GreaterThanOne

I love the 4ed limitation "Independent" (-2). It really has no purpose in a Superhero game, but it simulates powerful magical doodads which not only be taken away, WILL be taken away. In case your playing Fantasy Hero with a bunch of D&D guys.

If you take someone else's focus and you use a power through that focus that requires END, then it is the character who is wearing the ring/using the power that pays the END.
 
IBO in 6th edition can be set up to work the same way.
 
 
Doc

Now all I have to do is find a group, lol. Until then, character creation is still a blast

If a character has 2 psychological complications in conflict with each other and all else is equal what do you do? For example if if a character has the psychological complication: racist and the psychological complication: protective of innocents those two complications can overlap quite easily such as if someone of the disliked race is traped in a fire but has done nothing wrong. I assume that if the complications are uneven the more severe one wins out but what happens if they are equal? Do they just cancel each other out? Thanks in advance.

My namesake character, Bolo, was always the lesser-powered character in our team.  (He once got taken down by one of Firewing's agents.)  Powers-wise, Bolo's saving grace was a Multipower of various odd, little used things like a Force Wall, a Running Drain, and so forth.  And despite being the low-powered guy, Bolo managed to save the butts of every other hero on the team at least once. There was a certain satisfaction in having the team's mega-brick rely on *you* for help in a crunch.  So yeah, playing the clean-up specialist can be fun. 

Thank you; sincerely.  I like to be helpful when I can. 
 
I have to confess, though:  the stuff I voiced above comes natural: I started with the older, lower-starting-points editions, and I was hooked, mostly because of the way you had complete control over growing your character.  That was the big appeal to me: not super heroes, not some mythical mathematical balance,  but being able to develop a character the way you saw him growing. 
 
I have never made the jump to the higher-powered new editions because I've got all I want already. 

There is a _lot_ of solid advice up above, and I agree with _all_ of it.
 
I would like to offer a couple things I've discovered across my experience as a player and then later as a GM  (and I admit: I _still_ enjoy doing it; I just do it with the bad guys now.  ) .
 
First, if at all possible, have your character generation session with as much of your group as possible, or at least your GM.  This will help you determine appropriate starting levels right out of the gate to ensure that you do not outstrip your companions and that they do not outclass you.  It also helps to establish your character as a useful part of the team: you can see power overlap or shortcomings in the overall group, and you can each tweak here and there until you have a well-rounded group capable of supporting and accenting each other.  Yes; that second part is harder than it sounds, but the more you (as a group) practice this, the easier it becomes.  It can also be taken as an extremely enjoyable additional challenge to the character generation process. (Come on:  if you play HERO, you already _know_ that character generation is a mini game all by itself.   )
 
 
Second thing I would like to suggest-- once you have a feel for the right "level" you should start at-- is to envision this as your starting point.    Even if you have to, for whatever reason, start out "less" than you planned to be, keep an eye on what you visualized originally.  Build _toward_ that goal: grow your character toward that original concept.
 
If you do not have to start out lower than you wanted, then envision the character two years (game time) five years, and ten years from now.  Where do you see him going?  What do you see him developing into?   This helps guide your roleplaying, too, as it will give you some sort of idea of the person you need to be in order to become that person that you envision.  Same with your power growth:  you have an idea of how you _want_ to spend those hard-won EPs.  Instead of willy-nilly deciding "Oh!  I need another die of Energy Blast to keep up!" and ending up with a randomly-advanced character, you are pushing to fulfill a specific desire, to meet a specific goal, and there is just nothing as satisfying.  
 
 
Have fun with it!  
 

Agreed.  We are also definitely not talking about the same thing 😁. I sincerely hope the Hall of Champions program helps alleviate some of the pain of setting up a campaign by providing interesting settings and canned adventures.  Honestly, we have no one but ourselves to blame now that the gates are open to us.
 
I also am a member of a Meetup group that runs weekly mini-cons and I've noticed that the 5e tables always fill up first.  The non-5e tables?  Good luck with that.  That's sort of the problem with the hobby, the vast majority of people are only interested in playing D&D.   Critical Roll is a big factor I think... people think that playing D&D is like that.
 
Unpopular Opinion: the hobby is currently in a bubble that will burst.  All the hipsters will run with their hands above their heads back to their craft breweries as they await the next trend.  Calling it now 😝
 
 

It is, very much easier
 
But we are not talking about the same aspect of the game.
 
Everytime the "easy" question comes up discussion swerves into chargen or disagreements about being "easy" in play.
 
But that is not where the major damage comes from.  The primary failure is game/world/adventure generation.
 
Popular RPG (D&D, CoC, etc):
1 Players buy new game.
2 Players decide who will GM and when to start.
3 SHORT intro chapter give everyone enough information to understand the game premise.
4 Players build PCs using prebuilt abilities, equipment, spells and such balanced for the game.
5 GM selects one of dozens of prebuilt adventures or quickly assembles one using prebuilt creature/threats.
6 Game begins, this routinely happens within the same week.
 
