Brian Stanfield

That IS a titanic deed.
 
 
 
That Skill Roll is more limiting than it looks. It takes a penalty based on the Active Points in the spell. So it a spell has 75 Active Points, that's a -8 penalty. The character could have a Magic Skill of, say, 16 or less, and then find that to actually cast that spell they have only an 8 or less chance.
 
 
 
Well, one reason infinite spells in D&D would be a nightmare is that the spells are so powerful. But no one has a problem with a warrior swinging a sword a thousand times in a day. (well, the monsters getting a sword swung at them might have a problem, but who cares what they think?) If the spells are not that much more powerful than a warrior's abilities, there is less reason to put big restrictions on them.
 
With a batch of people new to Hero, you will probably be creating the characters anyway. So you can control how powerful the spells are and how they work.
 
What I did, was require spellcasters to buy an END Reserve, renamed "Mana Pool." You can put whatever Limitations you like on the RECovery of that END Reserve; including only refilling once a day. I ALSO put the "Requires a Roll" on the END Reserve and NOT on the spells; this has the effect of still requiring a roll to cast the spell (because you can't cast the spell without spending END, and it has to come from that Reserve) but the roll is not so cripplingly penalized because it's hard to spend enough Active Points of END to invoke the penalty. (no penalty at up to 25 END.) When the spellcaster is out of Mana, they have to stop casting until they replenish it (however you define as a way to replenish - rest, prayer, study, doing good deeds, sacrificing small animals, whatever.)
 
But if you are looking for a way to put an upper limit on how many spells can be cast per day, one thing you can do (perhaps in combination with the Mana Pool) is put the Charges Limitation on the MAGIC SKILL itself - you only get so many rolls on that Skill in a given day. Alternatively, you can put a Requires a Roll: Burnout Limitation on the Skill, so that rolling too high "burns out" the Skill and it can't be used the rest of the day. That makes it less predictable as to when the magic will run dry - whether that's good or bad is up to what you think.
 
Lucius Alexander
 
Summon Palindromedary
 

No... just no... I use these  Narrative mechanics with people I've been playing  with for 35 years in places. These mechanics are not training wheels, they are as integral to making the game work as having mechanics for resolving whether a punch lands or misses. "If you are mature role players you don't need rules for that. You should just be able to role play the fight without mechanics." They guide the group and provide structure for group interaction.
 
Not at all. The mechanics make the game. Mechanics matter to what kind of imaginative additions can be brought in, under what circumstances, etc. 

Ninjas always make things better!

Ninjas always make things better!

One thing I like about Complications is that they serve to remind players of a genre's most iconic conventions, and for those not very familiar with a genre they can serve a tutorial function. But I also think Complications go a bit beyond merely teaching how to roleplay, especially in a Champions (superhero) context where everything is cranked up to 11.
 
Complications are attributes of a character so potentially debilitating that you deserve some sort of compensation for agreeing to take them. Rather than viewing them as enforcing genre conventions and role-aligned actions (after all, they are entirely optional in the sense that every character is free to not take any), I find it more worthwhile to view them as reward vehicles for voluntarily taking traits that will cause real, and sometimes dire, difficulties for PCs. I see Complications as a vital part of the point economy built into the very foundation of the Hero System, and not merely as a means to incentivise roleplaying (that's just a side effect, in my view).
 
Another benefit of Complications is that they help GMs build plots that are PC-centric, which engage players far more deeply than generic plots with little or no direct connection to their characters. If Complications incentivise anything they incentivise PC-centric plot construction, which is full of win in my book because that helps intertwine characters with the game setting in a way that even writing an elaborate piece of fanfic as a backstory usually won't.

