Jhamin

As long as we're casting further afield for useful precedents, a series of Digital Hero issues describe the Temporal League, an Earth-based organization founded in the near future when technological time-travel had been discovered (not dependent on ambient magic), and devoted to preserving Earth's timeline from various threats. Issue #26 describes the origin and organization of the League, and some of its resources. #23 writes up the League's "super-class" operatives, the Temporal Champions, drawn from different eras of the Hero Universe. While #33 details more NPCs, allies or enemies of the League.
 
Although the Temporal League is set in and inspired by the official Hero Universe, Steve Long decreed that no DH article should be considered "official" unless and until it's been transcribed to a published book. That doesn't stop any of us from using it, of course. Moreover, Steve's not in charge any more.
 
EDIT: Here are links to free samples from those articles that used to be hosted on an earlier version of this website.
 
https://web.archive.org/web/20050905011514/http://www.herogames.com/digitalhero/Samples/d23temporal.jsp
 
https://web.archive.org/web/20051126232409/http://herogames.com/digitalHero/Samples/dh26temporal.jsp
 
https://web.archive.org/web/20051225071626/http://herogames.com/digitalHero/Samples/dh33unchanged.jsp

Even though he was left behind in the edition switch from 4th to 5th, I think that Captain Future from the 4th edition Golden Age Champions is another interesting take on time travel in Hero.
TLDR: He doesn't have time powers at all and just knows about time.  Being from the future is his origin.

His backstory is that he is a time cop from the future who was assigned to "walk the beat" in the US of the 30s and 40s as that was a period of intense temporal interest. 
His job is to 1) Protect the time stream (It isn't mentioned specifically, but all the people who time travel back to stop WWII come to mind) and 2) Maintain his cover as a crimefighter of the era. 
 
The thing of it is, other than some future history skills and a Sense: Temporal Anomalies gadget in his costume, his powers aren't time related at all.  He has some futuristic technology like his ray gun and fish bowl helmet life support as he needs to seem "futuristic" to the natives but beyond that he is expected to figure it out on his own.  Actual Time Travel seems to be limited to GM Fiat.  For a golden age hero, that isn't too unreasonable.  He mostly fights Nazis.

Where it gets weird is *why* he was assigned the Captain Future identity.  He was made Captain Future because history said that there has always been a Captain Future fighting crime throughout history, so impersonating him won't disrupt time.  There is a mention that it's possible all the Time Cops posing as Captain Future are the reason there has always *been* a Captain Future, but its played more for jokes than taken seriously.  It is ambiguous if all Time Cops are as confused as he is or if he just flunked Temporal Physics at the academy.

I agree, my philosophy of agents is that they are supposed to be cannon fodder, I want my heroes to mow through them, I want them to do that Captain America thing where he gets buried in a pile of them then throws them all away.  Agent power creep has been big time in later Hero stuff, more than I like.  But that's just my opinion.

Usable BY others allows someone else besides you to use the power/ability.
 
Usable ON others allows you to use a power on someone else as a combat action when it is normally a self or non-attack power.
 
 

i remember a rule saying you only have to pay END for STR once in a phase, no matter what you are doing

I don't think we ever saw any evidence that there is *any* mass limit to the gates.  One of Carter's more infamous tricks was blowing up a Star by reducing it's mass and causing it to go SuperNova.  She did this by connecting a Gate that was falling into a star to another gate that was next too a Black hole.  The Black hole pulled enough mass through the wormhole to affect the interaction between a Star's mass and it's internal atomic reactions.  This was with Milky Way gates
 
They didn't go into the math, but I'm betting its more than x128 the mass of a human.  Mass limits are a Hero System thing and don't appear to have any correlation in the Stargate franchise.  As far as I can tell, if it can physically fit through a gate it will travel through the wormhole.

