Khas

Personally, I have never liked systems like this, as a player having to expend long term development for short term gain has always felt like I was cheated.
 
I prefer not allowing xp to be used as xp until they have been used as a boost.  So every xp you earn has the potential to give a short term boost and then to be used to buy powers.
 
Howeve, if you wanted to do this, you could consider awarding Heroic Action Points instead of XP, they would be one use and you could limit them in other ways to get the value to one HAP per xp.  When a HAP is used it becomes an XP, only to be used for character development.
 
As a player, I would not then feel cheated, having to burn my future advancement just to hit an opponent.
 
Doc

Hey Herophiles! On the evening of September 27 I'm appearing on Marc Tassin's awesome Out Of Character podcast! Please come give us a listen to hear us talk about fiction, gaming, and all sorts of related topics!
 
 

Immunity to common sense comes to mind...

So if someone were to, say, set up a super basic campaign as a followup to Champions Begins, what kind of things do you think it should have?  I'm thinking a neat base, a basic big city, a few useful NPCs, and a string of loosely connected adventures leading up to a finale.  The PCs would be what players want to make, and the book could include super basic ideas on building characters.  I'd like to see the Goodman tips brought back, too, stuff we vets all know but new players would find useful.  They could even carry over Champions Begins characters if they want.
 
The adventures maybe we could update and reuse some from the old Adventurer's Club magazines, for ease of construction.  It shouldn't be too hard to find a few that relate somewhat and create a storyline that connects them, leading up to something.  I mean it could be as basic as leading to The Island of Dr Destroyer, but that would require people to purchase an additional product, and I don't know if that would be ideal.

My son uses it.  You know kids: they want all that flashy high-tech new-fangled stuff.....
 
(Grumbles incoherently in 2e....)
.

I run 5e with a less "granular" 4e build aesthetic.
I think 5e adds and clarifies a lot to the 4e chassis. 
It also introduced a cultural mindset of maximalist detail and granularity.
But that mindset isn't hard-coded into the rules. Its purely cultural and psychological.
Its just one way to build a game and characters.
Its the Steve way, and its 100% fine for those who prefer that style of play.
But Steve himself would tell you that you don't have to build characters his way.
And a lot of the later 5e and 6e books have a different style and sensibility.
Hero is super-flexible in all of its incarnations.
You can run pretty simple / streamlined 5e game if you go about it with some intentionality.
 

The passing of Scott Bennie has got me thinking about an equivalent to Villainy Amok for Fantasy Hero.
 
For those unfamiliar with it, it takes a bunch of classic superhero plots, pulls them apart and shows how a GM can use them to make their own adventure. It also contains more or less ready to play examples.
 
Appropriately, some of them could quite easily be used in a fantasy game, and the others could be tweaked into something suitable.
 
But I'm on my phone so I can't really go into more detail.
 
Anyway, a book of Fantasy plots could definitely work, and could either be run as a campaign or be used in bits.

The only reason I see to write up a plot device like that is just in case some PC has a dispel power or similar idea.

UAA is a bloody damn mess.  Yes, I think it's legal, but LW is correct that, as an attack, sending to a random destination is meaningless.
 
While I think it's legal, I'm gonna advise against it.  Note that XDM is a stop sign power.  UAA is a stop sign power.   This power hoses a character.  Very, very badly...in many, if not most, cases, it's a "turn in your character sheet" power.  Note that the escape clause to get out of Hell is...XDM.  But if you can do that?  The bomb doesn't work.  

Breaking this project off from the Fifth Edition Renaissance thread.
 
 
Working Title:  Pittsburgh: City of Champions
 
Purpose:  Provide a setting and campaign book.  With P:CoC and Champions Complete, GMs and players have everything they need to actually run a Champions campaign.  Bring in new players and folks who want a ready-to-run game and campaign, not a toolkit.  Support with future products, if sales support it.
 
Format:
Introduction - Explain where all of the toolkit toggles are set (Silver Age, Standard Superheroic characters, power levels, and so on) History Geography and Government Transportation, Media/Arts/Entertainment, Subcultures Police, Emergency Services, Underworld, Superheroes, Supervillany Places of Interest GMs Vault Villains (include an organization and master villain) Adventures Continuing the Campaign  
Note that bullet points 2-7 follow the structure of Millenium City and Vibora Bay.  MC clocks in at 135 pages, VB at 157.  Much of the difference in page count is VB's extended GM chapter and adventure seed ideas.  P:CoC would be longer, based on the Introduction and extended Adventures/Campaign sections.  Make the adventure/campaign arc related to why the previous super-team is no longer around and the new PC team has to pick up the mantle.
 
