Gnome BODY (important!)

It's an artifact of the bleak days when you couldn't just buy OCV and had to go through DEX or CSLs instead. I fully agree that we don't need them, but I feel we don't need CSLs in general now that CV can be purchased directly so my opinion is a bit biased.

What sort of series of skill rolls would you expect to be needed to resolve the problem? I'm curious how you'd run that.

If I might ask, what genre(s) do you play where you're experiencing that issue? I haven't seen that happening in the Champions games I've been in, so I'm just blindly hypothesizing here but I suspect it's mainly linked to genre. Or more properly, linked to the ability to spend XP on powers. Because I've observed that most characters in my group have been buying up powers, with only the "skillier" characters taking talents/perks/skills and generally just to fill obvious holes in their skill selection ("Oh, my tech girl should have Security Systems too."). But I suspect that if buying powers isn't an option, there's really not much to spend XP on besides damage, CV, Characteristics, and talents/perks/skills. And if there are caps on CV, damage, and maximum skill roll, that really doesn't leave much to invest in but diversification of talents/perks/skills.

More functions? What more functions? It's +1 OCV. You go from hitting on N- to hitting on (N+1)-. The cost for having multiple useful attacks is the cost of having multiple useful attacks. And again, I'm arguing that the status quo is wrong. Please stop presenting the status quo as if it's unquestionable truth, because that comes off as you ignoring everything I'm saying and implying I don't know the basics of the game. If the Spreading optional rule makes Blast work like a Blast/OCV Multipower that throws off existing cost structures then maybe Spreading has issues.

The big question is "Will this character take advantage of their energy being nature by leaving the suit?". If he will, it's a Multiform. If he won't, it's a Physical Limitation: Assumes weaker alternate form when suit damaged/destroyed. If he says he won't but then demonstrates he will, fill a spray bottle with cold water and aim for the face while saying "No! Bad player!" in a firm but calm tone of voice.

Which blindly assumes Melee Marvin has the STR to do anything meaningful with a thrown object. You pointed out that 10d6 is worthless in a 20d6 game, follow through with that logic! Again, everyone has a baseline of 2d6 punching. That doesn't mean a 12d6 game should give a rebate on OCV if it doesn't help you connect with that 2d6 worthlessness. If Melee Marvin did have the STR needed to throw things effectively, or dropped enemy weapons were a valid combat option, then sure that might be worth a Limitation. But that's going to vary with game and genre. Which, whoops, leads us back to the idea that you can't price those Limitations in a vacuum. I feel that CSLs are a godawful mechanic and need to die. Among other reasons, because of exactly what you're saying. Why should Bob get cheaper OCV? Why should Martial Arts Marvin pay less for OCV than Melee Marvin? What rationale is there to make the same benefit (+1 to-hit with everything useful) cost different amounts? CSLs are just an expression of "CV with Limitations" so I don't get why you're saying "look, here's static-price CV with Limitations" when I'm saying "static CV Limitations are bad and wrong". You're appealing to how things are when I'm saying things aren't how they should be. Right now, a character can pay multiple different prices for the exact same thing. There's zero excuse for this.

FRED priced +1 with All Combat at 8 points, not 10. 10 was the cost of an Overall Level. I have to disagree. No generalization of OCV Limitation is possible. It has to be done on a per-character basis. Melee Marvin has twelve different attacks and none of them are ranged. What does he lose by taking his OCV Only For HTH? Is that really a Limitation? Beam-Eye Bob has a Blast. That's it, that's his entire offensive selection. Does it actually limit him if he makes his OCV Only For Beam-Eye Blast and Block? No! Neither of those limit the character. But if Switch-Hitter Sam has a Blast and an HKA, OCV Only For HTH is actually limited. If Four Blast Frank buys OCV Only For Blast #2 and Block, that's a limiting Limitation. Edit: Figured out how to word my point: For an OCV Limitation to be a meaningful Limitation, it needs to (be able to) be phrased as "Not with this useful thing on my sheet". Sam's OCV is "Not with my Blast", Frank's OCV is "Not with these three Blasts". Both of those are excluding valuable things that the character always has access to. But Bob's OCV is "Not with my fists, my useless feeble 2d6 fists" and Marvin's is "Not with uh... maybe I'll pick up a gun?". The former excludes something that's not useful while the latter excludes something that's not part of the character or generally available.