I don't think we ever saw any evidence that there is *any* mass limit to the gates.  One of Carter's more infamous tricks was blowing up a Star by reducing it's mass and causing it to go SuperNova.  She did this by connecting a Gate that was falling into a star to another gate that was next too a Black hole.  The Black hole pulled enough mass through the wormhole to affect the interaction between a Star's mass and it's internal atomic reactions.  This was with Milky Way gates
 
They didn't go into the math, but I'm betting its more than x128 the mass of a human.  Mass limits are a Hero System thing and don't appear to have any correlation in the Stargate franchise.  As far as I can tell, if it can physically fit through a gate it will travel through the wormhole.

IIRC, we had a threead on this a year or two ago. Prenise was that the decline of magic wouldn't be instant, like flicking a switch, but a gradual dimming. Super-powers gradually weakened; new origins declined and eventually stopped. I don't remember the thread's title, but you might search for it.
 
For story reasons, I would presume that super-powers do not instantly stop working if a super time-travels to a low-magic epoch. Magic, after all, involves the mind, the soul and the self, not just ambient quasi-physical energies. Each super carries a bit of their own reality with them that keeps their powers running... for a while. But if Defender travels forward in time to a low-magic period, his armor eventually breaks down beyond repair even though the tech is more advanced and repairs should be easier -- because the principles on which his armor is based are subtly wrong, with magic disguising the flaws.
 
Other PCs in such a scenario would likewise see their powers become weaker or less reliable, until they reached the level that was generally considered possible at that time.
 
Like I've said before, logic is a slut that will do anything for anyone, at least where imaginary worlds are concerned. Decide what story you want, invent whatever metaphysics you need to justify it. IN this case, I think the most dramatic option is a gradual but perceptible decline as a way to put time pressure on the characters. Though other options are possible. Just try to keep it consistent if you do more than one time travel adventure.
 
Dean Shomshak

I've long felt Rogue might well be the single most expensive character to define, at least among the everyday-style Marvel characters.  Not more powerful per se...more expensive.  Think of the number of dice to drain a 15d6 blast...that's at least 75 active points.  Sure, you can take a few phases, but it's still gonna need to be 5-6 dice at least.  Then start piling on the advantages:
 
--any power
--how many powers at a time?  Believe it was several
--return rate to victim
 
On Rogue's side, it can't be Aid as written.  It's a 15 point Transform.  And you've still got 
--any power, but matches power(s) drained from victim 
--multiple powers at once
--fade rate
--Partial Transform?
 
And the active points will be so *insanely* high that 0 END will be needed.  
 
You always have to be careful in trying to translate oddball powers, as they are, as Hugh mentions, most often plot devices.  Rogue's power is a HUGE problem for her...kiss her boyfriend for 10 seconds, steal ALL his powers *forever*?  Or something about that level.  Once you break that down, it's OMG that's an insane power.  I think we as players too often have the very bad habit of trying to recast it so it's semi-manageable and usable, rather than going with implementing it very closely to the presentation, points be damned.
 
 
 
 

You aren't wrong.  Back in Fourth there was a "Transfer" power that worked the way you describe.  It was removed because it was basically Drain and Aid mushed together and Steve Long felt it was cleaner just to have the two powers each do their thing rather than have a 3rd one to worry about.
 
I miss the simplicity of Transfer, but the new way works fine.

Unfortunately this is one of those "choose your poison" type questions.  Most games just assume how many hits they want it to take for a hero to go down and then bake it into the system without asking you.  This is why games like Pathfinder have "average damage by Challenge Rating" in the DM guide.  They know how many HP a hero should roughy have and go for it.  Hero lets you choose.  Which is great, but as you are seeing its weird when you have never had too before.

Do you have Fantasy Hero?  There is some discussion about stat levels on pages 109-111.
 
