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So a few friends and myself decided that we wanted to start a superhero rpg and I am to be the GM. I came across Champions Complete and felt that this would be a good game to play, and then I started reading. I'm having a lot of trouble understanding and grasping the game, I don't know where to begin with the questions. Character Creation - I understand that a person is given an x amount of CP, and everything is bought using them, but beyond that I'm lost. Building Attacks - There is no limitation to the kinds of attacks you can make, but the vastness of it confuses me. For example, if I was creating a character like The Flash how would I make a "Lightning Toss" attack? Combat - So based on the character's speed (Base is 2), that's how often they go in a turn and a turn consists of 12 segments. Is there a limit to what you can do during your phase? For example, in DnD you can make 1 move action and 1 attack action along with a bonus action and a free action, but not two moves along with an attack action and a bonus and free action. Is it similar here? Any and all help is much appreciated. I'm sure my questions have been asked before and they'll be asked again so apologies! If having a reference for a hero helps, a player wants to be a speedster similar to The Flash. In you explanation if you could use a speedster that would be extremely helpful (the starting CP for my characters is 300 and 60 for complications).

I’ve been admiring Hero System from a distance for some time now. Over the course of a few years, I’ve started and stopped reading the rulebooks, occasionally intending on “Buckling down to RTFM cover-to-cover this time, then I’ll know it!.” Each time I stopped because I couldn’t maintain interest, gleaning only the most elementary understanding of the rules of the game. I recently tried kickstarting a game with my friends by reading both a 2 and 3 page version of the rules and then just finding premade characters on the internet to do a mock-combat with. The idea was this: after being forced to look up things we were seeing on the character sheets enough times, we’d have a high enough resolution gestalt of the game to start digging around and making our own characters (and playing quickly and smoothly). We were using these premade character sheets: http://surbrook.devermore.net/adaptationsvideogame/hl2/combine_overwatch.html http://surbrook.devermore.net/adaptationsvideogame/hl2/antlion_soldier.html http://surbrook.devermore.net/adaptationsvideogame/hl2/weapons.html We acknowledge the possibility that these character sheets are the overwrought brainchildren of a theory-wanking grognard, and might feature extravagantly avant garde applications of the rules that are satisfying only to the “clever” guy who thought of them. It’s a scenario we hadn’t much opportunity to avoid, so we opted to treat them as fine examples of character sheets. Nonetheless, there are certain concepts that are used on these character sheets that we can’t find anything about by CTRL-Fing through each of the core rulebooks. The shotgun’s damage is “reduced by range”, which is a string that we just literally couldn’t find in the rulebooks, and the pulse rifle utilizes “autofire” which we couldn’t find a core definition for (everything we found was an explanation of how “autofire” works for specific Powers and how it affects the strength requirements of melee weapons, it wasn’t listed at all underneath “Firearms”). Most of the terms we searched could be found in either books' glossary, but those definitions were often too abbreviated and none of them directed us to a page that would give us the full scoop. In addition to this, when we tried to use our best judgement about how these rules should be applied, we couldn't find a way to produce a result that seemed sensible. What I mean is, we couldn't figure out how these Antlions were supposed to penetrate the seemingly very strong body armor of the Combine Overwatch. This is just an example of the problems we have been facing. So what we want to know is: What are we doing wrong? Is this whole “trial by fire” technique just a bad technique? Is there a video or series of videos that we could watch that would connect the dots for us? Should we actually just read the books cover to cover before attempting to play? We can’t seem to find many straight answers to the questions we have just by digging through the rulebook, and so we’re kind of stuck.