1. The Character Generation. Probably the most fun I've had with a superhero character generation system. Spectaculars comes close, but Sentinels is probably best-in-class.
   
2. The Environment Turn. In Sentinels, the Environment gets a turn. Volcanoes explode, construction scaffolding collapses, parents pushing prams wander into the conflict. It's a small idea, but for me, it's a bit of a game-changer. Even in games with really easy ways to change the nature of the scene (Fate, Cortex), I think there's a benefit to going in to scenes with a list of things that can go crazy and taking a defined moment in the turn order to say "I'm the GM. I owe it to my players to spice things up." Again, Spectaculars does this too, but in Spectaculars it's kind of generic, where with Sentinels you're given examples of the difference between a volcano and a construction site.
   
3. The GYRO System. Having abilities tied to encounter pacing is awesome. I've loved it in other systems (13th Age's Escalation Die, Cortex's Doom Pool, etc.) but it really sings in Sentinels and is baked in to the core. Also, the variations on "roll 3, pick mid" were interesting.
   

1. Narrative Binary. I'll admit this is on me, not the system. For a game that's very fluffy and narrative, I found I really missed the variability to be found in the rolls of PbtA/Genesys/Cortex/Fate/Blades/whatever. I'm fine with a game like Lancer or Fragged Empire having a binary success/fail rolls. But in a game where the only limit to a player's description of a roll is the shared understanding of the fiction and their ability to bullshit, as a GM, not having penalties or difficulty modifiers and not having any way to interact with a roll was... frustrating. One player says "I want to punch a hole in the wall" and another player says "I want to thread my micro missile array past the faberge eggs, through the legs of the hostages, and then hack their guidance system mid-flight to hit the enemies" and my options for both were to say it was automatic, impossible, or roll their dice. It was lacking, for me. But that one's on me.
   
2. Non-Action Is Non-Existent. I can't dunk on the system too much, but there are essentially no rules for anything that isn't action. And that's fine, comics are about action. And Sentinels isn't even about comics of all kinds, it's just about the kind of comics you find in the core game of Sentinels of the Multiverse, which is about fighting. But my players had a session where they were investigating a mystery, and we never rolled dice. Not because we didn't want to - we did - and it wasn't too terrible - the role playing was great - but if we're getting together to play a role playing game, we want at least a little game. And you can easily, easily end up with a character who has gently caress-all dice to roll if they're not fighting or leaping across buildings. I'm fine with action-centric, but not action-exclusive.
   
3. It's Unbalanced. This one isn't personal, this is actually a problem with the system and would prevent me from wanting to play a longer-term campaign. The system is unfinished. It's all easy to houserule, but I think it needed another stretch of playtesting.
   
   1. Some of the archetypes are really laser-focused on recreating characters from the Sentinels game, and have way too many abilities focused on that. (E.g., the Elemental Manipulator, a pretty classic archetype that you would see in many comics, has half their abilities focus on self-harm, because that's what the flagship character Absolute Zero does.)
      
   2. It's not hard to have two characters of grossly different power levels. And I don't mean narratively, in the way that a 1d10 Telekinesis is just better than a 1d10 Icefist, because you can narrate its use with more permission. I mean mechanically. You can easily have a character who is just better, mechanically, than someone else at the table. And by "easily", I mean by accident. You don't need min/max shenanigans; given four PCs, you're highly likely to have one be flat better than another.
      
   3. The villain design is inspired in its structure, but fundamentally unbalanced. It's very easy to make pushovers or slogs, without knowing that you did so. In terms of difficulty, the villain generation system essentially makes random difficulty villains. Which wouldn't be terrible if knew when you were done how hard the villain was. But you don't, without system insight or seeing it in play.
      

Splicer fucked around with this message at 12:01 on Feb 7, 2021

stringless fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Feb 7, 2021

theironjef fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Feb 7, 2021