Tech

Don’t get me wrong I am a big fan of damage negation, but it is better at creating a high threshold of damage.  It is great for characters that are immune to damage below a specific point.  Damage Reduction is better for the character that is not immune but can take a lot of damage and still keep functioning. It really depends on how you want your character to work.  If you want to be immune completely immune to small arms but take damage vs larger attacks DN works better.  
 
A character with moderate defenses and 50% DR can probably take one hit from DR Destroyer and still be able to stay in the combat.  That same character can be nicked and dimed by enough agents. The character with the same defense and -6 DC of DN will completely ignore the agents, but likely be taken out by the same single hit by DR Destroyer.  Both concepts are equally valid.        
 
If you scale up the defenses the results show similar results.  With 15 defense vs a 12d6 attack 50% DR results in 13.5 points of damage, -6 DC of damage negation results in 6. At 15d6 the DR damage is 18.75, where the DN is 16.5.  At 18d6, the DR damage is 24, and the DN becomes 24.  
  
For the same cost the results of DR and DN are fairy similar
 

For those of you who use Foxbat, do you have him do things solo, is the Awesome Exo-Skeleton Man with him, did he form his own team? What do you do with him?
 
For myself, he's got himself some villains who hang around him. They have no group name because: "I'm Foxbat and we don't need a name. My name speaks for itself!". Unofficially, the heroes call him Foxbat and Company. The Awesome Exo-Skeleton Man is called, "The herald of Foxbat".

He is risen!

Hope this doesn't fall in the "well, duh" category....and also forgive me  int hat I'm really just familiar with 4th edition...but when you buy Flight, do you automatically get "x2" non combat movement for free? I originally thought it had to be purchased, but in character write ups I usually only see non combat move if it's x4 or greated
 
Have a great Easter all!

You will enjoy "Watchers of the Dragon". So many varied martial artists, including the very powerful. Also, if you don't know what name to give an oriental character, check the back. You say you want a very skilled ninja? No problem; check the back again.

Don't know if this is grandoise but Foxbat had a list of things he was going to get, for his collection of course. Two of the unusual items were: a heroes costume (or part of it), and the mayors Toupee'. He managed to get a glove and the mayors toupee. Surprisingly, the battle turned into a keep-away game with the toupee bouncing from hand to hand. He almost got away with the heroes glove but a superspeedster nabbed it at the last moment. Poor Foxbat.

I'd just go with Martial Arts. I wouldn't use Blast, no range. I'd go with extra damage defined as Energy to your Str. If necessary, add weapon proficiency. I don't think we need new martial arts.

Last Saturday, our heroes ran into a situation where they were being reviled on a talkshow. Our GM likes to use interesting/funny names so here we go. The talkshow host was a smarmy guy named Bart Babble of the show "Vent Your Spleen!". On top of that, an Alderman started to raise questions about the hero building. The alderman was working with the judge, Rory Rotheart (rot-heart), who was letting thugs who were committing crimes off for the slightest reasons. Turns out the Alderman was a Viper Nest Leader working with the Judge, transporting illegal goods. The talkshow host, Bart, was just a convenient person to keep the heroes busy. However, some good detective work on the part of the heroes turned up the evidence on the Alderman to go after him, and have the judge arrested. Another Viper nest down the drain & Bart Babble's show got cancelled. 

In the process of watching the cartoon tv series, "Justice League Unlimited".

In the process of watching the cartoon tv series, "Justice League Unlimited".

Re: Find Weakness and Lack of Weakness for 6th Edition.
 
Simplest answer, as always: Just bring both over as-is from previous editions.

I was wondering what sort of House Rules GMs out there have to simplify / speed up Hero System combat.
 

I have been and no, my characters aren't that strong. Nope.

I have never run any of the 6th edition villain builds in any campaign largely because they are wildly overpowered.  They won't just knock out a hero they hit, they'll probably vaporize them.  But I tended to run lower powered games than some do here at least, and as Liaden points out an old campaign with tons of xps probably can handle that sort of thing better.

I do this as well. The character is automatically assumed to have healed from any previous episode injuries. Not once, to my memory, have I ever had someone still injured when another episode started.

Rich, thanks for the RL examples. I've got enough so I'm done here.

Normal gravity is also irrelevant unless the hero is non-buoyant.  It's actually easier to ascend when underwater than descend, so the medium is aiding them here.  With Leaping and Flight the medium you're moving through isn't providing support, leaving you to fight gravity unassisted.  If you're on some alien planet that could be very different, but I'm not opening that can of worms.
 
If you're just trying to guesstimate to get a "feels about right" number, I'd go look at the reams of data on aquatic animals breaching the surface and compare actual speeds and leaping heights.  For a human-ish mass hero one of the dolphin species is probably a decent choice.  I don't know what "40m Swimming" translates to in real units of measurement (is that per phase or segment?) but you should be able to work out kph and work from there to get something good enough for a game.
 
