Min-Maxxing Superhero HERO

[Lago_AM3P]

There we go. I am going to buy this game this weekend so I can play online with a group of people, but you know me.

I want to max out my character hardcore-styles. Any suggestions about anything about making a really powerful character? I have a soft spot for magical or superhuman martial artists (Kenshiro, Gokou, Robin, etc.) if that helps any.

[Username17]

OK, the basic method of infinity cheating in the Hero System is by selling figured characteristics.

Every 10 points of strength you buy gets you:

5 points of stun.
2 points of PD
4 points of Recovery.

Do you see where this is going? Jack your Strength and Constitution as high as they'll let you take them. Then pocket the extra Stun and Endurance as points.

Secondly, you gt mad crazy bonuses for getting followers, vehicles, or whatever. It's expensive to be a detective, and it's expensive to be a giant robot. But it isn't twice as expensive to be a detective who owns a giant robot. And it's only five more points to be a detective who owns two Giant Robots. Summons and Automatons are so crazy awesome if you sink enough into them that most people limit them to a huge extent.

Always maximize your psychological disads. They make your character more interesting and are taken instead of shitty disads like "explodes sometimes" which might kill your character and are not interesting. The game doesn't handle susceptibilities well, so don't take them. If you want to be weakened by Kryptonite, you do it by taking a power disad on your junk that some of it doesn't work in the presence of Kryptonite. This not only allows you to have more total powers (since it's reducing the cost of your powers instead of being taken out of your mandatory disadvantages), but it also makes you not have your head fvcking explode in like 48 seconds the way even a 10 point susceptibility is going to do.

Multipowers are your friend. If you want to have at least two attacks available, there is no good god damned reason in the world not to have one. Put power disadvantages on the whole thing, it's awesometastic.

-Username17

[Tae_Kwon_Dan]

Strength is super cheap. Run your strength up crazy high and then if your GM isn't paying attention see if you can't throw some naked power advantages on it while he isn't looking. Technically this should go over your Active Point (AP) cap, but if you're dealing with somebody not paying attention you might be able to sneak them in there.

Reduced Endurance
Double Knockback
Penetrating

Those are all popular naked advantages on your strength. Martial Bricks can be ridiculously wrong if you don't mind only having a few martial maneuvers, but doing ridiculous damage because of high strength plus martial maneuvers. Once again your GM needs to not be paying attention to Damage Class caps for the characters.

This also applies to high strength characters that purchase Hand to Hand (HtH) attacks. You can also be a moderately strengthed character with a nasty weapon so that you have some kind of 4d6 Hand Killing Attack (HKA) and play the stun lottery every round.

Other popular and useful powers are Entangle and Flash. Flash is cheap as hell and rocks your socks unless they have Flash Defense, but you'd be amazed at the number of standard baddies that don't. Flash or Entangle plus a pushed haymaker of a 60 STR martial strike is pretty much wrong.


Other non-cheese things to consider:

1. Find out what kind of Speeds your fellow party members will have. Even if you'r slow you probably don't want to be more than 1 SPD lower than the average party member, because you'll feel like you never go. 5 SPD is usually pretty standard.

2. Don't bother running stats up to the upper end of their ranges. Just go low enough to get the rolls you need. There is no difference mechanically between a 15, 16, and 17 DEX. You still have a OCV\DCV of 7. Aids and Drains make a difference there, but that's about it.

I'll give you this advice though. Folks on the HERO boards aren't that impressed when you break the game. Usually it comes down to GM's that don't put restrictions on the campaign of some kind to keep things in flavor.

You should be able to build a very viable and enjoyable Goku type character on 350 points. He'll probably be about the power he was right after he beat Piccolo at the end of Dragonball.

[Josh_Kablack]

1117069657[/unixtime]]
Do you see where this is going? Jack your Strength and Constitution as high as they'll let you take them. Then pocket the extra Stun and Endurance as points.

Bzzt. Incorrect.

See FreD 25, Column 1 Reducing Characteristics

Known Infinite/Cheeseball loops in HERO:

1. Aid to Aid and any one other power at the same time. Works with other adjustment powers too, and in fact Mystic Masters had a doomsday device built as a power that would Transfer all magic around it into making its Transfer bigger.

2. Summon a creature capable of Summoning a copy of itself.

3. Followers with negative point totals. Every senior citizen sidekick you have, actually costs you -2 points and yet still counts as a Perk and not as a disadvantage.