Yes... Advantage Gained vs. Dramatic Challenge.  As a kind of hamfisted example... say, the player, when they get the advantage (adding extra dice to an attack, or guaranteeing a skill roll, whatever) the GM (or even better ,the play group as a whole) get a chit or something symbolizing "Drama!" which will force a challenging, dramatic shift when played. So... now, the PC, having just gotten the bonus to make a really difficult stealth role, sneaks into the base... GM asks, "Ok... any ideas on the drama challenge?" and one of the other players says, "I have an idea... how about this... we see PC Lad sneaking into the base, but cut scene, not far behind him, dressed in black with a look of determination on her face, is LL Smith, Roving Reporter and PC Lad's DNPC, who'd followed him up to Storm Mountain in the hopes of a big story! She follows PC Lad's path, and thinks she's made it when out of nowhere, a net falls on her followed by six ninjas! She's captured!"  
 
So now the PC's DNPC has been invoked, providing dramatic challenge, and it was a group decision and interaction that brought it into play, not just the GM "screwing with" the player. Suddenly the game becomes really fun and engaging storytelling. You'll get players debating whether it is good or necessary to risk further challenge for a benefit now. You can limit the number of times you can invoke the benefit, making it a special, powerful moment in the story, etc.
 
Sure, if you have min-max munchkins in the group where they only want to demonstrate rule mastery and that they are 'better' at the game than others... well, they aren't going to buy into this. But if people want story and drama and character development and such, this kind of thing can give a structure to pulling them out of the group imagination, rather than just hoping people are all on the same page and engaged.

This is old school RPG thinking, where the players are poised against the GM, and anything other than min-maxing task resolution/combat actions are considered a "mistake" by the players to be punished. Original CoC was taking a stab at narrative mechanics with this insanity enforcement, but it was long before that kind of game development hit its stride. It felt punitive to that old school mindset.
 
For a CoC game, or any such, you really need to be thinking narratively, as a player, and not "protagonizing" your PC... because it isn't about the PC gaining points and getting more mechanically powerful over time, it is about the PC as a vehicle to role play madness and obsession and isolation to evoke that feeling in the playgroup. The player doesn't lose agency, it is about granting them the agency to role play that descent into dissolution in a way that is an enjoyable experience.
 
To say mechanics don't matter to role playing is wrong. Just expecting players to "get it" and all have the same experiential reference will never really work, not even with long standing, similar style players. Providing a structure is important. Hero "rewards" players who want to be good at punching things by giving them a clear system and interactive mechanics for them to demonstrate effective punching. The same is for many different task resolutions, combat or no. 
 
To get to Brian Stanfield's question... there are many different Narrative Mechanics that layer very nicely over Hero's Task Resolution mechanics, so you can get the best of both worlds. Try a "bennies" system  or an "advantage/threat" system like in the current Star Wars RPG. Usually some mechanic that allows a level of director stance to players, works with intent not just action resolution ("You hit him, but what did you want to happen as a result of you hitting him?")  
 
Hero has traditionally not addressed (back to this thread's origins) Narrative mechanics, coming out of the old school, vanilla role playing concepts (mechanics help you fight, everything else is based on whether the player is just "good at it") though it has some attempts at this... the original Presence Attack was a step toward this, as it helped encourage intent "After I punch the guy's lights out, I want the others realizing they are outclassed and maybe giving up!" which was a great thing. It was limited in its applications, and was still about losing agency if the effect was turned on the PCs.
 
If you want to encourage role playing, maybe something like "Drama Dice" (which I'm making up as I type)... say PCs have a pool of dice, separated (by color?) from their other dice. They can choose to add these dice to a damage roll, or have the subtracted from a skill roll, but the number of dice, or amount rolled on them would result in some kind of challenge or dramatic shift appropriate to the story... and the PLAYERS get to help come up with this outcome, not just the GM... so "We are getting smacked down by the Doominator! I go all in on this blast, 'cause we have to take him out!  (Rolls big dice pool with Drama Dice added... gets big numbers!) YES! Got him! But oh boy, look at all those drama dice... something... let me think... oh, I got it, you mentioned that school bus earlier!  Well my blast was so powerful, it cracked the bridge struts, and suddenly it is starting to collapse out from under that bus! We have to save 'em!"   
 
