Don't Roll a One

The Sentinel Comics Roleplaying Game (SCRPG) has been on my “get it to the table” list for a while. I got it to the table but before I get into how it played, I have good news and bad news.

• Greater Than Games, SCRPG’s publisher, is in dire straits because of fascist bullshit and tariff tantrums.
• Ironically that does mean you can get the game at a deep discount.

Dynamic Duo

I wrangled only two players for this session – it was a last-minute thing and in hindsight it was a good move. Learning a new game, making heroes, and playing through some scenes would have taken exponentially longer with more people.

Both players came to the table with concrete ideas. While SCRPG has a very good random chargen process (the “guided” method) with plenty of opportunities to tweak the inputs, we simply chose the results that matched their concepts the best (in SCRPG that’s called the “constructed” method).

• Foreshadow, a precognitive detective; her deductions and her improvised weaponry strike with unerring accuracy.
• Lighthouse, an unstoppable bruiser protected by a reactive force field; he is the Luke Cage to Foreshadow’s Iron Fist, the Dagger to her Cloak.

Character creation in SCRPG is straightforward. You follow the book step by step, choosing dice traits and special abilities as you go. A second book would have helped, because there was a lot of page-referencing and copying down ability descriptions. It was easy but it took a fair amount of time.

If the special abilities were all on cards, that would have been great. I might try to make something to smooth that out if and when we play again (two players is a fluke; our group is larger than that).

We ignored the default setting (we nearly always ignore default settings) and started our game in the Bruce-Timm-animated-series-style, New Orleans-inspired Delta City – “the City of Change!”

Take His Brain

So because we’d decided on a kid-friendly animated series style for our first session, of course the villainous plot revolved around stealing a dead gang boss’ brain.

Foreshadow and Lighthouse, alerted by the former’s visions, arrived at the Old Town Bridge just as infamous mobster Vito Scaletta’s limo was hit by an IED. Members of the Sixth Street Slashers (it was Friday the 13th, I needed hockey mask wearing goons) moved in, trying to take the boss’ body while his own rattled protection detail tried to fight them off. It was chaos on the swaying, damaged bridge, and between panicked bystanders caught in the crossfire, the bridge supports failing, and the criminals battling it out, the heroes had plenty to do!

GYRO

SCRPG uses Green/Yellow/Red/Out to represent both a hero’s status and to restrict more powerful abilities to the final moments of a scene. Just like Voltron doesn’t open every fight with Blazing Sword, in SCRPG your heroes can’t use their showstopper powers until the tension in the scene has risen some, just like a real comic book story, a professional wrestling match, or a kaiju movie battle.

The GYRO colors also apply to the scene as a whole – as turns go by, the scene tracker moves from green to yellow and then through the final climactic red turns, where the gloves come off and things come to an end one way or the other.

The heroes tackled the bystanders first, getting everyone to safety. Lighthouse twisted bridge cables and realigned bent girders. Foreshadow had plenty of random debris to bounce off minion skulls. The goons all fought each other, but in the end a couple of the Scaletta guys escaped in a stolen SUV with Vito’s body.

You Can Just Do That?

Foreshadow and Lighthouse investigated the scene. In SCRPG a hero’s Principles provide roleplaying hooks but also give you narrative permission to just do stuff. For example, Lighthouse has the Principle of Strength: he doesn’t roll to flip cars and stuff like that. Foreshadow has the Principle of the Detective, so she just gets clues. It makes piecing a mystery together really easy, so we just moved on to the Delta City Naval Shipyards, where the explosives for the IED were obviously sourced. Obviously.

Once they talked their way in using Lighthouse’s background in the Navy, Foreshadow’s whodunit-busting powers revealed that a supervillain phased through the walls and simply took the explosives. This was Half-Life, a radiation ghost created in the same submarine reactor meltdown that gave Lighthouse his powers!

Press F to Pay Respects

The next scene turned out to be Scaletta’s funeral, the one place Half-Life knew Vito’s brain would be. Our heroes were staking out this gathering of Delta’s City worst crime families and spotted yet another weird gang approaching on themed motorcycles.

