)
 
As noted by others, come with some prebuilt characters, get them into how things fit together before you get into character creation. Even if they're very simple characters for a first session. If each character has a little bit of each primary aspect; Movement, Attack, Defense, Non-Combat; they see the pieces working together. This will help them understand what elements to use when building a character on their own.
 
Another little bit you can do is change how Movement is presented. I would split Movement into 3 representations instead of just Combat/Non-Combat.
1. Half Phase Movement (half the Combat Movement Speed)
2. Full Phase Movement (Combat Speed)
3. Non-Combat Movement (Non-Combat Speed)
It might help quicken up what you can do with a Phase that's split into Half and Full Phase actions; reduces Math At The Time, which helps with the learning process.
 
When you present pre-gens, simplify the builds, instead of presenting it as 8D6 Blast, AoE (12m), Focus (OAF), 6 Charges do it was "Flame Pistol: 8D6 in a 12m Radius, 6 shots, can be taken away."

Yeah, that last points to an unacknowledged issue in tabletop RPG design and industry: individuals have different experiences that are most rewarding to them, but usually the system creator overlooks this and assumes that his/her/their goals as a player are universal.  This leads off to Gamist-Simulationist-Narrativist considerations, and Robin Laws's taxonomy of Butt-Kicker/Power Gamer/Tactician/Storyteller/etc. for RPG players and their proclivities.
 
As a GM, I am an appalling Simulationist... my game-worlds have to hang together logically and flow clearly from first principles and cause-effect relations.  (The players in general never see those; it's that I have an overwhelming preference for top-down universe creation.)  As I learned twenty years ago, you can easily end up with a world in which there's no place for player characters that way.
 
As a player, I'm a Tactician; I try to exploit the opposition's weaknesses, and arrive as quickly as possible at the situation where I and my cohort not only can't lose, we can't even take losses.  I need a rigorous rule system, I want to master it and exploit the pinch points, and use them to manipulate the enemy into a position where they are quite vigorously doing ineffective things and my side's victory is entirely inevitable. As it turns out, this can frustrate the crap out of my fellow players; the Butt-kicker absolutely must get out in front and kick butts, and the Power Gamer absolutely must get out there and do his White Lotus Secret Decapitation Strike With +3 Vorpal No-dachi to whichever bad guys he chooses, and my suggestion that now that we have the enemy boxed in we just wait here and lob fire blasts and thunderbolts into them for an hour until they're all dead makes my buddies go into open revolt.
 
But ... I also have a strong latent Narrativist streak, in that as a player I really want to feel like there's an overarching plot and that we can, ultimately, end the evil we have to contend against.  Unlike my Butt-Kicker and Power Gamer buddies, to me a game world which is just a cornucopia of beatable bad guys with loot ... looks a lot like a humdrum miserable Hell whose underlying nature is in the global sense, nothing you do actually matters.
 
Creating a game and game system that scratches everyone's itches is really hard.  Especially if you don't know those often unarticulated basal desires your players/market have.

Ok... so we used "The Plan" mechanic (process?) in actual play again tonight. It was mostly successful, but still a bit awkward in implementation.
 
The good:
1) It felt really correct and natural to begin when the game naturally entered a stage of "Ok, so we want to do a, b & c and find out..." from the players (the determined they wanted to implement a physical hack of a cartel's server farm to determine routing and transactions of finances and who they were working with)... and I was able to say, "Ok, this is clearly time for "the Plan" so let's structure this discussion.
2) The structure of determining "What are you trying to achieve" and "what is your general strategy" worked out, though, as noted below, the goal they were trying to achieve kept shifting throughout the plan. The general strategy, "We want to find their information infrastructure and get a hard line hack into it without them noticing" was enough to get to "Ok, so what kind of prep do you need, and what actions do characters take to make this possible?" and this didn't take long at all.
3) The actual prep dice rolls and then "The Plan" roll worked well, and enable me as the GM to provide key information that they learn along the way, so the players and PCs are clear about what they are up against.
4) The "We planned for this" chits were used in a different way that was just as effective. The Plan roll earned them two such chits. They chose to spend one to say, "We create a distraction that pulls the majority of the guards away from the server farm so there is a window to infiltrate." By spending a chit, this was a given, the distraction works, and we could start the moment by moment actual play with the professional thief at the door and picking the lock.
5) the player with the thief character who was primary driver of this plan, really felt it was a chance to "show his stuff" and have the professional thief in his environment and really shine. (The op went nearly flawlessly, with the one major monkey wrench overcome with a 3 on a perception check and a 4 on the stealth roll to avoid discovery by a seriously bad guy.)
6) It was a good combination of "prep rolls" and "plan rolls" that are more meta... and traditional task resolution skill rolls like "Lockpicking" and "Stealth" etc. and they felt different enough, even though both used skill rolls to resolve. 
 