When the PLAYERS are encouraged to create these kind of drama bits... even if just by adding the dice to the pool and letting the GM come up with the drama issue afterwards... they are much more invested in the scene, theme story, than just reacting to every decision being implemented by the GM. This kind of mechanic encourages player involvement in the drama, provides an ingame reward, as well as encourages metagame dynamics... and some very small aspects of this (again, easily layered on to basic Hero task resolution mechanics) can go a long way toward encouraging the kind of experiential role playing that otherwise is just left up to undefined "good role playing" and whatever the heck that might mean for that particular group.

A good GM will make use of those Complications for sure. Unfortunately, they require a certain degree of cooperation from the players. They have to "play along", so to speak, for that to really work, and some players just don't. There's only so much the mechanics can do in the face of an unwilling player. You can usually spot the non-roleplayers because they are the ones who get irritated when their Complications come up in play, and they are the first to ask how they can buy them off as quickly as possible.

You could always hand out a couple of on-the-spot HAPs if you use them.  I doubt good roleplayers would care about HAPs or any other incentive...they don't need an excuse to roleplay, just an opportunity.
 
Roleplaying opportunities can be tough to engineer in some groups but you can stack the deck in it's favor if you know the characters Psy Lims.  Complications in general are a goldmine in terms of understanding what types of situations you could setup to encourage roleplaying.  It's a little sadistic but I like finding conflicting Psy Lims on players and putting them in a situation that will provoke conflict between them...it has led to some great roleplaying in groups I've been in.
 
Edit: I should point out that don't set the players against one another unless you're absolutely sure they're mature enough to handle it

I think Call of Cthulhu did a great job with building horror into the game, but the players do have to buy into it.  The biggest problem is that in a horror genre, the characters are disposable, and players have to understand that from the beginning.  Often, in these stories, characters do things that are unbelievably stupid and self-destructive, leading to a grisly end.  
 
I ran a game like that once on a Halloween, Camp Nunganhom (none go home).  The players played kids at a summer camp and you had two options: you could do things intelligently and try to survive that way, or you could do idiotic crap they do in these movies all the time, and get a luck point for each time you did it.  The luck point let you get out of a death.  So it was a way to encourage people to do retarded stuff like back into a darkened room without turning the lights on, neglect to tell anyone about the body you found in the lonely corn field, etc.  It worked pretty well.

Thank you for saying that, and for your breakdown of the way such things are presented in modern TV (etc.). I agree with a lot of your points, especially re: not mentioning specific church denominations and not making God a character on the show.  Honestly, if I reeeaallllyyy wanted to do it, I'd include a chapter on Christian Mythology and just say the heck with any repercussions. After all, I'm covering a lot of other mythoi -- Chinese, Voodoo, Hindu... -- that are living faiths. (Not to mention the possibility of "paganist" revivals of old religions, such as Asatru.) But at this stage, I'm just as happy to save myself the colossal amount of work a chapter on Christian Mythology would entail. After Mythic Hero comes out, if there's a tremendous hue and cry for Christian Mythology, there's more than enough material out there for me to do an entire book on the subject.
 
Heck, maybe I could make that a Kickstarter stretch goal -- I already have an idea for the first stretch goal, but maybe this could be the second.

If a player doesn't want to enjoy the horror aspects of the game, no amount of game rules will force them to roleplay it.  But if they are willing to get into character, a sanity mechanic artificially shortens the game.
 
I ran a CoC-esque game in another game system a few years ago.  I changed the descriptions of the world based on how much nasty stuff the characters had seen.  I wouldn't say: "You are walking down the street.  It's a beautiful summer evening.  The park is on your right.  To the left, there is a line of old 19th century brownstones.  You hear lively latin music coming from the second story of one of the buildings, and the street bustles with activity."
 
Instead I would say "You hurry down the avenue, constantly looking over your shoulder.  The street is crammed with people, you feel as though someone is following you.  To your right is a park.  There are children playing there.  Make a perception roll.  You notice that instead of playing, the children on the merry-go-round are all staring at you.  Decrepit buildings are on your left.  The sound of strange, foreign instruments and singing in an odd language drifts down to you from one of the dark windows above."
 
