Cloppy Clip

It looks like I completely failed to answer this; my apologies!
 
The main differences are intent and implied special effects.  Delayed Effect was intended to replicate a Vancian, early edition D&D style magic system with prepared spells.  You would prepare the spell and then release it at will later.  Trigger was intended more to replicate things like land mines, or other weapons or items that you might place somewhere, with a strong implication that it would be Triggered by someone else, and affect the target where they Triggered it.  You need to set up a condition that sets off the Triggered power, which you define at the time you build the power unless you pay extra. 
 
The mechanical differences are:
A Delayed Effect power can't be Drained or Dispelled, while a Triggered power can.  A Delayed Effect power is always activated by the character while a Triggered power is activated by an external condition (even if the Triggered power is activated at the character's location).  Further, a Triggered power can't rely on any senses for activation that the character doesn't possess, though they can buy Enhanced Senses that are Limited to only activate a Triggered power. A Delayed Effect power requires the GM to determine how many total "slots" a character can prepare, while Trigger doesn't (though the GM can set limits in the latter case). The differences are pretty subtle, and took me a while to figure out myself. 

I've always disliked the big VPP designs as well. TBH they feel a bit lazy to me in terms of defining what a character can do. (Not that I would ever call Steve Long "lazy." The man's work ethic is legendary.) I much prefer characters to have more specified abilities, although there are some concepts that practically demand the VPP approach. You couldn't do the Silver Surfer or Green Lantern justice without one.
 
 
If you're familiar with 4E or 5E (they're very similar) so the system differences from 6E won't give you pause, I'd suggest sampling Classic Enemies for 4E. It's a broad cross-section of Champs supervillains which has quite a few that were later updated, but also quite a few that were not. Overall power level is definitely lower, and there are more "small fry" suitable for low-power or your specified average-power campaigns. And the PDF in the Hero store is only $5 US. That would give you a sense of whether those villains meet your needs well enough to want to invest in more of those books. And you can always come back to the forums if you want recommendations.
 
 

I have been and no, my characters aren't that strong. Nope.

The 6E Champions villain roster -- and the 5E, to be fair -- covers a wide range of power levels. Yes, you do have the mega-villains, but there are also many who fall within the standards that Cloppy Clip alluded to in his original post, and quite a few below that, essentially being "street-level supers." So there are official villains usable for just about any campaign.
 
I should also mention that the Champions genre book includes a number of suggestions for making supers more effective than their stats would suggest against things made of mundane materials or realistic technology, e.g. making such things more "Vulnerable" against superpowers and supertech, or reducing the damage that Real Weapons do against super-class Defenses. Those suggestions make super interactions with the realistic world much more adjustable to the preferences of GMs and players.

I can only guess at the reasoning behind such design, but I'll try.
 
One thing you sometimes see in comics is the giga-villain who fights multiple teams of heroes at once. They come at him in waves, he bats them back, the next wave piles on and gets scattered in turn, etc. This is tricky to do in Champions, because a single team of, say, 5 heroes can dish out an awful lot of STUN in a Turn. Even giving the giga-villain high defenses and lots of Damage Reduction might not be enough -- and yet you still want it to mean something if a hero manages a Pushed, Haymakered, Called Shot to the head. So it's not a good idea to push the villain's defenses too impossibly high.
 
Ditto DCV. It's a boring adventure if the fight consists of whiff after whiff because nobody can hit Big Bad with any roll over a 5. Okay, so players might be able to devise a clever use of Powers to reduce Big Bad's DCV, but when you publish Big Bad you don't know who the PCs will be.
 
Or you use the STUN rules. Give Big Bad such overpowered attacks that any hero he hits is Knocked Out, or at least Stunned. That way, you don't have a dozen or more heroes launching 5+ attacks per Turn. You have the few who are conscious at any given moment, not all of whom will hit, while the others regain consciousness and take Recoveries.
 