A quick look tells me common dolphins (the fastest recorded species, slightly ahead of orcas) reach 55-64kph at top speeds and can manage 5m leaps in the wild.  Bottlenose dolphins are slower (~35kph, but there seems to be some disagreement about sprint speeds) but trained specimens can easily reach 6m leaps.  The world record is from a bottlenose at 7.92m, FWIW.  Orcas (if your hero does Growth) can reach ~52kph and leap between 3-5m, and I strongly question if they couldn't do better if they wanted.  Lot harder to motivate an orca than a dolphin, and far fewer in captivity for lengthy observation.
 
So figure out what your IRL speed is using that movement rate and work from there.  Or just pick a number from thin air, as long as you're consistent about it.

HERO is so good at representing everything and anything in mechanical terms that I think it's easy to slide into thinking that everything *must* have a mechanical representation, paid for with points on a character sheet. I can unfortunately imagine an exchange something like this:
 
Rubber Band Man's Player: "The Sun Stone could be a source of limitless energy! I need to get it back to my lab to study."
 
GM: "How do you plan on moving it? Like the name says, it's as hot as the surface of the Sun. It isn
't burning anything right now because it's magnetically levitated. If you take it out of the starship engine, it won't be."
 
I'm On Fire Guy's Player: "My costume doesn't burn up when use my Damage Shield, so let's make a bag from my costume. We can carry it that way."
 
GM: <fixes glittering eye on player> "Oh? And did you spend points on your costume being fireproof all the time? If it's not on the character sheet, it doesn't exist."
 
Now, I think The GM is being a jerk. Players should be rewarded for clever use of resources and capabilities. Sketchpad found the phrase I was looking for before: Using the costume this way is a *power stunt,* which is a thing in HERO but mentioned so briefly that it's easy to forget about it. And even that's been "mechanic-ized" by adding the Power skill, with rules for your chance to fail depending on the Active Points of the stunt effect.
 
(One way, and not the only one, in which I think earlier editions were better *because* they were looser.)
 
Dean Shomshak

Spidey had his Wheaties for breakfast?  😃

I know about tree, branch and root structures of trees, ground, root stability and so on. Besides, this is Champions with superheroes and supervillains. If we go with what should happen, we wouldn't have a superhero game... and the Sub-Mariner wouldn't be able to rip up a chunk of ice over 20 feet in diameter, superspeedsters would burn up from the friction of super speed, etc etc. We're talking superpowers.
 
The reason for specifically uprooting a tree is because heroes will be encountering an English myth that states "it can uproot trees". Therefore, this doesn't fall under the usual 'tree breaks from the power'. This myth doesn't follow the usual rules about trees so back to my original question... 😃

Well, we can...actually do this.  With some work.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d018/e3e81929583d82067a120adf8d0c134acefb.pdf
 
The key number...they gave 60 kN (kilonewtons) force.  The newton is the standard unit of force, it's 1 kg-m / sec^2.  To lift 1 ton, you're lifting against gravity, which is basically 10 m/s.  So..it's 10,000 newtons.
 
So a lifting STR of 6 tons can uproot the stump.  Call it 8 tons to rip out the entire tree.  40-45 STR for the trees discussed in the paper.  50, if you want some safety margin, and some SFX...that the mythical's STR grasps the entire tree, which is why it doesn't split or crush at the point of contact.  Something of the classic issue...fine, Superman can *lift* the large jet, but in this context?  The entire force required to lift it would be exerted by his hands, so the force exerted at the point of contact is almost beyond belief.  TV Tropes has fun with this one.
 
Another potentially useful page:
https://thetimberlandinvestor.com/how-much-does-a-tree-weigh/
 
The redwood from CRT's post...92m would be 3x the last column.  Diameter...15 feet, or 180 inches.  Use the 22" column, now it's 8x.  Volume increases as the square of width...so 64x.  OK...as an estimate?  200x the 95' by 22" amount of 4 tons, so....800 tons for the tree.  That's even before the root ball.  So, we're talking 80 STR to handle the mass, treating it as freestanding.  

Ahhhhh... I love Foxbat, he's my most favorite hero.

5th Edition is primarily what our campaign uses, with a mix of 1st-4th thrown in. I would say 6th is slightly more complicated.

For me, Fifth Edition core rules hit the sweet spot of rules completeness and clarity, while still being an interesting and readily digestible read. 5E Revised went a little farther along that first axis than I liked, but remained manageable. Sixth Edition makes me feel like I'm studying to pass the bar. Even over a decade later, I still haven't read through the whole thing.

Well a lack of bacon does strange things to people; no telling how people will survive without or society.