RDU Neil

No offense intended, RDU Neil. I should have been more explicit that the "training wheels" are for my case in particular, not for you or anyone else who may use this approach. In principle, zslane is right in that people need to want to role play in the first place rather than just problem solving. But I agree with you in that incentives are a great tool to keep people's heads in the game.
 
 
I was thinking about this imbalancing problem as well: perhaps the dice could count as xd6 to add to damage, so if you roll 3 "drama dice" a 1, a 5, and a 6, you add 12 to the damage. But when used for reducing skill rolls, penalties, etc., the body of the dice could be counted for the reduction. For instance, if you roll 3d6 "drama dice" to influence a skill roll, and roll a 1, a 5, and a 6, you'd get -0, -1, and -2 for a total of -3 to the skill roll. 

No... just no... I use these  Narrative mechanics with people I've been playing  with for 35 years in places. These mechanics are not training wheels, they are as integral to making the game work as having mechanics for resolving whether a punch lands or misses. "If you are mature role players you don't need rules for that. You should just be able to role play the fight without mechanics." They guide the group and provide structure for group interaction.
 
Not at all. The mechanics make the game. Mechanics matter to what kind of imaginative additions can be brought in, under what circumstances, etc. 

Ninjas always make things better!

I would say, even at the height of my gaming, it was really a once a week occurrence for the RPG thing. Yes, sometimes more, and we had our long weekends of multiple games when we pulled people in from far away... but I didn't play multiple regular sessions every week. Our group had one weekly game night.
 
That said, even then, when I basically ran a large meta-campaign that lasted for 25 solid years, and five more sporadically, I could only do that by changing things up. Make a big world, with players having multiple PCs, so moving between small arcs of certain characters kept things fresh. "Ok, on we are playing the Vanguard, ,high-powered global heroes" vs. "Ok... let's play Mavericks for a while... NYC based, mid-level heroes on the edge of the law"  vs. "Now it's Malta Professionals, metahuman and cybernetic mercs working for whoever pays in Euro-African theater" etc.  The games had different feels and scopes and PC interactions... but at the same time, inhabited the same world, and got to see larger plots from different angles... maybe one group would set something in motion that another group might have to deal with... so the players really got to become part of the larger world.
 
That really helped me both, stay focused enough to continue moving a large campaign forward, but varied enough to not get stale or bogged down. It also allowed players to GM their own storylines at times. I found that really empowering, as I could then riff off some small thing they introduced, some technological MacGuffin stolen from a lab, whatever, and wind it into my larger plot, and it helped everyone feel like they were contributing to building the world. That level of interaction made it easier to GM, as it wasn't just people waiting to be entertained and I had to do all the prep.

Yes... Advantage Gained vs. Dramatic Challenge.  As a kind of hamfisted example... say, the player, when they get the advantage (adding extra dice to an attack, or guaranteeing a skill roll, whatever) the GM (or even better ,the play group as a whole) get a chit or something symbolizing "Drama!" which will force a challenging, dramatic shift when played. So... now, the PC, having just gotten the bonus to make a really difficult stealth role, sneaks into the base... GM asks, "Ok... any ideas on the drama challenge?" and one of the other players says, "I have an idea... how about this... we see PC Lad sneaking into the base, but cut scene, not far behind him, dressed in black with a look of determination on her face, is LL Smith, Roving Reporter and PC Lad's DNPC, who'd followed him up to Storm Mountain in the hopes of a big story! She follows PC Lad's path, and thinks she's made it when out of nowhere, a net falls on her followed by six ninjas! She's captured!"  
 
So now the PC's DNPC has been invoked, providing dramatic challenge, and it was a group decision and interaction that brought it into play, not just the GM "screwing with" the player. Suddenly the game becomes really fun and engaging storytelling. You'll get players debating whether it is good or necessary to risk further challenge for a benefit now. You can limit the number of times you can invoke the benefit, making it a special, powerful moment in the story, etc.
 
Sure, if you have min-max munchkins in the group where they only want to demonstrate rule mastery and that they are 'better' at the game than others... well, they aren't going to buy into this. But if people want story and drama and character development and such, this kind of thing can give a structure to pulling them out of the group imagination, rather than just hoping people are all on the same page and engaged.

