New member here! :)

General GTG Off Topic
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Hi :). Hope I'm posting this in the right section - couldn't find a "new members" thread/area in which to say hello.

Well, I've been poking around these forums for maybe a week or so, now. I played Sentinels for the first time a few months ago at a gaming club I've since sort of stopped going to, but since the person who owned the game had told us about the upcoming Enhanced Edition due later in the year, a few weeks ago I started prowling the Net in anticipation of its release. Then I had to wait for a distributor over here in the UK to get hold of it - finally found it on Games Lore just over a week ago - ordered at around midnight on the Sunday, was dispatched on the Monday, then arrived at quarter past eight on Tuesday morning - woot woot! Infernal Relics came at the same time - Rook City had been out of stock when I ordered the rest but had appeared by about Thursday so I ordered that too and it arrived over the weekend some time (dunno when, exactly, as I was out from Friday morning but it was waiting for me when I got home on Sunday evening :D). Played the rest of it to death over the weekend, though. Literally - there were only two of us and we probably only won about four games or so, but I read somewhere on this forum about two-player games where both players have an extra turn after the Environment's go, so we're gonna try that this weekend and see how we do :). Perhaps one of the most amusing moments we've had in a game so far was during our first battle with the Apostate, in which he ended up being eaten by a T-Rex as we were on Insula Primalis at the time and he happed to have five or less hp when it came to the Environment's turn :D.

Anyway, what else is there to say? Well, I like gaming. A lot :D. I'm really into Fantasy (always have been) and have read and written plenty of it over the years. Gaming-wise, I've been using computers since I was physically old enough to be able to do so, and my early game memories are of playing stuff on the Atari - games like Frontier, Dungeon Master, Llamatron, Magic Pockets, and others…some of which I still play today, via DOSBox or other means, on my PC :D. I've always liked RPGs and still do. Most of the games I play tend to be "older" games, though…that is, mostly the games I play more seem to be at least ten years old now. Not always, but mostly :). I tend to find a lot of games these days are lots of pretty graphics and not much else. Also, I tend to find big-name games are less fun than independently-made ones (like MInecraft, Legend of Grimrock and the Torchlight games). Again, not always, but fairly often ;).

I have also played just one MMORPG, and that was Everquest, which I started in May 2001 (during what I later found was basically the best time for the game in terms of content and stuff) and played for just over four years before sort of fizzling out as the game had changed into something else that wasn't the game I'd originally started playing and I didn't really like it so much any more. But when EQ Classic is ready to go, I'm there :D.

I also like tabletop gaming. I've played plenty of old board games but hadn't got a chance to do any tabletop RPing until a sequence of events initiated by a random stranger on another forum I frequent (dedicated to one of the old games I've aleady mentioned) led to me discovering and attending a local gaming club. That was erm, about three years ago, I think. I sort of stopped going to it a month or two ago but during my time there I played plenty of tabletop RPGs, including DnD (mainly 4th Edition), all four Warhammer 40k games (Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Deathwatch, and Black Crusade), World of Darkness, Hollow Earth Expedition, Deadlands (a Savage Worlds setting), Nobilis, and probably a load of others I've forgotten for the moment. I also heard about and then acquired the book for the Red Dwarf RPG but haven't got round to playing it yet.

I also encountered several card games at club, apart from Sentinels. These were Ascension, Chrononauts, Forbidden Island, and Braggart. As mentioned, I now own Sentinels. My boyfriend's gone and got hold of the other four and we've played them all between us at each other's houses :D. Ascension was the one we played the most but I think Sentinels may catch it up a bit, though it does have a rather big headstart as we got it maybe two or three months ago and have played many games of it :D.

Hmm, perhaps I failed to mention that I like writing and that I cam sometimes end up writing a lot once I get started…but I don't think I need to now, do I? :wink: Anyway, it's nice to be here and I hope I can engage in plenty of gaming-related conversations during my stay :).

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Welcome!

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Glad to have you, Ameena - welcome! :grin:

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Hi, Ameena,

Welcome to the forums.

Was this games club London on Board by any chance? If so, I'm glad you enjoyed Sentinels as I was probably the guy introducing you to it. If not, glad you enjyoed anyeay.