THe not so good:
1) Again, it was difficult for the players at first, to get to the idea of "What are you trying to achieve." They tend to think in term of tasks, "Pick this lock" or "Sneak by X guys" or whatever... the specific actions, and they needed to be prompted to really focus on "Why? What are you hoping to achieve with these actions? What is your desired outcome"  It was up to me as the GM to say "Hey, back to what we are trying to achieve. No need to get bogged down with all the actions you could take, until we understand what all these actions are supposed to accomplish. 
2) Once established, the goal kept changing. This isn't inherently bad... the planning is fluid and the goal can change as the talk about it, but I needed to explicitly call out "Hey, it sounds like originally you wanted to shut down this server farm and really hurt the cartel, but now you want to install a hack and leave it running so you can siphon information over time? Am I understanding this? And we have to start over on the tactics, because you now have a different strategy."
3) The players can struggle a bit with prep rolls and ideas, as they aren't used to simply getting to state director stance "X is true and that means Y" as traditional games the players state a task resolution and look to the GM to tell them anything meaningful. Here the players say, "If I succeed, a, b and c are true and I know about thej, etc." The philosophy of "Yes... and ..." isn't intuitive at first.
4) Not all the PCs had a clear way to contribute to the plan, or the players felt that way, but that was ok as it just limited which PCs could contribute a possible plus to "The Plan" roll.
5) The more strategically minded/also GM type of players dominated the conversation, as other players can really prefer to react to specific threats a GM throws at them. This process asks for pro-active imaginations by the players.
6) GM needs to be able to give clear guidance on the minuses and such that indicate the difficulty of the task in general. It was a struggle at times to provide clear guidance on "Ok, this is what you'll get with a successful "The Plan" roll vs. what will happen if you fail it. 
7) It generally had some awkward moments as it can feel odd for some to "go meta" with the discussion which this demands.
 
Ultimately it worked really well, and a potentially quite complex and time consuming planning session fit right into our regular four hour play session, and the scenario was resolved by evenings end. It definitely helps structure and speed up "op planning."
 
All in all in worked

It was pretty bad in the 70s and 80s.  I recall one episode of The Hulk where an elderly woman fought the Hulk to a stand still using Aikido.
 
See, it doesn't matter that the Hulk is a 1000 pound monster that moves with terrifying speed and violence.  You just have to sidestep and use his own energy against him....
 
I took a year of Aikido at the University of Hawaii and I promise you - this is fiction of the worst sort.
 
A well executed Judo or Aikido move will let you do something to an opponent with a fraction of the strength to do it without technique.  But this fraction is on the order of 1/2 or 1/4.
 
It is not the 1/50,000 you would need to do something to the Hulk.

I think it would be more helpful for the author to suggest what to do for characters that have a power you might not want in the scenario. 
 
If it clairsentience that would destroy the plot, then the author should seek to provide something that nobbles the clairsentience and provides something else for the character involved.  It might be that an early encounter exposes the clairsentient character to an artefact that overwhelms the sense, taking it out of commission for the scenario.  The character then discovers that if she focusses on an object like she was going to use the clairsentience, it suffers catastrophic integrity failure and falls apart (RKA, NND, Does BODY, inanimate objects only).  That way the character gets a fancy new power to play with during the scenario.
 
Doc
 

Here’s part of the problem. If you want sparkling artwork, very few people do that for free. Artists these days take a dim view of being paid in exposure, and those that do, either you are married to, best friends with, or , more commonly, aren’t of sufficient professional quality to attract sales. Canned art won’t make it any more,’either. This is just the art side. What about the writers? The various species of editors?  Sure I can see someone reworking their personal campaign into an adventure book, simply for the love of the game, but art, and editorial, even for an unprinted PDF will still need to be paid for. I would love to illustrate stuff again, but other than one or two pieces to personal friends,’not without pay, and a contract. I suggest the writers take that into consideration too. 

Okay, guys.
 
It's done.
 
Now I've got to get Jason's attention and get it to him.
 
Then it's on to the next one:  I reckon I'll start with the first few Adventurers Clubs that a forum member was kind enough to loan me before deciding where to go next.  Star HERO (pet project) and Cyber HERO got back-burnered now that there are actual scans of those products in existence (though really: they could be a lot better.  ).
 
I'm going to tell you straight-up that there is a thing in the Western HERO final version that bugs me:  The spine and the rear cover don't align quite properly.  However, I'm done.  I'm just done.  I've been using my precious and rare spare time on this, wedging it in here and there-- sometimes working on it _literally_ less than five minutes at a time, and what?  Since November last year?
 
I'm done.  I'm including the covers and spine as separate elements for anyone wishing to make corrections on their own.  I know it was a labor of love, but I just can't look at it any more......  Birdy's got to get the hell out of this nest!  
 
