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From what I can tell, Hero Games considers 6E1/6E2 obsolete and no longer representative of the current state of the Hero System rules. I'm not really sure why they make the PDFs of them available but not POD softcovers, but in any case only CC and the books based on the changes in CC are considered "current". For the record, the old 6e Hero System Core Library was: 6E1/6E2, APG1, APG2, Bestiary, Equipment Guide, Grimoire, Martial Arts, and Skills. Hero System Vehicles was originally intended to be the final volume in the core library, but never made it to publication before the product line was abandoned. If one's goal is to have the latest version of the rules for use in play, then CC is all you need. If one's goal is to complete a collection of previous edition materials, then acquiring 6E1 is pretty much a must, don't you think?

Would someone kindly translate this statement for me?

I guess I have a different definition for "instant" than others do. In Champions, several Turns of "bleeding to death" provides plenty of time for any number of Heal/Aid powers to get applied. To me, instant death is the kind that happens in the same Segment that the damage is applied. The fact that a successful Paramedics Roll is sufficient to stop the 1/Turn death march shows that the Hero System is somewhat cinematic by default. But it obviously takes little effort to get a campaign into "gritty realism" territory.

I might go with Submariner.

You shoulda used your boxing glove arrow then...

I thought death came when a character reached -BODY. How would taking 10 BODY killing damage be insta-kill? That would drop a normal human to 0. Even if they went a couple points negative, they would be bleeding, losing 1 BODY per Turn until reaching -BODY. Again, not exactly instant death. As for Savage Worlds, most GMs don't find much need to go soft on PCs because of bennies. Players get lots of opportunities to denude damage and pull their characters' fats out of the fire on their own by using bennies; the GM rarely has to intervene during the action. In terms of Champions, the availability of high defenses makes dying extremely rare among supers. As a GM, you'd have to make the heroes face a lot of really big KAs in order to worry much about character death. And in my experience, KAs are just not that common, even for villains. And that is probably where the GM's cinematic or lethal touch is most felt: the degree to which they introduce big KAs into the mix. For an authentic four-color feel, you gotta keep the KAs to a minimum.

The 3rd edition MEGS write-up also gives her a strength of 16, but no mention of a boost just for lifting. In that edition, Superman is given a strength of 25 and no special boost. Somewhere along the way, game designers realized that WW had been given much greater lifting capability, but didn't want it to contribute to damage output for some reason. Whatever their play-balance concerns might have been, I'm not sure we need to take that into consideration when making our own comparisons. If she has a strength of 22, then she has a strength of 22. The whole "only for lifting" nonsense can probably be ignored unless there is some well-known and explicated reason to treat WW as fighting with only 16 of her 22 strength.

I guess I am skeptical that fans can agree on a particular comic incarnation of either character for comparison, particularly since most storylines don't come equipped with real-world values upon which to base analysis. Nor do storylines come with any way of examining the mechanics of those characters' powers. Not in a way that game stats (and the associated game mechanics) do. It just seems to me that choosing a particular set of game stats for comparison is far more concrete and explicit and less subject to personal interpretation than the alternatives. And game stats aren't based on "some writer's whimsy", they are based on values determined in collaboration with the publishers of the comics and the custodians of everything deemed "official" by them. If you knew the kind of Byzantine approval process Marvel and DC imposed upon RPG publishers, you wouldn't characterize the game stats as anyone's "whimsy".

Game stats are useful because they provide an invariant set of values, approved by the IP holders, that represent reasonable shapshots of these characters that everyone would recognize. Game stats are intended to provide a level of consistency that the comics themselves typically fail to, which make them a far better baseline for comparison than estimated values drawn from arbitrary appearances cherry-picked by readers. So, grab the most powerful version of each character as documented in any officially-licensed RPG, and go from there. And, btw, in all the Marvel and DC game systems over the years, lifting capacity has always been translatable to real-world values, which is where the analysis occurs.

I'll be putting up an extra set of "damaged cover" 6E1/6E2 volumes on eBay soon. It'll be interesting to see what they go for.

The main reason I refer to game stats is because they are reasonably objective parameters. Using a game's simulational engine is a good way to test the question using mechanics that have complete transparency. Otherwise we are left with the same inconsistent narrative methods comic book writers use, and they can't be relied on much since their only interests are serving whatever preposterous plots they are trying to scratch out on deadline.

The maximum I've ever seen for Superman is a lifting capacity of 800,000 tons.

Based on the most recent DC Universe writeup, Wonder Woman has the strength to lift 1600 tons. If She-Hulk maxes out at 100 tons, then Diana outclasses her by more than an order of magnitude. Granted, in Champions terms that is only the difference between a 60 STR and an 80 STR, but you gotta figure those extra 4D6 of damage are eventually going to take their toll on poor old She-Hulk.

