New players with a lot of questions; twists, "targeting", groups, boosts, more...

Played issues 1 and 2 of the starter set today. Had a lot of troubles with it, hoping anyone could provide some advice.

1) Powers/Qualities - sometimes it seems very hard to match up qualities/powers with defined abilities. For example, Legacy's Galvanize just doesn't seem to readily match up with any of his powers.

2) Twists - really not sure what principle based twists are supposed to look like in play. Should they have immediate definable effects or be mostly flavor? The sample generic twists are all fairly specific and mechanical, but many of the sample environment twists are just sort of "flavor". Like what would "Which whippersnapper just showed you up" actually DO?

3) How are you handling deciding whether a hero is at close or long range and how many foes they can hit with a "burst" effect (Like Legacy's Flying Smash or Bunker's External Combustion)?

4) Boosts/Hindrances - how specific/generic should these be? It is pretty easy to think of boosts that could apply to many situations, and also easy to think of very specific ones. Like, can Bunker just upgrade to get "targetting enhancement", which would help with pretty much any attack? Or would you do something narrower in field, that would only help with specific attack actions?

5) Collections - each hero starts with a collection. Is the intent that you only refer to things that have happened in the episodes so far to use it, or can you just make up stuff from imaginary prior episodes?

6) Along the 'make stuff up' lines, how about Bunker's Principle of the Tactician? Are you supposed to actually prepare before hand to use this, or is the intent that you can invent how you prepared on the spot?

7) Overcome - seems like some of the scenes have involved overcomes that were kind of hard for the PCs to figure out. How much detail do you give about these being available?

Guess that's a start...this was all pretty awkward over all. Seemed odd to be so strongly mechanical, but then so up-in-the air about how to apply things. And seemed like the heroes could only succeed because the GM is specifically sandbagging the enemies and initiative order.

I won't run answers for all of these, because it's been nearly a year since I did any play/running of SCRPG, but knowing the guys behind the engine the answer for your question 6 is that you are absolutely intended to be able to make it up on the spot.

I was guessing that’s how it is intended, but the wording “when you can flashback” makes it sounds like you actually need to have done something. Usually I’d think it would be like “Describe a flashback of how  you prepared for…”

Thanks for the clarification!

An ability unless it says otherwise is basically any kind of power or quality. Galvanize in card game does no damage and just gives every PC a +1 to attacking I'd say Awareness makes the most sense. It even says Leadership must be a die to use this power. 

1. Ask the player what they’re doing to galvanise the team, are they keeping an eye out and shouting warnings about upcoming threats, then awareness, making a display of strength, then strength, flying around and attempting to look inspiring, then flight, making a speech after taking a massive blow from the enemy, then vitality.  If your players can justify why they want to use that power then let them use what they like.

2. Principle based twists should have an effect on play, for most you can get away with using one of the other dice in their pool as a hinder or as damage (the whippersnapper showing up Legacy caused his concentration to falter, AZs suit overloaded and hurt him etc, etc.), for others you might even justify adding additonal minions to the scene (Tachyon didn’t notice additional robots arriving as she was too focused on her destination).  The principle based twists are there as suggestions if you can’t think of a relevant twist off the top of your head so using them to justify hinders, damage and minions is perfectly fine so long as it makes sense.

3. Fudge it, but keep it sensible, if three robots are attacking bunker then he can definitely hit all of them, but if he’s in the park near the mothership, he can’t hit the snipers on the rooftops as well.

4. As specific or generic as you want them to be, in general I’d say permenant, non-exclusive buffs should be more specific but it’s up to you and your players how specific you make them.

5. Imaginary stuff is fine especially for the starter collections, so long as it’s something that could happen in that collection.  It’s worth noting that the starting collection is the characters origin issue as well.

6. Absolutely make stuff up on the spot, how many comics are there where the hero sets everything up beforehand but keeps it from the reader until the plan goes off.

7. I generally give the first steps for known objectives, for example during the first issue I made sure to have locate argent adept as an objective on a card in front of the players along with the enemy lists so they’d remember why they were there in the first place.  Remember that the players are on a semi-strict time limit so making sure they remember what their goals are is a good thing.

That being said they didn’t know that the argent adept needed medical help until they found him, so feel free to keep back information they haven’t uncovered yet.

i hope this was helpful to you.

1) Powers/Qualities - 
Galvanize is a leadership die; it can be used with Awareness (spotitng threats and directing to them), Flight (distracting others), Strength (Either throwing stuff, or making a big showy action, possibly even throwing Bunker or Wraith).

2) Twists - really not sure what principle based twists are supposed to look like in play. 

They're temporary issues that have to be dealt with. One of my favorites is shutting down a power for the scene. Another is a scene duration hinder to self, or boost to another.

3) How are you handling deciding whether a hero is at close or long range?

whatever makes sense at the time from the story.

4) Boosts/Hindrances - how specific/generic should these be? 

I generally accepted it if it's obviously limited to one skill, one power, or one special ability. Larger if the usefulness is limited. 

5) Collections - each hero starts with a collection. Is the intent that you only refer to things that have happened in the episodes so far to use it, or can you just make up stuff from imaginary prior episodes?