Basically, it's all relative.  As Bluesguy says, you want to decide
A) How much damage does a typical attack do? 
How many hits do I want my characters to be able to take before they go down? 
C) Figure out how much Stun you want everyone to have
D) Figure out how much damage should get through defenses by dividing the average campaign stun by how much how many hits you want it to take to drop people.  This will give you how much stun should get past defenses on each attack.  Because you already know how much damage is on average getting thrown around, you now know how much total def (personal PD+Armor/Spells/Etc) a character should have so the appropriate amount of damage gets through defenses.
 
From there, you set campaign levels. 

A couple of bits of advice:
1) Don't let the worst OCV/DCV be more than 2-3 points from the Best.  Hero rolls 3d6 for everything (which strongly favors lots of totals between 9 and 13) so a 3-4 point gap is a much bigger deal than in a system where you roll 1d20 for everything.  Guys with an OCV of 4 are going to have a *HARD* time hitting a DCV of 7
2) When you are starting out, don't let Speed scores get more than 1 point apart, 2 when you are more experienced.  A 3 speed character will get 2 fewer actions than a 5 speed character (obviously) but when actually playing it out it will *feel* like the 5 speed character is going all the time and the 3 speed one never gets too.  That doesn't feel good for a new player to a system.
3) In Hero, once you are past the defenses every extra die is pure damage.  (As in: If I have 10PD and you punch me for 4d6 & roll a 14, I take 4 stun.  If you punch for 5d6 and roll a 18, I now take 8 stun.  One more caused me to take twice as much damage.)  So when you are figuring out how much damage you want to throw around, keep the ranges fairly small at first.  In actual effectiveness, 8d6 will cause WAY more than 2x as much damage to get through than 4d6.  So initially, keep offenses in a fairly narrow range of damage dice and don't go nuts with weird stuff like AVLD until you have a better feel for the system.

This is only complicated until you have played a few fights.  Once you wrap your head around it it will go fairly quick.  And remember, Hero is mostly complicated when BUILDING characters.  Once you have everyone's character sheets the actual fights go a lot faster.
 

You aren't wrong.  Back in Fourth there was a "Transfer" power that worked the way you describe.  It was removed because it was basically Drain and Aid mushed together and Steve Long felt it was cleaner just to have the two powers each do their thing rather than have a 3rd one to worry about.
 
I miss the simplicity of Transfer, but the new way works fine.

You aren't wrong.  Back in Fourth there was a "Transfer" power that worked the way you describe.  It was removed because it was basically Drain and Aid mushed together and Steve Long felt it was cleaner just to have the two powers each do their thing rather than have a 3rd one to worry about.
 
I miss the simplicity of Transfer, but the new way works fine.

I remember a long-ago discussion right here on the boards about what Caps shield can and can't do that got hung up on a comic where he jumped out of a 10 story building and curled up on the shield when he landed, then ran off like nothing had happened (I noted with some amusement that he does this *exact* thing in Winter Soldier). 
Some folks were fine with it because he was just soaking the falling damage & his shield can do that.  Others were not buying it because momentum doesn't work that way.
This turned into (as internet discussions do) a discussion of "can Cap stop a bus by standing in front of it and blocking with his shield?"  It was agreed Hulk could probably punch the bus to a stop from the front, and Cap holding the Shield can take a Hulk punch so can Cap holding the shield take a hit from a bus and stop it?
 
My takeaway was that this is all rubber physics and it's mostly a question of when does your suspension of disbelief start to fray.  We are more aware of how bad falling is and how massive a bus is, but we have a fuzzy idea of how much pressure a Hulk fist applies on a Newtons per square inch level so somehow falling onto the shield bothers people in a way that withstanding a Hulk fist doesn't.

The MCU just make that even more visible.

I remember a long-ago discussion right here on the boards about what Caps shield can and can't do that got hung up on a comic where he jumped out of a 10 story building and curled up on the shield when he landed, then ran off like nothing had happened (I noted with some amusement that he does this *exact* thing in Winter Soldier). 
Some folks were fine with it because he was just soaking the falling damage & his shield can do that.  Others were not buying it because momentum doesn't work that way.
This turned into (as internet discussions do) a discussion of "can Cap stop a bus by standing in front of it and blocking with his shield?"  It was agreed Hulk could probably punch the bus to a stop from the front, and Cap holding the Shield can take a Hulk punch so can Cap holding the shield take a hit from a bus and stop it?
 
