Cloppy Clip

I don't think anyone could accuse Steve Long of being lazy, but I think his strongest villains are held back a bit by the need to cover absolutely every angle. When he does the midlisters you can see some really creative build ideas and tradeoffs being made, which is why I tend to prefer those characters in the villain books. Thanks for the Classic Enemies recommendation; I'll have to give it a look!

To be honest, I prefer making my own NPCs too, but I like understanding why things are the way they are in the books, if that makes sense. So while I'm not going to drop Dr Destroyer as-written on my players, it's helpful for me to hear why he's written the way he is, so I'm hopefully better informed when making my own setting. @Tech I think I agree with you on the Multipowers. I'm more than okay with frameworks if the SFX justify it, but it does sometimes feel like too many villains have every possible variation on their power jammed into a Multipower, which makes them feel a bit samey. I have the same problem with the giant Cosmic VPP a lot of villains at the higher levels have.

Thank you very much, everyone! Your point, Lord Liaden, about long-running campaigns reminds me of the Harbinger of Justice from Dark Champions. I'm not 100% sure on this, but if that statblock was what Steve Long had gotten him to after however many years of playing then it would make sense you'd want villains like Dr Destroyer to challenge Champions characters who'd been playing that long. Not that it helps my newbie players, of course, but there's always the options for powering down villains, or using some smaller fry to get them warmed up. Would it be worth picking up some 4e or earlier books, if the villains got a noticeable power-up in 5e?

With emphasis on the Super. Something I've been wondering about is how certain conventions were decided on. 12 DC attacks feels about right for your baseline hero: bricks can lift a solid 100 tons with 60 STR, mentalists can steamroll bystander's minds while a bit of MD still counts for something, etc. But one thing that I don't quite understand is the top-end villains in the Champions universe: your Dr Destroyer types. They seem to have a baseline 30 DC power, whether that's Dr Destroyer's Destroyer-Beam, Menton's Mental/Telekinetic Powers or Takofanes's Darkest Sorcery. But isn't that a bit much? I only have the 5e book downloaded at the moment, but even a maxed-out Very High Powered superhero is going to fold very quickly against a 30d6 EB. So, given you could clobber most parties with a significantly weaker villain, why did 30 DC get settled on as the baseline for these guys? Does anybody know some old trivia that explains this?

I'm not sure if this would count as a full house rule, but one thing that's helped us is putting the rules aside if we don't care too much about the result. HERO has a lot of rules to resolve almost any situation you can imagine, but if everybody's happy to agree on an answer we can just go with that instead of rolling it out. So if somebody takes a big hit we might say they get knocked back "this far" rather than rolling for knockback properly. If somebody disagrees we can always use the rules to decide what it should really be, but a lot of the time nobody cares enough about whether it should be 14m or 16m or what have you. This means we tend to spend more time on the parts of a fight the players are invested in, which keeps the game flowing and people's enthusiasm up. That said, that's more ignoring the rules than a house rule per se. I'd be interested to hear what tweaks people have made to the game.

Blacksmith seems like the character that works really well as an NPC ally, but the fact that he doesn't have any attacks that always work regardless of the situation could make him a bit stressful to play as. But then that makes him a good supporting role for the PCs, as he can shine in the right circumstances, while not overshadowing anybody. And I'll have to go digging for the Omlevex bunch, thank you!

It does seem odd to me that the rules make a big deal of laying out which powers are allowed in a framework, and reinforcing that frameworks should not be stacked inside other frameworks, only to let you put Multiform, transforming exclusively into copies of yourself with these forbidden powers, in frameworks. It feels caught halfway between two viewpoints (people can do whatever they want in a framework vs adding Multiform to the list of forbidden powers), and it doesn't feel like the most natural position to take.

There's still a fair bit of overlap to account for, but Champions does something of this with the set-up of the different Worlds: Superhuman, Mystic, Martial, etc. Each one could effectively be treated as its own setting, and I wonder if there might not be some advantages to treating the Champions Universe as more of a multiverse of loosely-connected settings focused on different aspects, than trying to fit everything in all at once.

Indeed I will! I thought I'd be lazy and just start with the most recent patch of posts, haha, but that backfired a little. You've been good about giving overviews of the characters, so it'll be worth doing a deep dive from page one at some point, to see all the ideas worked out in full. That said, you're on page 19 of this thread and you've done a fair few characters. Are there any particular ones you remember fondly? Either for the backstory, or some feature in their mechanics?

Are you open to making any tweaks to the standard Greyhawk setting, Doc? GDShore's mention of city guard got me thinking about how, even though it's a standard fantasy trope by this point, it might get across the danger of the setting more if there weren't options for the villagers to turn to when something's afoot. From what I remember, medieval settlements relied on someone raising the hue and cry, after which everyone who heard it was expecting to chase after and capture the accused criminal. Failure to do so meant a fine for the settlement, but otherwise there was no official police force. And if Greyhawk HERO works this way, then whenever a dragon comes and starts stealing sheep the villagers would have no police to turn to, leaving the job up to whichever brave adventurers happen to be passing by...

Absolutely agreed on that point, and especially that adding more stages for Advantages means creating more debates about exactly which stage something belongs at. I think, even if I were rebuilding the system from scratch, there's still a lot to be said for the current set-up, but if accurately pricing Armour-Piercing is winding somebody up enough that they'll put their game on hold and rewrite all of the rules then I wouldn't want to get in their way.

I don't remember who it was I saw this from, but somewhere on this forum I came across the idea of making Regeneration an Advantage for REC, where +1/2 would move you one step up the Time Chart. That way, 1 BODY per turn cost 10 points, the same as Regeneration in 4e. Obviously HERO went a different direction in 5e and then 6e, but I quite liked the elegance of that approach.

I think the game runs much more smoothly in general when players build characters with an eye toward what the world looks like. If the rules say it's perfectly find to use your Megascaled mental powers to mind control the universe while never leaving your house that's one thing, but are we playing in a game where mentalists regularly do so? If people are mature enough to admit that no, and it sounds like a bit of a silly game, then we can move on while keeping the stop sign options like Megascale open for when a character concept does justify them.

I think the problem with AP stems from HERO measuring advantages in stages of +1/4. As unclevlad points out, AP is a bit stronger than an unmodified attack at +1/4, but as prior editions bore out it's a bit weaker at +1/2. We don't have anything in between these two stages, though, so you just have to pick whichever option feels more right to you. As for Penetrating, I could get behind pricing it differently for KAs, on the grounds that 1 BODY and 1 STUN aren't worth the same in terms of dice, but I'm not sure if that overcomplicates thing a bit. Of course, once you're at the point of 6th Edition's core books, trying to keep things from being overcomplicated might be wishful thinking.

Good stuff here! I appreciate the notes about tweaking power level for the characters, since that's one of the things I always like about official Champions builds. I don't have Super Temps myself, but are there any established villains for these heroes to fight?