Episode 318 of the Letters Page: Writers’ Room: A Day in the Life: Benchmark

Maybe this episode in the metaverse will get him more fans.

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Upcoming schedule:

• Tuesday, June 2nd: Episode #319 - Writers’ Room: A non-Vengeance Friction story
• Tuesday, June 9th: Episode #320 - Writers’ Room: Cosmic Tales: An intense space opera story
• Tuesday, June 16th: Episode #321 - Writers’ Room: The Rise of the Sixth Sun
• Tuesday, June 23rd: Editor’s Note #90
• Tuesday, June 30th: Episode #322 - Writers’ Room: Rambler calling in a debt pulls a character out of a different fight

Wow, I can’t believe this is episode 2 of the Letters Page Podcast!

No, this whiny bro voice bit is comedy gold.

Benchmark is the oven-toasted brussels sprout of Sentinel Comics.

I need an image of this broccoli-loving radical fox now. I wonder if he’s friends with Gun Rat?

Who knew Benchmark was an influencer? Though clearly, he’s the new standard for influencers.

I’m glad I figured out Setback as the most likely to take money from Revocorp because he needs it. Ra is a considerably funnier choice, however.

“Wow, this sucks” I’m so glad they’re having fun, because I am too.

Feels like Benchmark vs. Adhesivist would be a pretty one-sided fight, huh? God, what a great cameo though.

Gotta say, I wasn’t notably jazzed for this issue, but I had a lot of fun with it! B+!

Ooh, Benchmark confirmed for Definitive Edition! And more than one expansion left, too!

Writer’s Room: Setback fights an Argent Adept villain, someone make it happen!

So you could say there’s one ring to guide them all, and in their bloodline, bind them.

I neither needed to hear or see it, I knew Christopher was doing the walking-into-the-basement bit. XD

Adam doesn’t have any cats yet.

Oh wow, they actually confirmed more than 6 boxes. I was just kind of joking there!

I can’t say I’m exactly elated by the news that they’re expanding the DE roadmap. I feel like the initially planned content would’ve been more than enough to keep myself, personally, satisfied, with enough breadth that it would never get old. (Though I do acknowledge that there are many who play much more frequently than myself and thus might desire more content, and also that there are those for whom more content is simply always more better.) I also would have thought that the past year would have made GTG more appreciative of every chance they get to make something, and so focus on essentials, rather than add extraneous things.

There’s also the thought that extending the lifetime of SotM DE likely also means putting off focusing on the RPG even more, but I suppose it’s most prudent to assume that that ship has sailed long ago. Although I do wonder — perhaps they intend to make DE something of an evergreen product? That is, perhaps the company’s financial problems arose, in part, because there was a period when they stopped releasing new SotM products, and so they plan on continually releasing them for the foreseeable future. On reflexion, I don’t think that hypothesis is particularly likely to be true, since IIRC they were also releasing Spirit Island things during that time, which of course was far more successful and profitable than any Sentinel products.

Lots still unknown about their roadmap and so we can only wait on more information. At least I expect regular news coming out of them compared to the near complete silence of FRG.

Welp, so much for my plan to eventually review the entire podcast backward and forward.

The way you make broccoli cool is the Ant Man and the Wasp Colony Quantumania character Broccoli Man. I will buy any comic book that has him on the cover.

Pretty sure TikTok was still called Vine in 2016.

I think it might be Captain Cosmic who does the phone call. Ra is a stretch, but Hugh is maintaining a secret identity as a lawyer while not actually practicing law, he could easily find himself strapped for cash to pay the next YEAR of rent and bills on his flat, in case he gets lost in space again.

I could get really into the psychology of a character like Benchmark with the kid asking about Legacy; I could see his narration box making some commentary about how Legacy does the right thing but he’s a little old fashioned and cheesy in his earnestness, while Randall does the right thing but he’s doing this crass commercialism and tacky promotional stunts.

The only cool broccoli is @broccoli

“Well, the puns are back…” Honestly surprised they waited a week to do that.

Warden Hoffle…is he awful? That will determine which pronunciation is correct.

Reprehensible Business Practices needs to be a card in the Revenant deck.

PS: listening to this episode before the previous, I didn’t realize this was the triumphant return of the original intro theme.

The original intro theme is in the previous episode, just a minute or two in.

I find the notion of Setback taking more money from Revocorp—the same company that gave him his powers in the first place—pretty funny.

I don’t think much of the SotM team spent much time on Spirit Island. Christopher was involved, of course, but not as a principal. The visual design team did, of course, but that’s a rush of work at the end.

