Ndreare

That soft cover is the one I did illos for.  That was the original version. Before that was the xeroxed playtest rules.  (Also by Steve Petersen). If the Hard back is the same interior as the soft cover, then it was probably a custom job, as I have never heard of a hardback version.  However it was common at the time to take soft covers to binderies and have them rebound as hardbacks. This only cost about $60 bucks at the time.  Now it is a lot more expensive. 

This is discussed in 6e1p208-209.

Played a lot of Champions back in the day, using what I now know is the "3rd ed."  My friends and I played a few years after the 4th edition came out, but we were basically a 3rd edition group.  Strict adherence to any rules was not really an issue.  We played for fun.  If a dice role would break something, we looked away and rolled again.  And we took turns being GM, but each had our own character who would, when we were GM, essentially tag along as an NPC.  That said, we took our characters seriously and loved working within the rules to build and then, with experience, flesh out characters over time.
 
Anyway, many years after I stopped playing but many years ago, now, I bought a copy of the Hero System 5th edition rule book.  I just got it, in mint condition (minus a little yellowing of the pages), out of an old box of stuff I brought over from my parent's basement.  Now, my kids want to play!
 
My son has an idea for building a character, and I'm looking through the 5th edition rule book (I no longer know where my 3rd and 4th are) and thinking about how to build the powers he's described.  I could definitely use some help from "the experts."  Is this the right place to post about that?

It's an interesting idea. I might de-power them a bit to bring them into fantasy, unless you're running a pretty epic campaign. Could they fit in? Sure. I'd use them similar to the Nine Princes of Amber or a hidden species that players slow evolve into.

They were determined using the value of a Physical Complication of lacking the missing sense.

Perhaps you could use autofire or boostable charges to represent what you want?

Is there something like this worked out somewhere already? I need it because one of the characters in my game interact constantly with these events

You could just assume what people did at the time, where "man" simply means "human being".  I mean if you're going to set it at a time period with the language and words of the time its an option.

15-ish years ago, Darren and I were the guests of honor at HeroCon in Baltimore.
They had a big table (or maybe even two) covered with books. As per the rules, whenever we'd finish running a game or speaking on a panel, we'd go up and grab a few books.
I saw one book under a few others that was written by a friend of mine from high school. It had a sticker on the front that said Autographed Copy. And the sticker was from a bookstore back in my hometown, 600 miles away.
I picked it up and looked inside to see the autograph, and it was autographed to me! Using my nickname from college. Couldn't have been any other New Wave Dave.
 

That volatility is the issue.  We're moving between the extremes of setting standard damage - 12 DC is always 42 STUN, 12 BOD normal or 37 STUN 14 BOD KA (the pre-6e averages) and toss a coin - it's either 12 STUN, 0 BOD or 72 STUN, 24 BOD for a normal attack or 120 STUN, 24 BOD for a KA.  How effective each approach in between is depends a lot on the defenses of the target, because the roll is not as important as the damage passed through defenses.
 
 
Compared to 1d6-1, where we would see 64/216 1, and 32/216 for the rest, much less chance of plinking, slightly lower chance of 4-5 and markedly lower chance of a 5.  Average multiple grows to 2.87 from 2.67.  It's not the spread that  makes the issue less noticable in Heroic games with hit locations.
 
 
I don't believe the suggestion was to use hit locations.  It was to use that probability distribution to determine a stun multiple in the abstract.  For 12 points (8 PSLs to offset hit location penalties) every attack can target the head.  12 points isn't a big investment for a Super to double normal damage or guarantee a 5x KA Stun multiple.
 
 
You're not going to want it because you don't want the added volatility.  The question is not "do I want added volatility" or "should this be the new damage standard".  It is "how do we level the playing field between KAs and normal attacks, by reducing KA volatility to be comparable to normal attacks (which has attracted minimal comment) or by enhancing Normal Attack volatility to be comparable to Killing Attacks.  It's funny - Hero gamers are normally about dials we can set, and options for our preferred playstyle, not one true wayism like "more volatility bad for me so bad for everyone". 
 
