I was asked to make this thread (conversation below) so that some of the people who've played the game might end up sharing what it was like to play.
Thinking about it, I'm really trying to dig down into what I can find. It was an interesting system when I was just hearing about it, but after playing I really want to run a game in it, and I'm trying to dig down into the meat of it to make sure that when things come I can understand exactly what I'm looking at and begin teachng it to others. There is most likely not going to be anyone else in my area with the GMing material that I'll be in contact with, so you guys are kind of my only sounding board.
Anyways, thanks so much for sharing everyone, I'm really looking forward to what everyone has to say.
It's my opinion that the twin hooks we had - brand-new members of the Sentinels of Freedom initiative showing up together on their first day; having never met each other at the beginning of the issue, and discovering Heritage/Paul VIII had been kidnapped at the end - were great entry points to the story.
Some player decisions to split up created natural outlets for certain pairs of characters to bond with each other, and certain PCs didn't especially trust each other - the former was great; the latter didn't really get enough time to develop.
The principal antagonist NPCs were well-developed sometimes and nebulous others. There were definitely some specific rivalries that began to develop, and some PC/antagonist not-exactly friendships that started to develop, too.
Maybe because not all the PCs were finished until a day or two before session 1, the GM didn't retailor her plans to account for the fact that we ended up with a group that, while combat capable if push came to shove, were going to prefer to think their way out. That meant that
the GM felt (in more or less her own words) like a failure when the "best" sessions were ones that involved essentially no fighting, even though the main fights in the first couple issues felt forced to me.
There was an instance of a PC kind-of double-crossing the rest of us that played out just a little too quickly, IMO. A downfall of the PCs having just met each other is that, except for a couple of us who specifically wrote some out-of-character scenes designed to show our powers off, we didn't really know what each other could do. And when some of the clues to the upcoming double-cross involved somebody using powers that weren't really part of their schtick, it didn't feel like we'd had a "fair" chance to see this was coming.
System impressions:
Mostly, the PCs had electronic die rollers that hated us. We had lots of iterations of failure or succeed-at-cost.
For me personally, it was sometimes tricky to come up with which power to use if my character wasn't deliberately going after the magic. There were one or two limitations to her power set that I had some trouble figuring out how to model in the system, but I eventually managed to get something together - I had a pretty clear model for how her powers worked, and I'm a pretty experienced RPG guy, so those both helped.
The healing/montage rule set as we had them to use had something I think is a flaw in considering the corner case of somebody who happens to be at the highest stress level for their current status and rolling poorly.
The character creation guidelines as we had them available to us could use some structure in designing the Kickers (the pre-canned powers for green/yellow/red) that aren't just cribbed from existing characters. I trust the Critical Hits guys and think the final version will have something like this available.
My character specifically:
From a strictly mechanical standpoint, I enjoyed the challenge of trying to figure out what books I could come up with to have an appropriate item ready and being able to look up/quote the passage relevant to that item.
From a character standpoint, she dropped geek/pop culture references almost as much as Harry Dresden does, and threw at least as much snark at one of the principal antagonists. (That antagonist was a French woman who went by the name Madeleine d'Artagnan; Lacuna alternately called her appendicitis girl, asked if there were 11 others who formed two straight lines, had references made to her Dumas obsession, and provoked a fight by calling her Kermit.) I think that other players said that Lacuna's references were some of the fun parts of the session, especially because there were some that would only click a couple days later.
I've pasted a link to this in the channel we used for the game, so hopefully somebody else will come by & talk.
I haven't played the RPG, but I have read the Libriomancer series (offically Magic Ex Libris), and I feel I must reluctantly point out that the magic system is horribly broken.
I mean, it's awesome, and the author tries to put some limits on it by locking books with particularly powerful objects, but it's still broken. In one of the novels Issac uses a "Love Magnet" from the Road to Oz. Which is all well and good, except that if you assume that the Oz books are unlocked that gives you access to: Three magic pearls which provide super strength, complete invulnerability, and magical guidance (Rinkitink in Oz); The Waters of Oblivion, which can completely wipe people's minds (several books, particularly The Emerald City of Oz); The Powder of Life, which can bring any object to life (The Marvelous Land of Oz); Three Wishing Pills, which give you exactly what you wish for, but are extremely painful to swallow (The Marvelous Land of Oz); H.M. Wogglebug T.E.'s education pills, which make you instantly knowledgeable in whatever subject you swallow (Many books); and last but not least the Magic Belt, which can do basically anything provided the target isn't made of wood.
Moving on from Oz, Issac later uses a Holy Water Gun from The Man with the Golden Torc by Simon R Green (which is a bit silly because later in the series the main character gets an upgrade to his main gun which gives it the same functionality, along with about 15 other types of magical ammo and the ability to never run out of bullets. But I digress). Which is all fine and dandy, except that the same book includes such items as a watch that allows you to jump backwards in time by several seconds, a gun that shoots Hellfire, a snowglobe that could unleash Fimbulwinter, and the Oathbreaker - a stick that can break all bonds - down to the molecular level if necessary.
