Durzan Malakim

I would first suggest deciding whether you want to run this as a combat or not. If yes, then I suggest you consider the audience an opponent who can only be targeted by presence attacks. To win, you have to both defeat your wrestling opponent and also impress the audience by doing the most total presence "damage" during the bout. I would penalize the presence attack of anyone trying to defeat an opponent with obvious powers or non-grapple-based-martial-arts because, "that's just not wrassling!" Although nothing says the heroes have to play heroes while they're in the ring. There's a long tradition of professional wrestling villains who don't play by the rules. You may also consider adding a presence bonus whenever the characters ham up their performance and make appropriate monologues. Perhaps even give them free recoveries every time they meet some presence damage threshold like every 50 points to represent feeding off the crowd. This should quickly encourage players to maximize their presence attack each phase. If you don't want to run this as a combat you could just make opposed PRE attacks with bonuses for having appropriate skills, maneuvers, and powers.

My reading of the Target Effect rules is that you know the quality of the effect not its quantity. So its obvious that an attack damages the target, that an aid boosts the target's power, and that an entangle restrains the target. It may not be obvious how much damage the target took, how many points of aid the target received, or how strong an entangle is without some basis of comparison or complementary skill to provide that information. So trained soldiers and police officers would probably know "that was a .45 caliber pistol" versus an unskilled person who might just know "that was a gun."

Here's what the rules say. 6E1 p125: From "What's perceived" 6E1 p126 from "Obviousness" 6E1 p388 from "Invisible power effects" The combination of these rules means that if you perceive an Aid power in use, you're always going to know it's aiding/boosting the target in some way, even if someone paid for Invisible power effects. I don't think Target effects have their own special effects by default. You could argue that making target effects perceivable is a limitation or an advantage though. For example, a blast that leaves a glowing aura around its target might be advantageous in some cases or limiting in others.

@PhantomGM2602, Amazon lists the author as Jack Fariolo. Thanks for the recommendation.

Sounds like the consensus is to use the Autofire advantage as the game effect and two-weapon-fighting as the special effect. Of course, I expect there'll be a differing opinion in 3... 2...

This is one of those cases where the special effect (disintegration of incoming projectiles) distorts what the actual game effect is. Personally, I'd model this power as either resistant protection or damage negation and describe the special effect as a disintegration field. If you want to add gaps in the protection, add them as limitations. If you want to cause damage to people and things that enter the field, add the advantages to make it a damage shield. Things to consider: Does this only provide physical protection? If yes, just buy resistant physical protection. Does the field have any of these limitations? If yes, add a limited power limitation.Only versus projectiles Only versus inanimate objects Only versus ranged attacks FYI: In the real world, the energy required to utterly destroy a projectile before it can pass through a small space is immense and typically has its own side effects such as fusion-level-temperatures or black-hole-level-gravitation. For example, when a meteor enters the Earth's atmosphere you get a fireball (bolide). You wouldn't want to be anywhere near one of those as both the heat and concussion would ruin your day. So while the atmosphere does indeed disintegrate most meteors, there are side effects to that protection. Since I think you're going for the protection more than the side-effects, I'd suggest keeping it simple and select a protection power.

