The Sentinel Comics RPG Advancement System Is Seriously Misunderstood

One of the most common negatives I hear about the SCRPG is that it lacks an advancement system and characters don't change over time.  Even fans of the game get evasive or start making excuses when "experience" and "leveling" comes up in discussions.  And I don't get it.  Not at all.  I hear people saying they want "real" advancement, but what does that actually mean? 

You want your character to get stronger? Collections do that in spades.  

Narratively, you can use a collection to introduce elements to the story as long as you can provide a justification and get GM approval, and they tell the GM to be generous.  Got a meeting with a politician who's known to be hostile to supers?  Spend a collection and it turns out those hostages you rescued from Doctor Vivisector back in the first session included his wife and ten-year old daughter.  He's not only rethought his stance where you're concerned, he asks you to come to dinner sometime, little Susie would love to see you again and she's growing up so fast.  And that's a mild example.  

Mechanically, they let you pay off twist costs to do stuff like using Red actions in Yellow or getting two uses out of a mod.  Or you can set a die you rolled to whatever you want, and you do it after seeing your results.  That's incredibly powerful, like being able to buy a critical hit in other games.  And those aren't the only uses, just the most immediately impactful in an action scene.

Collections represent increasing ability as you gain experience just as much as levelling up a D&D character does.

You want your character to change over time? 

You can do that each time you gain a collection, and more often if the GM allows it.  The changes you can make are far broader than any other system's advancement system, including ground-up rewrites if the GM says story events have justified it.  Guy Gardner loses his ring and become a morphing alien bio-borg?  And then changes back later?  Perfectly legitimate in this game, and it sure puts gaining a feat or a level in a new class to shame.

What else do most advancement systems do beyond that? 

They add complexity.  Complexity that eventually causes the game system to collapse under its own weight.  Very, very few people play D&D from first up into the teens levels, much less beyond it.  The characters become unwieldy in a way that an SCRPG hero never will.  Even skill-based systems see the character sheet slowly get more and more cluttered, although they generally avoid the extremes level-based games have.  SCRPG hero sheets will always be immediately comprehensible.  The closest you get to serious complexity are a few of the more exotic archetypes like Modular or Form-Changer or Divided, and the complexity there is mostly in character design, not gameplay.

Setting aside complexity overload, the other problem with more traditional advancement is that your effective power level does ramp up enormously over time.  That is a Bad Thing, no matter how counterintuitive it may seem.  It makes it hard to take an experienced PC and use them alongside new ones.  Arch-mages don't tag along with their new first level friends when they run through Keep On the Borderlands.  That's a real problem if you have some players who can't make it as often as others and the experience gap between them widens to the point where they can't work together any more.  There's also character death at higher levels to consider. The usual fudge of just starting the replacement with an appropriate degree of advancement raises the question of why bother worrying about character death, and having resurrection tricks available to avoid needing a replacement PC doesn't really change that.

The SCRPG avoids that entirely.  The player always has control over PC mortality, sure, but that's not the key here. GTG has already said published adventures will (eventually...sigh) be rated for how many collections a character can use in a session, much like level ranges on a TSR D&D module. There's nothing stopping a GM from doing the same with their homebrew adventures.  Decide how tough a challenge an adventure is likely to be based on stakes and enemies and assign a limit, preferably one around the average of your PCs' collections. 

You want to bring your hero with 20 collections to a low-limit adventure with a bunch of new heroes?  That's fine.  Most or all of your collections will be walled off for that adventure, and with that limited access your character is instantly suitable to play a starter adventure.  You don't have to recalculate anything.  It's genius, and it takes all concern about everyone playing for roughly equal amounts of time off the table.  

It also plays into the whole GYRO design philosophy.  An adventure with a low collection limit puts less pressure on the heroes than a higher-limit one, and veteran PCs won't be giving their all (using all their collections) in those circumstances.  It even emulates the wildly varying degree of competence displayed by characters in actual comics when they're making guest appearances or appearing in team books instead of their own solo title.

The only thing that's really missing is a section in the book on setting appropriate collection limits for an adventure, and some tips on challenging very experienced PCs.  Hopefully that's coming soon, but in the interim you're going to organically develop a feel for adjusting challenges as your PCs gain collections.  Action scene design is always going to be an art more than a science in this game anyway.   

Twists In the Sentinel Comics RPG

Twists are an important part of the SCRPG but it feels like many folks misinterpret what their role is.  Because they have negative effects on a character and often come up by rolling low on an Overcome action, they get seen as a punishment to be actively avoided whenever you can.

