Jagged

Batman is terrifying, but still gets attacked by thugs on a regular basis.  The fact that Superman bounces bullets off his chest does not stop people shooting him with them, and they are probably the two greatest examples of PRE and Reputation amongst the Heroes of DC.  Similarly, Hydra never surrender when Captain America shows up.  They might say 'Oh no, it is Captain America', but they still fight him.
 
Getting an opponent to hesitate or gaining a minor bonus for your first attack, that is fine and IIRC, your character maxed out at about 30 PRE.  The problem is though that PRE Attacks are a lot nastier than that and can be absolutely monstrous while well within most campaign guidelines.  I don't like using them against PCs and you and the others only use them when it seems right, because you are naturally fair and decent people.
 
If you actually read the rules though, and apply them as intended (and by 'intended' I just mean 'allowed'), well, see below...

I have a sneaking fondness for The Sword and the Sorcerer. Not that good, but some cool visual moments, and that sword could have been designed by Q.

After Gandalf's speech there was a brief silence, and then the King of Eagles spoke.
"Gandalf, I and my people hold you in high regard and greatly esteem your wisdom. But what you ask of me now seems the greatest folly. I am no wizard but I am not wholly without lore,  and I know something of this Ring you speak of. It I were to bear it aloft into the sky, it would blaze like a beacon to the Eye of Sauron; within three beats of my wings he would know where it is, and if he bent his powers to beguile me, I cannot say I would not bear you and your small friend and the Ring straight to his doorstep. If he chose to blast rather than to beguile, or set his own winged servants upon us, I would not expect to reach the borders of Mordor alive. Indeed, it would likely cost my life to try to pass that border even if I did so alone and without carrying that treasure he would stop at nothing to reclaim. One does not simply fly into Mordor!"
 
Lucius Alexander
 
One does not simply ride a palindromedary into Mordor either.

Very nicely done. The Pogo effects amazed me.

Likewise, I'm perfectly fine with all of those people being wrong.

I am sitting here screaming "No" at this thread. 
 
I think skill levels of all types can only be balanced within an individual campaign against the other players and to a lesser extent npcs. If one player takes physicist as an int based skill while another takes science, one player is at an immediate disadvantage imo.
 
I also think combat skill levels should be used to enable how a player feels their character should work. Like your defensive swordsman above. Once they start getting loads of skills I would start pushing to merge them into globals or characteristics.
 
And lastly as an aside: many moons ago, when challenged to a duel at a larp, I did parry thrown daggers and arrows. Skill levels or missile deflection?
 

I am sitting here screaming "No" at this thread. 
 
I think skill levels of all types can only be balanced within an individual campaign against the other players and to a lesser extent npcs. If one player takes physicist as an int based skill while another takes science, one player is at an immediate disadvantage imo.
 
I also think combat skill levels should be used to enable how a player feels their character should work. Like your defensive swordsman above. Once they start getting loads of skills I would start pushing to merge them into globals or characteristics.
 
And lastly as an aside: many moons ago, when challenged to a duel at a larp, I did parry thrown daggers and arrows. Skill levels or missile deflection?
 

I don't have the 6th Edition of Champions.  As someone who started with the 1st Edition I found that the 5th Edition was the ultimate evolution of the system.
 

Except the 20 somethings don't have disposable income any more. Too busy saving for the deposit on the house they will never afford
 

You post this like it was good news?

These "ghost apples" were formed in a Michigan orchard when ice collected around rotting fruit. As the fruit decayed it slid out the bottom, leaving an icy shell.

This is simply sad truth...
 
 

That connects back to what IMO killed Hero as the visible go to Supers (or any genre RPG) game.  Starting with 5th, it became more about trying to achieve mathematical perfection than roleplaying.  When I build a beginner a starter PC, I really care less about efficiency or optimized builds. The keywords are simple and easy.
 

this almost 200 page **FREE** pdf was put out today... the plans are in Traveller squares, but this can be worked around
https://travellerrpgblog.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-starship-geomorphs-book-if-finally.html

I'm really uncomfortable with this line of reasoning. Frankly, there is nothing in HERO that requires high IQs, though there might be a correlation between people with a STEM focus and HERO system mastery. My hypothesis has more to do with the way that information is presented than anything else; simply put, until 6th edition, HERO has had a very dense presentation, and that's just not an effective way to communicate information to everybody. For some learning styles, it's great!
 
But it is entirely disingenuous - and frankly unworthy of this community - to posit that people who "get" hero quickly must have a higher IQ than others. 

<mumbles something about being far more related to personality types, mindset, and misinformation than IQ score>

The very first Hero campaign I ever played in was Fantasy Hero (3ed). In fact, I played almost exclusively heroic-level Hero for more than a decade before I got into my first Champions campaign. I think Hero works really well for fantasy, but it depends on what type of fantasy game you want to play. If your players want to play a standard-issue D&D-style game, then yeah the D&D rules are probably better suited for that. But if you want to create your own original magic system(s), or you have a character concept that doesn't fit neatly into clearly-defined classes, or if you generally you want to play a different style of fantasy, then Hero allows you to do that far better than trying to force D&D into something it wasn't made for.*
 
The best way to hook D&D gamers into trying Fantasy Hero is to ask them "Have you ever had a character concept you couldn't make work in D&D? Maybe something from a book/movie that didn't seem to fit in a D&D world? Let's try building that."
 