In the enterprise software industry I work in, one of the key metrics we care about is "time to value." You can have the best software in the world, but if it takes you a year or more to see any benefits from it, you're going to lose in the market to those who provide a faster time to value. Hero might have a "time to value" problem where the "time to fun" is too high for new players and new GMs who've grown up playing genre-optimized games. In my experience, learning the Hero system takes a lot of time. Some of the key concepts are the same from other games, such as you have characters that have statistics and you roll dice to determine game outcomes, but there are concepts unique to Hero such as building powers, knowing what all the power advantages and limitations do, and running combat from a speed chart. I really feel for new GMs because there are a lot of moving parts to juggle. You have to balance damage classes to provide challenges that aren't too easy and aren't too hard, determine penalties and bonuses for maneuvers and actions, and adjudicate whether a given advantage or limitation applies in a particular case. That's on top of developing an interesting story to engage your players. Unless you have an engineering/design mind-set, learning to apply extensible rules can be more work than fun. While it's cool that you can reuse the same rules from your sword-and-sorcery-fantasy game in your super-heroic-justice game, sometimes all you care about are the rules that apply to your setting. That's why books like Champions Complete and Fantasy Hero Complete exist after all - to make things easier for new players. As a player, I find Champions Complete and Hero Designer really good resources, but even with my year and four months experience I'd feel overwhelmed trying to GM a Champions game much less GM another Hero genre. If I were to GM Hero I fear I would either have to constantly be looking up rules, which doesn't sound like fun, or making up my own to move the game ahead, which may not be fun for those players who actually know the rules and expect me to use them. Are there any GM's who actually learned Hero from Champions Complete or Fantasy Hero, or are we just surviving on GMs who learned from earlier editions? I hope there are such GMs, but I fear there aren't.

Based on @indy523's disease type descriptions, I think diseases can be modeled by one of two game effects: Damaging agent: Something, usually a foreign body, causes damage by slowly consuming you. The typical example is a bacteria or plasmid. You cure such diseases by destroying the thing which is consuming you. This is what our immune system does with fevers and white blood cells. Draining agent: Something transforms part of your body into a glitchy competitor for resources that drains you over time. The typical example is cancer, but this applies to weird things like prions as well. In the real world, you cure such diseases by destroying the transformed tissues and hoping the patient has enough healthy tissue remaining to survive the experience. With access to powers you could literally transform someone back to normal, or alternatively ensure the person survives the rigors of removing the draining agent. In both cases, a typical heal of BODY and CON is just treating the symptoms and not the cause. Identifying the disease agent is usually a non-trivial task in actual medicine and is why there is a science of epidemiology. Most games could rightly hand-wave identifying common or known disease pathogens, but identifying the disease agent of the zombie plague should probably require actual effort. Are zombies the result of the T-virus, a rogue nanobot swarm, or a magical curse? Your cure will vary based on the source, and the cure for one disease agent will have no effect on another.

It's interesting that HERO doesn't have a condition for being diseased like other games. It has conditions for things that will come up in fights such as stunned, bleeding, prone, drowning, etc., but the only in-game mechanic for feeling bad or dying from a disease over time is either a continuous AVAD attack or a drain. My guess is the lack of a simple disease mechanic is a result of HERO's origins as a Champions spin-off. Until relatively recently in the comics source material, superheroes did not get sick. They did not whither away from mummy rot, suffer from an Otyugh bite, or turn into zombies from the T-Virus. They had no need to go to the cleric for a lesser restoration / remove disease. Now that there are multiple generations of gamers who expect such a mechanic however, perhaps it's time to offer some optional rules to make this simple. Perhaps the rules for radiation poisoning (6E2 page 153-155) can be adapted for diseases.

Given how often foci are both inaccessible and indestructible, players such as myself are probably much better off following the Vulture's example in Spiderman Homecoming:

Now I wonder if Dr. Strange has VPP called Focus Pocus.

I'm more worried about that awkward conversation between players. "Why is my character listed as a Follower on your character sheet?"

@Matt the Bruins: Yes unbreakable foci have those benefits.

My current favorite cheap powers all reside on someone else's character sheet: Teleport, Aid, Barrier, and Heal. I get the benefits without spending a single character point. I wonder if our wizard counts as an Obvious Accessible focus?

As I get more familiar with character designs I see why Variable Powers Pools are the natural end state for all builds. Why do just one thing, or even a few things, when you can do all the things?

Elegant as this is, a 75 PD exceeds most PC's campaign limits for defenses, unless your GM is feeling generous.

