Gnome BODY (important!)

You are explicitly permitted to take Zero Phase Actions before a Full Phase Action. You are explicitly able to take No time Actions after your phase ends. Everything on your list can be done before or after a Full Phase Action. I ask you again, why would any of those things need to be done during the Full Phase Action and not before or after? You seem to be staunchly ignoring that point. Please address it.

"The character’s SPD indicates which Segments he can take an Action in; these Segments are his Phases. " Bolding again mine. If your character has exhausted their segment 3 phase and takes the desired Full Phase action as soon as possible, it will be taken, both beginning and ending, on his DEX on segment 6.

The rules for what Full Phase means are very clear. Now that you mention it, I strongly suspect a good deal of the confusion in this thread is some people knowing the rules-meaning and some people guessing at the rules-meaning from the words-meaning. "Full Phase (-½) means the power requires a character’s Full Phase to activate and use. The character can perform Zero Phase Actions before he begins activating the power, but may not perform Half Phase Actions. However, the power still activates on his DEX in the Phase; he isn’t required to wait until the end of the Phase to turn it on. " All boldings mine.

Not during the activation of a power, no, they do not seem meaningful or useful. I see absolutely no reason why any of those couldn't be done before. Please give me a concrete example of when it would matter that you do it during instead of immediately before (or after).

You are allowed to perform Zero Phase Actions before you begin the activation, and after as well unless the activation is somehow an attack action. Non-actions aren't mentioned. I struggle to conceive of a realistic scenario where neither performing the action before activating nor waiting until after activation will suffice. If you feel otherwise, please provide a reasonable case when not being able to take a Zero Phase Action or non-action during the activation would matter.

No, you explicitly cannot take that option on Full Phase. Because you already can't do anything else while Full Phase acting.

An Extra Time: Full Phase power already prohibits the user from doing other Half/Full Phase Actions during that phase. "The character can perform Zero Phase Actions before he begins activating the power, but may not perform Half Phase Actions. "

I think I'm not communicating well. In a normal city-bound game, a PC might have a contact who is an esteemed university professor with degrees in history and language. The contact can answer a staggering variety of questions for the PC, provide important reference material, or direct the PC to somebody who'd know more than they do. In a globetrotting game, that same PC might have a similar contact. Except, to handle the greater scope of the campaign the contact now won't balk at an international call or to ship a book out to Brazil. The point cost and the things this contact can provide haven't changed, it's just that the scope in which the contact can operate has been expanded to match the scope of the game. In a normal city-bound game, a PC might have a contact who runs a shipping business out of a warehouse in the port. He might offer free (albeit slow) travel, know things about commerce, and be able to obtain difficult-to-obtain items for the PC. In a globetrotting game, that same PC might have a similar contact. Except, to handle the greater scope of the campaign the contact now operates a warehouse in every port. The point cost and the things this contact can provide haven't changed, it's just that the scope in which the contact can operate has been expanded to match the scope of the game. In a normal city-bound game, a PC might have a contact who Is a black marketeer. He can get just about anything the PC desires, and do so quickly and circumspectly. In a globetrotting game, that same PC might have a similar contact. Except, to handle the greater scope of the campaign the PC now knows a black marketeer in every city. The point cost and the things this contact can provide haven't changed, it's just that the scope in which the contact can operate has been expanded to match the scope of the game. When you take the map and draw a bigger circle labeled "You will be here", it's only fitting that the circle labeled "Your contact can help here" also gets bigger.

As per the standard Contacts price model. A PC shouldn't be forced to pay more to get the normal benefit just because the campaign will involve travel. Note also the verbage in the front of the Perks section. "If a character loses a Perk he typically gets the Character Points he spent on it back". Immediately reinvesting those points into an equivalent contact in the new location seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

I'll reiterate my opinion, high-travel campaign requires telecontacts, omnipresent contacts, or generic contacts. This businessman might be pals with a shipping mogul who operates a warehouse in every port. This businessman might have a retired friend who's spending his remaining years traveling the globe. This businessman might just have someone in his debt in every country.

Why do the AKs need to be individual countries? Is there some reason that AK: Europe wouldn't work for your game? Likewise, why do you feel tied to buying individual languages instead of declaring language "sets" to be purchasable at individual language prices?

If travel will be frequent, Contacts should be purchased with that in mind. Unique characters should be purchased with some excuse to be present or be useful if not present. Professor McKinley is never more than a phone call away, so no matter where you are in the world his double-doctorate can be of assistance. Hank "Hiking" Smith is a travelholic, so his 11- roll indicates the chance he's in the area anyways. Merlin is a wizard, and thus unbounded by mere concepts of distance and location. Anyone else should be purchased "generic". You don't know Marco the black marketeer, you just have Contact: Black Market 12-. No matter where you go, you can (try to) find a black market.

The correct defense against Presence Attacks is to look the GM/players in the eye and say it's best for everyone if nobody ever touches the mechanic. The alternative defense is to put half a dozen psylims on your PC that will oppose a villain's Presence Attack so he gets negative 12 DCs against you. It's just fundamentally busted wide open, between being usable off-phase every segment at no action cost, not being defended against by strength of will or mental defense, being trivial to accumulate massive circumstance bonuses to, being defended against by disads, etc.

If Incantations are a common and well known limitation on spellcasting, then silence fields should become common as well because they shut down spellcasters. I can very easily picture a warrior learning the spell of silence just so he can force enemy spellcasters into martial combat. Don't forget that any damage taken while incanting ruins the incantation. That alone makes it worth -1/4, since a canny enemy can just hold their attacks until you start with the magic words and negate your turn if they get a decent hit.