So that's my guess. I still think it sucks. I think it's based on a comic-book trope that just doesn't translate to the gaming table. Don't have a fight with large numbers of NPC heroes. (Or if you do, have them engage in a separate fight off in the distance, which you as GM merely allude to now and then. No dice rolls, good God.)
 
Though as LL recounts -- some campaigns have run so long the PCs *can* fight even the most apparently overpowered published villains and win handily. That's why 6e versions include notes on adjusting character power up and down... one of few 6e innovations of which I approve.
 
Dean Shomshak

Characters who have been operating since Champions 1 would probably be strong enough to kill Destroyer by 6ed. Talk about dedication.

I have never run any of the 6th edition villain builds in any campaign largely because they are wildly overpowered.  They won't just knock out a hero they hit, they'll probably vaporize them.  But I tended to run lower powered games than some do here at least, and as Liaden points out an old campaign with tons of xps probably can handle that sort of thing better.

I would say you have to attribute those benchmarks foremost to Steve Long. When these characters were integrated into the rebooted Fifth Edition version of the Champions Universe, Steve was Line Developer, having oversight over the creative element of all Hero Games products, as the late Darren Watts had over the business element. Steve would have had final say on what the power level of these characters should be. AFAIK that rendition of Doctor Destroyer was the mightiest published to that point. But I can't say what specific design considerations Steve might have had in mind when he set the characters' power level, and since Steve made it his policy to never answer design philosophy questions, we'll probably never know.
 
To address your point that "even a maxed-out Very High Powered superhero is going to fold very quickly against a 30d6 EB," some campaigns have been around a long time, with PCs having gained epic Experience and being raised to intimidating power. I'll just cite an anecdote from our long-absent forum colleague, Lord Mhoram. He once mentioned that shortly after Dr. D first appeared for Fifth Edition in Conquerors, Killers, And Crooks, Lord M pitted the villain as written against his PC team of Justice League-level veteran heroes, translated to 5E. Lord M reported that the heroes killed Destroyer -- killed him -- in two Turns of combat.

Ah, yes, I've seen other "force field" constructs like that. In this case I believe it's primarily a construct/notation convenience. A bunch of Defenses are being thrown together as a package, and the writer (I assume Steve Long) wanted PD/ED to be Resistant, so it was simpler to make all of them Resistant. Not that he necessarily expected the fact that the other Defenses are Resistant to come into play. Since the FF is presumably for a NPC, cost wasn't a significant consideration.

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.

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.

While I very much liked the comment, it is also _exactly_ the reason I hold out that Multiform should be considered to be a framework: so you dont take your 80 percent discount and then shove it into another framework.
 
 

I dare say that's what most GMs do in practice. There's too much CU to use in the average campaign; GMs must decide which sections and characters to use, and leave the rest in the background.
 
But that's how comic books operate, too. (Or did, anyway.) Take the Marvel U, for instance. The Fantastic Four have their stable of regular and semi-regular villains like Dr Doom, Galactus, the Mole Man, assorted aliens, etc. Spider-Man and Daredevil have their street-level villains, which the X-Men seldom if ever encounter because they're fighting Sentinels, other mutant factions, and such ilk. None of them are likely to fight Nightmare, Dormammu, or Dr Strange's other mystical foes. And so on.
 
Sure, change-of-pace stories happen: The X-Men go into space, Spider-Man fights a demon, or Thor fights robots. But that's the point: Change of pace. Heroes usually stick to their niches.
 
So pick what style of heroes and team you want for your campaign and pick the set of villains and background to support it. Say the rest doesn't exist or just ignore it. Like, unless you're running a Mystic Masters campaign most of the mystical side of the CU effectively shouldn't exist. Unless you really want to make anti-mutant prejudice a big part of the campaign, you can (and probably should) ignore IHA and the MInuteman robots and, conversely, Kinematik and his mutant supremacists. And unless you want to actually run an alien invasion story arc or out-to-space story arc, the alien races might as well all not exist... jnless one of your players specifically wants to play an alien character.
 
