How as a GM would I represent lethal or killing damage in the game? is there a mechanic for this? how would I show that the villain is trying to kill the hero as opposed to just Ko'ing them?
or is it just fluff?
That deals with having a conversation with your players. If the intent that going to zero health is death or that the heroes can die then you need to make sure the players are ok with that.
I mean, if your villain is using guns and knives and shouting things like, "HA HA I WILL KILL YOU, HEROES!" then it would probably give the idea that the villain is trying to kill them, regardless of mechanics. :B
Are there any mechanics covering ore lethal or deadly attacks?
It's just flavor. The players and you would determine consequences of what the lethal or deadly attacks cause.
There isn't.
The idea is that damage is damage. If the game you are playing is deadly and gritty, have that conversation with the heroes in your session 0 so they know what to expect. The game as-written is intended to be comic-booky (in a more mainstream, kid's comics kind of way), so players should be able to decide when their hero goes down if they actually die or if they're just incapacitated.
The main deal is that the spirit of this game is that a PC can't die unless their player says they do. Basically, you don't want "meaningless" deaths in your comic book superhero stories. A few bad rolls shouldn't end a character's story if the player doesn't want it to.
That being said, if your group wants to make that choice ahead of time and rule that certain situations result in character deaths, that's still a choice being made by the player as to the type of game they are playing in and how their character may die, but it's still important that they are the ones making that choice.
Thanks fot the replies guys. Just trying to get my head round the game and what its trying to model.
The game rules specifically say that heroes do not die unless you and they agree that they should die ahead of time.
Most likely the villains are always trying to kill the heroes, and always fail. You can decide what happens if the entire team goes Out--maybe they get captured, but maybe they escape. They might even "win" but with complications--the villain escapes, the doomsday device partially goes off, etc. The only thing you know is that they didn't win outright.
The concept of 'no death simply by chance and game mechanics' is to encourage truly heroic, selfless acts. A already-wounded hero is much more likely to throw themselves in the line of fire to save some orphans if their player is safe to assume that the hero will somehow be rescued by some random paramedics, to readily appear in the next episode.
Otherwise, we'd see big heroes suddenly turn into self-prioritizing cowards just because their player isn't up to that sacrifice.
(Of course, the above is also a nice scenario for a player who wants to test another character for a session or two, and then maybe return 'physically recovered, but wisened'.)
Something else that might help is to think of this not as a superhero role-playing game, but as a comic book role-playing game. :-) That distinction can be important for SCRPG, and focusing on the idea of creating comic book stories might help you get how the game is intended to work.
Not sure I am with you on that, as the genre of each comic book can be wildly different even in the superhero comic genre. Just talking about lethality for example is a very different kettle of fish in a Punisher comic to a early Teen Titans one.
do you mean the game is trying to represent a certain four colour comics representation, much more Superman tahn Suicide Squad. Or as previous posters have said that death is possible and altogether probable for NPCS if the gm wills it, but that the point its a decision rather than left to the chance of the dice?
AFAIK even in the Punisher comics it's rare for heroes to randomly die just because, admittedly.
Essentially, the Sentinel Comics RPG is very story-driven. Since the lore itself is very meta-layered in that it's technically about a fictional comics company that created fictional comics with the characters and plot and flavor text we see. And the RPG is the same way, where technically speaking all of the players are really more like writers creating an exciting comic book story to tell with their character(s).
So the approach is generally that if a hero dies, you want it to be because the "writers" (i.e. players) thought it would be an exciting, fitting end for that particular character. Hence why there's not really a mechanic for lethal damage since the built-in assumption is that you the players are going to choose to have chararacters die because it fits perfectly in the plot or because you decided you wanted to switch to a new character. (And of course this being comics if you change your mind later you can always come up with some way they really survived.)
Of course if you decide that the story you want to tell involves letting fate decide and so anyone who's Out is automatically dead (or maybe still alive but will be dead if the scene tracker runs out before players can do an Overcome to revive them or before the players resolve the overall scene or something like that), that's totally the way you can do it as well. Just write it into the plot when it happens.