One concern that I have is that CC only has 64 print copies left in stock, and I don't know if it will be reprinted.  Or possibly I'm an old pencil-and-paper grognard and that's not a big concern, folks today buy the pdfs and, if they want, use PoD or the local copy store for a paper copy.
 
Funding: Kickstarter.  Based on previous successful Hero System Kickstarter campaigns, rough estimate of $15,000. Start with a nice color cover and minimal B&W interior artwork; stretch goals would add more artwork and then upgrade it to color. Mention (and have) plans for future supplements: more linked adventures, a city development book; also to use Kickstarter.  Maybe have a second adventure arc, linked to the first, at a high enough stretch goal to fund it.
 
Staff:  Writers. Editor. Proof-reader. Artist(s). Project coordinator.  Mark Rand is providing backgound on Pittsburgh.  Need another writer to do the gamey stuff.  I am neither a writer nor an editor, but I can proof-read and coordinate (I am also qualified to do character write-ups.)

There's an official Champions villain, Nebula (Champions Villains Volume Three: Solo Villains), who has essentially this power, although not using ECV (which IIRC under 6E no longer automatically grants LOS). Nebula is a displaced extra-galactic law enforcement officer with a very Draconian mindset. Her "Duress Gauntlets" exile criminals to a pocket dimension called Duress.
 
Duress receives a capsule description in Digital Hero #5, p. 11 (13 of the PDF), along with stats for its robotic guards, the Keepers.

maybe a 5 point adder at best

Hello everyone! Hero Games publisher Jason Walters here with an update. But before I being telling you what we are up to at Hero Games this quarter, I thought I would take a moment to share my thoughts on where we are, what we are doing, and where we may go in the future. And, of course, to hear your thoughts as well. Because an RPG publishing company is at its core its fans. With them, it can accomplish a great many things. Without them, it can’t accomplish anything at all.
 
As many of you know Hero Games is owned by a parent company called DOJ Inc, which also owns the small press RPG distributor and promoter Indie Press Revolution (or IPR). While serving as general manager of IPR takes up most of my work time each day, it has also given me a lot of new ways to think about RPG publishing. Among these is the conviction that in the world of RPGs the line between fan, creator, and publisher should remain as blurry as possible. We are all fans and, in playing these games with one another, also creators. And that is really only a few short steps away from becoming designers and publishers as well.
 
If you’re like me, you’ve probably spent a measurable amount of your life using the Hero System to create just the sort of characters you’ve imagined, then shared them with your friends. I remember doing that a lot in my youth and, looking back on it, wasn’t that basically a kind of publishing? (Though admittedly, one with an extremely select audience!) Then years later in the late 90’s I discovered that there was an online community of people doing exactly the same thing, which renewed my interest in locating people to play Champions with once again. This in turn led to an odd and extremely unlikely series of events that involved befriending a nearly seven-foot-tall bouncer at a seedy San Francisco bar, making an entirely new circle of interesting friends, and eventually attending a business meeting with one of the suspects in actual case behind Tom Hank’s 1982 made-for-television film Mazes and Monsters that, eventually, ended in my writing the words you are reading today.
 
So that’s who I am, and probably who you are too: a fan. And it was in that spirit that I launched our DriveThruRPG community content program Hall of Champions a year or two back, which hummed along nicely for a while for a while before quieting down. Now I have a new idea in the same vein. I’m planning on launching a Hero Games Patreon (https://www.patreon.com) account that will serve a platform for new manuscripts to be seen and reviewed by serious fans before moving on to physical and electronic publication and distribution, with the goal moving forward to release a new book or project each quarter. You’ll be able to see and comment upon raw, unedited work before it travels the road to publication, and get an early peek into upcoming products while also contributing to their development. And you’ll get credit in the pages of that work for doing so.
 
