I ran the first issue of the Sentinels RPG last night and I had a question. How does spatial stuff work? Like, what counts as close for Ab Zero's mass hinder? What constitutes a group for the purposes of Legacy's flying smash? How does Tachyon's principle of speed work? And how do Tachyon's hypersonic assault and sonic vortex abilities work? My players were getting completely overwhelmed by bots in the final battle of the first issue, since they had a run of bad rolls against the mothership, which resulted in me having to fudge the fight, with some of the robots just leaving mid-fight to join the harvesters and groups assembling into threes like the previous fight. It just wasn't super fun for them and I want to know how to manipulate space better so that the players either will or won't get run over by the enemies.
Actually, things that say "multiple enemies" in general. What defines multiple enemies? All enemies? Enemies in a group? This game could really do with a hex grid or more definition.
This game is more loss on movement rules. I am sure the player guide will give some guidelines. If you want to make it crunchy by all means do so. Personally I have then can move with in the scene no problem. Give them a hard time if I think I need to.
For what it can area attack target. I go of what they describe and how many makes “sense”.
I play on a hex grid but keep everything loose. It is more of a drawing then a map. It is to save on people asking questions than evaluating distance.
With a Tachyon doing her area attack the bots in scene 2 should not be an issue. Or you can have AS give a -4 hinder to all bots. that is a wombo combo.
When it's become relevant to separate movement between locations, I've treated it as an overcome.
I try to break up the scene into locations if it’s big enough and then basically use the rule of “could the character cover this distance in one panel.
For example, in the second scene of the first issue we have the FF facing the spider bots in the park around Akash’Flora, as well as sniper bots on the rooftops surrounding the park.
This gives the locations as follows
Rooftops <> Park <> Akash’Flora
Adding NPCs into this we have
Rooftops - Armoured Spider Snipers
Park - Spider-bots, Spider Mothership
Akash’Flora - Harvester drones, hostages, Argent Adept.
Now for character movement
Legacy has a movement of two in the current scene, we know he can fly fast enough to cover the ground between Akash and the rooftops in one panel.
Absolute Zero and Bunker have a movement of one, Bunker is basically an armoured tank and AZ still needs to dodge around things on the ground, so it would take them both 2 rounds to move between the rooftops and akash.
Unity and Wraith have a base movement of 1 but can easily increase it with creative uses of their powers.
And Tachyon has speed ∞ within the scene due to her speedster archetype.
as for range, I just declare everything in the same area as close by.