I've seen it used with Cold, and Duplication mainly. They did pick the Shadow archetype, and Banter often shows up in their Sabotage ability.
The character tends to add on snark or to just banter with foes while fighting.
So they're not using Banter primarily to talk to people, they're using it to add flavor to an action driven by the Power. That makes more sense.
Yeah, I said above that Banter seems far and away the easiest social quality to use in this system: just use one of your powers and add a line of snark to it and you justify Banter.
But outside of an Action Scene, using Social Qualities for Overcomes requires unusual circumstances, great creativity, a d4, or an Intellectual Power.
(Keep in mind many of us play very differently from each other as you read this, so some GMs might not like this approach as much as others. :-)
I see a lot of powers that can be useful in social interactions, depending on the situation. The key for me is focusing on the character and being imaginative, but that's usually my preferred style of play. (And I'm not saying anyone else isn't being imaginative -- it's just a different focus in how GMs and players handle situations. ;-)
Strength and a lot of other powers can be useful if you're trying to impress or intimidate a person. A lot of the Psychic powers could be used in imaginative and fun ways in social interactions. Technological and Materials (and maybe even Elements) powers can be used as communications tools, such as holographicly showing what you're trying to communicate / ask about. Almost any power can be used to just say "I'm going to come up with an example of the situation/information that uses my power in a way to get the information across." Say I'm playing a portal generating hero and I want to ask someone about a facility that we saw. I might just show them a portal high above the location so they can see what we're talking about, we can point out areas we're asking about, etc.
For me, it's purely what makes sense for the character and how imaginative the player(s) can be.
And finally, if a character just isn't a social person, maybe it makes sense to just use a d4 for power. That often fits the situation, as we've seen in superhero comics/movies when someone who isn't good at being social tries to convince someone to help them (e.g., Thor talking to Banner in "Thor: Ragnarok"). That can result in some entertaining moments!
(But I also don't worry about if a hero has what they "need" to be "successful". I just want to make sure they feel like the character is a fully-realized person that they understand and will enjoy playing. I'll make sure everyone has opportunities to shine, of course, but there are going to be challenges that some heroes will face that they'll have issues with -- that's also why they're in a team. ;-)
I also think this could be hours of face-to-face conversation and a short block of text is going to be hard to communicate it all, soooo... :-\ Take that for what it's worth. ;-)
I had someone not realized how Training and Genius are nearly word for word the same until i read this.
Question- is there a build that is truely unplayable or one that you would pay someone not to play?
I was quite active on the old D&D4E forums back in the day and there was a lot of dscussion about when an adventure would have run better with out one character because they did not compensate for the extra monster that showed up to face an extra hero.
Of course the game play and objectives are diffrent and the people bragging about being a jerk about it were wrong.
I’ve ran a fair bit of the SCRPG now with several groups, and while some characters feel stronger (Tachyon is noticeably able to clean house out of the Starter Kit characters) no one has yet felt like they weren’t contributing.
I would go so far to say that if you had as a hero Captain Generic, and he rolled d8/d8/d8 for every roll and could only take basic actions, he would do ok enough to not feel like a burden.
That said, if the person playing Captain Generic also made poor choices and/or rolled badly you might have an issue. If he chose to spend every turn trying to deck the d10 Lt. only for it to fail each time instead of boosting another hero, attacking a minion, or overcoming a challenge there might be a problem.
I've yet to encounter a combination I'd rather not see play. I actually made a character who often ended up rolling a dice pool of d8/d8/d6 clear through the green and yellow zones, and they still ended up being a boon to the party.
They were a Powered Suit Armored combo, and were excellent at making sure that whoever they fought was going to focus on them, one way or another.
It depends. The worst you could do is create a character whose principles are so niche they never see use, has only abilities that are barely better than basic actions, and has such a mismatch of powers and qualities that they're rolling d4's and d6's most of the time. But even then, the only problem is if the adventure is written to be super challenging, or if the player feels like they're being overshadowed by everyone else.
With a die-step system, there's only so much optimization you can do, anyway. While there's certainly a quantifiable difference between continued rolls of d10s and d12s, the sheer fact that we're dealing with relatively small numbers (less than 15, certainly), means that you're only ever going to get so high. And, as it seems, the system's pretty well rigged that you're not ever going to have less than d8s in your primary power, and if you do, you're going to be pairing it with a lot of other d8s.