This is old school RPG thinking, where the players are poised against the GM, and anything other than min-maxing task resolution/combat actions are considered a "mistake" by the players to be punished. Original CoC was taking a stab at narrative mechanics with this insanity enforcement, but it was long before that kind of game development hit its stride. It felt punitive to that old school mindset.
 
For a CoC game, or any such, you really need to be thinking narratively, as a player, and not "protagonizing" your PC... because it isn't about the PC gaining points and getting more mechanically powerful over time, it is about the PC as a vehicle to role play madness and obsession and isolation to evoke that feeling in the playgroup. The player doesn't lose agency, it is about granting them the agency to role play that descent into dissolution in a way that is an enjoyable experience.
 
To say mechanics don't matter to role playing is wrong. Just expecting players to "get it" and all have the same experiential reference will never really work, not even with long standing, similar style players. Providing a structure is important. Hero "rewards" players who want to be good at punching things by giving them a clear system and interactive mechanics for them to demonstrate effective punching. The same is for many different task resolutions, combat or no. 
 
To get to Brian Stanfield's question... there are many different Narrative Mechanics that layer very nicely over Hero's Task Resolution mechanics, so you can get the best of both worlds. Try a "bennies" system  or an "advantage/threat" system like in the current Star Wars RPG. Usually some mechanic that allows a level of director stance to players, works with intent not just action resolution ("You hit him, but what did you want to happen as a result of you hitting him?")  
 
Hero has traditionally not addressed (back to this thread's origins) Narrative mechanics, coming out of the old school, vanilla role playing concepts (mechanics help you fight, everything else is based on whether the player is just "good at it") though it has some attempts at this... the original Presence Attack was a step toward this, as it helped encourage intent "After I punch the guy's lights out, I want the others realizing they are outclassed and maybe giving up!" which was a great thing. It was limited in its applications, and was still about losing agency if the effect was turned on the PCs.
 
If you want to encourage role playing, maybe something like "Drama Dice" (which I'm making up as I type)... say PCs have a pool of dice, separated (by color?) from their other dice. They can choose to add these dice to a damage roll, or have the subtracted from a skill roll, but the number of dice, or amount rolled on them would result in some kind of challenge or dramatic shift appropriate to the story... and the PLAYERS get to help come up with this outcome, not just the GM... so "We are getting smacked down by the Doominator! I go all in on this blast, 'cause we have to take him out!  (Rolls big dice pool with Drama Dice added... gets big numbers!) YES! Got him! But oh boy, look at all those drama dice... something... let me think... oh, I got it, you mentioned that school bus earlier!  Well my blast was so powerful, it cracked the bridge struts, and suddenly it is starting to collapse out from under that bus! We have to save 'em!"   
 
When the PLAYERS are encouraged to create these kind of drama bits... even if just by adding the dice to the pool and letting the GM come up with the drama issue afterwards... they are much more invested in the scene, theme story, than just reacting to every decision being implemented by the GM. This kind of mechanic encourages player involvement in the drama, provides an ingame reward, as well as encourages metagame dynamics... and some very small aspects of this (again, easily layered on to basic Hero task resolution mechanics) can go a long way toward encouraging the kind of experiential role playing that otherwise is just left up to undefined "good role playing" and whatever the heck that might mean for that particular group.

That was before Xanax
 

You mean like fear and horror - something the players can just handwave with "my PC is made of sterner stuff"?  If it is to be a part of the game, I think a game mechanic makes sense.  In Hero (and most more modern games) that means players make choices about where to focus their characters' abilities, so "sterner stuff" has a cost - maybe it means less combat skills.
 
 
 
That is a dislike for the genre convention more than a failure of the mechanic to capture the genre convention.  I like character longevity, so I prefer less lethal game systems, but that means I don't like splatter horror games, not that frequent character death should not occur in such games.  Similarly, Call of Cthulhu is the only game I can ever recall which once defined an experienced group of characters meaning no more than half are brand-new, acknowledging how short a character's existence would typically be.
 
