Jason Reid

I tend to add an "Exceeds Campaign Limits" required advantage for the portions of characteristics and/or powers that, well, exceed my campaign soft limits. Typically a +1.

Yeah exactly this is why SPD is so cheap on the surface...there are other assumed costs involved in maintaining that SPD. I'm really not a fan of conditional SPD.

The way I interpret it, an AoE Defensive Absorption would only add PD/ED if the character with the power was standing in the AoE. If the AoE covered an area the character was not standing in, the PD/ED wouldn't apply to (e.g.) other targets in that area. For that, you'd need to do as 6E1 147 suggests and probably link in some Usable by Others defenses. Given all those caveats I think the combination of advantages would be fine if not exactly what you might be looking for.

If you allow them to have some other action on Trigger, there is no logical defense for not alowing them to have this. If they already had 7 SPD, I probably wouldn't let them have any other regularly triggerable actions available. But that's all just expression of table limits.

Would I let someone do it? Probably. Would I let someone who is already at 7 SPD do it? Probably not.

Huh? Sure it is. From 6E1 314: As long as the Trigger is bought with it's own advantages/disadvantages, it could be naked. Which would be necessary, because without something limiting the Trigger to a character's off-phases, it would apply to the Deflection 100% of the time and then the player wouldn't be able to use the power without a Trigger (APG2 47). As far as what I'm trying to accomplish, I'm trying to help the player realize their hero fantasy is all. I'm in general not a fan of players finding ways to get more effective speed and actions in combat, since that tends to skew their table time at the cost of the other players', but in this case it sounds like the player wants to model a hero with a little extra capacity for protecting innocents and this seems like a way to do it. I probably still wouldn't allow it as GM but if the GM is cool with it, this is how I'd do it (mainly b/c I'd prefer to base the point cost on the power the player is using off-phase rather than on a more arbitrary limitation on SPD).

Can't something like this be bought and tweaked as a naked Trigger advantage on the Deflection?

Yeah, this is my take. One of my most important definitions of "broken character" is one who takes an outsized amount of play time in combat compared to the rest of the group. From a player-vs-world perspective I see no issue with allowing some sort of "Variable Applications" advantage (maybe at +1/2 or +1) on top of Selective AoE TK. If AoE TK allows a player to hurl a bunch of agents into the air, I don't see a real "balance" issue in allowing the player to hurl one, trip a second, and disarm a third. But the last thing I want to do is play that out every round of a combat.

I wager that lot of us have had, "If it doesn't limit you, it's not worth any points" drilled pretty deep into our core at this point. You can of course use limits as a storytelling vehicle, but for a lot of folks, they are limits first and vehicles second. So the notion that we would tack on extra limits to a character without some sort of compensation is at odds with our approach to the system. Extra story hooks? Sure, tacking something like that onto a Package would work fine. I just probably wouldn't treat them the same as I treated actual stereotypical complications.

I can't imagine having success at my table in a point buy system by packaging up something with complications but then giving the characters no compensation for those complications aside from the stuff they're already paying full price for. The math behind such a package would be obvious and my players would opt to not use them and just build their own concepts. Unless I was to use force or deception I can't see them working for me.

I'm curious if anybody has any particular favorite articles from the Adventurer's Club series of magazines. Anything still especially relevant or insightful to gaming today? Anything especially useful that somehow didn't find its way replicated in later editions of the core rules or official supplements? When I got into HERO in the early 90s I knew that AC was a thing, but I was a poor kid without the means to collect them. I'm curious about any gems I may have missed out on.

To me this doesn't sound like a move that just any random VIPER agent would have available to them in their repertoire, so I don't think it needs core combat maneuver rule support. I'd have no problem requiring a character to pay points for the privilege. Reflection with some limitations maybe seems fine to me. You could probably lay on enough to get this looking like a Talent. Alternatively yeah you could build the attack with a special limitation like, "Reflectable" or "Deflectable" but then you're rewriting every grenade in the game, or justifying why some grenades have this disadvantage while others don't. Other Alternatively you could extend the Real Weapon disadvantage to cover this, at least for the grenades that take it.

For initial encounters with villains, I tend to use 4e builds. I love how clean and focused they tend to be. If and as those villains recur, I'll upgrade them to builds from later editions over time to teach them some new tricks. I actually almost never design my own villains.

I think it's more a flaw in the concept of using "games" as a platform to explore stories & concepts. The fact that the underpinnings are a "game" means that it's naturally going to favor certain explorations over others. I can't think of any RPG where one player would consistently have the "combat spotlight equivalent" of 12 SPD while the rest of the party would be content to live with 5 or 6 SPD. Most of them try to enforce that every player gets equal spotlight (e.g. "everybody gets 3 actions per round of combat"). Champions gives you the option of a wider distribution, but the fact that everyone wants to "play" means that in practice you're rarely going to see one.

It's tough to have a uniform answer here because the distribution of CVs probably matters more than whether the campaign is "high powered" or "low powered". At the end of the day, the difference between 1/2 CV and e.g. -10 CV may not actually be that significant. For example, if the average CV is 10, then 1/2 is a -5. If the average CV is 20, then 1/2 is a -10. So in the first case, all else being equal when the OCV was halved the attacker would need to roll a 6-. In the high powered campaign, they'd need to roll a 3. Now 6 is better 3 for sure but it's pretty crappy odds either way. The way CVs work in this game, being high powered or low powered doesn't really matter too much. The difference between a 11 CV and a 10 CV is exactly the same as the difference between a 21 CV and a 20 CV, or even a 51 CV and a 50 CV. Little differences move along the bell curve at the same rate no matter how high the average is. Whether someone has a -5 or a "halved" CV isn't really much of a distinction because once you move down the bell curve a couple of points most of the significance is already captured. Now if the distribution of CVs is very wide (some creatures have CVs of 10, others have ~20, and others have ~30) then things like "halving" vs "-5" matter more. But that's gonna be campaign dependent so its kind of on you as the GM to shape it into what you want. There wouldn't really be a simple "high-powered" rule vs a "low-powered" rule. At any power level, 1/2 DCV is basically saying, "if something targets you, you're gonna need to be pretty damn lucky to avoid getting hit". But if I was forced to pick a number, I'd make it -5. The "Standard Superheroic" baseline for CVs is 7-13, and since I think "Standard Superheroic" is probably the default around which Hero is initially balanced, that would make the average 1/2 CV penalty a -5. That said, I wouldn't do this. Unless I was forced to. Generally I'm gonna want my star enemies to have better CVs than the PCs, and I'm gonna want the PCs to realize the biggest possible benefit when they successfully stun them.