This is unfortunate because twists give both the players and the GM an opportunity to be creative and come up with situationally appropriate twists.  Yes, they'll frequently harm or handicap a PC in some way but they can also introduce story elements, provide an opening for narrative tricks like cutscenes, flashbacks or foreshadowing.  I'd contend that twists are better regarded as a cost levied for a benefit than a punishment for failure.  And there are a lot of potential benefits.  Let's take a look at those.

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Things you can do by taking a minor twist:

-Take a Risky basic action, allowing you add a bonus effect to the action (p.19).

-Use an ability one zone earlier than normal, eg a Red action while in the Yellow zone (p.19).

-Succeed at an Overcome when you roll a result from 4-7 (p.25).

-When creating a mod with a Boost or Hinder action, let that mod last for two uses rather than one (p.26).

-Hit the deck when Attacked, using a Reaction to immediately take a basic Defend action affecting yourself (p.29).

-As a cost for using Emergency Change (p. 91).

-As an option to avoid taking damage when using Emergency Switch (p. 96), Push Your Limits (p. 106) or Unload (p. 109).

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Things you can do by taking a Major Twist:

-Succeed at an Overcome when you roll a result from 1-3 (p.25).

-Use Final Wrath (p.108, 109, 110).

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As you can see, you're cutting yourself off from a lot of very useful options if you're adamant about not taking twists.  There are lists of suggested generic twists on page 30 so you can get an idea what kind of impact taking one will have, but that's just listing a few possibilities.  Your Principles offer more options to choose from even when you're not using their abilities, and anyone at the table is always free to suggest unique twists based on the current situation.  The GM has final say about what effect to apply, but this is ultimately a collaborative game where maximizing everyone's fun is the goal.

It's also a creative game, which makes it important not to use the same twist effect too often.  You don't want players to develop an expectation that (say) buying an extra use for the mod they're creating will always cost them Mid die damage, for ex.  Twists are a cost, but not a fixed cost.  They're always negotiable and should be situationally appropriate.

To emphasize one thing from the rulebook (p. 30 again) it's vital that the effect of a twist doesn't negate an optional Overcome success.  If the player was Overcoming a challenge that would advance the scene tracker if it wasn't solved, don't choose "advance the scene tracker by 1" as a twist.  

You should also be careful about other twists directly negating whatever they're paying for.  For ex, if a player takes a twist to hit the deck to avoid taking damage, don't choose to have them take Mid die damage as a penalty.  Hinder them with Max instead, or separate them from the group as they dodge into a new location, or have a hero with Principle of Strength break something important as they hurl themselves out of the way.

That's even more important with major twists where the cost of an effect is much higher.  Majors are rare, and should be a big moment in the story.  Their effects often last to the end of a session rather than the scene, and narrative effects could last much longer.  If anything I think the rulebook example of a major twist (p. 167) underplays their potential impact, and the player there is losing their (in-character) voice for the rest of the session.  If a minor twist is "Spider-Man's web-shooter runs dry" then a major twist is Aunt May getting shot and mortally wounded.  A player that uses Final Wrath in a tremendous effort to drop a villain before they escape shouldn't suffer a twist that lets the enemy get away automatically even if their damage fails to drop them.  Make the villain earn their escape on their turn.

Positive Twists

There's one other type of "twist" (although the rules don't call it that) that deserves mention.  When you roll a 12+ result on an Overcome you get what my table calls a positive twist a bonus on top of succeeding with the overcome.  They talk about some possible benefits in the book (p. 25) but the general principle of inverting minor twist effects so they harm or hinder a villain instead of the hero works pretty well.  They don't have to be purely mechanical either.  Narrative effects that make it easier to foil whatever scheme is going on or provide definite leads on a mystery are fine rewards too.  You might even find a way to invert the twists of the PC's principles here, eg the Strength guy breaks something important to the baddies during the Overcome.  Much like other twists, variety and fitting the situation are important here.

Villainous Twists

Finally, don't forget that villains, lieutenants and minions can take Overcome actions too.  Lieutenants and minions don't generate twists the way heroes do (p. 156).  Most villains will try to use their Mastery (if they have one) to automatically succeed rather than rolling an Overcome normally, but when they do roll they succeed or fail normally.  They never take major twists (opting to fail instead) and have a set of additional minor twist suggestions unique to them (p. 154).