Is it possible to solo your own campaign with this game? Has anyone tried? How did you go about it?
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Anything’s possible with enough work, but this would be one of the last supers games I’d pick for solo gaming. The system’s written for group play, with the sweet spot IME being 4-6 players (the game’s H value) and a GM. Even doing a 1:1 single-player/GM ratio session shows up some of the spots where the action scene design system breaks down - too many single villains will be more than a match for any single hero, while a single minion is obviously not a challenge at all and lieutenants are weirdly swingy - plus you don’t have the scene element budget by the book to use environments and challenges alongside anything. Just not written for the idea of “solo title” comics, or really even “duo team-op” books, and I’m not convinced the changes you’d need to make are worth the effort for either true solo play or 1:1 mode.
You could do that sort of thing narratively and mostly ignore the mechanics like a pick-a-page adventure book, but there’s nothing like that written so you still need a GM or to do it yourself, and why bother using this game engine for it if the mechanics are incompatible? There are a few solo super adventures out there - Villains & Vigilantes has at least a couple, and IIRC Champions did as well, but both of those systems are written so that one hero can work reasonably well on their own. Probably some others I don’t know about - I’m not a huge fan of solo roleplay and haven’t gone looking for them, but I’d be surprised if DTRPG didn’t have a few more, probably for low-complexity engines like Tiny d6 Supers or BASH or even Icons.
All that said, if you’re the kind of person who enjoys playing the Sentinels card game solo by running 4-5 heroes at once, you might be able to play the RPG “multi-handed” in the same way by running multiple PCs. I frequently do dry runs on my action scenes with the stats for five or six heroes and whatever their opposition is just to see if I’m roughly hitting the sweet spot for challenging-not-walkover-or-TPKO. It can be done if you’re familiar with the mechanics. That isn’t roleplaying at all to me, but it suggests you could try to run a solo campaign with a team of PCs, at which point the game mechanics are fine. Where you get your adventure ideas I couldn’t tell you - the few official printed ones, maybe crib ones from other systems and port their stats into SCRPG terms - or maybe best yet, buy some dollar bin comics and steal plots from them, statting up baddies as needed or stealing them from published fan material online. There’s got to be close to a thousand finished villain writeups scattered around this forum and others, and my unimaginatively named blog is up to 230+ of them.
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Thanks for the reply!
Yeah, I usually solo the card game multi handed with a team of 4 heroes, so I can see myself doing the same for this game. I just wanted to immerse myself further into the Sentinels universe and found a good deal for the starter set on eBay for 45 bucks, so I went ahead and bought it.
Has anyone tried running this game solo with Oracle cards or other RPG solo accessories? I’m curious if anyone has tried this game solo yet.