Defense and some other questions

So, I got incredibly lucky today at Gencon and had a chance to try out the RPG. I had a blast playing AZ, but as I was driving home and thinking on the events of the game I started getting confused, and I think now that we missed some rules.

I got attacked by minions a lot, and they hit pretty hard because the dice don't like me. I was taking between 8 and 11 damage per turn, and there seemed to be no option to attempt to mitigate that damage. Sure, Bunker and Legacy had armor and Tachyon could use her Reaction to attack them, I seemed to have no choice but to take the full value of the rolls from the minions every turn.

The other part of this is, if I remember correctly, the ice shield ability only gave a Boost, and since my only options seemed to be attacking and overcoming, it was a defensive ability whose only use was powering up attacks for next turn, which seems off.

So, did we miss the rules on defense or is this accurate that the heroes have a really hard time surviving for more than a few rounds? Because without my healing ability I would have gone done in the very first combat from the sheer amount of damage I took. And I'm fairly certain Unity and other heroes don't have any such abilities.

Following this is some confusion on the Principles.

In that early fight some minions were going after some civillians. I wanted to freeze the enemies to slow them down and allow the people to escape. This is exactly what Sub-Zero Atmosphere does, freezes and slows a large group of targets, so I used that ability. However, despite causing some major hindrances for the enemies (-3 to all rolls) this did nothing for actually saving the civilians.

Despite being the exact same in terms of story effect, should I have said I was using "Principal of Cold" instead of saying "Sub-Zero Atmosphere"? Is not being allowed to check the box on the overcome track the trade-off for causing the penalty for the roll? I'm just not sure exactly how that is supposed to work.

I should also say the group as a majority used the specific actions far more often than anything generic, which may be part of the confusion, because our specific actions seemed to do the exact right things narratively, but they never seemed to work out mechanically like I thought they would.

Speaking of Principles, if Principle of Cold does just mean "use cold powers to overcome the challenge", yet is different than my other specific cold abilities, then I still think it works, but I have no idea how my "Principle of the Suit" could be used. It seemed like most of the overcome challenges were involving rescuing people, and Zero's suit (to my knowledge) is only a containment unit for himself and allows him to use his cold powers. If anything involving the cold powers falls under Principle of Cold, what sort of things could I possibly use the Principle of the Suit for? It seems like since it doesn't do anything to my knowledge then it is a weird thing to try and use to save people or stop a falling thing.

Thanks in advance for your time and the patience of reading through the writing of someone really tired from just getting back. I may have more questions in the future as I delve into this system, but it looks to be a lot of fun and I'm very interested in trying to run it myself one day.

There is a Defend action you can take. It reduces all damage done to you by the amount you rolled. No one took the action in our group, and it sounds like it didn't happen in yours, either. I believe that the design idea is to make offense more useful than defense, since it is more fun.

(P.S. It was great to meet you in person!)

It was awesome to meet you as well.

Okay, that at least gives me something. All I remember the guy saying was "you're always considered to be defending and dodging", he mentioned there were defensive actions, but I don't think he ever told us what they did.

It seems like that would eventually lead a character into a downward spiral though, if you are in dire enough straits you're going to be only taking defensive actions, which just delays the ineveitable. It's cinematic I grant you, but I wonder how often you'll end up in a situation where that set-up leads to a hero incapped in the first few scenes of a big battle. I'd have to play it a lot more to get a feel for it I guess.

I went to my pictures of the character book that I took at the demo, and here are all the references to defensive/healing type mechanics that I could see:

Defend

Your hero is always taking steps to protect themselves, but there are times when they want to focus on protecting themselves or someone else. In a Defend action, you describe what you hero is doing to avoid or reduce an Attack. Assemble your dice pool, roll those dice, and note your result. When you or the target you are Defending would next lose Health before your next turn, reduce the amount taken by your Defend result. If you or the target you're Defending are not Attacked before your next turn, the effect is wasted.

If you are under the effect of multiple Defend actions, choose the higher result to use; do not combine them.

Risky Actions

You can choose to add an extra effect to your basic action by taking a risky action. There will definitely be fallout--hence the "risky" part--so choose an appropriate minor twist when you decide to take a risky action.

A risky action only works for a basic action, and should only be as circumstances warrant it. If you're doing something you've practiced, it's an ability

Hit the Deck!

A common risky action is to take a Defend action when facing an enemy's massive attack. A basic Defend action can be done out of turn as a reaction by activating a minor twist. You may only Defend yourself this way and not others.

Reactions

Reactions (labeled with an R) are specific actions you can do in response to something happening. No matter how many abilities you have that grant reactions, you can only perform one reaction per round. This resets at the start of your turn.

Recover

Some abilities or other circumstances let you use a die from your roll to Recover as part of your action. Regain lost Health equal to that die's result, up to the maximum of your Green zone range. For recovering outside of action scenes, see Montage Scenes.

Montage Scenes

When moving between action scenes, the heroes might be in a montage scene to cover what happens in the downtime. Heroes can also use montage scenes to Recover lost Health if there's time to do so. Each hero describes how they recover from the events of the previous action scene. They recover Health up to the maximum of the next zone up. They may choose to take a minor twist (that lasts through the next scene as well) to Recover two zones, or if they were in dire straights, they may take a major twist to recover all of their Health at once.