To give a more practical example, Adam Rebottaro (the guy who draws all those arts, y'know?) ran a campaign last year in which one of his players became dissatisfied with her character, so (spoilers, I guess) they set up a way for her to have a dramatic, fitting, story-beat-appropriate death at the hands of her nemesis. It was discussed between them beforehand, but not with any of the other players, so it came as a major shock and set the tone for the rest of the campaign. That character's player played an NPC for a couple games before coming back with a different hero and finishing out the campaign with her.
If you want to see the entire thing, it's long, but you can find it here. They didn't record the first two sessions for some reason, but you figure out most of what happened during those games from context anyway.
That said, if a player is also dissatisfied with a character, death doesn't have to be the only option to write them out of the story. They can migrate to a support role for the team while introducing a new character for the player to spotlight. Or you can be like Power Rangers and ship them on a bus to a peace conference or something. :V
Short of a retcon, death is a pretty permanent end to telling a character's story that comics tend to steer away from. There's a reason the only semi-permanent deaths in most cases are the Waynes and Uncle Ben. Being a comics RPG and somewhat meta, SC RPG really plays in that space.
I just came here to comment on Jeysie's point for any new players reading here.
You *do not* have to play the game on the meta level of players playing writers of a fictional comic company. That is not a presumption of the game. We play a very traditional campaign where the players play their heroes.
We have had a player death and a villain death because it made sense for the story. The player accepted the GM's idea for his character's death, and the GM decided to kill the villain.
FWIW, there's literally a section in the GM chapter of the Core Rulebook specifically labelled "Think Like Comic Creators" that says more or less exactly what I said. Plus things Christopher and Adam have said similar at various points.
I agree you don't have to play that way because Rule Zero of any RPG is that you should play it the way you want to, but since the question was specifically in regards to "why is there no lethal damage mechanic", I answered by explaining the design philosophies the game was made with that leads to there not being one. It was meant as informational, not as prescriptive.
Fair enough.
I just know that I have talked up this game to a lot of people on other forums as well (and I'm generally not one to do so honestly) and I've run into plenty of times in which people did not like that level of metagame. I don't want to turn people off to the game, and in this thread, it seemed like @deanjday was not looking for that kind of experience, so I didn't want him to discount the game based on an easily ignored GM suggestion.
I know this also from my own game Fight!, which was designed with a certain presumed meta-level that the PCs were fighting game characters being played by actual people, and this lies not so secretly in the background of some of the mechanics of the game. However, I also know that many players of my game think that's stupid, and, when I run my own game, I never play that meta-level either.. So I sell certain design philosophies depending on my audience.
In any case, back to the OP, it's super-easy to do death in the game, but if you want the possibility of accidental death-by-die-roll, it should be as easy as having one more roll after someone goes to 0 Health. Decide what the roll will be, based on how likely you want death to occur.
I admit I wasn't expecting this to be controversial, since I was just repeating what C&A themselves and what other people in the thread have said. So you'll have to talk to C&A if you don't like how the game is designed, not me, I'm afraid.
In any case, one way or another the game is still designed with story-centric play in mind, hence why some things have mechanics and some don't.
I think the OP's specific want doesn't sound too difficult to add on, though.
The most D&D-like one might be to have it where any time a character ends up as Out due to damage caused by something flavored as lethal, the players have to come up with some realistic way they could do an Overcome to stablize the person using workable powers or via carrying around some sort of field medical equipment just in case, and they have to do it within a set number of turns or before the end of the current scene tracker.
Thank you everyone for weighing in, I can also see if would not be a problem to say to players at the start of a scene with a particuarly lethal villain, that if you do get ko'd in the combat, depending on the villains attacks, that it could potentially have more serious health conseqences and make the players aware of that potential up front.
This should increase the tension of the scene and make them take the villains attacks very seriously as they enter the red level.
Not to say I would just declare them dead, but you could say they are dying or damaged or injured in a nasty way and then spring a new challenge on the remaining conscious heroes to stabalise or heal them before they perish!
thia would maybe be more often done to a important NPC ie Gwen Stacy, but could be done to a hero ie Robin 2 depending on the circumstances and how I am trying to showcase the villain in question.