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How do you design a power? Figure out what you want the power to do. Decide what that means in game terms. Check the definitions of the powers in the game, and figure out how much it costs. The technique of going from the rules to the results may be more cost-effective, but not nearly as fun. It gives you cookie-cutter characters with no background.
What is the role of INT in the game? As far as I can tell, it reflects intelligence. The introduction to the rules specifies INT as perception and quickness of thought, but, except for perception itself, the uses in the game system indicate general intelligence.
How do you run an intelligent or deductive character? This is something the GM has to do. Some ideas:
How do you make language skills worth having? The problem is that players will need to be able to communicate wherever they are, and if they can do so they may not see the need for language skills. The solution is to make communication more complicated. Put a stranger in a town, such that the PCs can talk to enough of the townspeople to get by, but not enough to talk to the stranger. Provide interpreters who have their own agendas.
What's this "powers"/"special effects" stuff? Hero is confusing in this regard, in that their terminology is different from anything else I've seen. In the Hero rules, a special effect is what anybody else would call a power, while a power represents something you can do with that special effect. My first Champions character, Boreas, had what I would describe normally as "wind powers". In Hero terms, he had Flight, Energy Blast, Telekinesis, and Telescopic Hearing powers based on a special effect of controlling the winds. If you mentally translate Hero rules this way, I'm sure you'll have an easier time grasping the ideas behind the rules.
Why do you pay points for weapons and other equipment? First, you only pay points for equipment in the "superheroic" mode of play, which is optimized to cover comic books like the old DC and Marvel ones. In these comic books, superheros don't casually pick up equipment and use it indefinitely, but rather stick to what the character conception indicates. Second, think of it as paying for character actions, not objective capability, and it will feel better.
Why can you buy Tunnelling, tunnel through a character, leave a hole the size of your body, and not hurt your victim? Let's take this another way. Assume you want to hurt someone; you should then buy an ability to hurt people. Assume you want to go through things, you should buy an ability to go through things. Buying the ability to go through things does not, in the rules, give you the ability to hurt people. In fact, if you don't buy the ability to hurt people, you shouldn't be tunnelling through them. Figure out some reason why you can't; in a superhero campaign, this can be "It's not in my idiom".
What can you spend experience points for? This is not well-defined in any of the Hero system rules I've seen. It is obvious that you can buy, say, a three-point level in sword, but not that you can cash in such a level for a five-point level in melee weapons. I have come up with my own guidelines:
All contents of these pages Copyright 1997 by David H. Thornley.