4. Buy a base, a small one will do. Then buy some grounds for it. Then double the size of the grounds for +1 point, and those are Base points, so heck you can double it 5 times for 1 of your points. Heck, if you put like 50 points (the same cost as a 10d6 EB) into doing it you can get land mass of approxaimately 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, square kilometers attached to your base.

Other, fun, but generally less profitable things to double include number of followers, number of bases, number of vehicles, and number of Duplication forms.

5. Change Environment: Vaccuum + AoE 1 Hex on Str + FtL Travel + Move By

6. Duplication + Multiform bought recursively so that you multiform into a guy who has duplication into himself plus a duplicate with multiform into...lather..rinse..repeat..

7. All the N-Ray and telescopic vision you can get + attack powers with based on ECV and Increased Maximum Range. Sell your movement back, you won't need it.

Now then, some generally acceptable ways of min/maxxing in HERO/Champs:

1. Buy a lot of Str. Although this doesn't get infinite due to the sellback prohibition it's still dirt cheap and gives you a lot of stuff.

2. Buy your powers inside a power framework. Multipowers, Elemental Controls and VPPS are all really point-effecient.

3. Limit your powers. A - 1/4 to a -1/2 limitatation goes a long long way.

4. Always max out your disads. Psych Lims should come first, since you want to roleplay a character of some sort, you might as well get points for predefining it. Remember that some seemingly Psychological Limitations can be shunted off into Social or Physical limitations instead, letting you get more points out of the category. Next should come DNPCs and Hunteds, both of which give your character extra screen time. Avoid Dependence like the plague.

5. Multiple-power attacks.

6. Shrinking.

[Josh_Kablack]

1117072435[/unixtime]] You can also be a moderately strengthed character with a nasty weapon so that you have some kind of 4d6 Hand Killing Attack (HKA) and play the stun lottery every round.

The key to using Killing Attacks effectively is to throw A LOT of them. Autofire, Multiple Power Attacks and Rapid Fire/Multiple Move Bys (with PSLs) all help here. I once played a super villan who combined all 3 into the ability to launch 18 per phase (which was a good fallback for after he burned all his boostable charges on the big attack). His big problem was getting the time to Find Weakness first.

[dbb]

This reminds me of the old Champions light-bulb joke, thus:

Q: How many Champions players does it take to change a light bulb?

A: That's a GM call.

The point being that so much of the game is up to the GM that min-maxing advice has to be fairly general to be at all likely to be useful to anyone. Josh and TKD both give very good examples, but I'm having a hard time thinking of what I consider real "min-maxing advice".

When buying power frameworks, remember the following: ATTACK powers want to be in a multipower; DEFENSE powers want to be in an EC. You very rarely want to be using more than one of your attack powers simultaneously, so you get a bunch of different things (RKA, EB, Flash, maybe a Drain or Aid or whatever) and stick them all in the same multipower, and you can use them one at the time. On the other hand, you generally want your defenses to be around without them blocking off your other defenses, so sticking your Force Field or whatever into a multipower is a bad move.

Not that you should buy Force Field anyway. If you followed Josh and TKD's advice and bought a ton of Strength, you have a lot of PD and ED already, and you can just upgrade them to Resistant and hey, presto! You're tough as nails.

In fact, Strength IS a multipower, giving you HtH attack, ranged attack with the IIF: any handy object limitation, grab (entangle + damage), movement, defenses, and Stun.

Only In Hero ID (-1/4) is a good cheesy limitation to stick onto things if you need to save some points.

--d.

[Josh_Kablack]

You very rarely want to be using more than one of your attack powers simultaneously,

That's not quite as true as it used to be. The 5th edition rules for multiple-power attacks mean that nowadays shoving all your attacks into a multipower is now actually giving up something worthwhile in exchange for getting all your powers at 1/10th cost.

so you get a bunch of different things (RKA, EB, Flash, maybe a Drain or Aid or whatever) and stick them all in the same multipower, and you can use them one at the time.

Buy it all OAF (or maybe OIF): Bow and Quiver of Trick Arrows, call yourself Green Arrow or Hawkeye and you're good to go.

[dbb]

1117084853[/unixtime]]
That's not quite as true as it used to be. The 5th edition rules for multiple-power attacks mean that nowadays shoving all your attacks into a multipower is now actually giving up something worthwhile in exchange for getting all your powers at 1/10th cost.

How dare they? A hallowed tradition!

But intriguing. When I get to the point of unpacking all my stuff again, I'll look it up -- have the book, just never bothered to read all the way through it, as I haven't actually been in a Champions game since well before it came out.

--d.