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Thanks for the welcome :).

No, my club wasn't in London - I live in Medway (about thirty miles from London in a south-east-ish direction). The club was Maritime Games and I sort of stopped going because whenever a game (an RPG, I mean) got started, generally it'd only last a few weeks (if that) and then end up stopping due to lack of interest/people unable to turn up/someone else starting another game and people joining that one instead. The only game I can think of that lasted more than a few weeks was an 11-month Dark Heresy game (also the first game of DH that I ever played). I'd prefer to play a long-lasting game like that than one where it fizzles out just as I'm starting to get into it. That's how come I've managed to have a go at so many systems in a relatively short time ;).

I forgot to mention I've played a bunch of forum-based RPGs too - on one forum (the one where that random person ended up with me discovering my local gaming club), we played a DnD game (using 3.5 slightly modified to make some stuff such as skills a bit simpler and more like 4th) that lasted about two years, though it didn't feel anywhere near as long as that! And after that one finished, one of the players started her own (pure 3.5) game which is still going, though she hasn't been online for ages so I think something may have come up in RL. But that game's really fun - she said from the start that she was basically willing and able to allow us to play anything, since she'd tweak it so that our choice could balance right to fit with the other characters. So I went and looked through the monster list (given the choice, I'll always try and get away from playing anything that looks human - I'm already a human, so why would I want to RP as one too? ;)) and I've ended up playing as a Barghest and it's really great fun :D. Actually, in the other game (the one before that, which lasted two years), I made up my own race from scratch and basically collaborated with the DM as to what skills and stuff would work. While the Barghest doesn't have a class since the race kind of is one, my made-up character was a Rogue so followed all the usual rules for that. Since I write my characters as I go and am basically still creating them as the game goes on, she ended up being basically a pacifist so I never reallt got to backstab anything, lol. So the Barghest is a lot more…erm…morally clueless, shall we say? :wink:

Anyway, here I am talking about DnD and this forum is dedicated to a card game! So what can I say about Sentinels…well, when I played it at club I think we played maybe six or seven games altogether. I played the Wraith in every one (because when I tried her in the first game, in which I knew nothing about how anything worked since it was my first game, after all ;)), except for one game, I think my second, where I tried Expatriette. I don't know if Infernal Relics was out at that time but the bloke didn't have it, just Core and Rook City. I remember one battle against Spite where we managed to bring him down with Ra falling in the last round…I think he hit Spite and took some kind of retaliatory hit in return, but in doing so set him up for the next player to finish him off as he only had very few hp left. Mind you, so did the rest of us - he was a right bugger in his fully-drugged-up form :P. In another game (on the same day I think - I'm pretty sure I only played Sentinels on that one day before getting it myself and playing the hell out of it this weekend :D), I recall using Inventory Barrage on someone (might have been Voss) to bring them down to maybe one or two hp, then basically got KSd by the next player (might have been my boyfriend) :D.

I've played as most heroes now, and while I still do like the Wraith a lot, I've also given Nightmist a go and I've found her to be pretty good fun too, mainly, I think, because she's so good at healing herself whilst at the same time doing useful stuff (dealing damage, destroying annoying Environment/Ongoing cards). Both of us have tried playing as the Argent Adept and got killed within a few rounds. Maybe we had a bad hero/villian combination but our last battle had me as the Adept and my boyfriend as erm…actually, I can't remember, but we were against Voss and it lasted maybe three rounds before the minions finished us off. Think we may have needed some AE damage to get rid of those before they ganked us ;). I should have probably started getting out as many songs as possible rather than playing the "find an istrument" card, so that I could actually do stuff, lol. I'll play him again this weekend and hopefully do better (especially as we're gonna try the "players get an extra go each after the Environment's turn thing, there being only two of us).

