1st Impressions (finally)

I know I'm wicked LTTP, but after weeks of reading, asking loads of questions here, and converting 23 (and counting!) characters from my present campaign to SCRPG, I finally got a chance to run the Starter Kit last night.  It was a successful venture.  A few reflections:

1) It took 3 hours to do Issue 1, which is longer than I wanted.  But everyone was brand new to the game and we were dealing with online game tools that were partially being generated on the fly, so that took time.  I hope next week will go faster.

2) Choosing Twists was a lot easier than I feared it was going to be.  The text box in Chapter 2 was really helpful for that.  One of my players enjoyed suggesting Twists, which helped also.  We only used a Principle-based Twist once.

3) I was excited when the players pretty quickly realized that they didn't have to "power game" their dice pools with their best dice, because the difference between, say, a d8 and d10 was negligible most of the time.  As a result, their descriptions were more fun than just trying to jam their best dice into every description.  They also realized that when a Twist was likely, having a small die in the pool could work to their benefit.

4) As a GM, I realized I had SO much more control over whether or not I wanted to screw the players (and I get that the tone of the game is generally *not* to do so).  Two examples: Legacy had Galvanized.  I had the ability to choose who went next; if I chose Legacy, his Galvanize would have ended before most of the heroes could benefit from it.  I chose not to, and the players recognized that (and appreciated it).  I also had 8 roaming Spider-Bots in the scene.  On one turn, I paired them off against the 4 heroes and just had them all Hinder because I didn't want to damage the heroes too badly.  But on the next turn, I realized that Hindering them was just making their rolls suck, which in turn was just dragging things out.  So instead I had all of them do damage.  A couple players used the occasion to try out Responses and Hit the Deck, and overall, the damage done increased tension in a good way.  Without Hinders on them, they came up with a plan, got good rolls, and won the scene.  But it was the very "game-y" way the mechanics worked that gave me those choices as GM.

4a) Side note: we had tried this initiative system (i.e., you choose who goes next) once before with Mutants & Masterminds.  My players *hated* it.  But with the mechanics of this game, two of the players were constantly talking through the order to make sure their teamwork plans went off.  It was cool.

5) On a story note, Scene 2 seems to be difficult for some groups because the transmitter is really hard to discover.  I simplified it a bit.  I started by putting a card up that said, "How are the robots being controlled?" So the players knew to look for something.  A first Overcome revealed that the Mothership was key.  They took it out (with an awesome Lightspeed Barrage), but that didn't stop the robots.  I let Wraith use Principle of the Detective to spot the transmitter on the Mothership wreck and Tachyon dismantled it.  The scene went from "seemingly overwhelming and impossible" to "resolved halfway through Yellow."  It was a good call to make it a little easier to do.

5a) BTW, all the characters felt useful and all of them had moments to shine, which is great.  But, like many others, I'd say Tachyon was the most powerful of them.

A great first experience and a good sales pitch for when I propose switching our Champions game over to this system.

#3 fills me with hope. :)

Glad it went well overall.  

Re 1) Timing: My group always takes about 2 hours to do half an issue; that's just how we roll. So we've resigned ourselves to going slowly, and splitting every issue into two sessions. The Starter Kit took us about 14 sessions (no joke), and now we're session 5 or 6 into the Stolen Legacy one-shot. Once we came to terms with stopping half-way through an issue, it made us all less skittish and anxious about taking our time to do cool story stuff and talk things out.

Did you have extra healing then during the starter kit? I just was curious because usually some healing happens between issues in Sentinels so I didn't know if you made those adjustments or if you just kept great notes for the health.

Some 2nd impressions after last night...

The initiative order is a really big deal for the GM.  At the end of issue 2, with the Voidheart and all the Dark Shadows, we reached the end of a round where the heroes all went first, leaving all the enemies.  Then it was my call to choose first for the next round, and I could have just done all the enemies again.  But I knew that would have been a tremendous beatdown on the heroes, so I let one of the heroes go instead...and they ended the encounter before the enemies ever went again.

This was mostly good play (and a little luck) on the heroes' part, so I don't begrudge them the victory.  It's just that they were only 1-2 turns into Yellow, and I suspect this was supposed to be a tougher fight.  I guess I've learned that I need to teach them the error of their ways when they act that way.  It seems baked into the game, but it's a bit of cognitive dissonance in a system that is generally so favorable towards the heroes.

