RDU Neil

And if every single character had this same, steadfast attitude, then it wouldn't be special or interesting or dramatic or powerful when it is shown. It would diminish Capt. America and his steadfast courage, if that was just how all the heroes act. 

And if every single character had this same, steadfast attitude, then it wouldn't be special or interesting or dramatic or powerful when it is shown. It would diminish Capt. America and his steadfast courage, if that was just how all the heroes act. 

I liked the idea that he finally accepted that he had given enough and could enjoy his own life for a change.

If these characters stayed wallowing, I would agree. They didn't. When the occasion called for them to be heroic, they rose to it. Characters who are never challenged in that way aren't heroes, they're cardboard cutouts. And they're the ones who make me yawn.
 
Let's look at Thor for a moment. What led to his depressive period? He lost his lover. He lost his mother. He lost his father. He lost his brother. He lost his closest friends. He lost his home. He failed to protect half his people, and lost them. Through all of that, he kept moving forward, refusing to give up. What finally pushed him over the edge was what he saw as his personal failure to save half the people in the universe.
 
Granted, it took him a long time to find his way back, and he needed help. But in the end when it mattered most, he stood up and fought again.

I think we watched different movies.
 

Yeah, it’s not as though they experienced anything really bad, like having their favorite comic book characters depicted as having feelings. That really messes people up inside.

In the comics, Thor and Iron Man have both suffered severe breakdowns. Even Superman has gone crazy for a while, and not just in the Injustice-style alternate universes. The measure of a hero is not whether something causes them to crack. That can happen to anyone if enough pressure is put on a psychic vulnerable spot, which every person has. The measure of a hero is how they learn from it, overcome it, and rise up again.

Of course it was. Thor acting out of his usual character was intended to convey how hard it hit him that half of all living beings in the entire universe had been destroyed and he was helpless against that fact. O.O.C. Is Serious Business.

Here is the thread where my alternative END rules were discussed.
 
 
Would be interested in your thoughts.
 

Here is the thread where my alternative END rules were discussed.
 
 
Would be interested in your thoughts.
 

This is where we'd disagree. It is a killing attack... I'm killing the target, and the SFX is disintegration ray. That is classic Champs/HERO. To start over-engineering it to say, "Ok, that has to be this other more cumbersome build" is an example of exactly the issue I have with pushing HERO too far into complex simulation. Eventually everything is a Transform... Transform Character into Dead Character with a bullet in the heart... etc. The question is whether you want things simple " Cool... you have  3d6RKA Disintegration Pistol!" and let the story dictate the SFX interpretation, "Sure, you can zap a hole in the wall!" 
 
... or... you begin down the road of, "Well... for all the things a Disintegration Pistol can do, you at least need a Multipower with RKA and Transform and... blah, blah blah"... which, to me, is where things can quickly go from "fun and clever build" to "over-engineered nightmare of a points kludge"   The taste for that varies. I tend to the KISS side of things. 
 
 

Which always made me question... "How much Body do you have to do to disintegrate a character? If -10 BODY means the corpse can be "structurally whole, but had a myocardial infarction and just died"... what represents "no body, it was separated into constituent atoms?" or simply "blown to bits"?
 
That BODY is abstracted to represent both the structural integrity, mass and systemic functioning of a person or object... it lends itself to a lot of head scratching moments. SFX generally applies in a "whatever" moment... but if my SFX is "Disintigrator Ray!" and yours is "Shotgun!" but both of us have 3d6RKA... then things start to get dicey at times. One wipes out the entire body of the target, the other leaves a bleeding corpse, which all have game implications. One makes sense to create a hole in a concrete wall to walk through, the other doesn't at all. If I shoot the engine block of a car, it no longer runs, but you might be hard pressed to even notice it was damaged without a close inspection. 
 
There are a million places that HERO breaks down, because it was originally designed to simulate "Bronze Age Supers Combat" and not "semi-realistic world of objects and weapons" etc. 

I'm with dsatow on this one... if the thickness of an object is relatively very thin, just make an educated reduction in the normal DEF and go with it. No need to over think it. All this is too much detail for a game to really address, because it really doesn't help the game play... just the programming code for a simulation. 
 
Now, if you really WANT to overthink it, the "thickness affects defense (not just Body)" issue... the fact that HERO really doesn't handle this well... is part of the bigger issue that "relative size of attack vs. target" isn't accounted for/dealt with at all in the game. Size matters, a lot (and thickness is just a variation of size) but in HERO, size, most importantly, relative size, is not a calculable factor. They use some stat changes to sort of reflect size differences in changes to STR and Def and perception, etc., but they don't even begin to accurately reflect the significant differences size makes.
 