Basically it's the same description, just more sinister, and filtered through the lens of paranoia.  I've found that trigger happy players are far more susceptible to scenarios like this.  It's perfectly logical to play CoC like a murder hobo, except for the problem that nobody else in that world realizes they're in a horror story.

That was before Xanax
 

That feeling you get when you've been struggling all year to motivate your students, spark some passion for learning in them, and feel like you're just not reaching them... and then one of them tells you that they really liked being in your class and that they learned something, and thanks you for caring.
 
Makes all the rest worthwhile.

If you watch a real fight, 90% of it is footwork, blocking, dodging, feinting, and moving for position.  In role playing games its too often simply two creatures pounding on each other with their most powerful attack until one falls over.  I've pondered long and hard about how to encourage more defensive and creative fighting, including getting more mobility into the game.

Sentry0, perhaps it would be helpful to you to consider some of the adventures published in Hero Games' electronic magazine, Digital Hero. Most of them were written to fit into one-session convention games for new players. They all include NPCs with illustrations, most have maps, and some include pre-generated heroes to use as handout PCs. The adventures were written for Fifth Edition Hero, but since you're familiar with that they wouldn't be hard to adapt to Sixth. And the individual DH issues are quite cheap from the Hero Games website store; especially considering all the other cool stuff they contain.
 
I've found "Infectious Enthusiasm" by John Taber, from DH #9, to be the easiest to run, since it introduces a new team of heroes (and provides full PC write-ups) and does nearly all the prep work for you. However, if you want to include PC origin as part of the event you might prefer "Project Predator" by Ed Hastings, in DH #29. That adventure actually features a large selection of diverse low-powered PCs you can choose from. In any case all the DH adventures have elements you could crib from for your purposes.
 
Our fellow forum member JmOz made a list of all the DH adventures, categorized by genre, which he posted to the forum. I also saved all the Tables of Contents from the DH issues in a searchable document. I'll Attach both documents below for convenience.
DH Adventures .doc
DH TOC.doc

I like it, maybe he's the "test pilot" if you will for this set of equipment.

I have always hated the trope that superpowers can be drained, transferred and the like, as if they were a brightly colored liquid you can pour from one glass to another. Whether you were born with your powers (Superman, the X-Men, etc) or acquired them in an accident (Spider-Man, the Flash, etc), as far as I'm concerned they're always inherent, as much a part of you as your ability to see or breathe. No advantage/limitation required--or allowed. Just as I can prevent you from seeing by covering your eyes, or gouging them out if I'm feeling particularly nasty, but can't "steal" your power of vision or acquire it for myself (short of very advanced surgery to physically take your eyes and graft them into myself), so too are your superpowers. So a generic "mutant powers drain" is a no-go as a power in any of my campaigns. Ditto for handy, generic power dampeners for use by the authorities.
 
So if you've captured a superstrong villain, you're gonna need some way to restrain him that doesn't depend on simply "taking away" his superhuman strength. A strength-reducing drug cocktail that works on anyone, or keeping him sedated (chemically, psychically or electronically), or simply using bonds strong enough to hold him are your only options.
 
 

I would consider Inherent is an advantage that should rarely be used.  It should not be used, for example, to simply make a power undrainable.  I use it almost exclusively when a situation simply does not apply to a character: for example
 
1. RoboDog is a robot dog.  RoboDog does not have lungs or require oxygen.  RoboDog has LS(Does not breathe) that is Inherent.  It would be ridiculous for a drain to suddenly make RoboDog need to breathe.
2. Confusus has a weirdly wired brain that is hard to read because it is complex.  Confusus has Mental Defence (vs Telepathy) that is Inherent.   It would be ridiculous for a drain to suddenly make Confusus' brain less complicated.
 
I'm not so keen on the Angel/flight example because you could define your Drain as a gravity field preventing flight.  That would work, wings or not.  
 
I'm also not keen on defining something as 'so powerful it cannot be drained' because someone might have a really powerful drain.  "My Invulnerability is God Given!", "Well, my Drain is God's Dad Given."
 