HERO
 
1 Players buy game
2 Players decide who will GM
3 GM designs/stats practically everything from how magic works to creatures (weeks of work)
4 GM explains how all the stuff he designed works.
5 Players then design PCs based on 3&4
6 GM then adjusts adventures to account for PCs custom builds.
7 Game begins weeks to months later
 
The problem is that brand new HERO purchasers rarely get past HERO step 3.
By the time the GM gets enough material designed to actually play they usually discover the rest of the players are 6 weeks into the D&D game they started while waiting.
 
HERO  is a very easy game to run, and runs no slower than any other including D&D.  If a HERO game runs slow it is usually caused by player indecision.
 
The upcoming Content program should help new players be able to overcome this by allowing access to prebuilt adventures and content that can actually be played at the table. But it won't solve everything.
Once material is available, we will need to start running these prepackaged adventures in the public.  As in at your FLGS and Cons.
 
There needs to be interest generated that will motivate stores to look for the books and stock them.  Enough demand that will either draw the books into general distribution or prompt the FLGS to open another account for a single product.
 
Something to move HERO out of the boutique mode and back into popular gaming. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Yeah, it's just us ugly folks playing HERO. *sigh* It's a shame ... 😉
 
But generally speaking: HERO has always been quite under the radar. As far as I remember (started with Champions back in the 80s) it was always the "odd system out" - you had a better chance to find someone playing GURPS (which BTW is also not as popular as it used to be).
 
No publications from HERO Games sure is a bummer.

D&D is just really easy to pick up and play (5E is anyway, and the last time I played was 1st Ed AD&D). Hero isn't.
 
I think this is important. It isn't just Nerds that play anymore, RPG has gone mainstream and 'normals' play. I've seen hipsters in drainpipe jeans and 'Nerd' t-shirts. Other, Beautiful People have hijacked the hobby. You don't have to be weird anymore and revelations that you play are met with interest rather than wedgies.
 
Beautiful People - people in general these days it seems - want something that they can run with straight away. That ain't Hero System. 

Yeah, the causes for decline are numerous and varied, but the lack of a rebound--like D&D has enjoyed--can be summed up with "No resources put into the brand", both in terms of official supplemental material (it pretty much just stopped after FHC), and in terms of evangelizing, administrating, and advertising online streaming akin to Critical Role and organized play akin to D&D Adventurer's League.

To be fair, the hobby itself suffered a general downturn. Only a few of the tabletop games are really prospering today, having absorbed most of a diminished player base.

Hero's DNPC was taken by their archnemesis.

I joined this group and have gotten some absolutely incredible maps including animated maps for people that play on screen tables. This is just one was one that I am going to use and fairly time/genre generic but there are hundreds of all types. The Reddit group is r/battlemaps/ 
 
I am not in any way associated with the Patreon or even know who they are. I just grabbed one of the maps I downloaded and liked to show an example.
 
Enjoy!
 
 

Best thing to happen to HERO System in a long, long time. Thank you, Jason!
 
(It's funny. I was just looking over the events at Gen Con 2019, and noticed that HERO System was the eighth most popular game there, if you aggregate games run for Champions, HERO System, and Justice, Inc. It had more events than Savage Worlds. Far more than FATE. HERO's a good system that people enjoy. It just needs some love. Hopefully this new program will do it.)
 

Thanks to the popularity of Marvel Comics' X-Men series, and the movies and television shows spawned from them, many players of Champions and other supers RPGs want to play superheroes with a "mutant" background. Marvel has long used mutants as a metaphor for racism, as they suffer persecution at the hands of frightened "normal humans." The official Champions Universe doesn't feature the kind of widespread anti-mutant paranoia so often displayed in Marvel's universe. To most people on  Champs Earth genetic mutation is just one source of super powers, and mutants are viewed as no better or worse than other superhumans. However, there definitely is a minority of people who do hold such fears; and one official group is particularly willing and able to exploit those fearful people, and mold them into a force dangerous to all mutants, and any other superhumans who would stand in support of them.
 
To date there's been no PnP source book dedicated to the Institute for Human Advancement (IHA). One was planned before the severe downsizing of Hero Games several years ago, but AFAIK there are no current plans to publish one. Not a lot of information has appeared in other books, and what there is is scattered; but collectively it provides enough potential for some intriguing plot uses for the IHA, or a similar group, in any superheroic campaign which features mutants, aliens, or any other minority on Earth with special abilities who are subject to mistrust and fear. When one includes not just the possible permutations of the IHA, but the nature and history of forces opposed to or potentially allied with them, the possibilities multiply for uses of a group like this which may not all have occurred to GMs. Not to mention the character depths players might plumb who like their PCs angsty.   So I thought it might be helpful to pull that information together here.
 
