Durzan Malakim

I suggest building your demo characters around their team role and a perhaps a shared team theme. As someone who played a lot of City of Heroes, I tend to think of team roles in these terms:

• Tank: A meat shield who draws enemy attention. The primary power focus is on individual survivability/defenses
• Scrapper: A close-combat damage dealer. The primary power focus is on hand-to-hand combat.
• Blaster: A ranged-combat damage dealer. The primary power focus is on ranged combat.
• Controller: A debuffing disabler of enemies or a summoner of allies. The primary power focus is on lowering enemy abilities or outnumbering them.
• Defender: A buffer or healer who supports allies. The primary power focus is on team survivability/defenses.

Limiting your demo characters to these archetypes will highlight just how flexible the HERO system is when you allow players free reign to create their own characters.

As for a team theme, I have two suggestions: 

1. An element-based team where each member controls a different element such as earth, fire, water, air, light, and dark (or mind and spirit).
2. A pantheon-based team where each member represents a different god/demigod such as Zeus, Athena, Ares, Hephaestus, Hermes, and Hades.

Combine a team role with a theme and voila! you have a hero for example:

• Earth tanker
• Ice scrapper
• Fire blaster
• Air controller
• Light defender
• Dark scrapper

Doesn't this organization exist in real life as Amazon? Jeff Bezos is just a figurehead, right? 

Sounds like a promising game. If you're still looking for plot inspiration, here are several stories where powers come from an alien-origin.

• Raising Stars:
  A comet grants 113 people powers to uplift their world and eventually continue the cycle on another world. Whenever someone with powers dies, that power goes to the nearest person with powers.

• The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda):
  Two alien ships crash on earth and their tech transforms people giving them powers. Each faction has its own technology, power set, and agenda.

• The Reckoners:
  An alien grants people powers that corrupts them and makes them villains. Only by facing their fears/nightmares can they resist the corruption.

This satirical idea pulled an "Occupy Wall Street" on me until I had written it up. Hopefully it's good for a chuckle.

If someone else wants to make the next Infringer I suggest Irony Man, an anemic superhero who has to take iron supplements.

Corporate America: The First Infringer. 400 Total Points.

Sounds good in theory, but you can't buy PER Modifiers against the Darkness Power.

Darn you Darkness rules! (Conveniently available from 6E1 p186-187):

 

It doesn't just make PER Rolls with the affected Senses harder, it makes them impossible.

I suppose the meta-rule, "you get what you pay for" applies here.

If Character 1 pays for multiple foci, then she has a backup pair and can in theory use the backups when her primary pair is inevitably taken away from her. If character 2 pays for the backup pair, then that character gets to use them and see through the Darkness until someone inevitably takes the focus away.

The benefit of paying for a separate power such as Enhanced Senses: Infrared Sight Group would be the option to see through other people's Darkness powers, not just Character 1's Darkness Power.

For the teammate, the game effect of the goggles would be enhanced senses that provide +PER in smoke and possibly allowing Infrared or Ultraviolet vision. The teammate isn't buying personal immunity, but rather buying one or more related powers to counteract the effects of the darkness. Or at least that's what I would suggest.

This may be beating a dead cat, but I got curious how cats actually kill their prey. If I can believe the Internet:

 

 

Cats kill their prey by delivering a neck bite that severs the spinal cord. To do this, they must temporarily release the prey to get at the nape of the neck, but when they do so, they risk the prey escaping or counterattacking. Small animals will defend themselves if they get the chance. Mice, rats, and other rodents can deliver a vicious bite, and birds can peck. A cat has a very short muzzle, and to get close enough to apply the neck bite, she risks injury to her eyes and face from the prey.

In HERO System terms I'd say this is a maneuver that either increases DCs or changes their normal attack into a killing attack. The caveat being the prey has to be small enough to bite through the neck, or I suppose the cat has to be motivated enough to use its teeth on someone's neck.

I still think the most likely outcome of any cat versus bigger animal fight is one or the other opponent fleeing because outside of hunting or psychopathy most animals and people don't go around killing things for no reason. Certainly this fits the anecdotal evidence.

I don't know if Steve is going to report on this event as a GM, but as a player I can say it was quite fun to try and thwart these ladies. The points I spent in Knowledge Skill: Super villains actually paid off for about half of the crew by providing us some information about their power sets and tactics. Others in the group had previously fought Black Diamond and Shrinker and they quickly became primary targets.