My first concern would be viability of characters with no Sensory Protection or exotic senses. Take the example of Obscure Sight 1 (5 AP). If I hit somebody with no Sensory Protection and pay 1 END a phase, they stay blind for the rest of the fight. There's nothing they can do but pray somebody else Stunned or KOs me. That's frankly absurd for 5 AP. Related to this is END scaling. If I'd instead bought Obscure Sight 12 (60 AP), I'd be paying 6 END a phase and the benefit of the added cost wouldn't apply until I stopped spending END. Which is a little strange. My next concern would be verisimilitude. I buy Sight Sensory Protection 12, defined as sunglasses. My friend doesn't buy Sensory Protection. An evil wizard puts us in an Obscure Sight 8 AOE defined as magical darkness. I, the person with sunglasses, see better in the dark than my friend who is not wearing sunglasses. In general, common Flash Defense SFX don't make much sense as defenses against common Darkness SFX. By merging Flash and Darkness, you get a lot of oddball behavior. I do agree with the sentiment though. I think I'd personally work the opposite direction you did though. Ditch Darkness. Tell people to build it as Flash, AOE, Constant, NND. Or prebuild it as, say, 12 points per Targeting Sense, 7 per Non-Targeting Sense, definition of uncommon but existent defense (as per +1 NND/AVAD) and purchase of AoE mandatory.

It does work, it just wasn't explained perfectly. Let me try again for him, but with more words. A power with no Modifiers has its base cost multiplied by 4/4 to get final cost. Add Advantages directly to this: A +1/4 Advantage brings it to 5/4, a +1 Advantage on top of that brings it to 9/4, so on and so forth. "Add" Limitations to the denominator: A -1/4 Limitation brings it to 4/5, a -1/2 Limitation on top of that brings it to 4/7. If you have both, do both! A +3/4 Advantage and -1/2 Limitation brings the multiplier to 7/6. More formally, what you're doing is taking Base ∙ ( 4 + 4 ∙ Σ(Advantages) ) / ( 4 - 4 ∙ Σ(Limitations) ). The reason I phrased it as 1/1 was to rip out all those 4s. I'd do it as Base ∙ ( 1 + Σ(Advantages) ) / ( 1 - Σ(Limitations) ). Once you've added everything up, multiply to get real cost. If you're using the 1/1 method, you can also multiply base cost by numerator to get AP but the 4s screw that up. Of course, me saying it works doesn't mean it works, so I'll prove it works. Energy Blast 10d6, Penetrating (+1/2). 50 * (4+2) / (4) = 300/4 = 75. Energy Blast 10d6, Beam (-1/4). 60 * (4) / (4+1) = 200/5 = 40. Energy Blast 10d6, Penetrating (+1/2), Beam (-1/4). 50 * (4+2) / (4+1) = 300/5 = 60. Energy Blast 6d6, AOE 1" (+1/2), 1/2 END (+1/4), Reduced Penetration (-1/4), No KB (-1/4). 30 * (4+2+1) / (4+1+1) = 210/6 = 35. And HD agrees with all the numbers.

Is that complexity or just long-windedness though? There's a bunch in 6th that gets more space (for example, Clinging goes from half a page to a whole page) but doesn't meaningfully change, it's just wordier.

As somebody whose experience is entirely constrained to FRED and 6e, what was the complexity added? Unfortunately, I'd expect that to clear up approximately nothing. My experience is that the biggest source of confusion RE Limitations is "Wait, a +1/2 Advantage increases cost by half the base value but a -1/2 Limitation reduces cost by one-third? Whaaaa?". Maybe there'd be less confusion if the book would clearly enumerate that you start out multiplying by 1/1, then Advantages increase the numerator and Limitations increase the denominator.

I'd personally question how often he's going to use this power for anything beyond always having a weapon available and being immune to Disarm (which is done by just not taking Focus). If it seems highly unlikely that he'll be teleporting weapons out of other people's hands, then I'd say don't bother thinking about how to build it. In the event it does come up, a roll of Power Skill against Strength has you covered.

Like Killer Shrike mentions, I'd be very worried about when this gets declared and how to prevent bidding wars. I play a bunch of Honor+Intrigue, and that system has some maneuvers that allow you to act earlier. Every single time somebody's thrown their sword, they've neglected to mention before their turn that they're doing so and thus they've missed out on the +2 Initiative that a Blade Throw provides. This has caused some awkward moments when that +2 Initiative would have been really important. My experience is that many players do not interface with the game outside their turn. This is a mechanic that requires interfacing with the game outside your turn. This makes me worry. This is interesting to me because my groups have never had anything like this. What do you feel the underlying cause of "I gotta go faster" was?