Paul, if I remember correctly, was lead on defining the alternate history of the Spirit Island world. The thematic aspects of the adversaries are mostly his thing, and he had a lot more planned…

pretty sure Booster Gold has been hit by “do you know Superman?”
My interpretation of the final bit would be him trying to be “inspirational” telling the boy from the street to “don’t do drugs” and then on the monorail sees an ad for Revacorp pharma enhancements to make a new, better you through… drugs.

for those who did not get Dispiration the “next expansion” ad on the back of the rulebook (now changed was) Vengeance. Naturalist as a focus hero and other figures I am uncertain of and my copy is at my other house.

oh, and Grimm’s nemesis symbol is a crossroads sign over a pit of fire

Crossroads on the neck of a guitar at that. Hmm, who could it be now?

It’s a mystery alright…

(Apparently I’m not allowed to quote a post?)

When you highlight the text to quote, you don’t see this?

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Yes I did.

But now…?

Okay, so it was just some weird technical hiccup.

Yea, I think what likely happened is that the system doesn’t allow one to quote the entirely of the directly preceding post, as it deems doing so redundant. Without quotes, the assumption is that you’re responding to the last post, after all.

AH! Yep, it does do that. I completely forgot; thanks, fjur!

We talked about this in Discord, but clarifying for anyone else reading, more boxes doesn’t necessarily mean more content, it might just mean reordering/splitting content into more manageable chunks until they can hire Braithwhite back.

I think there’s still too much unknown to say for sure.

Okay but post-Oblivaeon content possibility Daybreak box, gogogo

That would go some way toward making me less resentful of the way Definitive crowded into the pipeline long before the RPG kickstarter was even close to fulfillment. I get it, they went with what would make them money and probably had no choice about doing so, but it doesn’t mean i have to like it. Getting the RPG timeline and characters fleshed out a bit through the card game would be better than nothing at all, which is what we’re looking at for months or even years to come.

And I don’t even use the canon setting in my games, so it’s basically just curiosity for me. Imagine how the RPG backers who do care about canon feel about the subject.

I personally feel like all of that is reasonable on at least a speculative level. Worth adding that whatever Spirit Island was contributing to the bottom line relative the Sentinels IP before is largely irrelevant now unless they can somehow get SI back. The FLGS was constantly cursing GTG for not getting reprints done faster to meet demand, and I have enough retailer and distribution contacts left from the old days to know that wasn’t an isolated opinion. Given the shaky way they were dealing with it before, what are the odds of doing better for SI now that they’re a much smaller business with even more limited resources?

Regardless, while I was a big fan of SotM from that first overstuffed boxed set back in the day, I probably won’t buy more Definitive no matter what they release for it (although that purely hypothetical Daybreak/RPG timeline box would be a strong temptation). I bought the first two boxes and then discovered that the game had died horribly around here, in large part because a lot of the people who’d invested heavily in Enhanced were furious that it was just over and done post-Oblivaeon. Very few players in the local community wanted Definitive, and many felt that it was a huge step backward from Enhanced thanks to starting off with far fewer options. In theory that last part will correct itself over time, but getting folks past what some see as planned obsolescence in late-release-stage Enhanced is a much harder task.

SotM has gone from being something that got hauled out almost every weekly game night to something that I’ve played a whole two games of since Definitive, and they weren’t my copies being used. Haven’t even bothered to sleeve my cards, there’s that little interest around here.

Should never have sold off Enhanced and bought Definitive. If other folks are having a better experience with it, thank your lucky stars. I sincerely doubt this is strictly a localized issue though, and I’ll be surprised if Definitive (even an expanded version of it) sees the kind of sales they were used to from earlier SotM products. Which, of course, would not bode well for their other recovery and growth plans, so hopefully I’m overly pessimistic here.

Our bi-weekly group (playing Sentinels since 2012, when we transitioned from playing Magic) has been reinvigorated by DE.

Personally, I know of only one person who was unhappy about OblivAeon ending the original game, and they’ve never been willing to explain to me why they’re so mad about it. I honestly don’t understand why people are upset about that one!

For everyone else I know, DE has gone over great. Obviously, we’re both just presenting anecdotal accounts, but I think it is interesting that there’s such a diversity of views on this.

I have to admit to being frustrated at the distractions that have pulled them away from the RPG, even before FRG shut them down. I understand that, though, as — I’m guessing — the RPG was never going to make as much money as the board games do (especially when most of the RPG money was already made on the crowd funder). But it’s still frustrating. Especially when the second book (Guise) was virtually useless for the kinds of games I’d run…

FWIW, it’s not just me and my regular group that’s seen a dropoff with DE. The FLGS has seen the same thing. There was an initial surge of interest from former Enhanced edition players (and basically no one else), then a bunch of “where’s the rest of it and when is it going to come out?” complaints, a smaller surge with the second box, and a pretty rapid dropoff of in-store DE play to the current nearly zero. Maybe the third box and the change in GTG’s circumstances will turn that around, but I know they don’t plan on stocking DE beyond token levels until there’s some proof of that.

Spirit Island, OTOH - they’d take all of it they could get given the chance. Not privy to exact figures, but that says a lot about their respective sales.