What worked well:

• Having our mentalist mind control Black Diamond was effective but "bad optics". Did I mention the whole event was broadcast live?
• Having our own shrinking character helped (briefly) acquire the MacGuffin gem.
• Using leadership and force fields to buff others.

What didn't work so well:

• Having our shrinker suffer from foot-in-mouth disease on camera.
• Having more villains show up to seek retribution on our shrinker.
• Having our shrinker not-so-heroically continue to damage downed foes... on camera... 
• Having to confront my fellow "heroes" about their actions.
• Having Microverse Nazis show up to claim a defeated Shrinker.

End Result: Lady Blue and crew escaped with the MacGuffin, earned money for charity, and earned themselves pardons. We get to deal with Microverse Nazis and bad publicity of our actions.

• Keep your friends close and your enemies entangled.

I think all that this discussion has revealed is that model of felis catus provided by the HERO System Bestiary is more than capable of winning a fight against a baseline human who is not allowed to use tactics and abilities that the rules would otherwise provide them (free gear and PRE attacks). Nothing prevents you from building better models of either opponent using existing rules. Most people just don't have a need to model such a fight in their games. More likely they model a power like Killing Attack with a special effect such as "swarm of berserk cats attack the target."

Since we haven't heard back from the original poster I don't know if we've already answered his questions, but I'm wondering if his perception that "[points] are useless for balance" stems from a lack of guidance on how to match point expenditures to gameplay styles. 

For example, if you want to play a [Dial 1:][combat-heavy] [Dial 2:][Champions] game, you should spend points on:

• DEX and possibly Lightning Reflexes to gain a higher initiative.
• Enough CON to avoid being stunned by an average hit.
• Enough STUN and defenses to remain conscious after receiving an average hit.
• Enough END to fuel yours powers for a full turn.
• At least one power with straight DCs to damage enemies with high defenses.

Spending points on these things make you "more balanced" for this setting. You can obviously spend points on other things, but your game economy favors some things over others. For this particular gameplay style, ten points spent in combat-effectiveness really is better than ten points spent on anything else.

I suspect both the community and genre-specific source books have advice on settings these dials, but I don't know if new GMs and players know to look for them. They might naively assume, "Ten points is ten points. My ten points in contacts should always be just as useful as your ten points in DEX." Certainly just reading Champions Complete didn't prepare me to use a game-specific exchange rate to determine if I was really getting my point's worth in purchases. That realization took joining a game with set limits and suggestions to make a "more balanced" character.

I suggest a combination of Images vs. sensations (itchy) plus Mind Control (remove items in contact with your skin). This combination does require GM approval however since Mind Control normally requires a "character must have some way to communicate the order to his target" (6E1 page 253). It seems reasonable to me that a failed PER roll against the Image attack counts as a command to "remove any items in contact with your skin," but since this is a matter of opinion, you may want to further limit the power to prevent abuse.

Aside from hunting to eat, most animals do not fight to the death except in situations where fleeing is not an option. A more realistic cat fight is one where one or the other combatant uses a PRE attack to scare the other one. Whether it's the human screaming, "Get this crazy cat away from me!" or a feline thinking, "Time to hide from this big predator" the most likely result is one or the other fleeing or being cowed by the other. I suppose a human under some external threat such as "Kill this cat or I'll kill your family" or a cat defending it's kittens might stand and fight, but I suspect such a fight would still degenerate into an exercise in cat herding more often than not.

The reason there is a difference between active and real point costs is because you can't guarantee that a limitation in one setting is actually a limitation in all situations. A killing attack that only damages evil creatures isn't really much of a limitation in a classic fantasy setting where the vast majority of your opponents will be evil.

I suspect you're comparing players who built powers around toothless limitations to players whose powers are actually limited. This is why a GM needs to review characters, powers, and limitations to ensure they match the setting they are playing in. Sure you can give your Conan clone a sword that does no damage to robots, but he shouldn't get a discount for it unless there are actual robots around not to damage.

There will always be people who approach character creation as an exercise in tax law and try to get the biggest deduction possible. In such cases, the GM can use active points as an AMT equivalent. "Sorry dude, your 100-Active-Point death laser is too powerful even if it only effects kittens on Thursdays."