The core info about the Institute appears in Champions Universe. While the current edition of that book is for the Sixth Edition of the Hero System, the previous Fifth Edition book includes some significant material relevant to the IHA which wasn't reprinted. Other small but valuable data are mentioned in Book Of The Empress, Champions Battlegrounds, Champions Universe: News Of The World, Champions Villains Vols. 1 & 2, Conquerors Killers And Crooks, Millennium City, Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth, Teen Champions, Vibora Bay, and VIPER: Coils Of The Serpent.

Start with the person, then the powers.

With the caveat that I typically run Champions games, so this may be different for heroic-level games...
 
While numbers aren't the be-all and end-all for balancing, the first thing I do is look at the max Active Points (APs) for an NPC character's attacks in comparison to the max APs of the player character heroes.  Unless you're dealing with a "big boss" character who should be able to take on multiple foes at once, the NPC's attacks should be roughly the same level as the PC heroes.
 
Related to that, I also look at attacks that are NND or go against unusual defenses (Mental Defense, Power Defense, Flash Defense, Impenetrable PD or ED, etc.) and see how many of the PC heroes have those defenses and if so, at what level.  If few or none of the PC heroes have that defense, or only at a low level, I'll often dial back the amount of dice for that attack.  Also, as a general rule, characters (whether NPC or PC) shouldn't have more than one attack that is NND or goes against unusual defenses (at least IMO).
 
You can look at the total points for the NPC in comparison to those of the PCs, but that's an even less precise way to try balancing NPCs against the PC heroes.
 
I also look at the defenses of the NPC, to see if they look comparable to the PC heroes.  If it's a "big boss" you can go with higher defenses - as well as if the concept calls for higher-than-normal defenses.  In that latter case, though, I tend to make them deficient in some other area (e.g. a high-defense character with powerful attacks might have sucky movement and/or few to no enhanced senses).
 
Also, if it doesn't run counter to the concept, you can always throw in a Vulnerability or Susceptibility that fits with the powers of one of the PCs.  When fighting a more powerful foe, my players love it when they discover that said foe takes extra damage from one of their powers.  (That's also a good way to spotlight a more shy / introverted player's character, by the way - make him/her a star by having his power be key to stopping the bad guy.)

Speaking as someone who is a die-hard simulationist himself ... make sure to manage your own expectations.  I experienced this in a sci-fi campaign... following my initial assumptions about how interstellar travel works physically, what that implies about defenses of inhabited star systems, etc. ... left me with a game world which had little room for players to do anything, and I didn't realize it until after we got into it.  You can't really predict where players may decide to go in your world, or why.  I realized too late that I was on my way toward making a novel, not an RPG, because of my determination to stick to my simulationist preferences.  In effect, I've had more success since then not working out full logical consequences of my ideas; instead, when players have important things they want their characters to do, I work out at the table, with their input, how that can happen in the broad framework in my head.  You need cooperative good players for this to work, of course.
 
Since then I have done more explicit appeals to randomness in aspects of games and game-worlds, especially for generating flavor text, and assigning arbitrary but important qualities to big NPCs or NPC entities (corporations, organized crime syndicates, etc.).

Thank you to everyone for the information. I am reading as quickly as possible both on Mechanics and World Building but I am definitely going to get the Updated Version first. If only because, for all intents and purposes I am relearning the rules from scratch. I am certain things have changed but its been so long that I can't see the differences. I don't want to awaken memories that might affect my fluidity with 6E as a GM. I'll almost for sure get the original later anyways.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

“I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.” --Arthur C. Clarke

I did an irreverent and entirely anonymous (read: paper response forms) survey in my morning class.  The numbers in the parens are the tallies of hits to each response. (22 responses (24 registered for the course); the prompt said "circle as many as apply" so selection of multiple alternatives did happen.)
 
1.    I feel I already know some stuff about astronomy, space science, and physics.
(1)  Oh yeah
(14) Some
(8)  I’ve heard those words
(1)  Don’t hurt me
 
2.    I’m in this class because
(2)  It’s the only way my schedule can work
(2)  I guessed that this is the <core class designation> that might have the least math
(17) I have no idea; I got put here by someone else
(4)  I explicitly wanted this kind of subject
(0)  I’m gonna drop, but I haven’t been able to find a satisfactory alternate to plug in yet
 
3.    Things I have heard about this instructor
(4)  Nothing at all
(17) Just what’s in his “Personal Trivia” on the Canvas page
(1)  He’s hard
(0)  He’s boring
(0)  He’s terrifying
 
4.    Astronomy is different from astrology!
(12) Yup, and I know the difference
(12) Ummmmm…
(1)  Am I in the wrong class?
 
 

Well, to generalize more: each of them are using terms which have more specific meanings in their own fields, and blithely assuming those meanings are forever-and-everywhere-and-for-everyone the meanings.
 
When I got together with my wife -- an attorney -- we rapidly realized that what makes truth, and a standard of proof, in the law is different (and has a different underlying meaning) than what it means in science.  Part of that is because the purpose of each endeavor is different.  The fact that scientists are systematically excluded from juries here indicates how fundamentally different (I will stop short of saying opposed) those purposes are.