So this past Friday I had two friends over and we were playing some games. With 1.5-2 hours remaining in the evening, and not a ton of brain power available for anything overly complex, I suggested that I felt confident in my ability to run Issue #1 of the starter kit. Since my friends are both fans of the game, they were quite excited and readily agreed.
So, out came the binder where I had printed my PDFs, heroes were decided on, I pulled up an SOTM album on spotify, and in we went.
How much prep did we have? Well, neither of my friends had reviewed anything prior to the game. I had reviewed the Gameplay Guide the night before, read through Scene 1, and skimmed scene two. The other major piece of prep I had was the fact that, when Boards Alive posted their play with Christopher a month or so ago, I listened to that episode at least 6 times. In terms of non-sentinels RPG experience, my friends and I have played ~10 sessions in a D&D-based system, and I have run exactly 1 session.
Holy wow did the game go smoothly! I ran through the character sheets and rules (saving minions and initiative until they came up, a la Christopher), and we got right in. The gameplay went great, and we had no real issues. The only “problem” we encountered was my one friend seeming a little confused at one point while trying to figure out what he wanted to do… when I realized that we was trying to find an ability to cover what he wanted, I explained that he didn’t need one: he could just tell me what he wanted to do and do it! (From the D&D-based background, he was used to searching through a full page of abilities to find a specific one, so having only 10 briefly threw him for a loop). Once that was covered we had no further problems.
Unfortunately we only managed to cover Scene 1, but that was because our game got interrupted by a 30min phone call. Excluding that, it took us only 60min to get from “we could try the Sentinels RPG” to “Scene 1 complete”. Very good!
Unfortunately I’m travelling the next couple of weeks, but I’m looking forward to continuing the games!