Sentinel Comics: A Great Game That I Don't Like

     I recently joined Meet the RPG, a round-robin thing organized on the Paper Cult Club forums, and we just went through three-ish sessions (plus a Session Zero) of Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game, an rpg based on the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game, which I have functionally no experience in and thus can't comment on at all. 
    You can read the GM's take here, and I'd highly recommend doing so since, you know, he ran the damn thing (I also ran it back in 2021, but frankly I didn't do a very good job, and I don't think that experience should be considered representative of the game itself). 

The Basics

    Sentinel Comics is a Cortex-adjacent system where every roll uses a combination of three dice:

• A relevant Power your character has
• A quality (such as a skill or something from their backstory)
• What Zone the character is in: Green, Yellow, or Red (more on this later)

    A character will have several different powers and qualities, with the die sizes of those powers (typically ranging from d6 to d12) representing how important they are to that character's identity; for example, the Hulk might have a higher Strength die than Superman not because he's stronger, but because being strong is kind of the Hulk's thing. A normal action, like Attacking or trying to Overcome a challenge, will take those three relevant dice and then use the middle one, although PCs have abilities to mess around with that, like attacking multiple opponents with your Minimum die, or both Hindering someone else and Healing yourself on the same turn. 

One of my hero Penumbra's abilities, Spring Attack. I ended up using it a lot, for reasons we'll get into later.

    Things get more interesting when you introduce that to the GYRO system. Each Hero has their own HP value, and then dividing that up gives you their four zones: Green, Yellow, Red, and Out. As they lose HP, they also gain access to increasingly powerful abilities from their character sheet, which leads to situations like Serket actively refusing healing so she can keep using her most powerful abilities. Braver players than I can stay on the edge and thus get to use their coolest stuff for far longer.

The Gyro values for my character

    Except that's not all. Each Scene (basically representing a large-scale battle) has it's own GYRO tracker, and you use whichever of the two is lower. So as the situation gets more dire and the villain closer to victory, you can still pull out greater stops. It's a great mechanic and a wonderful part of a design trend I've been seeing (like 13th Age's Escalation Die or Draw Steel's Victories) where the heroes get more powerful as the fight goes on, but things also get riskier and riskier. 

Shoutout to Forged for giving me a bunch of Screenshots of the roll20, it was a big help.

    Did I mention the environment also gets a turn? And it escalates right alongside the GYRO counter? Because it does. And it does. 

 

The map at the end of our first issue, A City Aflame. Forged knocked it out of the park with the environments, they were fantastic.

The Good

    Sentinel Comics has the best kind of, for lack of a better term, Random Bullshit character creation, where you roll on a bunch of charts to see what kind of character you get. I'm not normally a fan of rolling for stats, but I do enjoy procedural generation when making a character-the dice have a way of surprising you, and I enjoy the challenge of putting random results together. I'm the kind of person lifepath systems were made for, basically. What Sentinel Comics does is have you roll randomly for your Background, Power Source, Archetype, and Personality, with each step along that way affecting the following ones, but when you, say, roll 2d10 for your Background, you get to pick from: One Die, the Other Die, or the two Added Together. This means you're able to curate things a bit more: if you don't want to be Law Enforcement or Military, you can be a Former Villain. What's more, no options are inherently "Better," which allows for creativity to flow. Our team, the C-Team, was composed of the following:

• Thunderbird, a former child star who was born with wings which couldn't support his mass. Now, an ancient spirit has given him a second chance at the whole superhero thing.
• Xin, the royalty of an underwater civilization of squids, exiled to the surface in a suit of power armor.
• Enoch, an immortal wanderer with a trusty revolver and a drive to help the weak.
• Penumbra, a gossip reporter with a magic ring that let her turn invisible.
• Cyber-Angel, a computer virus/grey goo sent from the future who fell in love with humanity (including Penumbra, who she's catfishing).

    I love these dorks so much. 

    In addition, the framing of things like XP rewards and stuff encourage you to think about the universe as though there is a long-running publishing company handling stuff. This was aided for us at least because Forged has run this game before-we're in the Mythikal Comics universe, which has its own previous cast of heroes, and integrating ourselves into that was a ton of fun (like how my character, Penumbra, was originally created by the writers as a side-character for much more famous hero Captain Cain).

From our second Issue, Terror at 1.3 Million Feet, where we stopped the space station Atlantis from crashing back to Earth.

The Bad

    Sentinel Comics is a very mechanically focused game. It wears its card-game lineage on its sleeve, and because of that things tended to feel...rote. This has some problems (Astral, Thunderbird's player, mentioned all the floating modifiers and I very much agree). The limit of only eight rounds to a given encounter seems like it would keep things brisk, but because there are so many moving parts those eight rounds can take up a lot of time, and you only get Eight Distinct Things-I hope you buffed early, because I didn't for our first adventure! This is doubly bad if you go by the game's rules-as-written, where moving is an action in and of itself. Which...absolutely not. (Forged changed this, obviously, and I think between that and shifting to smaller areas in the latter two sessions made things flow a lot better).

    The mechanical combat focus also clashes with something else I liked, which was that each hero had two Principles: things that were important to them and core to their identity. They come with their own little bits of Narrative Permission, and also some suggested twists for when things go wrong. The issue is twofold: one, they're competing for (very limited) screentime with the Environment twists, and sometimes they just don't work. My own Penumbra had her Secret Identity as one of her key principles, but there's not really much of a risk of people in your life getting hurt when you're on a space station or a volcano lair. 

    Finally, it is possible to make a character that, while not underpowered, doesn't necessarily shine all that much. Sentinel Comics is a game that has the classic Leader/Striker/Defender/Controller setup, and expects a full party to contain one of each, but doesn't label which archetypes are which (for instance, Penumbra's Archetype, Shadow, might sound like a Striker, but is actually a Defender). The C-Team had two Defenders, but no Striker, so we struggled when it came to putting the hurt on, and my most important ability for defending other people came online during the Red Zone, which was rough because I didn't get targeted consistently enough to get there through HP loss alone. 

The Conclusion

    Sentinel Comics is a good, well-designed game. The actual nuts-and-bolts of the combat and environmental pressures are great at putting the squeeze on the heroes, going from "How do we manage this?" to skin-of-your-teeth victory over the course of an evening of play. The GYRO system succeeds at what it sets out to do, and is a fine escalation mechanic. Character creation is awesome, and a fun little game in and of itself. I fell in love with the C-Team, and I would happily defend Slick City (the Mystikal Comic's equivalent of Calgary) again. 

    I just don't think I'd do it in Sentinel Comics proper. My experience in the Mystikal Comics universe tells me I need to try out Spectaculars, though.

    All that said, I do recommend the game. It's really good, just not for me. The publisher, Greater Than Games, is kinda scuppered due to the Trump tariffs, so there's a bit of a fire sale going on as of time of publication. I'd say give them some money. Worst case scenario, there's lots of fun Hero and Villain ideas in there you can plunder for your other superhero games.

Every good supervillain has a volcano lair. We ended up having to call this one short because it was almost 11 at night.