The issue also didn't make clear whether the shadows and orbs went away when the Voidheart was defeated, but it seemed silly to continue the fight after that, so I ended it there.  Issue 2 took us maybe 90 minutes, so we started issue 3 right away and off they went to Insula Primalis.

Here we ran into a common problem with pre-packaged adventures: when the heroes do the unexpected, do you let them get away with it or do you find a way to gently railroad the expected narrative? I did a little of the latter.

As soon as they found Tempest and freed him from the allosaurus, they grabbed him and ran off to the plane and planned to take off - no Haka, no plant spirits.

If this was my own campaign, I would have let them get away with that and worked with it.  Instead, a couple Twists later and I brought the plane done with a missile, which precipated the Haka encounter, which, for our group, went better than what I've read from other groups.  The players didn't want to fight; they restrained her and talked.  I didn't make it to hard on them.  At the end of the session, the plant spirits attacked.

In session 2, the players definitely got a solid handle on the rules, though they were a little more inclined to repeat the same actions this time rather than experiment.  They've barely touched the Red ever, so they haven't had a chance to really cut loose.

As this was my 1st time with Environments, I was a little disappointed that they weren't as "present" as they seemed to be on paper.  When I read that these environments produced new opponents every turn, it seemed almost overwhelming.  But four heroes can clean up *a lot* in a single round.  Lieutenants only have a tiny bit more staying power than Minions; a d10 or d12 starts strong, but they death-spiral fast.

I'm glad I'm having these experiences doing the Starter Kit before trying this with my home campaign.  My affection for the system has not diminished at all, but I am realizing that there are some growing pains to learn to GM the system well.

We've adopted a house-rule initiative system for exactly this reason.  We have a deck of index cards with everyone's name who gets a turn.  Then we shuffle it, and place it face-up.  Then we draw the first card - the drawn card is who's turn it is, and the next person who'll go is visible on top of the deck.

Not for everyone, of course, but if the initiative mechanic is stressing you and your group out, you might want to try it (or something like it)

Thanks for that.  I like the initiative system, because the players definitely *have* used turn order to make use of bonuses or to keep a Galvanize around as long as possible.  I wouldn't want to lose that to a random system.  But I think the danger is there of "one side goes first, and then each side takes double turns after that, and whoever's dice are better wins."

It would seem this is partially based on the number of GM turns.  If the GM has more turns than the players, smart players will try to break things up a bit, even if it just means all the enemies act in the middle of the turn.  But if the players have more turns, it makes sense that they all want to act first.

It hasn't become a "problem" yet, but it has become something to watch more closely to see if it *becomes* a problem.

3rd session notes.

I mentioned the initiative issue from my last post at the beginning of the session.  They understood and focused on controlling the beginning and end of every round and the villains never got a double turn.  However, it was not a combat-heavy session, so I think we need another session to see it work in a more complicated situation.

We began with the fight against the tree spirits on Insula Primalis.  I forgot about the environment for the first half of the fight, but I think it was just as well.  I have some new thoughts on environments below.  I did get to experience a fight of heroes vs. lieutenants and minions only, and I did think that it was a little dull without challenges or (presumably) villains.  (As a playtest of the system, it's a bit unfortunate that the starter set doesn't include a fight against an actual villain until the last battle; I will probably use at least one every session.)

The heroes then flew off to Russia for the Proletariat scenario.  Here is where I can confidently say that SCRPG gave me the most fun and mechanically interesting time I've had with a superhero game that involved no punching at all.  That is a really, really cool thing.  I split the difference between not telling them what to do at all and explicitly putting out a card that said, "this is a 3 Overcome challenge."  I posed them as explicit problems to be addressed and left it at that, and it worked well.

The lack of combat, however, created a bit of an environment problem.  Since the environment had no threats to add, it would activate a twist each time it went.  However, the scenario was *all* Overcomes, so there were a *lot* of twists.  I "ran out" of environment twists pretty quickly.  I understand that I can make my own (which I did a couple times) and, with our own PCs, I'd encourage the players to do more character-specific and/or Principle-based twists.  But here, I felt a little unimaginative having to come up with so many.  I defaulted to advancing the Scene Tracker a few times.