One thing we should probably also consider is the probabilities involved on mid and min die rolls, when you're throwing variant combos. I'm sure that the probabilities on a d12-d8-d6 throw will come out a fair bit differently than a d8-d8-d8...
d6/d8/d12 Expected Values:
Min: 2.467 / Mid 4.476 / Max 7.557
d8/d8/d8 Expected Values:
Min: 2.531 / Mid 4.5 / Max 6.469
Maybe not as different as you think! I actually made a spreadsheet to play around with this stuff; anything calling on your Max die has the widest swing (both in general and as you shift what dice you're using) while your Mid die value stays generally close to the expected value of your mid-sized die, with the main difference being in how tightly bunched up that bell curve actually is.
Interesting! That definitely changes what sort of mechanical decisions I might make, if it's looking like I'm going to have larger number of "middling" dice (d8s, d10s), rather than a lot of d6s and a d12 or two. If I have a lot of abilities that hinge on my mid or min die, I might easily look towards buffing up my die pool all around, rather than simply packing on a high die value and hoping for the best.
Hm, that is good to know. I'd have guessed that d6/d8/10 would be roughly equivalent to d8/d8/d8, but that d6 clearly has an outsized effect on the Min and Mid. Makes it even more important to avoid them, and d4's even moreso. Although I'm glad that my instict that Min+Mid was roughly equivalent to Max.
I totally disagree that "there's only so much optimization you can do", though. Abilities that effect multiple targets are huge, and clearly using a larger die--especially going from Mid to Max when you have a large die or two involved--is significant, especially for Overcome checks. Action economy is a thing in any game.
Side Note: Mid+Min is often better a little better than Max, but even if it's not, it has a small standard deviation.
Optimization in this game is certainly possible and will certainly have a noticeable, even large, effect on the game, but i do think the effect is less pronounced then in other games.
In dnd, for example, you can have the perfectly optimized wizard that can do combat, deal with traps, deal with social interactions, deal with sneaking, indentify magic items, move the party long distances, see the future, and do all this otherstuff alongside a fighter that decided they wanted to do something cool with some exotic weapon that looked interesting but turned out to just not be that good even though it took all their feats just to wield it and contributes to combat a little bit but not much else.
The gap between a fully optimized character and one that wanted to do a thing because its cool is much less pronounced in SCRPG.
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I'm not sure that's true. Some foresight into your die and principle selection can result in a character who can do anything non-combat as well or better than any other member of the group. Particular combinations of boosts and mass attacks can erase any number of minions smaller than a d10-d12 (assuming they roll well) in the first round or two. Once you get into Yellow you can get even more ridiculous by combining mass boosts and powerful attacks--enough that even a d12 lieutenant won't withstand more than a couple of rounds, and there are Red synergies that can make a character essentially unkillable. I haven't gone through all the villain countermeasures that might keep them alive longer, but the ability to build a villain that could withstand that kind of assault would only reinforce the point.
As someone who has gone through the villain countermeasures, the point is that no villain can reliably survive that kind of assault on their own. The point of Sentinels isn't to be a combat simulator; It's to tell a story. And there's nothing less interesting than a hero who can do everything well, barring a complete lack of conflict.
It's not at all good that these combos exist, especially since they're being discovered by players who don't even have the final book yet (and I'm doubting they were caught or corrected by the devs). This means that GMs need to either have a closer eye on character design or play to a certain playstyle that I don't think the rules are ideally suited for.
Bit of a bummer. I think I'm OK for now because I'm the GM and I'm converting the characters. But I lack play experience, so I'm relying on what I'm reading here!
In d20, the difference between your character being amazing in a social situation because you have the right stats and skills and mine being awful means that your character breezes though the scene with no challenge and for me it is literally impossible.
In SCRPG the difference between your character having a near universally usable principle and rolling d12 d10 d8 and taking the Max and me not having a useable quality and rolling a d4 d8 and d8 and taking the mid is that you are more likely to get either no twist or a minor twist and i will likely get a minor twist or a major twist.
In d20 in combat, if your character is great at fighting he might clear out the entire encounter easily while mine might never hit a target or contribute at all.
In SCRPG, your character might use the OP speedster ability to clear everyone out, but my poorly made character will at least be able to contribute to taking out a surviving minion or whittling down the HP of a villain.
I have seen a d20 character do nothing for an entire play session, i can’t imagine the situation where that is the case for SCRPG.
I’m not arguing that you can’t make a character that is much better then another is SCRPG, i am saying there is a bare level of power that even the least optimized character has that means that character is still able to contribute.
Modifiers don't get that extreme in D&D until the highest levels, at which point the discrepancy is greater between spellcasters and non-spellcasters than whatever your modifiers are. And it doesn't make a lot of difference if you reduce a d8 minion to a d6 if the player who goes after you hits every minion in the scene for 9.