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Well, the point could be to view/read the PDF(s) on computers and mobile devices, and that's it. There are DRM settings that can be set to restrict PDFs in exactly this manner by whomever creates them. Even if the creator/publisher doesn't do this, it may be their wish that hardcopies of the content not be made, or only made with their permission. I'm fairly certain such attempts to abrogate Fair Use rights are legally unsupportable, but I still like to know the publisher's stand on the matter.

For some reason I regard the notion of hacking as a superpower as kind of stupid. About as stupid as any number of other dumb powers given to characters in the comics over the years. But what makes superhacking especially annoying to me is that the idea is given a weird cultural currency simply because we live in a time when hackers are disrupting our lives on a massive scale every year. To the ignorant, hacking a quinjet with a cell phone doesn't seem far-fetched, and thanks to them, otherwise smart writing is willingly undermined by lazy writing.

The notion that Hero's point system is a promise of perfect point balance is a naive fiction. It is, at best, a decent attempt to provide a consistent cost-for-power metric upon which to build roughly equal characters. But there has never been an edition of the game in which the GM was relieved of the obligation and duty to police character builds and concepts. I believe somewhat axiomatically that no system can be so perfect that intervention on the part of the GM is unnecessary. Consequently, it is up to the GM to recognize when a player is building purely for efficiency, not for concept, and to not indulge him in such. Shrugging and saying, "it's just human nature," is a cop-out. You're not being asked to regulate the stock market, just a handful of gamers. A character concept that is just inherently more point-efficient is a slightly different matter: the GM has to decide if that concept is acceptible in the campaign, and if so, accept it. Its slightly improved efficiency over other characters isn't really a problem unless you are dealing with immature children. In which case you have a much bigger problem on your hands; one that no game system I know of can help with.

Though it might feel a bit anachronistic, there could be a highly lethal disease that only affects dragons. I mean, aside from the occasional deity-inflicted "plague", disease doesn't usually play much of a role in swords and sorcery tales. The horrors of incurable diseases and devastating epidemics are generally regarded as elements of modern life, not the stuff of epic fantasy. And so its unusualness may be the very thing that makes it so evocative and scary, especially to dragons.

This is precisely why I rarely ever GM the Hero System. I think it would be a grave injustice to players everywhere to subject them to me as a GM; despite 30+ years of experience with the system, I just don't have what it takes to run it effectively. Now, my expectations are formed from my experiences playing Champions under the brilliant GM-ship of the guys at Flying Buffalo Games in Tempe back in the day (circa 1983), and any campaign run with less mastery is simply not worth showing up for, IMO. I know that sounds extreme, but who has the time or patience for game sessions where players are distracted, unattentive, and only engaged when their Phase comes up in combat?

Well, most GMs ballpark it. But in this day and age of digital assistants and mobile apps, a 30-sec alarm is not hard to setup and reset as each player's Phase comes up.

My philosophy is to change the game in stages, starting with changes that have the least impact on the rest of the game experience, and incorporating more extensive changes only as necessary (i.e., if combat still isn't fast enough). I recommend starting with changes that don't require any changes to character builds, and only institute policies that impact character builds as a last resort. The number one way to speed up combat is simple to describe, but difficult to get players to adhere to: 30 seconds to take your Phase. A player who isn't resolving their action in 30 seconds is either Holding Until Attacked or taking a Recovery (player's choice). This really shouldn't be an issue for experienced players. It takes around 10-15 seconds to move a miniature figure, declare a maneuver, and roll the attack and damage dice. The reason it seems to take players 5-10 minutes to conduct their Phase is because they wait until their Phase comes up to even begin to assess the current situation and decide what to do. Basically, they aren't paying attention to the game while others are taking their Phases. They should instead be constantly assessing the changing situation in real-time, and have a number of possible actions to take in their heads at any given moment. When the GM says, "It's your Phase," the player should take no more than ten seconds deciding which action to take, and then 10-20 seconds resolving it. This alone will cut your combat time down by an order of magnitude. If that isn't speedy enough, then try the following: 1. Don't give villains Recoveries. When dropped to 0 Stun or less, treat as -30 (GM-unc). 2. Everyone uses 5 End per Phase, regardless of what they do (unless unconscious or recovering, in which case they obviously use no End that Phase). 3. Don't use the Speed Chart. Characters act in Speed order, then Dex order within a Spd category. There are no Segments therefore there is no post-Segment 12 Recovery. 4. If really desperate, don't let player characters take Recoveries either (except to recover from being Stunned). 5. Don't allow any Held Actions. I feel that these changes, combined with the 30-second Rule, are enough to speed up combat without losing the essential flavor of the game. If that's still not enough, then I'm not sure the Hero System is the right system for your group. You would be asking for a combat system so fast and abstract that the primary value of employing the Hero System is lost, so what's the point?

I thought the show's essential mandate was that everyone on the team was nothing more than a talented normal, and that the show would focus on the non-superpowered threats that were beyond the ability of police forces and paramilitaries to handle. I guess that idea went out the window... Not that I mind. A show about non-supers in a superhero universe is a whole lotta boring to me, and so I'm glad they are amping up the power level of the show in general.

What is the official policy regarding printing Hero System PDFs for personal use?

Ego can be substituted for Pre in such situations as well.

Hmm. Tougher = more DEF. For self-awareness, just give it the character's INT. Weapons on vehicles are easy enough...the vehicle rules provide for such things. Adding amphibious operation is no different than doing the same thing for, say, a James Bond car. I think you may be looking for problems where there really are none, whereas Shapshift glosses over far too many things to cover convincing vehicle operations IMO.