The same goes for the "thousands of supers around the world" issue. For decades, 90% of Marvel stories happened in the Greater NYC area. Heroes were more likely to visit the Kree Galaxy than, say, Nebraska. Or even major countries like India or France. DC spread things out further by at least giving different home cities to heroes, such as Metropolis, Gotham City, Star City, Central City, yadda yadda. But those heroes tended to have their own favored sets of villains, too.
 
Dean Shomshak
 
 

I wholly agree that individual campaigns should focus on particular subsets of the setting, and mostly ignore the rest except for "change of pace" adventures. But I very much appreciate that the CU offers me such a vast range of possibilities to choose from. And I admire how, for the most part, all that diversity hangs together and makes sense, so that you have justification to bring those diverse elements together.
 
I love that one of UNTIL's young special agents with apparently minor psionic powers, is actually a much older and more powerful Empyrean clandestinely monitoring the agency's activities for her people. I love that the immortal sorcerer Dr. Yin Wu joined in the defense of Earth against Istvatha V'han's first invasion. And that VIPER's patron deity Nama ordered the group to attack and disrupt DEMON's terrible Demonflame ritual, that might have threatened Nama himself. And that the Greek goddess Hecate and Aztec god Tezcatlipoca teamed up to try to tear down the Ban barring mythic gods from fully manifesting on Earth. And Mechanon and Dr. Destroyer engaged in a year-long global war after Mech tried to "liberate" DD's artificially-intelligent supercomputer. And the alien Qularr attacked Earth to obtain genetic material from Earth's superhumans, because they encountered the great Silver Age superheroes, the Fabulous Five, during one of the heroes' missions in space. And that Herr Doktor Pandemonium of DEMON's Inner Circle discovered and exploited the genetic legacy that the Slug's race, the Elder Worm, left in humanity from the Worm's prehistoric era of domination of Earth.
 
The way it all weaves together is just so cool. 😎

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.

For some reason, Fifth Edition dropped Regeneration and replaced it with a specific Healing build. That made Regenerating characteristics other than BODY fairly easy to work out, so I'd probably go with Hugh's suggestion of treating Regeneration as an Adjustment power that heals 2 points.
 
On the topic of whether Regeneration per phase is too much, I'd say it's definitely a very different feel than limiting Regeneration to once per turn, but whether that's a bad thing or not depends on what sort of game you're playing. In previous editions (at least 4th and 5th, which are the ones I have), Delayed Return Rate started at +1/4, which makes long-lasting Drains much more of a thing to watch out for. In that case, having more reliable Regeneration of different characteristics would probably be justified, but if you're not expecting to deal with a lot of effectively-permanent Drains (like in most 6th Edition games, I'd guess), then it's probably going to take over the game a bit.
 
@Duke Bushido I didn't know that about 2nd Edition Transfer, but that's a good reminder to me that the HERO tradition of character builds that make your GM pull their hair out with stress goes back a long way!

If we dig into the history, 1e had only Regeneration - no Healing.  By 2e, Hero made a fantasy game - that needed a Healing power, and an Aid power (neither of which were in Supers yet). It stayed that way, I think, in 3e.
 
4e combined everything. Aid also healed, unless you limited it to only Healing. Anything in any of the old games made it into the new system [NOTE:  3e and prior, Hero published games; 4e, Hero published a system and games built using the system; 5e+, Hero published a game system and advice on how you could use it to design your own games.]
 
5e looked to do some streamlining.  Some of it worked.  Regen did not, in part because they had to tone down Healing, and that required Regen to have a handwave for the re-use period required to balance Healing better. 6e put Regen back, but its cost was higher, consistent with trying to build per-turn Healing.
 
I recall the 1e "Characteristic Drain/Transfer".  While you did not Drain CP directly, it worked that way indirectly as a STR Drain cost 10 points per 1d6, but a SPD drain cost 100 points per 1d6.  2e's broadening of Drain and Transfer required the direct use of CP to measure.
 