My takeaway was that this is all rubber physics and it's mostly a question of when does your suspension of disbelief start to fray.  We are more aware of how bad falling is and how massive a bus is, but we have a fuzzy idea of how much pressure a Hulk fist applies on a Newtons per square inch level so somehow falling onto the shield bothers people in a way that withstanding a Hulk fist doesn't.

The MCU just make that even more visible.

and his mother...and his father...and his brother...and his friends...and he didn't just lose a big battle - he basically got half the universe killed because he had Thanos beat and took time to gloat.  Yeesh, it's perfectly realistic for him to quit on life IMO.

Thinking about how easy Hero is to start up, I think one of the problems is that there aren't enough examples of how to use the toolkit to make the setting you want.

In the Supers books there is usually somewhere that says "A strong guy should have these stats, a fast guy should have these. buy about this many active points of powers".  The published characters then generally follow that.
 
When you get to some of the Genre books it gets murkier.  I feel like I have seen a zillion threads that boil down to "how much armor should my dungeoncrawl paladin have?  and how should he compare to the thief?"  Some theoretical "how to play hero" web supplement should have a 4 person party & 2-3 standard enemies for them in as many genres as feasible.  Both to help new GMs pick which they like but also to give them a starting point.  Your Conan Expy will be built a lot differently than your Robin Hood Expy.

Your arguments make sense for a PC that has to balance his points and keep within campaign limits.  Mechanon is an uber-villain who gets to ignore all that.
Mechanon's got a zillion powers now and as an uber villain his point totals and active point limits and END totals are ridiculous anyway.
 
Built in weapons multipower: 150 active points
1) Pulson Beam Array: 15d6Blast variable advantage +1/2 (+1)
2) Disintigrator Array: 5d6 RKA, variable advantage +1/2 (+1)
 
This does leave him without his 22d6 main blast, but you could replace that with a 3rd slot if you wanted.  Otherwise, this gives him 90% of what he can do now with his main multipower and actually increases his flexibility while making his sheet a lot easier to read.
 
I'm not arguing this is how he should have been written. I'm not sure Mechanon needs an affects desolid Pulson Beam or a Megascale Disintegrator beam.  I am arguing that at some point his three offensive multipowers with a bunch of slightly different slots crosses over from a lot of utility into "too much to keep track of".  I miss 4th edition Mechanon that could still take on a whole PC team but whose writup fit on half a page.

Inspired by the recent conversations about in-universe fictional replacements, I got curious about how the in-universe "real" members of the Champions changed over time in the 5e/6e Champions Universe and started digging.  Im admittedly mixing two different editions here, but they are fairly compatible lore wise, with just a bit of weirdness around Nightwind.
 
Champions Complete (among other sources) indicates that Defender founded the Champions in 2001 and the team quickly became:
Defender
Sapphire
Nighthawk
IronClad
Witchcraft
AKA: The Classic Lineup
 
Millennium City mentions that they frequently team up with Doctor Silverback, Kinetik and Nightwind who consider them allies but are not members.
 
In 2006 Nighthawk faked his own death to work undercover without letting his team know his plans and came to blows with Defender when the truth came out.  He quit the team before they could vote on his expulsion.  He was replaced by Kinetik who the Champions had worked with numerous times before. "Champions Universe: News of the World" says the Champions also added Nightwind and he helps the Champions fight Mechanon on October 15th 2006 (Book of the Machine) , but Champions Complete (the most recent book by publishing date) has a mini-recap of the events of 2006 and writeups of the characters that doesn't mention him.  So maybe?
 
So in 2006 the Champions membership was:
Defender
Sapphire
IronClad
Witchcraft
Kinetik
Nightwind?
 
