Sentinel Comics
Publisher Description
In Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game, you and your friends play as comic-book heroes - either from the pages of Sentinel Comics or from your own imagination! Join forces against terrible villains and fight in dangerous environments, all in a tabletop roleplaying game!
The core rulebook teaches you everything you need to play Sentinel Comics: the Roleplaying Game, whether playing a hero, or running the game as the GM. It has full, robust rules for hero creation (that we will be showcasing more in an update, coming soon!), as well as a vast set of tools for GMs to create their own minions, lieutenants, challenges, villains, environments, doomsday devices, action scenes, and so much more!
Sentinel Comics, First Edition - Rules SummaryCollapse
Character Creation [ edit ]
Character creation involves a series of steps that can either be random or chosen. The random selection involves rolling multiple dice (which dice is often determined in previous steps). The player then either chooses an individual die's result, or the sum of any two dice, ensuring no one can ever get stuck with a single bad option.
Powers and Qualities
Powers are the characters' super power, while qualities are more similar to skills in other systems. Example qualities include being good at Banter, History, or Close Combat, while powers include all the standard super hero abilities, like Flight, Strength, or Inventions.
Powers and qualities each have a die associated with them. Which die, and which powers/qualities a character has, is determined by the other steps of character creation.
Ability Colors
Characters use powers with abilities, and there are three types: green, yellow, and red.
Green abilities can be used any time, but yellow and red abilities can only be used when circumstances get more dire (ie. when either the status of their injuries, or of the current scene, becomes yellow/red). This mechanic ensures characters only use their most potent abilities at the culmination of a fight, instead of leading with them.
Background
There are twenty different backgrounds for a player to choose or randomly select. Backgrounds can be more mundane (eg. Academic, Law Enforcement, or Tragic), or exotic (eg. Otherworldly, Former Villain, or Interstellar), and they provide the character with "Green" and "Yellow" abilities.
Power Source
Again, the player can select or randomly determine their power source, again with twenty options. There's all the standard comic staples, from Accidents and Relics, to Aliens and Radiation. A character's power source provides powers (of course), but also potentially yellow abilities, qualities, or other abilities.
Archetypes
Finally the player chooses/rolls an Archetype. Again, these should be familiar to any comic book fan, with options like Speedster, Blaster, Gadgeteer, or Psychic. Archetypes also provide green/yellow abilities, and determines your Principle.
Principle
Each character has two principles, which are the character's guiding directive, such as Destiny or Justice. They provide a green ability.
Personality
Again the player can choose from a variety of personalities. The character's choice of personality is very significant in Sentinels, as it determines their three status dice (Green, Yellow, and Red).
Red Abilities
Red abilities are the character's signature move, and are always chosen at the end of character creation; they are never randomed. Red abilities are organized into groups, and a character must already have a lesser power from that group to gain a red power in it.
Retcon
Finally the player gets to make one "retcon" to their character, which let's them violate the rules to improve them in some way. For instance, one option is to add extra red ability, while another is to add a d6 power of choice.
Core Mechanics [ edit ]
Actions
All actions a character can take fall into five meta-actions: attacking, defending, boosting, hindering, or overcoming. Attacking and defending are self-explanatory, as are boosting and hindering. Overcoming is a sort of catch-all action, which covers things like rescuing innocents, or disabling a ticking time bomb.
Each hero has a set of powers and qualities as a result of their character creation choices. To take an action the player rolls one die associated with a related quality, and one with the relevant power. They also get a third die, based on their current health status.
Outcomes
Most effects use the middle die of the roll to determine the effect, although some heroes have powers that let you use the maximum die rolled instead (or that let you use the minimum die rolled, but have it affect multiple targets).
The result of the roll determines the outcome. If it is an attack roll, the result is the amount of damage inflicted. If it is a defense roll, that much damage is prevented from the next attack.
On a boosting or hindering roll every four points of outcome results in a +1 or -1 to the roll of the person you're boosting/hindering.
