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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 2861307" data-attributes="member: 8158">Quite true, it's unavoidable to some degree. But HERO involves much more overhead than these other games. if HERO is no more solid in this respect, then the overhead involved just isn't worthwhile IMO.It seems to break down like this: eIther the character comes out point-balanced, or it doesn't. At that point, the GM either wavies the point imbalance, or the player has to start whittling. Now, the remark that was I responding to is that "there's almost no such thing as house rules" with HERO. The implication of that statement is that the game has so few shortcomings that the GM just plays it as-is. If that were true, there would be no need to waive something as fundamental to the system as balanced point costs. To put it simply, point-waving is an off-the-cuff house rule.I'll check it out once my eyes recover from being dialated. I would extend that issue a bit to cover attack powers whose primary benefit doesn't apply some kind of damage to the target. Mental Control, Mind Control, Mind Scan, and Teleknesis are all prohibitively expensive for the level of effect you can get out of them. It's much easier to blast some Viper mook through a wall than it is to freeze him in place with mind control. In general, simulating D&D's save-oriented effects like Confusion, Hold Person, Scare, or Sleep is generally going to be too expensive to be reliably effective.Oh, I don't hate it, I just think its time is past and it will remain obsolete as long as its designers keep thinking certain aspects of the system are inviolable.I wrote a couple of the first articles for Digital Hero back in the nineties. One article I wanted to work on dealt with the Spirit Shift and Spirit Consumption powers. I loved them and the spirit rules as they were presented--I thought they were much beter-suited for a fantasy campaign than the pyrotechnic pseudo-superpowers that we're accustomed to seeing from mages--but again everyone who wanted to use them ran into one little obstacle; they were cost-prohibitive to the point of being practically useless. They costed 20 and 30 points per d6 respectively, had no range (the spirit rules explressly stated you can't use no-range powers against spirits), and had no effect unless a character was drained to negative EGO yet it wasn't even inherently cumulative. I had a series of email dialogues with the guy who designed the spirit powers about ways to make them more attainable. He insisted that they should remain expensive because he thought they were so powerful. I tried pointing out that for half the cost in AP to get even a marginal level of effectiveness out of the spriit powers, a character could have a Ranged Killing Attack that would annihlate an opponent with one shot. That's about as powerful as anyone needs to worry about. I got nowhere with him, because the HERO designers just see things in their own light.I would love to see that change.</blockquote>

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