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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 5078887" data-attributes="member: 8158">My experiences with other gamers playing HERO System in 20+ years can be summed up as follows: take the 250 points you're alloted, and see how much you can get away with. My experiences with gamers playing M&M over the course of one year is more like: it's so easy to get away with murder, it's obvious that this game relies on GM fiat. For instance, let's say a player wants the power to turn enemies into slugs, which they can then pour salt on. In HERO, this is (supposedly) balanced through cost-prohibitiveness. The base power is expensive, and there are advantages to buy for it that are essentially mandatory. The end result is a power that requires about six to eight hits to actually kick in, and there's no detrimental effect on your target until it finally does kick in, so he's probably beating you up in the meantime. The player now will go one of two ways: he'll either realize this isn't going to work like he envisioned and he abandons the idea, or he'll mitigate the cost by lathering on Limitations. Let's see, Activation 14< (-1/2), Doesn't work underwater, in vacums, in intense magnetic fields (-1/4 x 3), Only works in Hero ID (-1/4), and then the biggest non-Limitation of all: Obvious Inaccessable Focus (-1/2). Now, in M&M, the power is not at all cost prohibitive on your average PL10 budget. Nor is it some cumulative effect that takes place after a half-dozen hits. The enemy has to make a saving throw to avoid becoming a worm, and that's pretty much it. Acknowledging this, the player may quickly come to the realization that there is no pretext of the system policing his efforts to design an over-the-top power, so he either has to police himself or fully expect the GM to put his foot down. Or perhaps the character gets the power and, in all likelyhood, after using it a few times everyone agrees that this ability is a little exploitative.My problem with Champions/HERO is that it implicitly offers the pretext of playing gatekeeper through elaborate (some say "elegant") point-costing, but what it really does is ween unassuming players over to the dark side of min-maxing. I think the place where this really becomes evident is the 150 points of Disadvantages each player is required to come up with in building their character. It quickly becomes evident that all Disads are not created equally disadvantageous. Some, like Psychological Limitation and Distinctive Feature, just add some color to your character. Others, like Vulnerability and Susceptability, can get you killed. And still others, like Hunted, don't ever seem to amount to anything (most GM's just can't be bothered). The part that's problematic is that the system-recommended baseline of 150 points is just TOO FRIGGIN' MUCH. Most characters just aren't going to have that much depth. Now, I realize that and if I'm the GM I lower it, but rest assured that the number of Champions campaigns that reduce that baseline is not large.</blockquote>

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