So far I haven't tried playing as Bunker, Fanatic, Legacy, or the Visionary. Or Mr Fixer, but I didn't have Rook City at the time so couldn't ;). But I've given everyone else a go at least once, and my boyfriend has played all of those that I haven't (he even played Mr Fixer when we played it at club). We've fought every villain (and lost, mostly ;)) except Gloomweaver and the Ennead. At club we fought the Chairman and Spite but privately the two of us obviously haven't had a chance to have a go at those two again yet, or the Matriarch or Plague Rat. And of course, we're tried every Environment except the two Rook City ones, but I think we did play in both of those at club. At home, we started off deciding who plays what and against whom in which location by rolling the appropriately-sided die. Once we'd basically played every hero between us we'd then roll only for the villain and try to decide from there which hero/environment combo would be best. And still lose, in many cases ;). So far I think our only 100% victories have been against Baron Blade and Apostate - twice each, and in our first battle against Apostate, as I mentioned in my first post, it was actually a T-Rex that finished the job for us! :smiley:

I wouldn't mind getting my hands on Unity and Ambuscade, just to complete the collection (since after all, there are dividers for them in the box ;)), but there doesn't seem to be anywhere in the UK that stocks them and sadly I think the postage cost of ordering anything from here (ie this site) wouldn't really be worth it :(. Oh well, maybe they'll turn up on this side of the Atlantic one day and then I can grab 'em :D.

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Welcome to the family. Hope you enjoy your stay here!

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I guess I should believe you when y ou say you like writing stuff, given the incredible length of all of your posts thus far.

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It's great when the environment turns against the villain. During a game in atlantis, we started joking that we should count (h) as 5 (we were playing a 4 player game), given how much the Kraken was helping us out.

Speaking of (h), did I understand correctly that you were playing with only two heroes? Things do get a  bit odd with just two, officially the (h) mechanic only scales down to 3 (otherwise some attacks do nothing at all). Still, even if you did scale down to 2, things can get pretty impossible with just 2 heroes. When you're more comfortable with the game (which should be about... right now. You sure played a lot!), it might be worth it to try to have a third hero which you play together, or play with 2 heroes each (that's what we do, and it works pretty well, though it does make the game feel a bit less personal, since your efforts are divided over two heroes).

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One day, I am going to attempt a one on one battle between nemeses (given either an appropriate or random environment) with (H) actually being equal to 1, just to see how difficult it would be (I assume some will be far too easy, while others would be completely impossible).

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Yes, the two of us were just playing one hero each. Well, in our first game (on Friday evening at his house, not our first game ever back at club a couple of months ago), I played two but I wasn't overly keen on it as I felt like I couldn't concentrate properly on both of them. And they weren't even particularly complicated ones - Tachyon and the Wraith. Table space is also an issue (especially with someone like Tachyon, cards everywhere!), so one hero each is fine, really ;). I figure as far as the (H) mechanic goes, the fact that any "H - 2" damage becomes zero is a sort of "bonus" for playing with only two heroes - it's difficult enough so why make it more so with us taking extra damage? :wink: As mentioned, we're gonna try the "have an extra turn each after the Environment's turn" thing when we play this weekend to see if that helps. We did find quite often that we weren't doing particularly badly against the villain, but got messed up by the environment doing various things, such as extra damage or destroying cards, or whatever. Happened fairly often with Akash'Butah, but I think that with her, that's kind of the point ;).

If you were to play with only a single hero, wouldn't any (H)-mechanic stuff technically work out in your favour? I mean, H - 2 when you have only one hero makes -1…so anything that hits you for "H - 2" would surely be healing you for one point, right? :smiley: That would be a pretty funny game to play, if a stupidly easy and therefore probably pointless one :D.

I'll keep you posted on anything else interesting/funny/silly/ridiculous that happens in any of our games. I think my boyfriend actually made an account here last night, but doesn't seem to have posted anything. He's likely to have taken the username of Ja'Ph' I expect :).

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I don't think it'd be fair for any villain attacks to actually heal you. In the case of playing with one hero, I'd set anything involving H to just be 1.

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I suppose that's fair enough, though I expect that in a solo game anyone with minions (eg Voss) is gonna kick your arse regardless of what you do with the (H) mechanic, just because you're likely to have more mobs appearing than you can deal with. Maybe you could get around it by using someone who hits loads of stuff at once (to gank the minions before they can do you too much harm), or someone who's good at healing themselves, like Nightmist. Or someone who can redirect enough damage to take stuff out that way. Or something. I suppose the game is built so that every hero lacks in at least one area which other heroes are designed to fill, hence the teamwork requirement ;).

