The Sentinels vs. Primordial Plant Life and River of Lava

My understanding (and how I always played it tabletop) is that "The Sentinels" count as single hero, but 4 hero targets.  Thus, I would expect that anything deals damage to "all hero targets" would damage them all.  However, my remembrance of the tabletop was that when something dealt damage to "all heroes" you were supposed to pick a Sentinel to take the damage for the single "hero" that is The Sentinels.

Is that right?  I ask because I just played a game in Insula Primalis where both Primordial Plant Life and River of Lava were played, and while each only targets "all heroes" (or in River of Lava's case, all heroes that don't do a thing), each member of The Sentinels took the damage.  Have I just been playing it wrong on tabletop?  Did a ruling change? Is this a bug?

I can double check, but I think this was asked about for the video game, and how it is working is what Christopher ruled.

Found it. Yep, this is Christopher’s ruling.

So.....In the case of River of Lava, at least 3/4 are taking damage no matter what? That feels wrong.

My understanding is that the Sentinels count as "one hero" for the purposes of determining H at the start of the game, but otherwise, the four characters themselves are indeed "heroes" in the gameplay sense.

So, any effect that damages "all heroes" would indeed hit all four Sentinels. The difference between that and "all hero targets" is that the latter also includes cards such as Unity's golems and Visionary's Decoy Projection.

If you destroy any one Ongoing you get the two damage for all Sentinels members from Primordial Life.   For River of Lava destroying Durasteel Chains prevents all members of the Sentinels from being damaged by it.  

And if I can further complicate the situation I believe that it has been ruled that "Hero" is a shorthand for "Hero Character Card" which is why all when all "Heroes" are targeted each Southwest Sentinel is targeted too, but when something attaches or targets to a singular "Hero" the Sentinels are considered one unit (or perhaps tied for the same qualification,) and that's when you select one to take damage.

I seem to recall playing a recent game with The Sentinels in which something prevented a certain "hero" from taking a certain action -- I can't recall if it was "can't play cards" or "can't do damage" or "can't use powers."   In any event, the "hero" I picked was Dr. Medico, but that didn't prevent the rest of the Sentinels from playing cards, doing damage, and/or using powers.  

Which villain was it against as that would narrow it down as to which affect was used.

Was it La Capitan? She has the one card where it's the hero that she hits that can't use powers.

I think Iron Legacy has something similar, but I don't think I'll ever take the Sentinels in against Iron Legacy – no Ongoing destruction, and low enough hitpoints they could easily be dead before their first turn.

Could? I was foolish enough to play them against Iron Legacy. That was a fun game only getting to use their incap powers all game while everyone else got to actually do stuff for the next 30 minutes.