Gnome BODY (important!)

You are wrong. You are wrong because you are conflating "role-playing" and "not being a jerk while role-playing".

Jokes aside, I agree. I've always felt gnomes were just off-brand halflings desperately trying to find their own niche, and failing horribly.

HEY!

Matter of opinion, right there. Following conventions has nada to do with role-playing. Role-playing is playing your role, regardless of if that role is conformist or non-conformist. The guy who brings The Gunisher to a session of The Justice Team isn't not role-playing because of it. He's just not following conventions and it's fine to say no to that but it's still role-playing. RE the paladin, it depends. If Sir DoRight's player cannot choose to not stop Dirkas Thief, that's a loss of agency. If Sir DoRight cannot choose to not stop Dirkas but his player can choose to do things that the player knows will let Dirkas do his dastardly deeds without DoRight knowing, that's not loss of agency.

I agree! It also works fine for supervillains. Yes, actually. One team times 10AP is greater than one villain times 10AP. Also, FREDp427 and 6E1p134 say

I'm fine with scifi, given that I grew up on Might&Magic games. It just needs to be integrated. What I can't stand is modern tech. No guns please, unless they shoot lasers. Magic as modern equivalent is just lazy worldbuilding, and I don't like it. The things we have today look and work the way they do because of how things work, so replacing technology with magic will result in sweeping changes. I am not researching history for my elfgames thank you. I am not researching linguistic history for my elfgames either thank you. If a player knows a thing to be fact, they're going to have a hard time not using that fact. The human brain just doesn't do "ignore this piece of information" well. Either change the way the world works or let the way the world works be known, don't make me waste mental effort pretending to forget things when I should be pretending to be somebody else. See first. My personal "OH GOD NO"s are mainly Earth-things on not-Earth. References, place-names, nationalities. Accents is the big one. When somebody gives their character a, say, German accent all I can think is "He's German! Wait no there's no Germany." and my immersion shatters.

A thread has a life of its own. Punching up just requires a restructuring of the scenario. For example! Bad-Man shows up, does something nefarious, wins the fight while the heroes minimize the damage or thwart his scheme before retreating. Heroes research Bad-Man, figure out his weaknesses. Heroes apply weaknesses to Bad-Man, Bad-Man loses the fight and goes to jail. Rinse and repeat. Omit first step or roll it into the second if desired. Champions already has the tools to make this work beautifully. Limitations, Vulnerabilities, Susceptibilities, Dependencies, etc all work great to make a villain whose threat level plummets once you know how to handle them. It's just a matter of using the tools the system already gives you. Pushing exists. All that needs to be done is permit Pushing to add points to more things. So ask "How do you build pathos" and see how many good ideas come flying at you.

I'm in an open-table game (two actually) with a fair amount of players showing up and dropping out. I can confirm that HERO works great for newbies when somebody else makes them a character and that character doesn't have any weird bits or excessive bells and whistles.

I've used "Power must be used at maximum value or not at all" before as a -1/4 Limitation. Though never on an attack, though, I've never seen somebody want to use fewer ouch-dice than they're allowed to. But what I think you're really looking for is something more along the lines of No Conscious Control. Obviously that doesn't really fit since the character can deliberately wallop somebody, but the idea that they might accidentally wallop somebody feels pretty similar. The - value would be something to discuss with your GM depending on how inadvertently destructive you want this guy to be. The third option is a PhysLim: Does Not Know Own Strength When Dense.

I think it's critical to distinguish between acceptable failure and unacceptable failure. If Aquatronic is attacking a ship to steal a crate of diamonds, an obvious single point of failure is "Aquatronic jumps overboard with the crate and sinks to the safety of the ocean floor". But that's fine, because that's an acceptable failure since the game keeps going. The heroes might conduct an underwater raid to take it back, or it might not come up for another few adventures until Aquatronic uses that diamond-money to launch a super-scheme. But if Mechanon is building a kill-all-humans machine, he can't succeed. Or well, he can but that ends the campaign. Any failure to stop Mechanon is unacceptable. I fully agree RE genre emulation. It just don't work unless you get the players to help make it work. I have had this exact experience, going into a last-thing-of-the-session fight with full metacurrency and realizing that I can make awful decisions and win anyways. It was pretty awful. I have also had the exact opposite of this experience, going into a big fight with full metacurrency and watching the tension tick up as the metacurrency ticks down. It was pretty neat.

Ugh, not group metacurrency please. The thrifty players rarely get a chance to benefit because the spendthrifts rip through it. Or you require group consensus to spend and things grind to a screeching halt every time somebody wants to talk it out. Sure, but Role-Playing puts the RP in RPG. An RPG is more than a game, [...] and this argument has already been posted in this thread.

1 point will get you +1 BODY. So sink, say, 28 points into BODY, 9 into 3 PD/ED and 3 into a big-enough-to-englobe-me barrier and throw on One-Way Transparent (To Your SFX) +1/2 and turn a Half-Phase Action and 6 END into three totally negated 12DC attacks. And you can still shoot out!