Speedsters like the Flash are unbelievably powerful. The only reason Barry in the show isn't absolutely owning every adversary he comes up against is because the writers are forcing him to not use his brain. He is contrived into being an absolute moron when it comes to confronting other metas. If he was given half the intelligence of anyone here (i.e., your average roleplaying nerd), the writers would have to earn their pay by actually coming up with inventive and plausible ways for the villains to overcome Barry Allen's Stop Sign collection of abilities. But he's not, and they don't, and that is probably the most frustrating thing about the show for me.

If you ignore the fact that the Guardians began as a comic book from a superhero comic book company, it is clear they are straight up space opera. Even the movie was meant to be experienced as space opera rather than as an extension of The Avengers stuff. And if you keep supers with tights out of a Guardians campaign, it can remain space opera through and through. If you marry the core Hero system rules with (space opera) genre advice from Star Hero, you should be good to go. I don't see any particular need to pull out Champions.

I would even go so far as to say that a Transformer in vehicle form isn't just "disguised" as a vehicle, it is a vehicle. That's why the so-called disguise is so effective. The nice thing about Multiform is that you also have the option of adding in-between forms, for times when you want to be half-truck/half-robot, like when you need to keep your passengers inside a relatively safe cockpit-like enclosure while fighting with arm weapons or whatever. Designing each form with a distinct character write-up gives you the freedom and flexibility to design it exactly as it needs to be, rather than trying to force the Shapeshift mechanics into handling the myriad things/properties a vehicle/robot hybrid can do/has.

You know what, I heard it wrong (twice...I rewound it on my DVR to verify, but apparently I misheard it twice). When Wells referred to "that man," I heard "Batman". "What that man does is carry out a dark reckoning for his city..." If you put Batman in place if "that man" it maintains identical grammatic syntax. Of course, "that man," referring to the Arrow, makes more sense contextually, but the fan in me couldn't help but think he heard something more interesting.

I kind of agree with La Rose; "war" is so broad a subject that I'm not sure what a book called War Hero would really bring to the table. I would much rather see a product line covering a particular war as an in-depth RPG setting, with material focused on its politics, geography, society, training regimens, weapons, vehicles, tactics, famous units, etc. And then follow that up with mission scenarios. I just don't think there is much to be gained anymore by putting out unfocused subject books that help the DIY crowd. I feel there is far more potential, both from a creative standpoint and a commercial standpoint, in rich, detailed settings that pull double-duty as fully playable worlds and as demonstrations of the core game mechanics.

Those APG powers don't appear in 6E1, but they still reside within the core library, which may have been the only qualification Steve needed to justify using them on a few villains.

I'm surprised nobody is talking about the fact that Wells name-dropped Batman in that episode!

Given the round ball's lack of penetration power, it might make more sense to have the musket deliver normal damage rather than killing damage. An 11d6 normal attack is still pretty devastating; it doesn't have to be a KA to incapacitate a normal person (like a soldier). It might also make sense to have its DCs diminish over distance due to its drag characteristics.

Which just further reinforces how invaluable a resource the new villain trilogy is.

Copies of the original pop up on eBay fairly regularly. Of course, you'll probably be paying collector's prices for it...

In a heroic campaign of derring-do in which wounds are just flesh wounds that the protagonists shrug off and deal with later, you can simply roll killing attacks as their Normal Damage equivalent, rather than keep them as KAs with reduced Damage Classes. So, instead of taking a 3d6 KA and lowering it to 2d6 (average of 7 killing Body), roll it as 9d6 normal (average 9 non-killing Body). And allow extra (non-resistant) PD to be bought as a kind of combat luck that such heroes always seem to have in abundance. Of course, I'm assuming you just want to adjust for swashbuckling genre conventions, not rewrite the weapons because they seem overpowered regardless of genre. I mean, what's the point of treating killing attacks as killing attacks if they aren't going to be truly lethal? Lowering their DC still leaves them pretty lethal because they bypass normal defenses, and hit locations (a common Heroic campaign option) can potentially take an average damage roll and turn it into a kill shot. Simply translating from killing DCs to normal DCs takes away much of the lethality without neutering the overall potential impact of the attacks.

I can't speak about the cartoon (I've never seen it), but in the movies, people ride inside Bumblebee's vehicle form. Having a vehicle form that is built as an actual vehicle gives you all aspects/mechanics, both benefits and drawbacks, of being a vehicle. You don't have to approximate it. In the case of Bumblebee, just take the Chevrolet Camaro from the Hero System Vehicle Sourcebook and use it as the secondary form. Done and done.

Multiform might work. One form is the vehicle form; use the vehicles rules to build it (or just grab a stock vehicle from a supplement) and throw in some INT and EGO if necessary. The other form would be the giant robot form and could be built as an automaton with a few levels of Growth.

You might be thinking of the Marvel Super Heroes Basic Set. Judging from the writing and presentation style, it was definitely aimed at a younger audience. However, the Advanced Set was pretty much a straight up RPG with all the usual bells and whistles. Now, the use of descriptive terms to indicate power levels was unique to the FASERIP system, and some people liked it and others didn't. I guess having your character's Strength rated as "Monstrous" made the game feel cartoonish to some. Never really bothered me, to be honest. What probably bothered me more was being impressed that the Hulk could adrenaline surge in MSH up to Shift-Z Strength, which is listed as "up to 1000 tons" (a kiloton), and still find himself being almost three orders of magnitude weaker than pre-crisis Superman (his MEGS Strength of 25 lets him lift on the order of 800,000 tons, nearly a megaton).