The Champions 2007 chapter from "Champions Universe: News of the World" lists the team membership as
Defender
Sapphire
IronClad
Witchcraft
Kinetik
Nightwind
This is pretty much the same as 2006 but I list it as it definitely included Nightwind where as there are some questions about his 2006 status.
 
Champions Universe 6E indicates that the Champions have a set of reserve members they can call when needed.  If we assume the publishing date is the date in-universe:
Champions 2010
Defender
Ironclad
Kinetik
Sapphire
Witchcraft
 
Champions 2010 Reserves:
Dr. Silverback
Nightwind
Ultratech
Blockhead
Crusader
The first two are described in "Millennium City".  Does anyone know if the last 3 are written up anywhere?
 
It is also stated that Nighthawk still sometimes helps the team, which implies that his former teammates have at least partially forgiven him.
 
The Champions Complete book lists the membership as of 2012 as the same as 2010 but makes no mention of their reserves.  As this is a quick overview of the team the reserves may or may not exist.
Defender
Sapphire
IronClad
Witchcraft
Kinetik
 
Galactic Champions recounts Mechanon's final battle with the Champions in the then futuristic 2014 and has a very different membership:
Defender
Kinetik
Ironclad
Tekno
Deuce
Witchcraft
I'm assuming that Deuce (with her shadow form) was the same Deuce mentioned in "Conquers, Killer, and Crooks" as part of PSI's Support team who was the same Deuce who got a writeup in 4E's "Mind Games".  I kind of like that she eventually got away from PSI and joined the side of the angels.
 
I'm not sure who Tekno is?  I briefly thought Teknique from Millennium City changed her name as that is where many of the new Champions come from, but Tekno is a He and we don't get any indication that Leah Reece has any ambitions for gender transition.  Did I miss a writeup somewhere?
 
At this point our info runs out.  The 5e/6e universe used to end shortly after 2020 when a battle with Tyranon uses up the magic that made powers possible.  We know that Kinetik and Witchcraft die in the Antartic battle with Tyranon and that all supertech and metahuman powers fade completely by 2022 but we don't know who was on the Champions roster at the end or what their final fates were.  Other than that Defenders family continued to produce the heroes their ages needed for at least 1000 more years.
 
This was what my memory and a bit of reading dug up.  Do we know of any other roster changes for THE HERO system superteam in the 5e/6e timeline?
 

@MainSandwichSalad, another thing you can do which helps is take to normals give them weapons and FIGHT! Then mix it up, normal versus skilled. Keep track on what the average die is rolled. If some one rolled fantastic, like getting and average of 5 per die then you’d probably one shotted the opponent no problem. If average die is 2 and they’re still taken out well then something should be increased. You can crunch the numbers but I feel seeing it in action works better. 

Unfortunately this is one of those "choose your poison" type questions.  Most games just assume how many hits they want it to take for a hero to go down and then bake it into the system without asking you.  This is why games like Pathfinder have "average damage by Challenge Rating" in the DM guide.  They know how many HP a hero should roughy have and go for it.  Hero lets you choose.  Which is great, but as you are seeing its weird when you have never had too before.

Do you have Fantasy Hero?  There is some discussion about stat levels on pages 109-111.
 
Basically, it's all relative.  As Bluesguy says, you want to decide
A) How much damage does a typical attack do? 
How many hits do I want my characters to be able to take before they go down? 
C) Figure out how much Stun you want everyone to have
D) Figure out how much damage should get through defenses by dividing the average campaign stun by how much how many hits you want it to take to drop people.  This will give you how much stun should get past defenses on each attack.  Because you already know how much damage is on average getting thrown around, you now know how much total def (personal PD+Armor/Spells/Etc) a character should have so the appropriate amount of damage gets through defenses.
 
From there, you set campaign levels. 