Is the Energy blast a half-inch beam or a two inch wide beam or an 8 inch wide beam? That matters a lot in terms of how much damage it does. Is a larger beam more defuse, or just more power? Is a smaller beam more focused and therefore more penetrating, or simply weaker?

Let's take that tin foil vs. 1/2" thick sheet. If I'm Giant Man, at full size, that 1/2" thick sheet is basically tin foil to me, so now has its DEF gone down... or is my STR just so much that I ignore it?
 
Thus, "thickness" and all that is still just relative. There needs to be a standard that is the point of reference (let's say "relative to normal human size") or whatever, but then you have to figure out what that means.

All this is supposed to be generalized in the interaction of "number of dice of attack vs. DEF and BODY"... and for the most part, that works just fine... but if you want to get more complex, for a better simulation, you might need to do something like,
 
Attack = Xd6... you get those dice from a combination of 3 factors... raw power, size of attack, density (including shape) of attack vs. the strength, thickness and density (including shape) of the defense... and now we are just getting closer to basic physics, and doe we really want to go there? I certainly don't.
 
Ultimately, these thought problems bring me back to, "What am I trying to do here? Oh yeah, run an entertaining action adventure game... so the answer is whatever quickly and intuitively approximates what I need in the moment."  Now, if what you are trying to do is create a physics simulator..." 
 
It would be nice if HERO has some general rules on "relative size differentials" like a simple scale of Normal and One Size Level Up or Down, Two Size Levels up or down, etc. Give some generic "+d6 per size level difference" or whatever. It should probably be a lot more, but HERO has always had low, linear changes matched to large exponential changes (see STR chart) which I've never liked, but seem to keep some semblance of game balance. Something like this would be a nice general rule, good for a game, that was not resulting in physics simulator complexity.

Warlock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.

I was big into what he was doing, but the play test crashed and burned with my group. Funny that you should bring up END, but that is one area I completely disagree... I feel that mechanic does the exact opposite of engaging with story, and completely disengages as it forces this micromanaging bookkeeping that drives me nuts. "I look at my fork."  "Mark off your END." "Ok, I move to pick up my fork." "Ok... big move, mark off that END." "I actually pick up my fork." "Are you sure you have enough END for that?"
 
I mean, seriously... how much of the source material has supers constantly worrying about every little move nickel and diming away their energy? And this is in Supers... let alone you never see in even typical level action adventure. END as written actually works well for gritty level stuff, where swinging a sword for a little bit DOES exhaust you and fist fights often results in two people sagging and staggering into each other. That is NOT supers, though. 
 
Also, END cost usually simply became a default "First buy all your powers to O END" built into the cost over everything, or other gaming of the system as a work around... far from inspiring narrative play, it caused gamist power builds to be foremost at issue. 
 
Now... dramatic use of limited resources... THIS I really like. The moments when a character goes "all in" on an attack and risks being weak and vulnerable afterwards... rules that encourage this type of decision making and dramatic play I like. We through out END as written decades ago, and instead moved to a END as a governor of active point use, and a pool for "pushing"... which has worked pretty well. (There is another thread on it somewhere on here.) 
 

Sorry... wasn't directing my comment at you at all... just that "handwaving" was kind of the old school short hand for dismissing what has come to be seen as the important stuff... how to actually make good judgments and decisions. I agree it shouldn't be an afterthought, but when you look at the page count and content comparison between "crunchy rules" and "a few mentions of facilitating play" a reader is driven to think one is way more important than the other... it just happens to be true in the other direction.

I actually think there is room in an evolved HERO (very different direction than it has gone) to create some Nar rules, particularly around SFX, that could layer on the crunch. In fact, a lot of crunch is trying to quantify SFX in some areas (think Growth and Density Increase rules, etc.) that in other situations, are left unaddressed (energy blast doesn't deal with side effects of setting things on fire or whatever, so why does Growth or DI try to deal with being too big and heavy that you break things... all that is SFX so be consistent). 
 
If there were more rules around SFX in terms of "judging interactions and using SFX to storytell around power uses" that would be huge... but very much a new interpretation... not old school HERO at all.