Basically if it is not something you do, it is something you are then you can have Inherent, otherwise probably not, at least in my tiny little world.  It does come down, to an extent, to SFX making sense, but the system places mechanics over SFX - there is nothing preventing you buying Inherent for any power other than common sense, which, in practice, rarely stops anyone doing anything they want to do anyway; I do like to ask players why their powers work as they are built though, and if I don't like the answers, I beat them to within an inch of their lives, so that rarely happens twice.

I take a different approach. I think to myself WWAAD: What would Aaron Allston do? (if he were alive) and then I build that.

Hello,
 
I plan on running a few HERO games at Origins this year.  I will require a sponsor, and am working on getting one.
 
I will probably run the following (subject to your recommendation):
  Revelations 1001 (HERO System, Fantasy HERO):  The End Times of Book of Revelation are literally coming true in 1001 A.D.  Six heroes have been gathered by the forces of light, some of them far more reluctantly than others, to gather sacred artifacts that will help defeat the Anti-Christ and his forces. They must brave terrible monsters and great evil to acquire them, and then shall face the Anti-Christ and his army on the plains of Megiddo. This game is intended to be an entertaining and thought-provoking game, and every effort has been made to treat faith with the utmost respect, and no offense is intended towards anyone's individual beliefs. RPG. 4-6 Players.
  The Temple of the Three Valleys (HERO System, Martial Arts HERO): Set in late-16th century China, a group of heroes from all over the world have come to a village to find a long-lost temple that contains the secrets of martial arts and great riches.  They must also use their martial arts skill and superhuman wu shu abilities to defeat a ferocious tyrant and his minions. RPG. 4-6 Players.
  Con-Flagration (HERO System, Monster Hunter International): Set in the action-packed world of Larry Correia's Monster Hunter International, you are part of a team of monster hunters who wanted to go to an ordinary gaming convention to sit back, relax, and roll some dice. Unfortunately, two warring factions of monsters just decided to crash the convention in search of a powerful artifact. It's time for to cowboy up, grab your gun, kill some monsters, and hopefully get paid!  RPG. 4-6 Players.

This might be of some use here.
 
 

Yeah it should have a fairly low body stat so its destroyed kind of rapidly but really it was only needed for one fight at a time, so that wasn't an issue. For adventurers, maybe more of a problem.

If the binding has simply pulled away from the first page and everything else is still structurally sound, you can use acid-free linen hinging tape.  It's quick, simple and strong. I did this to a volume of 6e2 I got on the cheap because of its binding issue ... about 18 months ago ... and have had no issues with the repair.  You can also use glue, which should also be acid-free (ideally neutral pH).  I bought some thinking I'd need both tape and glue for that volume of 6e2 I repaired , but the hinging tape proved plenty strong, so the glue went unused.
 
In case it helps:
Here is the repair tape I used: https://www.amazon.com/gp/css/summary/edit.html/ref=dp_iou_view_this_order?ie=UTF8&orderID=110-2180671-8978607
Here is the glue I bought, planned to use, but never needed: https://www.amazon.com/Neutral-pH-Liquid-Adhesive-Ounces/dp/B000KNJEYA/ref=sr_1_1?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1520628367&sr=1-1&keywords=binding+repair+glue

In terms of Hero combat, there's very little difference between a falchion and a gladius.  There are notable differences in real life (different designs are good at different tasks, strong in various areas and weaker in others) but those distinctions are very minimal in terms of combat in an RPG. 
 
For example, a curved blade will tend not to catch in a victim and get stuck when slashing, but isn't as good at stabbing.  A straight blade stabs well, but does not chop well.   A big heavy blade chops through hard objects well but does poorly against things like ropes where a slim, light blade excels.  Big heavy weapons are more tiring than light ones, but the light ones are more prone to breaking and further are harder to re-sharpen after battle. 
 
But in Hero terms those distinctions are either not worth the complexity to represent or so minimal they aren't going to show up in the somewhat abstracted combat.
 
Watch some episodes of Forged In Fire on TV (history channel I believe, I watch it On Demand later on), and you can see demonstrations in various tasks and how the different designs perform.