Haven't seen it run myself, and haven't considered doing so because we've got enough of a HERO community in my area that teaching players "backwards" math would just cause horrible confusion if anyone switched to or from our group.

I'm going to have to disagree. My group consists of two types of people. Half the group will take the shortest and most direct route in chargen. So when the GM said "Campaign standard is a CV of 7", they responded by putting their DEX at 20 since that's the simplest way to get CV 7. The other half pokes at numbers and thinks about things. So when the GM said "Campaign standard is a CV of 7", they responded by saying "Well I can get +1 CV via 3 DEX costing 9 points but -3 for the SPD rebate so +1 CV for 6 points. Or I could buy CSLs for how much? No thanks!" and put their DEX at 20. So in our first fight, we had one hero above 20, the mooks and a villain in the teens, and a six-way initiative tie at DEX 20. So my experience is that CV keying off DEX makes variation in DEX mostly go away. Every other characteristic, my group has wonderful spreads going up and down the range. But DEX is mostly a pile of 20s. And I don't like that.

So @zorak, two big questions we'll need you to answer if we're going to give you the best advice possible: What sort of game are you running, and what role do mechs play? Because if you're trying to make Giant Robot Man to fight your superheroes, that's a very different thing from making a Robot Gladiators game or having a Nazi Bipedal Tank show up in your WWII soldiers game.

I'm not saying (that people are saying) "subtraction is hard". I'm saying "HERO has a bunch of math-stuff compared to other games, and some of that math-stuff is very unintuitive". How many more math-stuff, you ask? Thrognar the Fighter should be simple, right? Let's count the operations in hitting once and being hit once! D&D 5e: Roll to-hit, adding your bonus to a d20. Tell the GM your result. (1 operation) Roll and sum your 2d6 damage dice, add your bonus. Tell the GM your result. (2 operations, 3 total) GM tells you the enemy's attack resul. It hits your AC, ow! (Technically another operation here, but people can do comparison so fast I'm ignoring it. We're not computers, we don't have to do subtraction to tell which number's bigger.) GM tells you a damage number. Subtract it from your HP. (1 operation, 4 total) HERO: Roll to-hit, subtracting the sum of 3d6 from your precomputed 11+OCV. (3 operations, +1 if that handy precomputation wasn't done) Roll your 3d6, sum it to get BODY. Roll STUN multiplier and multiply by BODY to get STUN. Tell the GM these numbers. (3 operations, 6 total) Subtract the END cost of your attack from your END. (1 operation, 7 total) GM tells you the enemy's attack result. It hits your DCV, ow! GM tells you two damage numbers. Subtract your rDEF from the BODY damage, then subtract the result from your BODY. Subtract your DEF from the STUN damage, then subtract the result from your STUN. (4 operations, 11 total) Notice that HERO requires Thrognar's player to do roughly thrice the math and track thrice as many numbers (STUN, BODY, END). There'd be even more math if Thrognar was using a Normal Attack or Knockback was in use. That means a new player has roughly thrice the learning to do and thrice the mental burden. It doesn't matter that each individual step is trivial. There's three times as many steps to do and remember! What math-stuff is unintuitive? A Knockback result of zero is unlike all other effect results of zero. Zero anything else does nada. Zero Knockback knocks you down. It takes negative Knockback to have no effect. Advantages add in a straightforward manner. A +1/2 Advantage increases the power's cost by 1/2 of the base cost. But a Limitation doesn't behave that way. A -1/2 Limitation doesn't decrease the power's cost by 1/2 of the base cost.

I've never had people complain abut fractions or any other mathematical operation. What I've had people complain about is the number of different math-related things they have to keep track of. To-hit isn't just sum-and-tell. Three ways of counting damage. At once! -1/4 doesn't mean 25% off. Get told three damage numbers, subtract different things from different ones, compare one to a threshold, remember that zero means "fall down" instead of "no effect" for another. Track three different "keep fighting" numbers, two of which go up as well as down and one of which goes down multiple times per turn. So on and so forth. That's what I assume people who complain about math in HERO are complaining about.