 
 
 

It seems like you don’t even need #3 as long as people are willing to share their adventures at no cost. I’m not sure how the licensing works, but maybe it would be possible to have an adventures section in the downloads page of herogames.com where people could share their adventures with the rest of the community. No one profits from it, and it wouldn’t be compromising any IP . . .
 
The adventures really wouldn’t even have to be all that complex or complete. They’d need just enough to give people the tools to run an adventure right away. Characters & villains, the main point of conflict, and a series of interactions, and you have something playable. 
 
I wonder if anybody would be willing to try something like this?

This was my problem with Deadlands in the past. When I created my Luck Chits, I specifically made them "use 'em or lose 'em" for each adventure, because I wanted them played for dramatic story shifts, and not hoarded for EXP or whatever. 

And while I, the GM, do have access to some Luck Chits as well... one of the things my players like, is that they can see my pool. When I spend to give the villain a free recovery, or whatever, they see this as a victory... they are wearning down my resources as well. If I didn't save a big bennie for the villain at the end, then he doesn't have his "automatic getaway" or whatever. Yes, the GM can say anything they want, but a bennie system can help moderate (in the eyes of the players) when the GM clearly is swinging the narrative against them. In fact, it kind of frees up the GM to be open about "yep, I'm deciding this in favor of the bad guys... here I'm spending a chit to have things go their way" and the players seem much more ok with that.

I actually included something similar (after reading Blades in the Dark)... calling it "The Plan" in my game. I already have a bennie system with "Luck Chits" and I've been experimenting with a relatively simple process.
 
1. When a scenario calls for it, players come up with a general "plan of attack"... like "We want the infiltrate the club in disguise, after having hacked the security cameras, and gotten a decent floorplan. The goal is to narrow down where the hostage might be kept, and so our assault is fast and quick, with a planned getaway."

That's it... no long involved arguing about how many grenades you are packing, or what language your hacking program is written in, or whatever... quick, general, covers the basic idea.
 
2. Each player/PC gets to role a "Prep" roll based on their skill/expertise/contacts, to contribute to  "The Plan". (i.e. the hacker rolls to say "I'm gaining access to the security network through cables running through tunnels under the club." and the faceman says "I'm organizing our local support to have watchers on the street and around the building and a getaway driver." and the ninja says, "I'm going to infiltrate and get in position way ahead of time, before things go down."   whatever...)  Based on how well they roll, they get contribute plusses or minuses to "The Plan" roll. for example... hacker rolls well, that says he is in, with full view of all cameras, give a +2 to "The Plan" roll... but ninja rolled badly, he was able to get inside, but unable to get far due to unexpected employees showing up and can't break cover"... -1 to The Plan roll.   The rolls help narrate the "set up montage"
 
3. Then, based on the total plusses or minuses... a player with Tactics or Teamwork... rolls. Based on how well they roll... the players gain Luck Chits for the group as a whole, that can be utilzed when necessary to say "I planned for this!" when they run into some obstacle in the actual op. For example, the PCs could only infiltrate with light weapons... but once inside, realized they were likely heavily out gunned. The ninja spent a chit saying, "I planned for this, and on my way in, I left a duffle bag of guns on the roof of the elevator off the kitchen." The PCs are then able to pick up a couple assault rifles and a shotgun before heading for the penthouse.

A few more tweaks (like I set a number based on how difficult the target it... from Easy to Hyper Secure (infiltrating a night club owned by gangsters is easier than infiltrating an NSA black site)... but generally that's it.

Players/PCs contribute to "The Plan"... a single roll is then made to determine how effectively the plan was up to the point of "Go" when the actual, moment to moment play begins... and a good roll provides "I planned for that..." bennies... or not if the plan wasn't so good.

Have just recently begun trying it, but it works alright and I'm committed to using basic HERO skills and contacts, etc.... just using them in a different light.

I take the view that the character sheet is nothing more or less than a kind of contract between the player and the GM.  If a player chooses to spend points on something, I treat it as the GM having the obligation to on occasion make that something helpful in player.    If a player wants his character to be a grandmaster chess player, he can give himself PS: Chess Player 21- for free.  If he wants to use his chess playing skill as an activation roll on his ability, he would of course have to spend points, or if he wants to spend points on the skill just because, I might right a scenario were he has to win a contest with an opposing chess player or allow it as a complimentary skill in situations where strategy is in important.
 
If a player takes points on something, the GM has permission to make it into a problem.  For instance, if a superhero maintains a secret ID but didn't take the complication then that character will unlikely have any problems associated with maintaining a secret ID, but someone who takes the secret ID compilation will have to occasionally deal with nosy neighbors or explaining to the boss why he's always late.
 