There is also the fact that as you move from one zone to the next from taking damage, more abilities get unlocked and are available for use. So while you might consider taking damage again and again to be ridiculous, it does result in your character becoming more powerful and having more options to fight back or react to incoming damage. And even when you are Out, you still provide a unique ability for anyone on your team to use, just like in the card game.

I'll try to respond in stages.

That first line of the Defend action bothers me. "Your hero is always taking steps to protect themselves" Yet, mechanically, that is not the case at all. There is no way to dodge or mitigate anything that is "always" on unless you have armor. I think this is what leads me to my initialy confusion. I was being told that I was also defending myself, while doing my best impression of a punching bag that even the weakest foes and minions could easily damage. I come from the traditions of DnD and other systems, where attacks can miss due to armor, this is more a culture shock than anything else and that phrasing does not help explain to new players how the system works in mechanical reality.

The next part is perhaps due to the combat I am remembering. AZ and Legacy were alone, and we had about 6-7 robots attacking us. At three bots each, and all of our attack actions only able to target a single bot until we lost enough health, we were looking at approximately three rounds of combat. Using just average numbers from the d6's, I was looking at 10 damage, followed by 7 and then 3. 20 damage of my 29 starting health, dropping me into red from the very first scene of the entire game.

That does make me more powerful, but it also puts me closing to being dropped to incap, which is a drastic reduction in power, and I'm sure if everyone fell it would be a pretty lousy first bout.

In addition, only healing up to the max of the zone I am in, if AZ did not having healing, he could only go up to 11 health after that encounter, essentially guarenteeing that later encounters would drop him in short order.

Now, perhaps it was because of a demo game and a lot of novices at the table not used to the system, but the "Minor Twists" seemed fairly major when we encoutered them. We suffered extra attacks or had our abilities nullified for the entire scene, and it seemed to be far more in the DM's hands than the rules indicated, though that was probably because of the demos. I can't imagine taking more than 2 or 3 twists in a scene before my ability to contribute would be sorely limited, and starting a scene with a twist just makes the chance of the overcomes leading to lots of problems even more pronounced. And taking a major? I can barely imagine it, considering how the minors alone tended to effect us.

Again, this might be a system shock for me, more time with the system will probably smooth it all out, but it was highly noticeable to me that this downward spiral of the characters seems incredibly hard to mitigate, and against multiple groups of foes, it seems like it could quickly lead to characters who are severly beaten down, and I never even saw what a lieutenant could do because we took it down so quickly, and I know the enemies can get tougher than that.

It's concerning to consider for a few reasons while I'm thinking on my group. They tend to either charge in with no thought, or be incredibly, frustatingly cautious. Both have problems with this system. I suspect I would see a lot of people taking armored abilities and defensive reactions, probably self-healing, making the characters I'd see at the table be a little too homogenous for a superhero story, and they would slow things to a crawl when they starting actually dealing with a scene, because once you are in a bad spot, it is incredibly difficult to get back out of it.

I hope I'm phrasing things in a way that make my concerns clear, I'm not good at explaining my reactions sometimes.

I am getting bad about multiple posts, but I was wondering if anyone had any answers for my questions about Principals.

After seeing the Principal of the Tactician thru Lacuna's stuff that was linked elsewhere I feel I'm closer with "can you use your cold powers to fix this problem" than anything else, but I'd like to get other opinions if I can and see if that is the general consensus

I think it depends on how something is set up in the scenario. I could definitly see a Poison Cloud used as a Hinder that could be removed with the Overcome Action, or it could be represented by a Enviroment Attack. 

I think in both cases I would allow the suit to work to some degree, should be about what is relevant to the fiction.

Jettisoned into a Vaccum, Extreme heat/cold, Gases, Water (might not be able to swim but could have some breathable air for a bit).

Okay, so the overcome action is also meant for non-enemy dangers? I could see some of those where the suit is useful, still not many but at least that is something.

So, why Principles? I know it sounds cool and it fits to a degree, but it looks like using a Principal is the same as using your already prepared powers or established abilities. IF AZ can already freeze a group of enemies with Sub-Zero Atmoshpere, why do I need to use Principle of Cold to freeze them if I want to tick off the next box to save the civillians. IS that simply a GM call or is there something I'm missing here?

As I recall, looking at AZ now, if you're in the yellow zone, you have access to yellow and green zone abilities. One thing you get in the yellow zone, if I remember right, is the null-point calibrator. This is what let's you heal when you're dealt cold damage. Back in the green zone, you have an ability that hurts your opponent and deals you cold damage. Therefore, much like in the card game, you're constantly taking full damage from hits, but you're usually healing at a constant speed. Haven't actually done it in practice, but it seems reliable.

I've not had the chance to play the game, having missed out on the con demos and picked up the Starter Kit just a week ago as a birthday gift to myself, but having re-read the rules several times, one thing mentioned here stood out to me.

The mechanics seem bult to specifically emulate the card game. The heroes are on a timer to achieve their goals set not just by the environment (i.e. the Scene Tracker), but also by the inevitable attrition of their health. In Sentinels, invulnerability is non-existent, and victory in battle is defined mainly by endurance (who outlasts their opponent).

As such, that is a major paradigm shift from other RPGs, especially superhero ones, and one that may be difficult for many players to achieve, never mind find satisfactory.