My plan is for there to be a single level at $5.00 per month. We’ll release individual 3 to 5 page sections of manuscripts sequentially each week, possibly several manuscripts at a time, entering patron’s suggestions and edits into a spreadsheet for that manuscript as we go. Then, after those patrons have had a good hard look at the content, we’ll integrate the input into the product during the later stages of production.
 
Right now I’ve got several complete or almost complete manuscripts ready to go plus the beginnings of several others. The first is Gaslight by Christopher Hackler, author of Hero System Book of Templates 1 & 2. It’s a setting for competent normals set in London in the 1890’s. Think League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Call of Cthulhu, and Sherlock Holmes mashed together with all sorts of period characters like Spring-Heeled Jack, Dracula, and the Invisible Man.
 
The second is Imperial Throne, a Champions organization book about a deadly conspiracy whose goal is to transform the world into villainous parody of classical Chinese heaven. Our friend and fellow fan Michael Satran, author of such works as Imaginary Friends and Foxbat For President, was writing it when he was suddenly and tragically struck down by brain cancer in 2017. It’s 99% complete, and packed with hundreds of pages of characters, locations, and source material.
 
Though it isn’t a Hero Games product, I’m in possession of the final unreleased novel of our recently deceased friend and veteran Hero Games author Scott Bennie. Entitled The Last Orc, it's quite a lovely, classical sort of fantasy novel - the sort of thing we all grew up on, but one seldom sees these days. I’ve touched base with Scott’s family and they would like for it to be released, so we will use the upcoming Patreon account to do that, then most likely pass it on to my own High Rock Press imprint for actual publication.
 
Additionally, I have some projects of my own I would like to release using this method. I’ve begun getting chapters of my Star Hero supplement The Melancholy Seas of Space ready. It’s a sort of homage to Nishizaki’s Space Battleship Yamato, informed by simple setting creation elements I’ve taken from Powered By The Apocalypse games. Finally – and probably of the most interest to you – Hero Games legend Steve Long will be contributing material to this project as well, most likely beginning with chapters of The Martial World and Advanced Players Guide III. Though like the titans of old his ways are mysterious, and He Shall Create those books which He Shall Create.
 
If you have a manuscript of your own you would like to submit, contact me at jason@herogames.com and we can talk about it.
 
Now onto other Hero Games matters!
 
1) A lot of people have downloaded our free introductory product Champions Begins since we introduced it earlier this year and made it available on DriveThru, Indie Press Revolution, Itch.io, and our own website. Than you once again to the mysterious “Hero Fans” for their hard work.
 
2) We’ve been making various edits to Thomas Stadley’s IHA: Pride & Prejudice, and are basically ready to publish it. Steve wants to check over the manuscript and make sure the information in it lines up with the Champions Universe; then we’ll take it to press. We have an excellent cover and interior artwork all ready to go.
 
3) Veteran Hero System fan Carlos Castaneda has come to us with a proposal to create a Champions Complete package for Roll20. We’ve already signed a contract and he will be getting to work shortly with a proposed release date of October 2022. He’ll be keeping you updated about his progress here on the forums.
 
4) As many you already already know, Steve and I have already written six chapters of Champions International and he’s working on a seventh. So we should have that ready to go by Q3 2022 as promised. After that we’ll focus on running new material through Patreon before publication, with the exception of the Gemini System project, which is mostly complete down to a final layout.
 
 

I'm not sure -- perhaps Dan S. or someone else removed it (or changed its "pinned" status) during a clean-up session. I'm still working hard on MH, trying to get at least a little work done on it every day, and more than a little whenever possible.

I still wish for a Champions Villain Volume 4: Organizations . A simple place to get basic information on villainous organizations and basic agent writeups, all mostly in one place with a small sidebar about where one can get more infomation if one wishes to find it. 

The most common way I've seen this handled in Hero System, is for the creature's "burrowing" ability to be represented as Desolidification, with Mind Control to dominate the host creature, and sometimes Telepathy to access the creature's memories. The Advanced Players Guide also has an optional Power, "Possession," which runs all those elements as a single Power. That is generally less expensive and simpler than the first compound Power.
 
Another example, an alien head-burrowing creature in the book Arcane Adversaries, uses a Major Transform: Person to Person With Psychological Complication: Must Obey "Possessor", to cover the whole effect. The creature has a -0 Limitation on the Power, "Creature Has No Separate Existence" while it's in the victim's body.
 