I had forgotten Regen was per recovery!
Maybe 5e should have built Regen as 1 REC, BOD only, moved up the time chart

For some reason, Fifth Edition dropped Regeneration and replaced it with a specific Healing build. That made Regenerating characteristics other than BODY fairly easy to work out, so I'd probably go with Hugh's suggestion of treating Regeneration as an Adjustment power that heals 2 points.
 
On the topic of whether Regeneration per phase is too much, I'd say it's definitely a very different feel than limiting Regeneration to once per turn, but whether that's a bad thing or not depends on what sort of game you're playing. In previous editions (at least 4th and 5th, which are the ones I have), Delayed Return Rate started at +1/4, which makes long-lasting Drains much more of a thing to watch out for. In that case, having more reliable Regeneration of different characteristics would probably be justified, but if you're not expecting to deal with a lot of effectively-permanent Drains (like in most 6th Edition games, I'd guess), then it's probably going to take over the game a bit.
 
@Duke Bushido I didn't know that about 2nd Edition Transfer, but that's a good reminder to me that the HERO tradition of character builds that make your GM pull their hair out with stress goes back a long way!

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.

For some reason, Fifth Edition dropped Regeneration and replaced it with a specific Healing build. That made Regenerating characteristics other than BODY fairly easy to work out, so I'd probably go with Hugh's suggestion of treating Regeneration as an Adjustment power that heals 2 points.
 
On the topic of whether Regeneration per phase is too much, I'd say it's definitely a very different feel than limiting Regeneration to once per turn, but whether that's a bad thing or not depends on what sort of game you're playing. In previous editions (at least 4th and 5th, which are the ones I have), Delayed Return Rate started at +1/4, which makes long-lasting Drains much more of a thing to watch out for. In that case, having more reliable Regeneration of different characteristics would probably be justified, but if you're not expecting to deal with a lot of effectively-permanent Drains (like in most 6th Edition games, I'd guess), then it's probably going to take over the game a bit.
 
@Duke Bushido I didn't know that about 2nd Edition Transfer, but that's a good reminder to me that the HERO tradition of character builds that make your GM pull their hair out with stress goes back a long way!

Something my group always has in their minds.  When we were teenagers and they wanted poison on all their weapons all the time.  I said that if that was good, then all their opponents would do so.
 
If they didn't, only the most evil ones would and they could assume that anyone who did was an enemy.
 
That truce has lasted almost four decades.

Best of luck with your next session! If you make any tweaks based on feedback, please post them here as I'd love to know how it goes and what, if anything, you'd change.

My house rule for power pools is that players can use any powers they have written up before the game begins, and any power they are able to cobble together while waiting for their phase to begin, but once they are called and the phase begins, they cannot create any new powers.  Too many times people waiting around for someone to take action.

I would still require prewritten power instead of using the template @unclevlad presented.  The reason to do that is that not everyone has all the modifiers memorized.  The thing that slows down the game is having to look things up.  Very few people are able to write up a power in their head and get everything right.  To prevent seeming favoritism it is easier and fairer to simply say all powers need to be prewritten.  
 
In addition to having to look things up this also eliminates questionable powers or abusive powers that are legal.  The only way to ensure that there is no distracting discussion on powers during combat is to have all powers defined before the combat starts.  This would also mean any NND’s have to be defined before combat to prevent discussions on whether the defense is appropriate or how much of a limitation it is.  
 
Keep in mind that the problems affect both the player and the GM.  If the GM is not capable of checking the power in his head including the math that will slow the game down just as much as the player looking it up.  One of the main responsibilities of the GM is to ensure that the characters are appropriate for the game he is running.  Having a player able to create things on the fly makes this incredibly difficult.  
 
This is one time where the GM should give the players little or no slack.  Changing the special effect of a power that does not alter the game mechanics is fine.  Changing an attack from physical to energy should also be fine.  Changing the defense for an NND from immune to heat to mental defense is not.   About as far as I would allow would be change the defense of an NND from immune to fire to immune to cold, immune to fire to longevity would not be acceptable.