Sentinel Comics RPG Core Rulebook

Running Action
Scenes
With everything in place, running action rounds
becomes straightforward. Heroes, villains, minions,
lieutenants, and the scene tracker/environment
each act in turn. Each player on their turn decides
who (or what) goes next as described in Chapter
2: Playing the Game.
Remember: you’re all collaborating to create the
kind of vivid, dynamic scenes you’d expect to see in
a comic book. Your side of the conversation should
be a mix of describing what happens as you play the
actions of NPCs and questions you ask as players
describe what their heroes do during their turn.
Challenges
Being a superhero is much more than punching
villains and their horde of minions. In fact, things get
a LOT more interesting when heroes have to punch
enemies on a collapsing bridge, while a school bus
with a broken brake-line barrels towards a stalled
SUV occupied by a family of four. Oh, and did I
forget to mention the second bomb placed under
the bridge that will explode in sixty seconds?
Challenges are obstacles, dangers to civilians,
or complications that must be dealt with in the
timeframe of the ongoing scene. They’re all about
cracking ceilings, toxic waste leaks, steam jets, virusinfected
Artificial Intelligences, and everything that
can and invariably does go wrong in the comic
book world, often while there’s bad guys to fight
at the same time.
Challenges add both flavor and suspense to
scenes. On top of villains and minions, challenges
add a entire ensemble of interactive elements that
heroes get to act upon. They force players to make
hard choices and divide their attention as everything
around them feels as though it’s a hair’s breadth
away from chaos.
Challenges are resolved with Overcome actions.
At their simplest, a single Overcome action takes
care of a challenge. But life is rarely that easy.
Challenges can require multiple steps, have a timer
that needs to be beaten, or even lead to additional
challenges. In Chapter 5, we go into a lot more
detail about the ways you can create all forms of
interesting challenges for your heroes to resolve.
Simple Challenges
At their simplest implementation, challenges can
require just one heroic act to resolve, like stabilizing
a car teetering from an elevated highway, or helping
ensnared bystanders who need to be freed. These
challenges represent a particular situation that a
hero can resolve with a single Overcome action,
usually during an action scene.
Unless indicated otherwise, simple challenges
don’t pose an imminent threat to anyone or have a
mechanical impact on the scene from turn to turn,
other than providing a problem that needs to be
resolved. A few examples include:
• An electrical fire in a control panel
• A group of panicking bystanders
• A nosy photojournalist in the middle of a fight
• Overwrought police officers
• An injured scientist stuck under rubble
• A bus, turned on its side, filled with injured civilians
Challenges by themselves don’t lead to negative
consequences unless they remain unresolved by
the time the scene tracker brings the scene to an
end. In such cases, you should bring story-based
consequences into play.
For example, in the list above, if the heroes failed
to calm the panicking bystanders, you can conclude
that a few of them got badly injured in a stampede,
creating some negative press in spite of their heroic
efforts to save the day.
Challenges can also serve as a source of scene
escalation when a minor or major twist is required.
You can decide to use a challenge as inspiration to
make things more troublesome for the heroes.
For instance, if you use the “electrical fire in
a control panel” challenge in a scene set on a
spaceship, it could trigger the ship’s self destruct
protocol after a major twist.
Running Action Scenes
Intro
Playing
the Game
Creating
Heroes
M oderating
the G ame
The
Bullpen
Adventure
Issues
The
Archives
Appendices
161