The "other best" way to hook them in is: "Hey, I have this really cool idea for a fantasy game, where magic works a little differently, but I can't make it work using D&D rules. Are you guys willing to try this other system?"
 
Also note that Fantasy Hero requires much more up front work on the GM's part, particularly in terms of designing magic systems, world building, etc. In general I find the more work you expect new players to do, the more frustrated they're likely to get. Depends on your players, of course. Some will enjoy creating their own spells, so you can hand them the rule book and let them go nuts. (Subject to GM approval, natch.) Others will have a concept in their heads, but would prefer to let you handle the mechanics of building it. Other just want you to hand them a list of spells they can choose from.
 
The other things that drew me to FH immediately were the rules mechanics "fixed" several things that had always annoyed me about the D&D system (armor making you harder to hit; whittling away Hit Points by death from a thousand cuts; etc). And lastly - and this is entirely subjective - D&D characters always felt more like a 2-dimensional framework to hang magic items off; whereas Hero characters felt much more 3D, with magic items enhancing character abilities rather than supplanting them. YMMV on the last part. (On all of it, really.)
 
* BTW, this was my chief complaint with most of the published settings for Fantasy Hero. Turakian Age in particular felt like it was trying too hard to be "How to run a D&D game using Hero," as opposed to Tuala Morn and Atlantean Age which gave you something different and original that you couldn't do in D&D.

I think teaching people Hero is best done at a minimal level.  They don't need to know very much at all about the rules, just how to interact with the game at the most basic level.  Here's how you roll to hit.  Here's how you do skills.  Here's how you do damage.  Lets play.
 
Using premade characters for newcomers allows them to step into play very quickly, in my experience, and gamers at least are quite familiar with the basic concepts of how rules work so they learn quickly.
 
The absolutely worst thing you can do is have three or four people trying to explain things all at once.  It becomes overwhelming and few things frustrate me as badly as trying to teach some guy how to play with kibbitzers throwing in extra details and anecdotes.  One teacher at a time.

We watched A-M & W for the second time this weekend (now on Netflix) and enjoyed it just as much the second time around. The fact that it is light-weight... it is a personal story, nothing about the world ending, and not even a real bad guy... I rather liked it. If you are going to have a "universe" of super-wacky adventures, some of them need to be small, only relevant to the people involved, adventures that are just entertaining to watch. IMO, the best Marvel movies have been personal... Winter Soldier was Cap & Bucky at the core... Civil War was about the split in the team... Spider-man: Homecoming was Peter and Stark as well as the incredible personal motivations of Vulture... Black Panther was T'Challa touching on the personal POVs and experiences of that amazing supporting cast as the basis for his own maturity, A-M & W was family... 

Sure, there were big plot lines going on in some of them, but the power of those movies is in the personal motivations of the characters. Perhaps one of the reasons I hated Infinity War so much, it had none of that, except a bad attempt at making Moron Thanos somehow relate-able. 
 

Been following this thread for a while now. Nearly posted a few times. Wrote long posts that never got submitted because threads like this are why I left these boards for over a year and now I am back only really post in "Non-gaming" and "General roleplaying" forums. Still, here goes:
 
"Mechanically best" - no idea what that means and care even less.
 
From my point of view 6e changed loads of things in Champions that gave it its flavour; To solve problems I never experienced; Which when explained to me made me wonder if those games had a GM? Worst still, those problems were placed ahead of the real problems that Hero System suffered from, which was all about getting people to play the game.
 
If you spend any time in other gaming forums you will know that the "consensus" is that Hero is Complex, Hero is Slow, GURPS is better. Did we do anything to change that? We produced a big, enourmous, blue book. ? At a time when the market direction was for small and simple and quick and old skool. Great job!
 
Finally I think "The Story of COM" is very representative of where its all gone wrong imo. No new player ever had to ask what COM was. It was a dirt-cheap points sink. It provided 10 minutes of fun at the start of every campaign while we worked out who was the prettiest. Now we have "Striking Appearance" ?
 
I think we built a game that was perfect for a small group of people on this forum, which is unsellable to the general gaming public. Harsh, but I think true. At least we have some pretty covers again.
 

For the first time in literally decades, I've been looking back at the Third Edition of Champions. It's the version I learned to play on, and there are times when i miss the simplicity--especially as I contemplate teaching new people to play. So I've begun building characters again. And I've got to tell you, here's something really cool about building a character with pencil and paper. I've had to relearn how a few things work, like END (Holy cow! How did my heroes ever stay awake for more than a Turn?!) and proper Elemental Controls, but I'm now able to create a new character in ~30 minutes, start to finish. It's been a lot of fun.
 
Anyway, I've created a handful of characters under the 3rd Ed rules, and I'm going to post a few of them here. Feedback is, of course, welcome.

I put this here just to document my own, similar obsession:
http://hero-id.co.uk/hotm/
 
Unfortunately it is yet to turn into a viable game ☹️

Shuma-Gorath's spawning grounds discovered (proof at 2:56):