I didn’t mean to come across as dismissive. I used “handwaving” based on someone else’s post, but may mean something different by it. I agree with you that the best parts of the game are when the players interact and spontaneously build the game, and I consider the rules to be guidelines to help resolve and balance that creativity. I don’t consider that to be an afterthought to the mechanics; I actually see it more as the opposite. 
 
How ‘bout I replace “handwave a bunch of stuff” with “make judgments on many important elements that are not rules related”? I always read the 6e rules, despite many complaints to the contrary, as guidelines for play since they are constantly reminding the reader that it is only a game, and the rules are there to facilitate play, not constrain it. Hence the provisos about common sense and game balance, etc. I think Aaron Allston understood this in the early ‘80s when the rules were still pretty much wide open. All his “old school” advice pretty much still holds up. The players and play are more important than the rules. 

100% agreed

I'm actually on board with this trend. In my earlier gaming days, I loved simulationism. Today, I realize that there is no bottom to the simulationist rabbit hole, and also that 1) most people are going to be using their intuition and judgement to determine whether a simulationist approach is "realistic" or not, so 2) the simulationist approaches tend to spit your seat-of-the-pants judgements back to you but with more work, so 3) why not just go straight to the seat of the pants and save some work and play time?

My desire is more focus on this than on all the mechanical and rules. The way it is stated is that this is just basic GM advice... rather than the crucial play paradigm to make everything work. This is the difference in design that I see with modern RPGs vs. old school models like HERO is the new ones focus mostly on what HERO calls "handwaving" which can seem dismissive.
 
More "play rules" about making these judgments, engaging the players as part of the decision, etc., these things need more focus, rather than the micro-simulationist text book aspects... again, IMO.

This reminds me of when I tried to figure out, according to the rules, if it was possible to throw a coffee mug with enough momentum to both disintegrate but also blow a hole through a wall. I quickly got lost in the rules, and gave up.
 
I really hope one of my players doesn’t throw a coffee cup at a wall. 

Agreed... and so I have a house rule for it that I use in my "more realistic" heroic level/guns and martial arts game.
 
Blowthrough: It is possible for large and/or armor piercing attacks to pass through defenses and barriers without being reduced in damage applied to the target on the other side. To determine blowthrough, the house rule is 
Body rolled on attack doubles the non-hardened defense (of barrier or armor)  AND Body rolled also is more than Body of barrier or target  Hardened def stops any chance for blowthrough... would need double AP to have a chance to blow through hardened  Blowthrough can only happen once for an attack (can't blow through multiple targets)  Example: Target is wearing a Level II vest under their shirt, and is hit with a 5.56x45mm rifle round (2d6, Light AP vs. this non-hardened armor) Damage rolled is 11... 6 rPD is reduced by 11/2=6, so 0 rPD vs. 11 damage. Body of target is 10... so armor is exceeded and Body of target is exceeded, bullet blows through. target takes full damage and so does whatever is behind him.  
 
Now clearly an APDS would keep going through several people and only stop once it hit something sufficiently thick and dense, or eventually fell to earth. Such an attack scenario would be rare and likely get all kinds of GM handwavy stuff... but I did try to account for the much more common scenario of gun fights within buildings and where multiple targets may be near each other. It never requires this calculation every time, simply when the situation makes the question "Huh... is there possible blowthrough happening?" dramaticly applicable. 

It's my understanding that a "proper" modeling of firearms would include the Real Weapon and Beam (can't find that in 6E, though) limitations, which would account for those differences.  
 
I don't know how to rule on corpses being destroyed, though. HERO has some blind spots, and that's one of them. There's also nothing in the rules (that I'm aware of) about "blowthrough"--by RAW, if a human gets hit by a main battle tank APDS round, they'll die but they'll also stop the dart. That . . . doesn't seem right to me.

I think-- we'll never know, because Steve doesn't answer those sorts of questions--that this is the sort of thing that "real weapon" and "beam weapon" was meant to address. 
 
I never used (and rarely allow) either of those limitations, simply because there are both advantages and disadvantages to any special effect, and I have always felt that making those calls is specifically what the GM is for in the first place. 

I agree with all of this... but now we are talking "guidelines for GM and play group SFX judgment" and not mechanics. I'm totally fine with that, but we are far from being able to mechanically define exactly how much BODY loss represents how much physical destruction vs. system disruption, etc. 
 
Again, I'm actually ok with that... dialing things back to core HERO... Mechanically deal X Body and X STun vs. their defenses. Consider the SFX of the attack vs. SFX of the target... make a story telling call that makes sense for that scenario.  NOW we are playing a game... not writing simulation code. Again... my preference.