If DE’s doing better (or even Enhanced players still getting it on the table regularly) in your area be thanlful. I can easily believe it is, my area is not heavily populated enough to be good indicator of national or global trends. Still, from asking around there are dead spots like I never remember seeing past the first few months after the initial release of SotM, and that worries me. Lost momentum is really hard to regain in this industry, and the mess with FRG cost GTG almost all of it.

I’m holding out for an official Electrifying Dynamo deck (and somehow making the Cauldron villain Dynamo still canon while they don’t share a name, at least for gameplay purposes).

It’s sad because I really think DE has already eclipsed EE by a good margin in terms of usable decks. There are like 2 decks in DE that I would consider “fine” and the rest range from good to excellent. That was not the case for me when I went back to EE, especially with the villain selection, there are only 5 or 6 that I genuinely liked fighting, and a lot of the environments were really unfriendly to the player in a way that subtracted autonomy. DE has given the luxury 3 boxes in of being able to play with a randomizer, tap the button once, and get a workable game with all decks I enjoy playing.

The other anecdotal evidence I would put out there is that each time FRG posted any DE box for sale it was sold out within a day. I don’t know how many copies that was necessarily but given the feelings regarding FRG that still seems like there is a market for DE to me.

I see DE as having flattened the curve a lot, almost too much. It’s a very preliminary experience since I’ve only done seven games, but no villain I fought was amazingly good, nor were they terrible, and no hero that I played was super incredibly fun. I had the most fun with Bunker, followed by the Edge Twins, and then probably about a tie between Visionary and Ra, both of which were quite short games (Baron Blade for Ra and I’m not sure offhand on the other, though one of the games that day was Mad Bomber Blade, and it might well have been Visi for that one). Past that, my impressions of all the heroes, all the environments, and most of the villains have blended together a lot. Apostate was similar to Grimm but harder, Ruler of Aeternus disappointed me with its similarity to Apex…ironically the two Blade games were probably the most different of these comparable pairs, though our nightmarishly long slog against the Ennead remains the most unique experience today, in a way that was somewhat good. At least it gave me lots of time to get the hang of D&P, I’m glad that wasn’t my Ra game because I would have been so bored of him by the end, even with the extra damage.

Oh, wow. That’s … interesting. And definitely not our impression! But it may also be that we prefer different kinds of games.

In our experience:

• The drama Grimm presents is very different from Apostate, to us. Grimm provides interesting choices to manipulate the game state, whereas Apostate is just messing with the heroes with little input from them.
• Apex and Ruler do have a similarity in that they have some potential infighting, but Apex is — to me — more of an entertaining game of HP manipulation, with Apex’s healing and all the werewolves having the damage reduction ability based on HP, while Apex is the only one that actually matters; and the Ruler is a race to take out demons before more can come out while also making sure that is done without leaving just one Prince.
• While I’m personally not a fan of the Emo Twins (purely due to theme), other folks in our game group love their complexity. I appreciate it for the hand-management puzzle it is, but prefer AA’s unique approach — but he is also much more support than the Twins, which fits my play-style much better.
• I find AZ to be an exceptionally fun puzzle! I enjoy Bunker. I think Setback can be hilarious, if I’m in a random mood, but he can sometimes be completely overpowered with the right combination of cards. I don’t enjoy Visionary’s style of random, though; where Setback might accidentally hurt other heroes, we can usually see it coming and find a way to manage it, but Visionary’s Dark Side Deck does a good job of feeling completely malicious in intent, which I don’t enjoy.
• Dawn and Voss are often, appropriately, hard as hell but entertaining in that difficulty. They can also be manageable, depending on their deal and the heroes involved. BB is generally easy while also being entertaining, with rare games in which he’ll chain more threatening combos. Because of his low difficulty level, BB can sometimes be a little more boring, but for folks who don’t know how to play their hero well, he can still be a challenge. (Of course, those folks generally won’t stand a chance against Voss or Dawn!)
• Much of my enjoyment of the game is narrating what is happening in the comic telling the story of the game. I’m borderline role-playing Sentinels in the card game when we play, which definitely helps with the thematic aspects and seeing differences. For me, I’m digging into the puzzle of each scenario, but I’m applying a layer of theme on top that helps me enjoy it even more.

We all have our own ways of playing games. I hope you’re able to get some more games in and find a love of it, yourself!

You should try narrating a few games for us on the board sometime! Or, if you’re not a typist, maybe record YouTube videos? I haven’t enjoyed the Handelabra streams on the few occasions I turned into them, but they don’t really try to make them into improv theater; perhaps your storytelling might fare better.

I mostly do it in my head, trying not to distract the other players. (I don’t think they’d enjoy it as much as I do. ) And, honestly, I barely have time to keep up with everything else going on in life; I would not have time to add that to the list.