 
 
 
Call of Cthulhu prized the source material.   Making something different was not the goal (FWIW I am referring to the old Chaosium CoC in the 80's/early '90's).
 
Sanity was, in that game, a renewable resource.  It could be restored through success, or through therapy.  But it was reduced permanently by understanding of the true nature of the universe - the Cthulhu Mythos skill.
 
 
I don't recall any recurring characters in the stories, but I do recall a lot losing their minds after what would be a single RPG storyline, if not a single game session.  The game had a lot more combat than the writings did, though, a trope of gaming in general.  I don't recall too much combat in the source material (running through Cthulhu's head with a steamship notwithstanding), nor do I recall many characters carrying, much less wielding, firearms.

I've had the same issue with regard to likes on my own posts.  I seem to have been able to see likes of others' posts without trouble.

Worth reading: the Quora answers to Why didn't attorney-client privilege prevent the FBI raid on Michael D. Cohen?
 
It also explained where the terms "scrubbing the taint" and "taint team" came from. Either Sandra Day O'Conner is very clean or very dirty.

He's just agreeing with a King of France and Robert Mugabe.

It is when I say it. 

He's large enough to qualify as a country.
 
Meanwhile (spoilered for size):

Certainly Obama wasn't going out of his way to save coal, but neither did he do anything to kill it.  Renewables, fracking, natural gas, and the resulting economics have inflicted the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique on coal, and coal has taken about two steps out of the five it has left.

This talk of "balance" has reminded me that all too many people in my nation confuse neutrality with objectivity.
 
Neutrality -> "Side A says this. Side B says that. Both sides are equal./We leave it to you to decide who is correct."
Objectivity -> "Side A says this. Side B says that. The facts show that what Side B says is true whereas Side A is either horribly misinformed on the matter or perhaps deliberately deceitful."

Advocatus diaboli.

So I got the notification that you reacted to my post, but when I get to the post, it shows me nothing. Seems endemic to the new  setup. I'm assuming YOU can see that you liked my post, but I can't.

Unless the math-challenged fellow jots down "defenses vs AP attack" on the sheet, much like he has likely marked defenses against BOD of killing attacks.
 
I think this is a holdover from the days when Hardened also defended against Penetrating, which failed entirely if any part of the defense was Hardened.

Och, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me. 45 pts 8/8 vs AP, 51pts 11/11 vs AP, 56 pts 15/15 vs AP. I'm sure there is a breakpoint that is slightly more efficient, but ultimately you can pay an extra 6pts to get an extra 3 pts armour against AP, or an extra 11 to get 7 more?
As always it depends on the campaign (there are A LOT of 4d6-1 standard effect RKAs?), but otherwise this looks a lot less twinky than an awful lot of "legal" purchases.
YMMV, obviously, and added complexity is a perfectly reasonable reason to enforce the RAW.

PleasenottheBeyonderPleasenottheBeyonderPleasenottheBeyonderPleasenottheBeyonder. ??

Yeah I have never understood where the Eternals fit into the Marvel Universe, exactly.  Marvel's cosmic/space stuff has always been really weird to me anyway, most of it was just a jumble of crazy stuff and images.

Well, with DC greenlighting the New Gods, I'm not surprised Marvel would go with the Jack Kirby knock-off of his own creative work.
 
And for all my years of comic reading, I never really have grokked the Inhumans/Eternals connection and/or lack thereof. Something about the Kree running into the Eternals and that giving them the idea of experimenting and creating the Inhumans... gah.

To me, he looks about as close to Thanos as you're going to get with a live actor instead of a CGI one, costume and shade of purple notwithstanding.
 
ETA: Here he is in the armor and helmet, and it looks pretty true to the basic Thanos design to me:
 

 
It's not going to be a perfect match, but that's not a bad translation from one medium to another. If someone handed you that pic ten years ago and said, "What character is that?", I think most of us would immediately identify it as Thanos.

Argo. The tale of how the CIA spirited six members of the American Embassy out of Iran as they had been hiding out in the Canadian Embassy..This has a slow burn and it works wonderfully.

"I guess the guy is a war criminal now or something... whatever..."
 
Classic.