That supposes that skills are currently equal. Breakfall can be counted on to be important multiple times a superfight if Knockback is in use. Is that as valuable as Lockpicking? Combat Driving? Contortionist? I'd say no, I'd be amazed if those skills came up once per session outside specific genres. HERO makes some blind assumptions about frequency of use that are likely to not hold true for any given campaign but probably be vaguely accurate if averaged across all genres. And for that matter, genre says a lot about what skills are even useful. Take Climbing, is Climbing worth giving the time of day when you could buy Cling-Grips (FRED page 143) for 4 points? I'd say most certainly not, but if it came packaged with Acrobatics and Contortionist it'd be more tempting. Is the ability to drive mundane vehicles well worth charging for when the party is The Flash, Superman, Iron Man, and Thor? Of course not, getting in a car would just slow those heroes down! If Knockback isn't in use, merging it with Acrobatics lets people have Breakfall for the once-a-campaign time it's needed but not be overcharged. If locked dungeon doors are commonplace, Lockpicking shouldn't be merged with anything since it's already great. So on and so forth. I'd suggest looking at how often a given skill gets used in your campaign (or prior games with the same genre even if they're different systems), and trying to merge similar underused skills.

a) What's the maneuver The Pikeman is using? Basic Strike unless specified otherwise? That said, Move-Through has a DCV penalty, thus making The Pikeman more likely to hit. b) What's the maneuver The Pikeman is using? Basic Strike unless specified otherwise? Unless it has a DCV penalty, why penalize him? c) You said it yourself, it's 2d6 KA. d) 50 STR and 6" movement, that's (10+6/3)d6. -(6/5) OCV. Now what I think you're really asking is "How do I make the 'brace for a charge' maneuver/power that's implicit in having a big sharp stick". I'd personally just call that a combination of spending your first Half Phase Action to Resist Knockback (so The Dud eats full recoil damage) and holding your second to Strike at The Dud when he gets in range. That would change the answers to a') Full normal. That -3 DCV on The Dud is going to make it really likely to hit though unless there's already a big CV disparity. b') 1/2, from Resisting Knockback. c') Full normal, plus a decent chance of forcing The Dud to eat full recoil damage. That said, The Dud is way outclassing this poor dude with a stick so recoil damage is pretty unlikely. d') Unchanged If a character wanted to be double plus good at impaling people running towards them, I'd have them buy a custom MA maneuver with an OCV bonus, the v/3 or v/5 element, and have it follow Resist Knockback. Say, +2 OCV, v/3, follows Resist Knockback for a total of 3 points to learn. Changing the answers again to a'') +2 OCV, and The Dud is at -3 DCV so a hit is very likely. b'') 1/2 DCV, somewhat mitigated by the The Dud being at -(6/5) OCV. A mutual hit is very likely. c'') 2 1/2d6 KA, plus a decent chance of forcing The Dud to eat full recoil damage. That said, The Dud is way outclassing this poor dude with a stick so recoil damage is pretty unlikely. d'') Unchanged.

Agreed. If you can only use Power X if you're using Power Y, and Power Y is Always On, when can you not use Power X? Never. So it's not a Limitation.

That's illegal RAW. "[A] slot in a Power Framework cannot add to or modify a slot in the same or another Power Framework, or the same or another Power Framework as a whole." FREDp310 and 6e1p398. If a player approached me with such a construct, I'd point out that they're getting "more" Multipower slots than they're buying by doing so and while clever, they should be paying for all those slots.

Knowing how many total points they're built on doesn't really help us. What we really need to know are DCs, defenses, SPD, etc. There's a massive difference between a kilopoint character who spent 100 on combat stuff and a kilopoint character who spent 800 on combat stuff.

You're the GM, right? Why not just houserule it? Hero Designer will happily let you buy PSLs and call them PSLs against Multiple Attack penalties, and Steve Long isn't in the habit of coming to people's houses and telling them they're Having Fun Wrong. Heck, 6e has a bit in the front saying that some things used to be different in 5e and if they weren't problems then they won't be problems now so let it stay.

No book reference I'm aware of, so let's get mathematical! 6e sets the price of CON at 1 point per 1 CON. 5 CON therefore costs 5 points, and provides +5 to your Stunning threshold as well as +1 to your CON rolls. We now have X+Y=5, solve for X. Technically it also protects against being Adjustment Power'd down to 0 CON and the problems that causes, but how likely is that to matter? 6e sets the price of a Skill Level that provides +1 with a given characteristic roll at 2 points per +1. So +1 to your CON rolls is worth 2 points. We now have Y=2. Substitute and simplify, X=3. So 5 CON only to prevent Stunning should cost 3 points. A -3/4 Limitation will make 5 CON cost 2.86 points, a -1/2 Limitation will make 5 CON cost 3.33 points. The 2.86 is closer to 3 than 3.33 is, so the most accurate Limitation value is -3/4. Assuming, of course, that the CON Skill Level is fairly priced, this should be a very fair price. Personally I've never seen a CON roll or any construct that'd call for one at my table, so I'd say "-0" and "so don't" if one of my players asked and we were playing 6e.