Honestly, outside of maybe reddit threads, I don't know that I've seen anyone really make that mistake. Anyone who has dipped their head under the hood would have noticed it.
The problem is people act like it was the intention, and that might have been vaguely accurate in 1981, but it really wasn't even by the time Champions 2e came out. That's why you rapidly started seeing things like Active Point caps and the like. But people still talk like that's what its there for and its been more than 40 years now since that was the intention, if it ever really was.
My point, in case I was unclear, was that if point value did represented something more valuable to me, I would find investing more effort into the math of the situation more fruitful.
Well, if you routinely play with people who will self-restrain, they don't. But if that's true, most character generation systems are unnecessary; you can just write down whatever works for you and the others you play with do the same. If that's true almost no math in character generation at all is needed. Its just that's not a common thing by all evidence.
The later point inarguably. I can verify, since I've personally switched from enjoying that kind of activity in my gaming and enjoying doing so in Hero System to the opposite and not.
Sure. I'm not sure I really need that level of detail myself any more (unfortunately, the next step down turned out to have in-play problems I don't like that took a while to notice, so I'm kind of twixt and tween). I probably land more about the Savage Worlds level these days generally (too bad there are big problems with using it for supers).
My comment was more about people for whom the idea that Hero served and actual purpose seems a massive mystery. It really shouldn't be when someone (like you obviously do) understands there's just different priorities and needs involved. But apparently engaging with the idea people genuinely have those is some sort of major cognitive dissonance for some people.
To the first, it certainly could be. I'm not as exhaustively familiar with Hero as I am with GURPS 3E, were I found situations where I don't think it did. Specifically the vehicle supplement, where you could rebuild your James Bond spy car twelve ways from sunrise and the math would collapse down to a small number of vehicle handling stats and result in no actual difference.
I don't feel qualified to comment there. But I'll note GURPS has a baked in bias to simulationist approaches in the old usage that Hero's never had. It may be fussier about distinctions than some people want, but it very rarely cares how you do something so much as that the in-play output works the way it seems it should and produces the result you want (and as much as possible, to the degree you care about; as noted, someone can be producing an energy chucker and anything from just a straightforward Energy Blast with no modifiers, to a finely honed collection of Advantages and Limitations are needed, depending on how fussy they are, and the difference in the maths involved is pretty striking).
I wouldn't even limit it to characters. How detailed (or just how granular) you want the game world or game as a whole are considerations as well. The bevy of slot-based encumbrance systems and range-band systems certainly indicate preference variations there.
Oh, yeah. I'm currently running 13th Age which has very much a loosey-goosey approach to a numberrange i of things (movement and range issues in particular) and while its not normally what I lean into, it does what its trying to do well enough; you just have to be aware you're getting what you paid for there.