A Disadvantage should logically be the inverse of an Advantage. It wasn't, so that terminology change made sense. The ones you talk about feel like change for change's sake.

I'm glad to hear metacurrency works better for your group than it does mine! But isn't giving the heroes metacurrency making the odds actually be in their favor? I'm having trouble seeing the difference between that and shaving numbers off.

The Justice League was brought up as context. Dead heroes were brought up as context. Now, I'm not the biggest JL fan but so far as I'm aware the Justice League has basically no fatalities. So, to me, the concept of JL heroes dying suggested the game had gone wildly off the rails and the GM had accidentally made his villain far too lethal but not realized until somebody died. So I was conversing with that as my foundation. Was that incorrect? Edit: I'm still confused RE villain strength. Why do HAPs matter? It makes the GM's life harder. That's the problem. And it's a problem common to almost all* metacurrency implementations I've seen, so I don't hold it against HAPs. *: PARANOIA's Perversity Points are a beautiful piece of mechanics that cause near-zero GM headaches. They have never done me wrong.

I'm clearly failing to communicate, as that is in no way my position. Could you please explain how you reached that conclusion, so I know where I miscommunicated?

It is exactly the same problem. If "you are going to have dead heroes a lot of the time" then the GM has made the enemy too strong. HAPs won't prevent that. HAPs just make that worse, since they're another variable for the GM to consider. And worse, they're a variable that's going to shift wildly based on player usage and the dice. I've seen people blow their entire stack of per-session metacurrency halfway through a session on a roll to woo the barmaid. I've seen people blow their entire stack of per-arc metacurrency the instant the first fight starts because they're not willing to let the bad guy escape (he did anyways). I've seen people sit on a stack of per-session metacurrency with half an hour left in the session during a tense fight. I've seen people start with full health and a full stack and be low on health and metacurrency at the end of a fight nobody else took damage or spent metacurrency in.

Given that the JL seem to have defeated Darkseid before (I assume, never actually read any of those issues), and in a straight up fight (I assume even harder), I don't see the problem. Clearly this means that Darkseid has a level of power that is greater than any given JLer but not so much greater that teamwork won't win the day. So I'm not sure why you suddenly need metacurrency for this one supervillain but not the rest the JL has fought. Are you worried about over or under powering him, resulting in a unsatisfying fight? Well, metacurrency just amplifies the power of the JLers so you've got the same problem. Whoops, Darkseid couldn't handle the accuracy shifting from HAPs, chumped. Or whoops, Darkseid had too many CSLs to deal with HAPs, they ran out and now he's unhittable. Exact same problems, just with the new layer of headache that is guessing how much metacurrency your players will wade in with and how they'll spend it.

The .hdc files are human readable! For, uh, admittedly questionable values of "readable".

The pedantic programmer in me says "Well that's just configuration data, the program was probably totally gone. He probably just missed a tickbox.". He is then immediately shouted down by the security security guy in me going "WHY THE EXPLETIVE WOULD THEY LEAVE LOGIN DATA AFTER AN UNINSTALL! EXPLETIVE THAT'S BAD!" and the tinkerer in me going "Well I just tried it and there wasn't any tickbox he could have missed.". I only put up with the blasted thing because my entire social circle recoiled at the mention of IRC like vampires exposed to a cross.

I agree with both those statements. I'm not sure why you're directing them at me, as I believe I have indicated my agreement with that train of thought. I believe that Heroic Action Points (I think that's what they're called) are an awful implementation of metacurrency. I believe that one of the reasons for them being awful is the raw determinism of them where a player can say "ah, nah, I win right now". I believe you agree with these statements, is that correct? I believe that a much better implementation of metacurrency in the HERO System is possible, and such an implementation should not be based on "I lose. Actually no, I win." but on more interesting distortions of failure to keep the dramatic tension the dice provide. A mechanical method of replacing "Roll to see if Hawkeye misses the most important shot of his life." with "Hawkeye makes the most important shot of his life. Roll to see how bad of a situation he had to put himself in to do so.". I have no idea if you agree with these statements, but would value your input.

Hole in the Middle (+1/4).

It's going to depend on how magical senses are built. If all magic-based senses are in the Mystical Sense Group, then just drop a Darkness to Mystical Group and you're good. If not, you'll need Darkness to [Groups you want Blocked], Only Against Mystical Senses.

That is factually correct. I was complaining about the current state of affairs. I was stating that a much better system than the current one exists (in the abstract "one is out there" sense, not the "I have one right here" sense, though I could probably whip up a better one pretty easily).

I thought the idea was to allow a small degree of player intervention in the dice, not always win forever. To prevent a, singular, failure. I do feel that a much better system exists than the horribly boring "you may change dice by this much per interval". Something to turn "no" into "yes, but".