My edit-fu is weak, so if this looks messy, my apologies.
Are you primarily a player or a moderator? If you split your time between both roles, what percentage of time does each take up?
100% moderator at the moment. I would happily be a player, but no one else in my friend group would GM this particular game (some GM other systems).
How long have you been playing or running the game in calendar terms?
Technically before it was even released. I was part of a brief playtest of the game in mid-2018. After I left that playtest, I received my copy of the rules from the Kickstarter, but didn’t get a chance to start playing until the beginning of 2022, when I started my current ongoing game. So in total, a little over 2 years.
How often do you play the game?
Weekly, though the usual RPG scheduling demons afflict us as they do every group.
How long is your average session?
We start around 7:30 or 8 PM (after everyone is home from work and has eaten dinner) and usually play until 10 or 11 PM, so 2.5 to 3 hours a session.
Do you play one-shot adventures?
I have used (or plan to use) almost all of the existing published one-shot adventures, but I tie them into the ongoing narrative of my campaign. I’ve never done a true one-shot, it’s all been part of the ongoing campaign.
Short story arcs lasting 2-4 sessions?
No, I prefer longer story arcs. The Starter Kit “arc” was the full 6 adventure issues, and my first main arc was originally also 6 adventure issues, but I ended up adding one mid-stream so it turned into 7.
Longer campaigns, and if so, how long have they lasted?
Still ongoing campaign since the beginning of 2022. We began with the Starter Kit, which I counted as the first plot arc, then everyone made their own characters and I started each PC with a Collection for having completed the Starter Kit. We just wrapped up the first big plot arc and all the PCs now have two Collections. If all goes according to plan, there are two more big plot arcs planned, so they would end the entire campaign with four Collections (though they would never get the use the 4th Collection in play).
If you can estimate it, how many hours have you dedicated to actual play? If you run the game, how much extra time have you spent on session prep?
Hard to say exactly, but if you say a roughly 2.5 hour session weekly, but with occasional missed sessions, so let’s say about 8 hours per month. and we’ve been going for roughly 25 months, so say 200 hours of play? As for prep, I am a prep-heavy GM by nature, but Sentinels is a pretty prep-light game. And I’m also lucky that we have a table dedicated to the RPG, so I don’t need to clean up our stuff every week. If I had to estimate, I’d say it takes around 1 hour of prep per 4 to 6 hours of game play? So about 40 hours to date?
Do you use the Sentinel Comics setting when playing? If not, do you use another published comics setting, or a homebrew of your own creation?
I use the default Sentinels setting post OblivAeon, with the PCs being sort of at the Freedom Academy (it’s complicated). But I frequently make my own bad guys and hero NPCs, and while I try to be fairly lore-accurate, I don’t let that get in the way of fun. And my (currently unrevealed) big bad is a custom villain that will absolutely be breaking some Sentinels setting lore, but it’s my game so I have no problem with it.