It's not supposed to be balanced like that, it's superheroes; supers aren't balanced. It's supposed to be designed in a way to create a good narrative that every character can make a decent contribution to despite them being "unbalanced" to each other.
Likewise twists are an important part of the game, you can't look upon them as incompetence on the part of your characters, as failings as much as a thing that keeps the flow of action scenes more interesting and engaging. They're a narrative function as much as a mechanical one - superhero fights go "wrong" all the time, comics wouldn't be anywhere near as fun if they didn't. Most superheroes really are quite "bumbling" compared to say most teams of RPG adventurers, they're just super flashy about it and roll with the punches.
Twists are all about the flavor. "Bumbliing" twists are great for characters like Setback ("You succeed, but in doing so you tripped and broke something"), but for other heroes, the bad thing that happens can just as easily be something that wasn't your fault at all: more bad guys show up, the villain pulls out some new trick, a new environmental challenge emerges, etc. They're just as likely to make your character look more heroic as they deal with the additional threat! ("I'll go rescue the out-of-control trolley car and still come back in time to beat you!")
Yeah, that exactly. I'd recommend reading over a couple of comics and seeing what plot contrivances you could see as twists happening for the characters - there's often quite a lot of them. It could help with ideas for new twists in your own adventures.
I'm reading the classic Excalibur comics at the moment as I think that feel is right for what I want to do, almost every other panel something happens which could be a twist!
To my knowledge, there has yet to be any official statement as to what the dice mean in regards to real world skill levels. That said, since d4 is the lowest die that can be used, I find it difficult to believe that it is the human average, since that would mean that, mechanics wise, no one can be below a d4. I find it hard to believe that a 6 year old child and an 80 year old woman would be as “average” as an individual in their 20s in most areas.
I use the following unofficial scale to help myself (and others I talk to) to map the dice to real world equivalents.
d4 - Below Average (Completely Untrained)
d6 - Average (High School or Undergrad equivalent)
d8 - Skilled (Bachelor’s Degree or a few years of training)
d10 - Expert (Master’s Degree or a decade+ of training)
d12 - Master (Doctorate’s Degree or a lifetime of Training [20+ years])
These of course are merely guidelines… with raw talent in a given area adding a level or two to the usual die that would be used (depending on the level of Talent). This particular scale doesn’t quite map to Powers… still trying to work on that.
I could have sworn the rules said d4 is "Average", but now I can't find it. However, on pages 23, 28, and 49, it says "from [d6] (above average) to [d12] (godlike)"(although qualities are described on page 28 as "from [d6] (solid competency) to [d12] (world class)"), which implies d4 is average...
Hey, so, I'm late to the party and I apologise for responding to this days later, but I want to point out that in Sentinels RPG, you aren't so much playing a superhero as you are playing Sentinel Comics writers and editors creating exciting comic book stories within the metaverse. So while yes, you are creating a superhero character to play, you are also trying to make a superhero that would make for fun and exciting comic books that the "consumers of Sentinel Comics" would want to buy and read regularly.
For my money, that's what I will try to emphasize to my players. Don't get locked into making a "balanced" game or attempt to game the rules to min/max max power game, because that probably won't make for interesting characters that the "consumers" want to read about. Instead, try some broken combos and some flawed builds. Embrace a d4 in that power or quality! Take the combo that generates one or two more bonuses on your turn. Make a long combo chain of abilities! But! Do so with the intention that you will use them to make "comic book stories" that will sell like hot cakez. Talk about your build with the other players. Make that session zero for character creation super awesome and exciting for each other, because if the "editors" are all excited for each other's "new superhero first appearance", then they will begin to gel as a team and shore up each other's weak spots and possibly helping to tone down the power gaming drive to somehow break the game and instead focus on having cool team interactions and great back stories with flaws and hopes and story goals they each want to see develop over a six or twelve or more issue arc.
If at the end of hero creation the players are as excited to see the stories of the other heroes along with their own hero, then you've done your job during that creation session. And if they play those heroes and find the stories maybe aren't as exciting as they hoped, have an "editor's bullpen meeting" and retcon what needs to change to make the stories better going forward. This happens ALL. THE. TIME. in actual comics, so why wouldn't it happen here in a game about comic book superheroes? That, to me, is actually part of the game by design.
So really. Don't sweat the "balance" of the character creation rules for this game. They are literally guidelines to make whatever comic book superhero you think people would want to learn more about and stand in line at the local comics shop to get their hands on the latest issue of harrowing adventures, dangerous villains, and heroic wonder!