As far as OCMV goes, if I have no plans to have the trait to be valuable, I will allow players to neither buy nor sell points.  If they don't have an obvious need to for it, but they either buy or sell it anyway, then I will interpret it as a desire to have it be an issue in play and work up some ideas.  I can envision mentalist/gadgeteer hybrid characters who design all their equipment to function based on mental attributes, or what about an entire alien race who designed their technology around mentalism.  You could come up with a scenario where the players have to blast through base defenses using only captured mind guns that function entirely off of OCMV vs DCMV attributes.

Yes, it very often is!
 
Re: Elves: I don't dislike elves, but then I've never had the "Legolas Problem" with players. We've had a few elf PCs in the D&D games I've been in recently, but that's been from players calculating advantages for various race/class combinations; i.e., "This character is DEX-based, and elves give a DEX bonus. I don't give a rat's ass about the rest."
 
But we also have fairly broad tastes in Fantasy, so nobody expects Tolkien, Tolkien, Nothing But Tolkien. I don't dislike Tolkien, either; LoTR is the mountain-tall standard by which all epic fantasy shall be judged, for a long time to come. But ye gods, I hate the Tolkien rip-offs by writers (and gamers) who never look beyond the surface of his work and trot out endless copycat dwarves, elves, dragons, magic swords, quests and Dark Lords. They're literary vampires, feeding on his creativity without even trying to add anything of their own.
 
Dean Shomshak

My friend freaked at his kids for this, did not understand it.  His son asked him if he enjoyed watching football (the soccer kind) which of course he does.  “Never see you out playing it though dad....”.  Burn.

Hides his ears... slinks away... Looks for a thermo nuclear device to blow up the stars... Returns as... a Vulcan...😉

So there was this normal that was confronted by a super. The normal pulled a gun, the super laughed, and the Normal put a hole in the super (then ran).

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2016/02/10/50-bmg-single-shot-handgun/

Water Works-
 
Ruthie Sullivan is a plumber and inventor who created a juryrigged water powered set of armor made up of various plates, pipes, valves and hoses. The armor is outfitted with an internal water supply, but when she connects it to an outside source she amps the power of her wrist mounted water cannons and her water jump jet boots to frankly wildly out of control and dangerous levels. It is not unheard of for Water Works to end up flying through the air on the end of a hose while flailing and firing powerful streams in all directions, but she means well.

Margarita Man

Nibblin' on sponge cake
Helping a thug make
The smartest decision he's made in some time
Yeah he'll get off scott free
But that doesn't bug me
'Cause the three he'll turn in are the worst kinds of slime.

Savin' the day again, I'm Margarita Man
Scanning for some good deed I can do
Some people claim the fact I'm here is a shame,
But I know, that they don't have a clue.

That mugger was stalking
A young woman walking
But now he's freaked out and his mind's come unglued
She's a real beauty
A Mexican cutie
She's had a close call, but she hasn't a clue.

Savin' the day again, I'm Margarita Man
Scanning for some good deed I can do
Some people claim the fact I'm here is a shame,
But I know, that they don't have a clue.
 
My fights, I must pick 'em
I can't save each victim
And mind reading psychopaths drives me to drink
But if you ask how come
Some killers get so dumb
And finally get caught, well now, what do you think?
 
Savin' the day again, I'm Margarita Man
Scanning for some good deed I can do
Some people claim the fact I'm here is a shame,
But I know, that they don't have a clue.
 
 
 

Lucius Alexander

Some people claim that Jimmy Buffet's to blame,
But I know, it's the palindromedary's fault.

I would avoid potentially bad party mixes such as:
Characters built for a different type of game such as combat-monkeys for a role-playing-heavy game or a role-playing-heavy character for a combat-focused game. Provide players some build guidelines so they know whether they'll be playing in Superhero Fight Club or Ang Lee's Superhero Art Film. Players who unintentionally build rivalrous characters with the same power set, party role, or schtick. For example, two players build scrappers, but one consistently outshines the other and makes that player feel useless or underpowered. While Champions is "classless" you still may want to encourage players to build toward a desired party role. However, there is fun to be had for groups who intentionally build rivals. Just make sure your players want that fun. Players who unintentionally build characters who are antagonistic toward other characters in party. This is usually some poor mix of Complications like player one has a hatred of aliens and player two makes an alien. It's fine when intra-party conflict is a dynamic your players want, but such interactions should not come as a surprise. Again, build guidelines such as, "no brooding loners or murder hobos" can prevent these issues. Groups where one or more players have attacks against alternate defenses or attacks with no normal defense that make other players feel useless or underpowered. These attacks should have diminishing returns over time as foes adapt to them. "This time the Malta agents have come prepared for Internet Troll's NND mental attacks." Essentially, everyone should have a time to shine. Don't consistently reward or punish one power build over another.