For those of us not fans of volatility, we don't need a STUN multiple - we can go to that 1d6 = 1 DC KA model from my initial post (that one has not attracted much commentary; I'll reprint below), or discuss other options, to bring KA volatility down.  For those who like that wild swinginess, why is it good for KAs but not good for normal attacks (unless your goal is to incent all characters to killing attacks).  My wakeup call for this was realizing how often I gave mooks 2d6 KAs instead of 6d6 Blasters so they could get some STUN through.  The KA was always the better choice at the same DC and point cost.
 
 
That is one reason Heroic has less issues, I believe - Normal attacks can also do enhanced damage.
 
 
Yup - volatility means you either need much higher defenses to cope with the occasional lucky roll (and there will be one eventually), and those defenses are so high average attacks become useless.  Enough defenses to feel secure a 5x Stun Multiple isn't always going to exceed CON is enough defenses that the same DC normal attack is useless.  Those who want the volatility presumably also want a combat model with a material risk that a lucky shot will stun a typical target.  That's not "right" or "wrong" - it's just a different playstyle.
 
 
So why would a similar level of volatility to that which a KA gets by default be an advantage on a normal attack? If this added volatility should carry a higher cost for an attack that averages 3.5 STUN and 1 BOD per DC, and caps out at 120 STUN and 20 BOD, why would it not be an advantage for the KA, that averages more BOD and a bit less STUN, has similar volatility and caps out at 120 STUN and 24 BOD, even before considering the KA requires a special defense (I don't see that as huge when pretty much everyone buys that special defense)?
 
A less volatile KA Option:  For KA's on 1d6 per 5 points, consider counting BOD like we do now, except that we get 1 BOD on 1-5, 2 on a 6.  This averages 3.5 BOD per 3 DC's, just like the pre-6e KA model.  That's the easy part.  We also want to average roughly 9 1/3 STUN on 3d6 if the goal is to match a pre-6e KA.  The average roll will be 10.5, so if we subtracted half the dice rolled, we would get 9.0.  What if we added up the dice, but ignored all 2's (they count nothing)?  That would average 3.16667, so 3d6 averages 9.5.  That's a "normal attack" level of volatility for Killing Attacks.

Hero System 6e Bestiary. 
 
 It gives you an amazing sense of scale and understanding of the system. Just by looking at all the monsters in there and inspiration across so many genres

Nice, this makes so many things possible. I am bringing friends into Hero and was thinking we would not have a good way of getting all my bad guys in there. 
Thank you very much for this video.

Before 6th came out we'd started using hit locations instead of a stun multiplier die.  That way you get 3d6 and a more predictable, smoother curve of effects (both low and high tend to be unlikely, but possible). You ignore all the other hit location mechanics and just use it to determine the stun multiplier of the KA.

Yes. As a matter of fact, that is how I uploaded the characters from Champions Complete and Champions Begins into Roll20 for the upcoming project. Here is a video link that shows you how to do it. Note, that you can now select the importer from a drop down in roll20 instead of copying the link. 

No, rebrought those already, still don't want the hardback vol1. I know Waco is a small town really but this is crazy.
 
Pelts you with D6

This is so very cool. I recently came back to Hero after about 5-6 years away and planned on using roll20. Finding out someone is working on it is super awesome and I really look forward to when you work becomes available to consumers. 

So when I got out of prison and even before I picked up some hero books. While at a half-way house my parole officer revoked me. The owners refused to give me belongings to a friend citing "rent due" even though they hoarded my money in their bank account. So all books, clothes, family photos from prison or brought after disappeared.
 
The point. Going to the LGS here I see some used Hero books...APG 1 & 2. After I pay and have lunch I really look and guess what!! They had been sitting there for 6-7 years. The store had 4 more Hero books and after looking at my store purchases I'm laying odds they were mine too.

You say you dont need a VTT but there is no reason you could not use a VTT to accomplish this.
 
With the work that has been done to make HERO playable on Roll20, the base level membership of Roll20 should allow you to discuss, share maps, roll dice and play asynchronously.  It actually means that Roll20's biggest weakness - its audio and video - vanishes.  While it would allow real-time play, there is no need to use it that way and I think it could provide a decent platform for play by post...
 