You mean the Kane of Old Mars stories? Are they any good? I've been thinking of picking up a copy of the anthology.

I finished The Man of Bronze recently and have started The Land of Terror.

Yeah, I love that too. My experience with Lulu has been so good that I find myself constantly trying to think of new book projects to create.

I hope you waited for a good discount code; the full cost for that many full-color pages is quite sobering.

The guy playing Heatwave is Dominic Purcell who was in the show Prison Break with Wentworth Miller some years ago. Miller pretty much steals the show every episode he's in.

Doh! Yes, I surely did mean 7 not 70.

Yeah, I see these things affecting the OCV of the attacker, not the DCV of the hex. A hex is an immobile, 70 cubic-meter volume and should have a fixed DCV of 0 (IMO). Any and all difficulties in targetting it should be reflected in situational OCV penalties, not an invariant DCV "bonus" (of 3) for the hex.

Again, "aiming at nothing" is not something the system regards as intrinsically difficult, as demonstrated by Teleport. As far as I can tell, there is no logical reason for hexes to have a DCV of 3. At best, it is a game balance hack that assumes giving hexes a DCV of 0 is unbalancing (despite making more sense logically). The house rule I want to try is this: the hex you are in is auto-hit (don't even bother rolling to hit). All other hexes are DCV 0. All OCV mods apply normally, including Range mods. This makes a lot more sense to me, and my instincts tell me there wouldn't be any noticible balance issues. But, of course, it needs to be tested in the field, so to speak.

Of course we're all free to use the rules however we wish. However, my personal philosophy is that redefining the rules unnecessarily constitutes "bad practices," which in my game sessions is equivalent to "incorrect usage." That's just my perspective, and I write all my posts within that context.

I use Lulu (www.lulu.com) for all my personal POD book projects. All told, I have created and printed nearly two dozen books, both hardcover and softcover, using their service. Every single one of them has met or exceeded my expectations in terms of the quality of the final product delivered to me. However, I want to stress that not all PDFs are the same, at least not as far as a POD service like Lulu is concerned. In order to get the best results, one must learn how to prepare a PDF for the proper paper size, especially if printing full-bleed. One must understand the quirks of font embedding and other esoteric concerns. In almost every case, all I had to do was make sure all the pages were the correct size (and all the same size, which is not always the case if a PDF is the result of scanning the original), upload them to my Lulu project page, and then let them do their magic. But the 6E1/6E2 books were a different matter. The PDFs that you get when you buy them from Hero Games are full-color and they make liberal use of advanced PS/PDF transparency features. Lulu's printer RIP will not print them properly. In order to get flawless output, I had to convert the documents to grayscale (which I wanted to do anyway in order to keep costs down), and flatten all transparency effects before uploading to Lulu. If you have tools like Adobe Acrobat Pro, these steps are fairly trivial, but if you don't then you'd probably have to negotiate with Lulu customer support to have them do it for you. Then there is the matter of the cover art. I am a graphic artist, and so working in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop is second nature to me. I spent an afternoon or two reconstructing the front and back cover graphics from the PDF files into properly-sized wraparound cover files (the dimensions of which are calculated and provided to you by Lulu after you've uploaded the main PDF and the thickness of the spine is determined). If you are not similarly inclined, then you will not get books from Lulu (or anyone for that matter) that look like mine. I mention all this because I don't want anyone to get the impression that it is always just a simple matter of uploading the original PDF files and then having them printed. If you know what you are doing, the final results can be impressive and the costs can be very low (well, as long as you stick with B&W interior pages), but preparing the material for perfect, error-free printing can require a bit of work (especially the wraparound cover). Caveat emptor and all that...

I don't have the technical specs, like paper stock or weight, available to me. But when I compare them side-by-side with the other core library books on my shelf, like The Hero System Martial Arts or The Hero System Equipment Guide, I detect absolutely no difference in quality between them. The cover stock feels exactly the same and the binding seems the same as well. The interior paper stock used in my 6E1/6E2 softcovers is maybe a teensy bit thicker, but overall I would say these volumes are indistinguishable from all the other core library books (and I have them all).

You seem to be asking, "What's in a name?" To which I say, "Everything." The name of a limitation is very important because it describes how the limitation affects the power. Not all -1/4 limitations have the same affect even though they all have the same cost impact. A power with Limited Range doesn't work the same way that a power with Conditional Range does. The power I was trying to build did not have Limited Range according to the RAW for that limitation, and so I don't feel it is correct to apply a -1/4 limitation with the label "Limited Range".