Crank up the Aurelio Voltaire and hom on the USS Make S*** Up!

Later collections can be call-backs to played adventures, or to "off-screen" stuff.

6) Along the 'make stuff up' lines, how about Bunker's Principle of the Tactician? Are you supposed to actually prepare before hand to use this, or is the intent that you can invent how you prepared on the spot?

Again, make it up on the fly.

7) Overcome - seems like some of the scenes have involved overcomes that were kind of hard for the PCs to figure out. How much detail do you give about these being available?

Depends upon the scene and the overcomes listed for it. Don't forget that sometimes, you can have them roll first, and narrate it after.

Hey all. Thanks for the responses. Unfortnately, a lot of "no, there aren't rules for this", which is kind of expected but disappointing. Any idea if they'll fix any of these problems in the full game? I'm guessing not...I'm guessing most people don't even perceive them as problems.

Regarding twists...is the intent that you always get a mechanical effect and the scene twist suggestions are just the flavor? Like, we took "drop a bystander on their head" as being the entirety of the twist, which is certainly bad, but has no mechanical consequences.

Can anyone give examples of the principle twists in play? Still don't know how to handle those.

Yeah, the "there aren't rules for this" is touted as a feature, not a bug.

Twists don't necessarily contain mechanical effects, no.  If the outcome is flatly undesirable, like a bystander being injured, that can be the whole thing.  It can even set up an additional challenge that has no mechanical consequences for failure (the bystander slipped and is about to fall, you can save them with an Overcome).  The heroes are meant to be heroic, and them failing at things they value is punishment enough.

This is an interesting issue. I am starting to wrap my head around this issue as well, and here are my current thoughts.  First of all let me tell you what I am assuming you mean by lots of there are “no rules for this”.  My assumption is that you are referencing these issues

They suggest causing scene to advance as a major twist

JesterOC - first, thanks for the response! Sorry I've been a long time in replying.

Regarding the Principle Twists: Thanks for the examples. We had very much had the impression a principle twist was supposed to be very fundamentally different from a 'default' twist, but had no idea how. Sounds like you just played them exactly like a 'default' twist; just using the 'principle' element as flavor for it.

That makes more sense, though between having to go to a different page and so many of the principles being so obtusely confusing rather than easily inspirational, I suspect we'll mostly just ignore those if we try to play again.

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Regading "no rules for this".

You gave the example of 'how much can spider-man lift', and it seems like a lot of the game is built around 'however much the players think he can'. But then  you get abilities which feel like "Activate to lift an extra 2 tons". And that makes no sense - we don't know much he can lift in the first place, and frankly none of us have the foggiest clue how much one of Baron's Blade's hover platforms weighs in the first place anyway!

Like, even if we knew exactly how big an area Bunker's blast hit, that wouldn't help because we aren't tracking distances or positions in the first place. Why even have a character with both 'melee' and 'ranged' attacks when those have no game meaning? Why not just have a 'combat' trait which works perfectly fine for 'I slam Citizen Dare with all my might, sending him flying into the air where I can bullseye him with a plasma ray!" which seems a very comic-book appropriate action? Is that melee or ranged? Why does the system try to act like it matters while having no mechanics that actually make it matter?

It almost feels like the system had two different design groups, and one half wanted a more free-form system (maybe alaPbtA type stuff?), and the other wanted a mechanical D&D type thing, and instead of reaching a compromise they just stuck in half of each and didn't bother to make them work together. :(

Overall just a huge letdown. I'm not even sure we're going to finish up the intro scenarios.

I don’t think we have any abilities in this game that are “activate to lift two extra tons”. Rockstar has “The Principle of Strength” which does two things. 1) It says that you do not need to roll for mundane acts of great strength. Throwing a car? Not mundane. Throwing a dude or breaking down a wooden door? No roll. She just succeeds, because that is “mundane”. Will that definition change per table. Likely. The second thing it does is overcome a problem with brute force. Does that mean she can throw a Mobile Defense Platform? I don’t think she could do it with just the strength of her arms, but if that player decided to reinforce their body with rocks and it was a small thing instead of a mobile city? It might work.

The bigger question though seems to come in with the bolded part. Why do we have ranged combat and close combat instead of just combat? The same reason we have “Electricity” and “Infernal” even though mechanically they fill the same slot. Because the story is the important part of the design. The action you describe would be close combat to me, because the more important action is the slam and flying through the air.

Difference between Strength and Close Combat? I’d allow someone to throw a chunk of masonry with strength to hit a flying enemy, but I wouldn’t allow a close combat person to do that. But, if the person wanted to run up some rubble and tackle that flier out of the air, I’d let them use Close Combat. Because that makes sense as something they should be able to do.

Can a person run up to a villain and punch them, if that villain shot from the hallway of a convention center. Maybe, I’d say likely. I could see a super hero get a panel of run and then a panel of punch bad guy.

It might be hard for certain groups and certain playstyles, but this system was consistently designed for being kind of vague with distance and the like so that the action of the scene wasn’t stopped by people being a single 5 ft square to far back to do the awesome thing.