These were the Pink Slips – Rev, Kawaii, and Redline, an all-female powered street racing gang. They were here to receive the brain once Half-Life took it from Vito’s body (it’s okay, he had a Science Jar so we kept the tone more “Mr. Freeze” than “Return of the Living Dead”).

The racers kept Foreshadow and Lighthouse pretty busy – my dice were hot even though I was running the Pink Slips as d8 Lieutenants and not full villains, they kept making their damage saves and it felt like they hit a lot harder than I expected. I waited to reveal Half-Life until halfway through the scene because our opening turns were pretty complex and harrowing.

When the villain did appear from the side of the funeral home, Science Jar clutched under one shadowy arm, we had the classic “hero and villain linked by a shared past argue about morality” banter between Lighthouse and Half-Life.

One Pink Slip escaped and as our scene tracker ran down, Half-Life narrowly escaped (with only 6 health!) without Scaletta’s brain, a failure he indicated his as-yet-unknown boss would pay forward unto our intrepid heroes tenfold! Days would be rued!

Why?

Because Frankenstein’s Mobster needed that brain to gain Vito Scaletta’s knowledge and take over Delta City’s criminal underworld.

Look, I don’t know when our next session will be (that knowledge is beyond even Foreshadow’s prodigious powers of prediction) and I couldn’t sit on that pun name forever.

It Works!

We all had a great time with SCRPG. Because an action scene has a definitive end, dumping “future badness” to be revealed in later turns or status shifts didn’t feel like an ongoing treadmill of consequences like it sometimes can in Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark games. The way the hero abilities escalate and unlock keeps every turn feeling fresh. We never felt like Lighthouse “just punched a guy”, for example.

Balance-wise, I don’t know… and honestly I’m okay with it. My group has played a lot of supers games that try to assign point values to an overwhelming amount of very different effects. SCRPG feels much looser than that but we never felt like we didn’t have enough power choices (in fact, Foreshadow needed some help coming up with powers beyond simple precognition). The “power level” in an SCRPG game comes from what’s going on in the story. Is a D6 minion in your game a Scaletta goon with a gun or are they an alien battlesuit? It’s easy to adjust how “street” or “cosmic” a session feels, and I do mean session. You can change it up every game, similar to how sometimes Batman is hanging with the Justice League outwitting Darkseid and sometimes he’s swinging through Gotham.

Where I Needed Help

My first quibble with SCRPG isn’t even the game’s fault. My players and I kept tripping over the fact that generally when you roll an action in SCRPG, it just happens. Your attack rolls determine the damage, not whether you hit or not. Your generic “overcome” actions might come with twists or consequences, but they never simply whiff. Our brains kept trying to add a “defense” step when there was none (aside from specific reaction abilities), and it slowed things down. Once we get used to all the basic gameplay, I imagine SCRPG will go much faster.

SCRPG uses “popcorn” initiative, where the player who took a turn chooses who goes next. I needed tokens or standees or something so we could all more easily see who’d already gone in a round, because it’s important to keep that scene tracker counting down. I think it would’ve been overwhelming to handle more than 2 heroes and 2-3 villains/groups in my head.

Finally, I did start to feel some creative fatigue as twists kept popping up. Luckily I could offload some of that onto the scene tracker and buy more time, and at least once I simply asked the table for ideas. Creative fatigue isn’t relegated to SCRPG either, it shows up in any game that tends towards improvisation over procedure. It’s also mitigable with the right techniques.

Influences

Some minor rules hangups aside, SCRPG felt pretty comfortable. I’ve run a lot of Fate and a moderate amount of Cortex Prime, and given the names in the book it makes sense that SCRPG feels like a descendant of both. It prioritizes hero change over hero numbers-go-up, it tones down the metacurrency economy that’s prevalent in its ancestry, and it’s more focused than either of its parents.

On a selfish, personal level, it also uses a handful of three varying polyhedral dice, which happens to be my favorite dicefeel.

Finally, Cam Banks, one of the designers of SCRPG (and Cortex and Marvel Heroic and etc etc etc) has a Patreon where he’s working on an Overwatch/Marvel Rivals style “hero shooter” take on the GYRO system. It’s a neat framework and I’m excited to see some other interpretations!