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I'd honestly say the best villains for this kind of thing would be Spite or Plague Rat, based solely on the fact that they don't have any targets but themselves (well, PR has one more).

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Well, first, if you noticed my entire post, you'd notice that I said single hero against villain, but between nemeses.  Now, (H) would equal 1, and, in almost all cases, nemeses bonus would apply, and for (H) - 2, you'd get 1 - 2 + 1 = 0.  Also, any case where damage is less than 0, it is simply stated as no damage dealt.  (Imagine a hero with three different abilities reducing damage taken by 1 point each.  You wouldn't expect another card dealing 1 point of damage to suddenly cause 2 points of healing, would you?)  I actually figure having (H) to equal 1 because of so many (H) - 2 declarations would become 0 for nemeses, and the next most frequent of (H) - 1 becoming 1.  And, unlike the case with two heroes, which, assuming no nemeses, have the same results, only one hero is in play, thus only one hero turn exists per round, which gives such a huge disadvantage that, in quite a few cases, the incredibly small amounts of damage from nullifying (H) - 2 and reducing (H) - 1 to just one might not even be enough.

So, I could play The Wraith vs Spite, but I can't play Plague Rat yet as his nemesis hasn't been revealed yet.  I'd imagine Ra might have it tough but possile against The Ennead and The Tomb of Anubis, though I think Anubis (the target himself) would help Ra more than hinder him.  The Wraith against Spite might do well, considering how most games I've played against Spite had The Wraith as the most vital character against Spite (not sure a fitting environment, so probably random). The Argent Adept probably has no chance against Akash'Bhuta though.

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What about Mr Fixer versus the Chairman? Doesn't Mr Fixer have loads of stuff that hits multiple targets and so would be good against all the Thugs and stuff? I haven't played as him yet myself and the only time I've fought the Chairman was months ago in that session at club...though both of these points will change at the weekend >:). I also have no idea how Nightmist versus Gloomweaver would pan out as I've not yet got round to fighting against him...

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Hm, I think I'm going to think about how to scale the game nicely for two people now, because I agree with you that controlling one hero *is* nicer. I don't like just treating (H) as 2, because some cards/villains just don't do anything then, which is a bit boring. But treating (H) as three is very harsh; losing one hero worth of hitpoints, plays and powers matters a lot, especially in the low hero counts (playing with (H)=5 with 4 heroes is probably less bad than (H=3) with 2 heroes), and even if (H) scaled down to 2 properly, it would be way harder. Maybe treating (H) as 2, but making the minimum of any H-x calculation 1, and give each player an incapacitated hero to help them out a bit.. hm.

ANYWAY, I'll make a new thread for that when I've fooled around with it a bit, this is your welcome thread! So.. WELCOME!

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Lol thanks LCinn :).

I've figured that if H - 2 = 0 then that's fine, because there's always plenty of other stuff that can hurt the two of us. Having a few sources of damage nullified through having a small number of heroes present is making up for the fact that there's a small number of heroes present, surely ;). As I think I mentioned in my first post, out of all the games we played over the weekend I'm pretty sure we lost considerably more than we won. The only villians we've consistently beaten (as in, we've beaten them every time we faced them...which is erm, twice each, lol) are Baron Blade and the Apostate. Most of the others have kicked our arses. Actually, I can't remember who else we managed to beat. We've had a go at most of them at least twice (definitely done Akash'Bhuta thrice), though haven't got round to fighting Gloomweaver or the Ennead yet, or any of the Rook City ones (obviously). We're hoping that upping our number of turns will help somewhat ;).

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So, today me and my boyfriend (hereafter referred to as Ja'Ph', his preferred online nickname…or JP if I can't be arsed to type that ;)) played some more Sentinels. We had an extra turn each after the Environment's turn, so basically in a whole round we had two turns each.

So, what happened?

