Again, the solution is not to pre-stat things. When they meet the villain he should match the character he's up against appropriately.
That said, 17 isn't good. It's the lowest level that someone who has the slightest claim on being a professional can have. Newbies. Good is twice that. Really good is three times that high. Make sure the players understand the scale. If a guy with 17 goes up against a seasoned veteran, let him get his ass kicked. One of the nice things about HQ is that losing doesn't threaten the character's life at all. So I regularly trounce my PCs. In fact, I have this one coming up, where I just hope the PCs attack him so that they can see their real place on the food chain....
Starting characters aren't really very good at what they do. I tend to think of them as 17 year olds. They're only so effective because they have HP, and presumably the GM is making up conflicts where they will have a lot of augments to show off their features.
>Which brings me to a question for those with existing campaigns: Do
>you find groups tending to break out into assorted specialists
>(someone does combat, someone does combat magic, someone else does
>stealth), so that each has one outstanding score? Or do you find
>more that most heroes develop a fair range of their abilities, so
>that the differences between them in any area are usually not so
>large? If the former, do you fudge things to get the right
>opposition against the right hero, or do you leave that up to the
>heroes to figure out?
I find that none of this matters one whit. I think that HQ plays just as well with characters who are of massively different abiltiy levels as with characters who are the same power level. For all the same reasons. I just make up opposition strength on the fly, and losing is a cool thing in HQ. Others too, like characters augmenting each other. "Balance" in terms of power, is just unneccessary. In fact, it's not high ability levels that make a character cool - it's what relationships they have, what their personality is like, and how those things are involved with the situation as it evolves. You could play two guys with exactly the same ass-kicking abilities. As long as their personalites were different, relationships, etc, they're completely playable side by side. In fact, maybe even better than disparate characters.
As long as you make play about the things that the players find most interesting about their characters, i.e. what's on their character sheet, you cannot go wrong. Period.
Mike
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