Also GM approval. Bob may say your limitations are accurately priced, Alice may say Only Improves OCV is a -1, and Carl may say you can't do that and have to use CSLs. With 6e you're going by-the-book so unless your GM didn't tell you about a house-rule there's no (OK, less) mechanics dispute chance.

I don't see any reason to apply a called shot penalty, since declaring "both arms" doesn't mandate a called shot to the arms. That said, there's a valid point that grabbing the head doesn't necessarily entail obstructing speech. If the grabber doesn't know that the grabbed has powers with Incantations, I could easily see them grabbing in such a way that it doesn't prevent incanting. A "shut up, wiznerd" grab could be very different from a "get those eye-beams away from me" grab.

"To use Incantations, a character must be able to speak freely and clearly", so 1. Unless of course the Incantations were defined as playing an instrument or some other non-vocal noise, in which case there'd be some other limb to grab to shut down the Incantations.

I personally build my mooks as OCV ~4, one or two Firearms CSLs, and then build their gun as a multipower with an attack slot and an Aid Firearms CSL 1d6 (standard effect) slot. This both speeds up combat, since I only have to make one attack roll per mook-group, and makes them threatening only in groups. One mook shooting at you? OCV 5, he'll miss, ignore him. Six mooks shooting at you? One attack at OCV 10, you're likely to get hit.

Buy the magic as Requires A Skill Based Roll. Buy the corresponding skill. Buy two levels in the skill, Usable Only During Daylight. This achieves the two point difficulty swing without any fancy business on the Requires A Roll modifier, since it offloads the variability to the skill itself.

Normally Danger Sense gives you full OCV if you make your Danger Sense roll by half even if you don't have any (other) Targeting senses that can sense your attacker. Intuitional Danger Sense doesn't do this.

That's right. Putting some more thought into it, I think a NPC not intended for combat can be elegantly reduced to jobs and rolls for those jobs. So an Olympic gymnast might be written up as Gymnast 13-, Celebrity 11-, Everyman 8-. These inform his capability out of combat without requiring a full writeup. If he needs to leap a fence to get away from Doctor Defenestration, that's a gymnast thing so he's got 13-. If he needs to talk a bystander into giving him a ride, that sounds like a Celebrity thing so he's got a 11-. If he needs to remember the conversion rate between ounces and kilograms, that's something anybody could know from school so he's got his Everyman 8-. If he needs to fix a car engine, he's calling a mechanic. And if he's unlucky enough to be present when the eye-beams start flying, then he's just another generic bystander statblock.

Like Greywind said, I'd model a top-level non-super NPC professional as PS: Whatever at a high but not superhuman level. 14- sounds about right. Unless they're story-centric that would be their entire sheet, too. If they're intended to compete with another NPC I made, I'll just predetermine (via fiat) the result as "X beats Y by a margin of Z". If the PCs decide to intervene, then their actions will be converted to modifiers. Get enough modifiers, change the outcome. If they're intended to compete with a player made character, then I have to decide if they're story-centric competition, transient competition, or just a speedbump. A speedbump boils down to "roll skill at -x". Transient competition boils down to some time for PCs to scrounge for modifiers by researching the judges/competition, preparing for the details of the competition, sabotaging the opposition, preventing opposing sabotage, tuning their instruments, etc, and then an opposed roll. Story-centric competition means a series of opposed rolls over the course of a session, with plenty of time for modifier-scrounging and unfair play. The skill system in HERO isn't interesting enough to be fun in a white-box environment. It needs more avenues for PC interaction. That's what modifiers are for, so the more important a skill-based challenge is the more focus should be placed on modifiers. The actual roll at the end is the narrative climax, not the entire story.

If the desired character is human movement-speed and superhuman combat-speed, buy high SPD and sell back some Running.

With that attitude, we are most certainly not "cool".

No, when you have the wrong numbers then your numbers are wrong. I don't give a caped donkey about liking things, I fully agree that DEX was underpriced before 6e and removing figured characteristics was the correct decision. That doesn't change the fact that your table is full of Sewer-Man's extra-putrid leavings. 12 DEX 4 CV does not cost 36 points. This table describes the relationship between DEX, CV, and cost. The DEX column is the DEX of the character. The CV column is the CV of a 5e character with that DEX. The 5e NFC column is the cost for a character in 5e to buy that much DEX (and thus CV) with No Figured Characteristics. The 6e column is the cost for the given DEX and CV in 6e. The 6e no DEX column is the cost for 10 DEX and the given CV in 6e. The 5e _ 6e column shows the relationship between 5e NFC and 6e. The 5e _ 6e no DEX column shows the relationship between 5e NFC and 6e no DEX. DEX CV 5e NFC 6e 6e no DEX 5e _ 6e 5e _ 6e no DEX 3 1 -14 -34 -20 > > 6 2 -8 -18 -10 > > 9 3 -2 -2 0 = < 10 3 0 0 0 = = 11 4 2 12 10 < < 12 4 4 14 10 < < 15 5 10 30 20 < < 18 6 16 46 30 < < 21 7 22 62 40 < < 24 8 28 78 50 < < 27 9 34 94 60 < < 30 10 40 110 70 < < 33 11 46 126 80 < < 36 12 52 142 90 < < 39 13 58 158 100 < < 42 14 64 174 110 < < 45 15 70 190 120 < < Conclusion: ANY CV above 3 costs more in 6e than in 5e. Period space space carriage return line feed. 6e's DEX/CV changes do not give any hero a "cost break" like you claimed, unless you're proposing that bystanders are more competent than your heroes. And what's most appalling to me this that this is mathematically obvious. Painfully so, even. +1 CV in 6e is 10 real. Even 1 DCV and a 2-point CSL is 7 real. And 3 DEX NFC is 6 real. And 6 is a smaller number than both 7 and 10.