I would even use the bulletin board attached to the game to do a lot of the discussions - no need to even fire up the game to do those discussions and you get decent threaded conversations.
 
Doc
 

Paizo.COM has a rather extensive PbP forum, with the occasional Hero System game.  More importantly, it has tools for spoilers, die rolls, etc built into it, and they let you play in any game system you like.  

Hello everyone, 
 
Between summer vacation and holidays, we haven't posted an update for several weeks, but work continued. 
 
We did finally were able to meet with Roll20 to get the Compendium for Champions Complete going last week. Currently, we are working on updating the Structured-Data Template for the book. This template is basically used to organize the book's content into a format used to create the Compendium in Roll20. We're about 40% done with this process and hope to finalize it by the end of next week. 
 
We've also continued to update the maps for the Viper's Nest Adventure using Blender. To give you a preview of the difference with using Blender, I'm attaching the updated version of the Lake Forest Cemetery. Let me know what you think!
 
As I may have mentioned before, the Viper's Nest adventure text, characters, villains are entered and completed in Roll20. We will finalize the maps in between updating the Compendium. 
 
With the current progress, we've caught up with the timeline, so still looking at a 4Q release. 

We were able to get a lot accomplished this week for the Champions Begins GM Book & Adventure. We completed editing of Chapters 1 through 4, and added the content to the Roll20 Adventure that'll be included in the bundle. The work done this week concentrated on editing and proofreading the adventure, and formatting it for Roll20. It's just the copy text and art for now. The maps, characters, and tokens are planned for after the text content for the adventure is complete. 
 
The plan for next week is to complete Chapter 5 by editing and formatting for Roll20 (making sure all the headers are consistent, another proofreading pass and such). Then doing a final edit and proofreading pass of the whole adventure. Additionally, we'll do a final review to particularly look for opportunities to include additional links in the text for easy access to references. For example, clicking on VIPER Agent in the text will open up the Character Sheet for it, or clicking the name of a Skill will open up a window with the description. As a stretch goal for the week, we will start adding the characters and character sheets. We'll start with the pre-generated characters first. That'll be a bit of work considering each pregen has a new character sheet per chapter. 

Shrug.  Its usually best not to look into the personal past or ideals and lifestyle of creators you admire, no matter what their work.  Enjoy their work and use it as you see fit regardless of the failings or stupidity of the creators.  If you start to judge someone's work by their creator you have to end up throwing out most of what you enjoy.

Its a bit frustrating as a PC to have your KA either bounce or do a lot of damage, depending on a single die roll.  That's one of the things that I don't like with D&D, the single die roll resolution for nearly everything.  I love the polyhedral dice, but I don't like how they are used.  Savage Worlds has single die roll resolution as well, although it can "explode" to more dice creating extreme volatility, again.
 
I appreciate the designers of Hero trying to make different kinds of attacks feel different and have different mechanics, but in the end I think its best to convert KA into blast damage and treat the defenses differently.

So design your house rule accordingly.  I would rule that the doubling of cost over 50 AP, in your example, means the AP is doubled. The Multipower pool is 150 points, so it can hold 50 AP + 50x2 AP = 100 AP worth of the power (say 20d6 Blast) consuming the full 150 point pool.
 
A character buying a 20d6 Blast outside the Multipower would also pay 150 points.
 
Or simply prohibit any power in a power framework from ever exceeding the campaign max, period, no "double cost" exception. 
 
It's a house rule.
 
It comes with the challenge of dovetailing with all of the other rules which don't, under RAW, fit within your house rule.  For example, does that 20d6 Blast that cost 150 points use 10 END or 15 END?  If you Push for 10 points, is that +2d6, or +1d6?  Does a Haymaker increase it by 2d6, or 4d6?
 
It comes with the advantage that you decide how it works.  You change it when it does not work.

Its yet another level of calculation and I'm not convinced its balanced properly yet so I cannot recommend it to people.