They also used clever approaches to the situation that *would* have worked for later Challenges, but were "out of order."  I didn't want to penalize good ideas, so I just filed those successes away and applied them later.  We stopped the session just before the reactor was going to meltdown.

We had scheduled our playtest for 3 sessions.  So at the end of this session, we had to decide whether we wanted to continue the Starter Kit or not, and also whether to switch our Champions game over to SCRPG or not.  The players definitely wanted to see the rest of the story and they were then willing to switch over to SCRPG for our regular game, though one player expressed concern that she didn't want her character to feel less powerful than her present version.  I think it will be fine.

No comments on our 3rd session, but I figured I'd post my 4th session impressions anyway.

We finished the nuclear plant quickly (we were literally 2 Overcomes away from finishing it), did all of the Tomb of Anubis, and set up the first fight of the last issue.

Based on the clues they've discovered, they're assuming the Big Bad is Baron Blade and that he has an underwater base, so that's pretty cool.  

Despite some reviews I read, I did not enjoy running the Tomb of Anubis.  Maybe I ran it wrong, but my players very quickly figured out that each new room required an Overcome just to get to the next one.  They tried to come up with interesting ideas, but a couple of them just resorted to, "I look around for an exit," just to move things along.  Also, "Principle of Cold" is so much easier to use than every other principle these heroes  have.

The threats were fine, though not much of a challenge.  I still think Environments produce threats too slowly by default to make much of a real difference on their own.  I suppose I could have just used twists to add more bad guys.  This is definitely one of the things I look forward to trying out on my own in my own game.

There was a bit of "ability fatigue" creeping in, which was a little disappointing.  While two of the players (the one most into both the lore and this system itself and the one who is the best role-player of the group) continued to make good use of all their actions, the other two players had largely resorted to the same couple actions over and over. It may have been partially because of the scenario, further confirming the advice in the book that action scenes should ideally have challenges AND minions AND a villain to really keep things interesting for everyone.  Nothing in the Tomb gave them the impression that things were spiralling out of control.  The final big robots were cool, but they went down fast too.

Finally, I'll say that I' think it's odd that the Starter Kit waits till the very last action scene to have the heroes finally fight a supervillain.  I hope it's fun.  I plan to lower Blade's Health by 10, as I assume he was built to fight a team of 6.

I actually figured something out about Blade, after I ran him initially. I'll PM you something quick.

5th and final session of the Starter Kit completed!

As many have written, the final issue is easy to run and has plenty of excitement.  Scene 1 went very quickly.  They chose the stealthy approach in Scene 2, with only a couple threats.  Legacy used Principle of the Mentor (the only time he did so) to save Tachyon from a Twist, which was fun.

Because they succeeded at stealth, and because I wanted to get to the big fight, I just narrated sneaking through the base rather than the book's suggestion of providing some easy encounters.  IMO, SCRPG is not suited to playing out "easy encounters." 

The big fight was a lot of work to run.  I asked the players after it was over if it *felt* stressful, and they said, "definitely," so that's a good thing.  They only ever accomplished 2 of the 3 suit overcomes (and he repaired one of them).  The victory was achieved by a 25-point attack by Wraith.  In the end, only Legacy's Health was in the Red (he was down to 1).

Blade had too many abilities.  I honestly randomized them after the first Slash and Burn attack because they were all viable and interesting choices.  I completely forgot about his Reactions until it was too late - not that it would have made a difference.

Overall, it was a successful venture.and we're looking forward to getting back to our old campaign with this system.  I'm especially interested in exploring Principles more, because my players discovered Principle of Science and Principle of Cold could be used for damn near anything, and, because most of the players didn't really know these characters, we never used a single Twist from a principle.  So I'm going to try to push those more with their own characters.

Easy encounters has a specific meaning in the full corebook. Essentially, each such encounter is an additional scene... and they allow you to judge the needed time.

Sadly, the starter kit didn't make that element clear.

I didn't take it to mean the formal definition of easy. according to the rulebook.  That never would have crossed my mind.  Even so, an "official" easy scene would have been table time ill-spent and also did more damage to them before the big battle.  I suppose that would have been OK.