First game - Ra (me) and Legacy (Ja'Ph') versus the Matriarch in the Pike Industrial Complex. Having never played against the MAtriarch before, neither of us knew what to expect - I only knew she summoned lots of birds, or something. And summon she did - loads of birdies came up but if I remember rightly, most of them only ever dealt one damage and often they didn't even do that due to erm, I think we had various cards out that countered it. Since we had Legacy handling buffs, boosting our damage and redirecting/soaking most damage dealt, and me converting all damage to fire and being immune to it, we basically kicked her arse pretty well (she never flipped either). I think the total damage dealt by Legacy in the whole fight was probably in the single figures - obviously, most of it was dealt by me, and at the end of the game I hadn't actually lost any health at all throughout the whole fight :D. An easy battle and one that was good fun too :).

Next up, we had the Argent Adept (me) and Fanatic (Ja'Ph') against Gloomweaver, in Rook City. Again, we'd never fought Gloomweaver before so had no idea what would be happening. Note that character choices for this game and the previous one were picked with thought after we'd decided on a villain - whichever hero JP chose, I tried to choose something that complemented it. So, if he chose a damage-dealer, I tried to choose support, and vice-versa. Another reason for my choosing the Adept was that I actually wanted to last more than five minutes on him. As it turned out, this battle ended up lasting about two hours or so but we won in the end! Fanatic had about 3hp left (but with one of those auto-rez-with-10hp thingys in play, and a spare one in hand), but I don't think I ever dropped below 19/24hp the whole time thanks to being able to heal myself repeatedly using that song with the Accompany that lets you heal yourself for 2hp. I'd usually play the Perform text of that song most turns so that I could then use another power to put some more effects into play :D. Anyway, eventually we managed to defeat Gloomy without him flipping - we only saw one Relic (the Drum of Despair, I think it was called) the whole game :). And I had over 25 cards either in play or in my hand by the end of it. And I used Arcane Cadence a lot :D.

Third game was the Visionary (me, again playing something that could support the other character) and Ra against the Ennead in the Tomb of Anubis. Well, they didn't last long! That is, I think we did it right - we only ever had one card that said "Bring a card from beneath the Shrine of the Ennead into play", which brought the total Villains up to three - that one, plus the two who were there to start with. Since the text says that heroes win when there are no villain targets in play, once we'd defeated those three and no more had had a chance to come out (so, no villain targets left as there was nothing left with any hp), we were kind of "Oh…wow, we won? That was quick", so maybe we just got lucky or had it easy or something. The ones we beat were Tefnut, Geb, and Osiris (the latter being the one who came into play later on). No biggy :).

Finally, we played as Bunker (me, playing Bunker for the first time) and Mr Fixer, against Omnitron in Insula Primalis (this time, both of those were chosen via random die roll as we couldn't decide whom we wanted to fight). I think it was a bit of a bad combination of stuff that we chose. Raptors whittled us down, meanwhile Omnitron had that evil nasty device thingy that zaps you for damage equal to its remaining hp (which start at 15). And fairly early in the game, the bastard had that erm, Technological Singularity thingy come out - the one that destroys all your equipment and then deals two damage to each player for each of their cards that was destroyed. So that was a bit of a bummer as both of us had some equipment in play. Then in the same turn (he was in the mode where he draws a card at the end of his turn) he got the Flechette thingy that destroys all your ongoing cards as well! So that destroyed the rest of our stuff :P. I ended up getting about 30 damage-worth of cards stacked up under my Omni Cannon, but never got a chance to use it. Omnitron was on 80hp by the time first Ja'Ph' went down, then a turn or two later, so did I. We're gonna need a better hero-combo and kinder environment to beat him, I think. Maybe the Tomb of Anubis, which has quite a few cards that attack the thing with the lowest hp - handy to get rid of drones and stuff. Can't say I'm all that keen on Bunker as he's really very equipment-dependent…okay so he's not the only hero who is, but it felt like I was constantly waiting for certain cards to come along in order to be of any real use. I think a combination of maybe Ra and Nightmist could do fairly well. Anyone who doesn't rely on equipment and/or ongoings, or who can mess with the villain deck, I suppose. So Tachyon, the Wraith, the Visionary…maybe Legacy or Ra if the other player can stop all their cool cards getting destroyed. Our Legacy/Ra combo against the Matriarch worked really well, actually, since we were both boosting each other's damage and Legacy was able to redirect everything to him and then take no damage due to it being reduced and stuff >:).

Anyway, a good time was generally had (of course), and we again vow that we will kick Omnitron's arse one day!