Also keep in mind that characters should match the style of game you're playing. If your games are just a series of HERO Clix fight scenes, then any points spent on Interactions skills, perks, and talents are probably wasted. Likewise you probably shouldn't bring your combat monkey to session of whodunnit (because we all know it was Professor Plumb in the Library with the Wrench).

Her name could also reflect that she is one of the few remaining practitioners of this martial arts style such as:

• Scion
• Legacy
• Inheritor

Although Waking Blossom is a pretty good name.

Infinity Professor --

 

Ok, stop right there...Professor should not be in the second column. That just doesn't work.

 

-- The Destroyer of the Living!

You should house rule (forum rule?) this to be Professor Infinity The Destroyer of the Living. You're absolutely right that Professor should not be a valid option in the second column.

To avoid confusion with this fine fellow: 

Valiant (he's a Superman-like alien who arrived on Earth as an adult, or so he thinks anyway) -- He's got a secret ID he's trying to maintain, so I doubt he'd move to the base.  He would probably leave the quarters furnished however they came.  Generic furniture.  He might put a few pictures on the walls (a landscape, a boat on the ocean, etc).  Might put a few pictures of smiling people on his desk (it's what humans seem to do).  He doesn't have any family of his own, so he'd probably just go with the ones that came with the frames.  He's not exactly an interior decorator.  Some of the things might not match up right, he's barely familiar with human culture (he hasn't been here long), He might have a picture of Joseph Stalin next to a picture of Martin Luther King, and not see any problem with it because he doesn't know who either of them are except "they're famous, right?" (until someone tells him).

I'll refer to my guy as My Valiant.

As a former TV and movie actor as well as current minor celebrity, My Valiant would have both an "office" and a bedroom on the second floor. The "office" is really just a place to display memorabilia and gather people together for social events. Imagine a Los Angeles cliff-side house with lots of glass to enjoy city vistas. Add some well-made display cases, artfully decorate the walls with posters and photos, and sprinkle in some couches and tables, and that's My Valiant's office. The bedroom is surprising bland and functional by comparison. It's a place to sleep and store clothes. Of course there is a secret exit via underground tunnel. What's the point of having more money than you know what to do with if you don't indulge in a secret door... or two.

I think a good character name should match the person's behavior or beliefs. You wouldn't expect someone called Raging Beast to be a soft-spoken pacifist for example.

Other than being hunted, what complications does this woman have? Is she a berserker or rager? Does she have any personal codes, duties, or relevant distinguishing features? Is she a straight up scrapper whose name should strike fear into the hearts of her enemies or is she more of a brick or controller?

Does she have a signature move, attack, or weapon? As Roter Baron mentioned, you could name her after the sword in her picture such as Heaven's Sword, Celestial Blade, or Master Stroke.

Bow before Silver Tiger The Immortal of Gotham!

Or don't. I can always have a cleaning crew remove what remains of you.

• How did you come up with your 'handle' (forum name)?

​Durzan Malakim is the name of a Dungeons & Dragons Online character that I have ported over to several other games. I've grown so used to being "Durz" online it felt only natural to continue the tradition here.

• What was the first tabletop RPG you played?

Although I recall owning a copy of the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons basic set, I think I actually first played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. As others have noted, it's often easier to indulge in the meta-game of character creation than to actually find and play in games.

• What was the first tabletop RPG you GMed?

I first GMed in college by running a game of GURPS Space where the plot was going to be inspired by (read: shamelessly stolen from) Dan Simmon's Hyperion novel. The PCs were supposed to travel from Earth to Mars to investigate some alien artifacts & ruins. Instead, the game became a Mutiny-on-the-Bounty scenario when the ship's PC captain used her socially-unacceptable psionic powers to uncover an NPC's secret involvement in a past murder. After ordering the NPC detained without cause, the other PC's thought she had gone mad and plotted to remove her. Oh the places PCs go...

• What are you currently playing/GMing?

I'm a player in a game of The Strange, where I cross into alternate realities and try to prevent the world from being devoured by cosmic-scale abominations. No pressure.

I'm also in the process of joining a Champions 6E game run by Steve. I look forward to putting on the costume again and rolling lots of D6.

• When did you start to play Hero?

I ran across the third(?) edition of Champions and fell in love with it. It was the one with this cover.