Game Breaker / Hollow Earth Expedition

• Specialisations are way more cost-effective than any other option increasing Skill Ratings or reducing variety of penalties, at least outside the character creation. Not only they cost merely 3 experience points per rank, they have a fixed pricetag - it's always 3 points for the next rank^note For comparison, skills double the cost with each following rank, and rising one from 0 to 5 costs 30 experience points, which is twice as much as for 5 ranks of specialisation. Due to their cost-efficiency, they render variety of Talents completely useless or overpriced by comparison (you can achieve the same effects at the fraction of the Talent's price, while getting bigger bonus, applying to more things) Sure, it's a bonus to specific subset of general skill, but in many cases, you actually don't need or even want a broad skill, but a narrow specialisation.
  • And while during character creation specialisations don't look so hot for basic skills, they are even more broken for specialised skills (like Piloting, Academics, Crafts etc.). Those can only be increased by getting specialisations, and during char-gen they cost merely 0.5 point per rank. Thus, for just 2 points, one can get a skill to 4, which would take 4 points for a basic skill (an already bargain price).
• Allies and Followers, two Resource types, are completely busted when it comes to experience points economy. A basic Ally costs 15 points^note Or you even start with one if picking as a starter a Resource rather than a Talent, but that's rarely profitable, given variety of Talents can be only picked during character creation, which might sound like a lot, but really isn't. By total stat and skill count, it's a character just slightly weaker to a starting PC and can easily cover all the bases the "real" characters lacks. However, what makes them busted is the fact Allies start with their own slot for a Resource. They can't have their own Allies, but they can have their own Followers: either one strong one (which is an Ally in all, but name, having identical point counts), or two weaker ones (for a total point count above a starting character). Followers don't even have to be human, which is a great thing, allowing to use the otherwise fixed Size stat. The end result? For 15 points, you can get a Scarily Competent Tracker with a pair of Canine Companions or a raptor-riding Amazon warrior or even something as outlandish as an assistant professor and two students of his, competently covering skills that cost 45 points and can easily defend their "master" by sheer numbers alone. But Wait, There's More! An Ally can be upgraded for additional 15 points, and that in turn allows the Ally to gain improvement of the Followers. By then, it's 30 points that turn into 90. This process can be done up to five times, and the number of Followers can be increased each time, too, turning into a real crowd - and by 3rd rank, you can get additional Allies, too (with their Followers, of course), putting everything on its head. Since players have full control over how those characters are build or develop, it's Min-Maxing galore, given Allies and Followers can fully embrace Crippling Overspecialization as NPCs. Literally the only thing preventing Allies with their own Followers from breaking the game in half is the fact they can die and the points invested into them are lost.
• Block, Dodge and Parry Talents turn the related actions into reflexive ones. Normally, you must use your Attack action to perform any of those defensive moves. When they are reflexive, you are still free to act and then gain an "extra" move to perform the defensive maneuver.
  • Taken a step further when combined with Counter-Strike or Riposte Talents, as those in turn allow to perform an extra attack after, respectively, a successful Block and Parry.
• Skill synergy is a weaponised Master of None that snowballs into a Master of All in zero time, particularly when it comes to the broad array of Academic and Science skills. As long as the related Stat is at 3, it only takes a single level of any given Skill to get Skill Rating of 4 and thus qualify for a synergy bonus. So rather than using the otherwise crap rating of 4 for the tested Skill^note Barely enough to pass default difficulty tests, up to +10 bonus from synergy can be added, offering up to the staggering 14 for the final Skill Rating - that's equal with having 5 in related Stat, Skill and also 4 ranks of Specialisation. All while in reality, your character is barely qualified in all the piled-up skills when treated separately. When taken to the extreme, a starting character can cover 22 different skills, out of the list of 50. This is also the sort of character that's going to thrive on having the otherwise useless Jack of All Trades Talent, as it negates the -2 penalty of the remaining 28 skills and ties perfectly with the enforced But I Read a Book About It playstyle. The only possible downside is that you end up with having to play as a Librarian - as if that was a bad thing.
• Long Shot, a unique Talent from the basic ruleset, doubles the effective range of any ranged weapon. It has immense utility by itself, but most importantly, it completely negates Short-Range Shotgun, in a game where the only weakness of shotguns is their somewhat lacking range. The talent even covers bows and antique firearms, so pretty much any kind of non-throwing weapon allows you to outrange opponents or keep a safe distance from them.
• Secrets of the Surface World expansion introduced a wide variety of guns and their accessories. Among them are scopes. They respectively double, quadruple and octuple the effective range of any given weapon that can mount them. Not a big deal with shotguns and pistols, but rifles have effective range of 100 feet. Sure, it takes an aim action to use a scope (so decreasing attacks to every other round), but who cares, if you are outranging with the resulting Sniper Rifle whoever is on the other side by such ridiculous margain, you might as well take extra aiming actions to further improve the odds of hitting while doing so with complete impunity. It is so broken that most players either ignore scopes as range multipliers (giving a flat +1 to a weapon's stopping power) or simply re-stat the ranges they add. And yes, scopes are cumulative with the mentioned above Long Shot talent.
• Due to the way how Style points can be used to invoke Cutscene Power to the Max and massively enhance various aspects of the character, the game requires a pretty competent GM, or else the meta-currency can be freely abused. Especially if players gear their characters from a get-go for easy (and dirty) way of pumping those point - a cocksure Egomaniac Hunter is probably the simplest of such pumps, but it's also perfectly fine within the context of the game. The basic ruleset even openly advises to limit the gains per session at 5 whenever in doubt.
• Basic, "minor" Bless offers a +2 to all checks for the duration of the scene. Keep in mind that when using average values instead of actual rolls, every two points in any rating translate into a single, but guaranteed success. Thus nothing comes even remotely close to such buff and the temporal aspect of it is a complete joke as a counter-balance. If that wasn't enough, it's the lowest tier of the White Magic spells, and when cast on oneself, it requires zero successes - and it only takes 2 to cast it on the whole party. Pretty much everyone house-rules this spell to offer a +1 bonus or taking lethal damage to cast (often both), which still leaves it very powerful, but at least up to a chance during rolls and not as game-breakingly powerful as a free, automated success for the whole scene to all possible actions, free of any charge.
• Under Continuous Combat rules, Quick Strike Talent provides an option to attack 2-5 times per single round. With a good enough starting Initiative, at least one rank of this Talent and using attacks or weapons labelled as Fast, it is all but guaranteed to have action twice per singe round. Rising Quick Strike or boosting it with Style points, along with taking Quick Reflexes (+2 Initiative) Talent, and the Initiative rate will go so high, your character can move every other phase of combat, outpacing everyone by a huge margin. And since each consecutive attack on the same target causes -2 Defense debuff, it will pile-up really fast, allowing to use the sheer speed against some Mighty Glacier.
• Using weird science rules, it is entirely possible to design equipment that's broken on few different levels, be it weapons or even basic gear. This includes things like adding powerful buffs balanced with trivial to manage "flaws", like extra bulk (or flaws in-name-only) or applying some special effects that go well beyond simply killing someone or something.
  • A particular broken combination involves a gun with +4 Damage Enhancement, Balanced with -4 Capacity Flaw, when used by a character with Instant Reload Talent. Who cares if your Hand Cannon holds only a single shot, if you reload it for free, effectively having no flaws at all, while making the gun dirty cheap to construct and not requiring any rolls to make it whatsoever. Even without that Talent and requiring a reload every other turn, it's still a weapon that deals 6-9 points of lethal damage all by itself, without even accounting Skill rating, thus allows to perform a One-Hit Kill every other turn.
  • The Inferior Damage Flaw isn't really a flaw, providing free Enhancement points to any Utility Weapon that's "non-lethal" (-4) and deal "no damage" (-6) just in theory. A reinforced bola launcher that's gonna stop a charging Triceratops? Check. A ray gun disabling vehicle engines? Check. An earthquake machine opening Bottomless Pits in the ground? Check. Not only they are easier to make, since technically they have a serious Flaw, but it leaves plenty of room for highly useful Enhancements, like a Touch Attack or even Increased Damage (it's extra non-lethal damage of a stun gun, after all).
  • And last, but not least, Skill Enhancement works like a set of custom-made tools, being the most basic custom gear possible to make. It offers additional Skill rating to a selected skill: either +2 to someone who already knows that skill, or a free +4 to someone who doesn't have a single rank of the related skill^note This method avoids not only the -2 penalty for untrained rolls (effectively providing a +6 bonus), but also allows the use of Specialised Skills that are normally completely barred... and being just another reason why Jack of All Trades Talent is useless. And that's just the basic tier of this Enhancement, with each following providing additional +2, technically capping at +18 with liberal use of Flaws. Even the most trivial example provided, an Advanced Toolkit (Craft), allows one to operate as if being a highly-trained mechanic, or significantly help the actual mechanics with their work. Designing your own sonic screwdriver or translation lenses was never easier, while highly affordable.
• In the basic ruleset, Instant Reload unique Talent fall squarely into Cool, but Inefficient territory, as there aren't too many weapons and mechanics to interact with it and thus making it a worthy choice to not have to use actions to reload. Come expansions and their expanded arsenal, along with other talents to interact with, or even the simple re-focus on the surface world affairs and Instant Reload can make designated gunslingers and artillerymen just as cool (and broken) as you think operating with Bottomless Magazines is.
• Similarly, Wealth Resource significantly improved in value with the expansions to the game. Originally, it was pretty inefficient: get two ranks of it to temporarily (for the duration of the scenario) gain a single rank of another Resource. Pretty bad when you are stuck inside Hollow Earth. But with expansions came organisations, weird science, expanded Resource rules and simply so many more toys to buy, becoming The Team Benefactor even as a player character became extremely powerful. This also includes a particularly broken logic loop of having The Team Benefactor as an Ally, Charlie-style, where such a character simply throws money at the party, in turn boosting their other Resources or outright buying them new ones. The flexibility that Wealth offers makes it one of the most powerful utility abilities in the game, but it does require at the very least Secrets of the Surface World expansion to make it so.

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