A couple of bits of advice:
1) Don't let the worst OCV/DCV be more than 2-3 points from the Best.  Hero rolls 3d6 for everything (which strongly favors lots of totals between 9 and 13) so a 3-4 point gap is a much bigger deal than in a system where you roll 1d20 for everything.  Guys with an OCV of 4 are going to have a *HARD* time hitting a DCV of 7
2) When you are starting out, don't let Speed scores get more than 1 point apart, 2 when you are more experienced.  A 3 speed character will get 2 fewer actions than a 5 speed character (obviously) but when actually playing it out it will *feel* like the 5 speed character is going all the time and the 3 speed one never gets too.  That doesn't feel good for a new player to a system.
3) In Hero, once you are past the defenses every extra die is pure damage.  (As in: If I have 10PD and you punch me for 4d6 & roll a 14, I take 4 stun.  If you punch for 5d6 and roll a 18, I now take 8 stun.  One more caused me to take twice as much damage.)  So when you are figuring out how much damage you want to throw around, keep the ranges fairly small at first.  In actual effectiveness, 8d6 will cause WAY more than 2x as much damage to get through than 4d6.  So initially, keep offenses in a fairly narrow range of damage dice and don't go nuts with weird stuff like AVLD until you have a better feel for the system.

This is only complicated until you have played a few fights.  Once you wrap your head around it it will go fairly quick.  And remember, Hero is mostly complicated when BUILDING characters.  Once you have everyone's character sheets the actual fights go a lot faster.
 

Another thing I notice about Mechanon (for example) is that he has several multipower slots where he buys a big attack, then the next slot is that same attack at fewer dice but 0End.  Dr. Destroyer does the same thing.
I can totally understand how these are useful, but are they useful enough to actually keep track of?  If he really needs all these options, you could still cut about half his multipower out by giving him Blast, variable advantage.

Once again, these are examples from a Master villain, but I think it's a thing

He's right, though, both him and Dr Destroyer became books when they didn't need to be that complicated and written up.  Dr Destroyer is a great scientist, just give him the basic branches of science at a high level and then assume he's also good at molecular and experimental and all the other versions of each.  Give him x points of followers, not x points each of a-z different types.  Its not really that necessary to give each and every single possible ability on paper to bad guys, especially mega villains.  He's got a lot of followers and bases, good enough.
 
I mean seriously as a GM if the bad guy doesn't have enough points to buy that base do you just say "well shoot I guess he doesn't get it!" or just give him the base anyway?

But that version almost never showed up in any of the color art.  I think Champions of the North goes with that, but it may be the only art that does.

On the cover of the Core Book (the Perez art with Seeker Fighting Dr. Destroyer), Defender's shoulders are red & his helmet is blue.  Which is the scheme they go with on Champions in 3D and Challenges for Champions.
Kingdom of Champions gave him a red helmet
Zodiac Conspiracy show him the White torso & shoulders like in the image above, but reversed the colors on his legs
Invaders from Below gave him a white helmet & gauntlets, a Red Torso, and blue legs and biceps
Allies also gave him a White Helmet, but with White Forearm guards and Blue Gauntlets

I'm gonna just assume that 4th edition Defender didn't have multiple suits, he had an assortment of Helmets, Torsos, Gauntlets, Boots, etc that were all some variant of Red/White/Blue which he put on at random and we were just lucky that the Boots normally matched.
 
 
 

I don't think we ever saw any evidence that there is *any* mass limit to the gates.  One of Carter's more infamous tricks was blowing up a Star by reducing it's mass and causing it to go SuperNova.  She did this by connecting a Gate that was falling into a star to another gate that was next too a Black hole.  The Black hole pulled enough mass through the wormhole to affect the interaction between a Star's mass and it's internal atomic reactions.  This was with Milky Way gates
 
They didn't go into the math, but I'm betting its more than x128 the mass of a human.  Mass limits are a Hero System thing and don't appear to have any correlation in the Stargate franchise.  As far as I can tell, if it can physically fit through a gate it will travel through the wormhole.