@DasBroot, from my player perspective breakable foci are most often mook-level gear. It's possible I've met an opponent with a breakable focus before, but our typical fight-of-the-week has to able to handle four to six 600+ point super heroes. I would have expected our cunning tactics of "get 'em" to have hit any such focus in an area-of-effect attack by now. I suspect it much's easier for a GM not to track focus defenses and BODY when they have so many other things to manage already. It's the same reason we never see opponents run out of END, because it's not even being tracked.

I like the idea that in a Champions Universe our world's version of events qualifies as a conspiracy theory. "Right, a comet or meteor just happens to air burst over Russia and leaves no impact crater. Next you're going to tell me there's a world without super powers and magic."

For your evaluation, consider the Captain America fight scene in the elevator. Undisputed Focus qualities displayed: Obvious: It's a shield. Durable or Unbreakable: It survives falling damage without a scratch. Possible Focus qualities displayed: Inaccessible: No opponents target or take the shield. Personal: No opponents pick up and use the shield. Possible Limitations displayed: Extra time: Captain America takes a phase to kick the shield into his hands, but perhaps that's just a PRE attack for the guys watching on camera. Restrainable: Captain America cannot use the shield while being grappled. Possible Limitations I would rule out: Activation roll: The shield may not offer protection from all directions, but no opponent ever targets an unprotected area or shoots him from behind. Lockout: The shield may not offer protection when used offensively, but no opponent ever targets him while he's attacking.

I suspect the effectiveness of Dispel and Drains is why players never see an opponent over a mook who has a breakable focus. Certainly our group's VPP wizard would have a field day dispelling resistant defenses if he ever faced an opponent with a breakable focus limitation.

The why build a focus breaking power has an indirect answer. My super hero has a psychological limitation to follow a heroic code of conduct, which includes the appropriate use-of-force. So while he has a deadly killing attack power, he is not likely to use it to kill opponents except in exceptional circumstances. Objects and focuses however are fair targets. So I don't necessarily need to create a niche power as much as understand how to best use the power I already have for a new purpose. For the admittedly rare cases where I will face a foe with a breakable focus that I know about, it appears that doing lots of damage to break it is a viable strategy. I am just considering alternatives and learning from the experts. From a theory-crafting perspective, a Penetrating Autofire attack is an elegant and optimized solution to the problem. From a character concept perspective, it's not a good fit and now I know that.

I have some experience points to spend on a Champions character, and was thinking of repurposing a killing attack power into an attack I use to break objects and focuses. My current power is a deadly 5d6 (with STR) armor piercing killing attack, but by my reading of the focus rules more damage isn't better when it comes to focuses: Would a Penetrating attack or a NND attack with does BODY be better at simply doing the 1 BODY needed to damage a focus? What's your advice?

From my player-observer-perspective, the focus rules only tend to come up in these circumstances. During character design you can select the focus limitation to save points. When fighting mooks with weapons its expected you can disarm or destroy their focuses. When the storyline includes the capture of heroes and you have to escape without your usual resources. What I don't ever see is players or GMs going out of their way to remind each other about Obvious focuses that can be exploited. Nor have I seen many story lines where a villain or PC spent time wondering, "Where do Hero Protagonist's or Vile Villain's powers come from?" to identify Inobvious focuses. More often, players run into a signature villain in powered armor who can never be deprived of his or her powers. It doesn't matter that we know the powered armor is the source of all our troubles; one does not simply remove or break Dr. Destroyer's armor. So while the focus rules provide a lot of variety in point values, in actual game play, the decision seems to be more binary. Does the GM want to temporarily take someone's power away, yes or no?

I suspect dstaow assumed you'd only apply the +8 Range mod bonus when in water. You could apply the standard HERO System range modifiers when in air, which stack up pretty fast without Penalty Skill Levels to reduce them.

I was just typing my response about adding rapid to sonar in water, when Christopher beat me to it. Here are the relevant details which if you squint hard enough kinda match your math. From 6E1 214: