sentinels comics RPG

[Doc Democracy]

This is the RPG sprung from the Sentinels of the Multiverse boardgame.

 

There are a few mechanics that seem interesting and am thinking of playing it.

 

Anyone had any experience with it? 

[Cygnia]

Not yet, though I'm addicted to the card game

[Doc Democracy]

From a first read through of the rules, it seems to bring a lot of that feel into the game.

 

I like the way it uses the system to manage the powers available and to drive action.  Got serious questions about setting up a scene and how long to set it up for.

[Rich McGee]

On 7/22/2023 at 10:59 AM, Doc Democracy said:

From a first read through of the rules, it seems to bring a lot of that feel into the game.

 

I like the way it uses the system to manage the powers available and to drive action.  Got serious questions about setting up a scene and how long to set it up for.

You might better off asking over on the publisher forums, but as long as I'm here maybe I can help.  What are the question(s)?  If it helps any I did a two-part article on how I design an action scene over on my blog, the first part of which is here.

[Doc Democracy]

I think I did and got no uptake, the forums don't seem particularly active and I may not gave hung about long enough.

 

I was thinking of setting up a one-off, possibly using Sentinels for an arc of the Golden Age HERO game I am playing with my group.  I converted the characters but when I thought of the first scene I froze.  This first encounter us supposed to be the characters escaping from a lab where they had been getting experimented on.

 

Obviously the environment us important, lots of things that might interrupt or complicate the scene. There are the guards to defeat and a perimeter defence to breach.

 

So, the scene tracker.  How long? When to change G to Y to R? What happens if the tracker ends? Do I need another scene with higher stakes?  How long should that be?

 

I reckon this would become more obvious with experience of the game but I wanted the one off to go well. Any hints and tips would be useful, I want that first scene to get easy but, for plot reasons, not too easy (they are being allowed to escape but should not know that).

 

I was also wondering about whether and how the GYRO system might be used for the meta plot of the adventure.

 

Two heroes were captured,  the scene begins with the other heroes breaking in to free them, there will be three other prisoners, one of whom will escape with them, the other two will die/be recaptured. They need to get to London and return to their secret base.

 

Actually, this is all in their minds, the nazis are watching to find the location of the secret base and the surviving prisoner the captors way to communicate with the heroes. I want each scene to have the potential of giving away the secret, possibly using an additional GYRO counter.

 

Or am I being too ambitious? 🙂

[Rich McGee]

Hmmm.  How many players do you expect to have?  That value (H in the rulebook) determines how big your scene budget is, which is kind of a starting point.  It sounds like you'll want a moderate or even easy action scene for the rescue and escape (since they're secretly supposed to get away).  The normal 8-round tracker is probably fine, giving you two rounds in Green (where the tension is low), four in Yellow (as the action heats up) and two in Red (hopefully the climax where the heroes have to get away with the prisoners before overwhelming reinforcements trap them).  Since they're intended to get away, having tracker run out should maybe just give them some disadvantage going forward - or perhaps they get a reward in the form of those two "doomed by plot" prisoners surviving if they finish early, while a tracker exhaustion leads to them being gunned down horribly bravely delaying pursuit for the heroes?

 

From your description you'll want to spend one of your H "elements" on an environment ("Sinister Nazi Laboratory" or somesuch) whose twists will gradually put NPC guards and researchers into play, apply effects to one or both sides (eg an alarm might Boost the baddies with the Min die, while breaking a bunch of chemical flasks in a lab might Hinder or Attack everyone there), introduce a new challenge (eg a security gate slides shut, requiring an Overcome to bypass or force open).  Elaborate to suit, but remember that the environment will do something every round so you want to think about a variety of potential twists so you don't have to repeat them too often.  Environment twists usually start out with very small game impacts in Green, are roughly equivalent to a modest hero ability in Yellow, and can really produce huge changes in Red, with Major twists being stronger than Minors at each tier.  So don't be surprised if them seem trivial initially - they mean more and more as time goes by.   

 

Using another element or two on free-standing (ie not generated by the environment turn) challenges to represent the perimeter defenses or maybe breaking the prisoners out of their cells or whatever would give people some Overcomes to deal with, which is usually a good idea.  It helps generate twists to complicate things, and it lets heroes use the Principles and overcome abilities rather than just punching things all the time.  Experienced players frequently come up with crazy ideas all on their own that are best treated as Overcome actions, but for newbies challenges act as signposts for "think of a cool way to use your powers and abilities" points.

 

The rest of your budget can be spent on the baddies.  Sounds like you want mostly regular soldiers and maybe some tougher leaders, so a mix of minions and a few lieutenants as leaders is best.  Doesn't seem like you'd want an actual full-blown villain here.  They don't have to be actual infantrymen - the lieutenant mechanics are a good way to represent armored cars, halftracks and tanks, for ex.  Durable, but not so tough a hero can't deal with them in a few Attacks.

 

One thing the rules gloss over is mapping.  The game's very theater of the mind when it comes to ranges and positioning, but I still find it's a good idea to split a scene into at least a few different broad locations.  In this case, maybe a couple of different outer perimeter sections (maybe one backs on a forest and the other drops off as a cliff so the players can choose to use one or both to fit their powers?), a vehicle park in front of the lab building, and a few different interior sections (actual lab space, holding area for the prisoners, maybe a barracks or personal quarters/offices if they might matter).  Maybe a guard tower, Nazis love guard towers.  Usually best to have somewhere between H-2 and H+2 discrete (albeit often abstract) location so the heroes can split up or concentrate a bit.  Movement rules are pretty abstract as well, but I wouldn't let it get in the way of drama - don't count how many locations it is to the perimeter on the way out if a hero is just running like mad to beat the scene tracker, especially if they have mobility powers.

 

A single moderate difficulty action scene usually takes my groups under two hours to play, maybe three if there are a lot of distractions.  If you want a longer session you could throw in social scenes as endcaps or even just hit pause on the tracker and shove a short one into the middle of the action when the prisoners are first found (especially if the heroes have been fast and sneaky and the scene's still Green or low Yellow).  Remember to give them their Hero Point for social scenes, even if it doesn't matter in a one-shot.  You could also endcap with montage scenes before or after, although tend to go pretty quick.

 

If you really need to stretch the time, you could split things into an initial action scene where they fight past a patrol getting near the lab, montage to recover and sneak into the lab itself (using Overcomes) without alerting the guards, then start a second action scene as they find the prisoners just in time for a second patrol that found the remains of the first one to pull up and sound teh alarm.

 

No matter what you do, the usual GM proviso about no adventure plan surviving contact with the players applies, of course. 

 

5 hours ago, Doc Democracy said:

I was also wondering about whether and how the GYRO system might be used for the meta plot of the adventure.

That's a whole other kettle of fish, but you can do a lot more than just super-brawls with the GYRO system and different time scales on what a "round" is.  I ran a three-month election campaign for city mayor as a single very extended action scene (with other more traditional-format scenes nested inside it) and it worked out dandy.  All you need to make an action scene is some kind of deadline to provide urgency and justify a scene tracker, and election day is as good for that as the countdown timer on a bad guy's doomsday device.

 

Hope that helps some.  Best of luck if you do try running it.  Very different system from Hero, but it has its merits. 

[Doc Democracy]

So it is, like many narrative systems, very important to set up the contest: what victory means, what failure means and the consequences of each, with a handful of fuzzy edge elements you might throw in to qualify both victory and failure.

 

You say normal 8 round tracker. I presume longer teackers are easier for PCs, shorter ones harder.  I also presume that turning red sooner makes it easier because PCs get access to those abilities for longer in the scene?  Though that feels a bit counter-intuitive...

[Rich McGee]

1 hour ago, Doc Democracy said:

You say normal 8 round tracker. I presume longer teackers are easier for PCs, shorter ones harder.  I also presume that turning red sooner makes it easier because PCs get access to those abilities for longer in the scene?  Though that feels a bit counter-intuitive...

Kind of, but I wouldn't call it universally true.  The GM can use whatever tracker length they like, but longer ones are usually used for big, epic scenes - the climax to a multi-session story arc is an example the designers use - and shorter ones are often minor scenes with an obvious "win condition" that the heroes don't need as much time to complete.  In practical terms that usually translates to difficult scene (following their guidelines for scene construction) = longer tracker while easy scene = short tracker, but again there will be exceptions.  The encounter budget system seems optimized for moderate scenes with the 8-round 2/4/2 GYRO tracker, but it work for easy and hard scenes fairly well.  I think the design goal was to have the tracker almost equal the expected time for the heroes to win (or have a Total Party Knock-Out), with the ideal situation being that every hero has something meaningful to do on their turn (even if it's "just" Boosting a fellow hero) until the win/loss condition plus an extra round or two as allowance for PCs going Out (at which point their options are sorely limited).  Action economy is pretty important, as you might expect.  Makes challenges (which often require multiple Overcomes) more meaningful than they'd be without time pressure.

 

The spread of GYR rounds is also important for determining hero (and, rarely, villain) effectiveness as you surmised, and the more Red rounds there are the more impact those potent Red abilities will have.  Pretty rare for a scene to last more than two rounds once you're in Red, both because the team is now firing on all cylinders and because you may have a TPKO from heroes going Out back in Yellow.   By comparison, Green rounds really limit the PCs, and often get spent doing Overcomes on existing challenges, swatting some minions, or putting out mods with Boosts and Hinders rather than whaling on villains.  The book's suggested epic scene tracker has a 1/6/4 GYRO spread IIRC, and I don't think I'd ever bother with more than two Green rounds in an action scene unless something really weird was going on narratively.  Green is the calm before the storm in an action scene, Yellow is where the bulk of the action is, and Red is where the end (whatever that might be) is near.  Having the scene tracker run out is almost always beneficial to the villains, but what that benefit is can vary a lot.  Maybe the heroes get a fiat KO and wake up partially healed in a prison or deathtrap, maybe the villain's gadget/ritual/scheme seriously changes the world and everyone has to deal with that (Thanos snap, summoning Cthulhu, etc.), or maybe they just stole what they wanted and get away via a pre-planned escape scheme.

 

Worth noting that there are a few ways to use Red abilities before the tracker is in the Red, including just getting beaten up really badly early on.  A big part of the game's tactics involves around deciding when you need to (say) invoke a twist to use a key Red ability while still in Yellow.

[Rich McGee]

A bit off topic from the original question, but since it fits the thread title I'll parasitize it instead of starting a new one just to toot my own horn a bit. 

 

Today marked the completion of a long-running project over on my SCRPG resource blog.  Since villains are one of the things a new(ish) supers RPG needs most, a couple of years back I started in to do one of every possible pairing of villain "approach" and "archetype" in the core book.  For those who don't play, villains are constructed by pairing those two elements, selecting some options off each one's menu, adding a few other details, and you're done.  It's a faster process than Hero by a bit but not trivial, and of course you need a solid concept for what you're trying to create to start with.  There are (inexplicably) 18 villain approaches and 14 archetypes, which makes for a grand total of 252 possible pairings. 

 

Didn't expect to actually finish all of them when it started, but after some grinding I finished up the last one today, squeaking over the 2023 finish line.  Still doesn't begin to cover every possible villain build (you'll always have menu options you didn't take, which can differentiate one Bully/Indomitable baddy from another) but it's enough for me.  Also quite a few more villains than some supers RPG get in their whole history, and probably twice or thrice as many as the Greater Than Games folks have officially published.

 

So yay, me.  Now I can think about what to move on to next.