As usual with Hero, what you choose depends on what best models the effect you want, and what feels right to you. There's rarely one "correct" way to do anything.

Depends on how the GM interprets the power. But, well...
Yes it does. In 4ed unless the attack is Linked you can only do one attack and the phase ends. Question: can he teleport without using the Flash attack, or must he always Flash?
Trigger. I don't remember if the advantage was in 4ed or not. In your example it would be Trigger (when arriving from a Teleport by own power). 
 

Caveat: If you are looking for an official answer, you might want to try a private message and ask permission to publish the answer. 
 
For me, personally, I am very hesitant of other people's "house rules" as I find them to be generally untested and rife with potential conflicts and unconsidered implications to existing official rules. I also don't like the idea of having published "house rules" because then people use it as a justification to move those same rules into campaigns or settings where it has received even LESS testing than it did in the intended campaign or setting.
 
So I am all in favor of spelling it out very clearly (and early in the book) that these are house rules only, intended for use in this setting only and the reasons for having them in the first place. I don't really see how it is going to detract from a product for people to know up front that the content is not part of the official universe since you are publishing your own setting in the Hero System.
 
- E

Dearthwood is on the back burner for now, simmering as I work on the Player's Guide and Jolrhos Codex.  I don't know when I'll get back to it, I might put out a beginner Fantasy Hero adventure first.

Believe it or not, it was 20 years ago today that Darren Watts, Jason Walters, the Secret Masters, and myself bought the HERO System (and its related IPs)!
 
It's been a wonderful, amazing journey ever since -- one with its ups and downs, like any journey -- but still an awesome one. My deepest thanks to all the HERO fans out there who have made it possible!

I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish.  The only thing DEX has to do with movement is to determine when you can move.  Lightning reflexes could be purchased with the action being moving or using a specific kind of movement.   So if you wanted to get extra DEX just for moving that would probably be considered a large group of actions so every point would get you +3 DEX, but that would not allow you to do anything but move.  So you could not use it to move and attack, including using a move through.  In game terms movement is an action.   

I found an old paper while cleaning my room that has a list of ideas for Champions campaigns of various types and power levels.I figured I would post them here to offer some inspiration for GMs looking to start up a campaign:
 
Part of a government or state official super team collected to fight crime and terrorism Each character is a child of an extradimensional being who has sown his oats widely - characters probably don't even know they were related. Dying alien distributes part of their power amongst all people gathered nearby to help fight his evil family.  Low powered game, possibly no other super types in the world Characters all awaken in a high tech lab in a dark  and dystopian future world, each with powers.  Who did this to them?  Why don't they remember anything? Regular people in this world who use a special device (alien tech? Magic item?  Extradimensional debris?) that ports them into the Champions Universe, with powers, but only for a set time period each day Members of an existing team with a base, contacts, history etc get into a dispute over tactics and goals and split off: the PCs are the new team Wake up on a deserted South Pacific Island with no memory, and powers.  They are in an alternate dimension where aliens are invading and have to fight them off.  But where are they really from? All were terminally ill of various ailments, even advanced old age, and submit to an experiment to save their lives.  The mad scientist is a supervillain who in exchange wants them to use their powers for him -- but will they? Very low powered police force members, part of a special powered task force in a big city to help fight low level street crime and minor supervillains Old retiring supergroup seeks out new members, holding auditions and picking a new team.  In the process a new potential member does not take rejection well, but is extremely powerful. Very rich old geezer wants revenge on the supervillain that casually crippled him in a battle with police in collateral damage.  He hires the PCs to deal with the villain, and the team stays together with his sponsorship. Individual superheroes are all captured by a big bad supervillain to keep them from interfering with his plan, they all escape and work together to beat the guy, and gain a nifty new base (with many secrets to discover) in the process  
I'm sure other people have ideas for campaigns as well

OK, an update: I've begun working on the maps for the various adventures.  Mostly its an updated version of the existing maps from the original adventure with some small changes.  I'm trying to keep them fairly simple and uncluttered, with some color but not very much.

I have 3 players and the edition I'm using is Champions Complete.

It's a villainous deathtrap! Make sure you have the appropriate necessary skills to get yourself free!