All of this can be worked around, I imagine, as long as you're not trying to sneak horribly broken weapons past your DM. But this is something that I've wanted to rant about for a while, and you happen to be the first person I've met who has read the series, so you win the prize! The series is great, but what can I say? The first thing I try to do when given a cool magic system is figure out how to abuse it for fun and profit. And Libriomancy is very abusible.
I'm a story guy first, so I was actually looking for limits to put onto myself/Kit. I recognize that there are ways the system could conceivably be abused, but tried to work actively with the GM to assure that wouldn't happen.
Fun fact: the author lives, functionally, in my hometown. In fact, his address puts him just outside the district my father represented in the county commission for most of 10 years.
I like that all of your "complaints" @jffdougan are focused on the human element of the game. I can account for my own failings as a DM after all. And I totally agree that if no one knew each other's powers that betrayal would be super hard to catch.
If memory serves from your Reddit threads, Lacuna had the PRinciple of the Tactician, which allows for retconning a plan you already came up with. Would it have been possible to call on that to retroactively learn about the other player's power set by saying that you studied up on your teammates for the purposes of working out better future plans? I imagine the Sentinels have a record keeping section with the recruits power sets, though that might have been locked and inaccessible.
As for the healing, my own demo experience at Gencon did not involve rolling for health during the montage scene. You went up to the max of your current level automatically. Not so helpful for Red zone unless you are planning on taking a minor twist and therefor going up to the top of yellow, but it sounds like whatever issue you had was fixed there.
I'd heard during the demo that the character traits and power sources and such are how you determine a lot of your abilities (AZ had Elemental Manipulation Cold, Tragic Backstory, Sarcastic, and Accidental Powers) did you feel constrained by the options given? Or is there a little bit of give in altering these as creation goes on?
Yeah, and important ones too. I really liked the idea that deciding your character discovered their powers by accident and your a happy-go-lucky person actually helps determine your abilites to a degree. It makes things normally glossed over an important part of the game.
In the case of this particular story twist (with the betrayal), Lacuna wasn't there for one of the giveaways, and half-conscious at best for the other. On top of that, the sessions (5 or 6 spaced over a couple months of real time) represent about 3 days in story.
We were using a hack/reverse engineer of material out from last Gen Con, so it sounds like a couple things you've discussed, especially as relates to character creation, are things that have changed in the last year or so. It's one thing I've tried to be open about.
FWIW, this story represents one of the times that characters got the chance to open up to each other about what they could do. And I think that, possibly because of writing that scene, those two characters were closer to each other emotionally than probably any other pairing. (I had a wary distrust for story reasons of the character who ended up double-crossing us anyway.) [Arcanist Lupus, you might recognize a reference to Isaac in that linked story.]
That's super cool man. I love reading stuff like this.
I understand no one is going to have all the answers I want, just trying to wrap my head around what parts are obvious to other people. This game is pretty far outside of the games I'm used to, at least in some ways. And I've tried to learn systems like this in the past (FATE, OVA, and one or two others) and I've always walked away more confused than I started. But, I think since this system is so specific instead of being incredibly broad, that is helping me understand how eahc piece interacts with the whole.
In this game, one can create your backstory. Your backstory also plays a role in the Collection Mechanic (let you change what number came up on a die, add a truth to the story or Be used instead of a minor Twist).
You are allowed to be creative in your actions and Describing what goes wrong (the twists).
Could you be more specific with what you mean by "one can create your backstory"
Also, how does the backstory effect the Collections? I was under the impression the Collections were the EXP mechanic of the game, nothing to do with dice or anything else.
So every Hero starts with a Collection, This is their backstory, their first appearance. I doesn't have to be perfectly defined, Just a rough how you became who you are. At any time you can invoke your collection, state a fact about your past (Could be a past session, we worked on team maneuvers, or something about your backstory, after getting my powers I found that my faith, getting me through a tough time, and I always keep the holy text next to my heart, saving me form damage this time.). Retconning is allowed and part of the game.
Having a background throughout might give you some good creative ways to solve problems or give more narrative strength to the game.
Example. I had a player Invoke a Collection to state that Fanatic has been going after her to remove her Demonic powers. He went on for a bit, coming up with a cool past scene where they where fighting and a few lines they said to one another. So Fanatic is now a recurring person in the group. (The players favorite Hero is Fanatic)
My only experience comes from a demo at PAX. Anyway, I must say I found the game amazing but what really brought it to life was the players. Between tachyon accessing the sentinels wiki, legacies crazy plans and face planting, me (absolute zero) using ice creatively, and wraith constantly using grappling hooks and smoke bombs it was hilarious. Unity and bunker were there too but they didn't really do anything memorable.
I assume there is a limit to invoking your collection? Like you can only do it once, or only once per some sort of points or metric you have to build up or earn?
Also, is the game master allowed to veto a invoking of your collection? I've got a player or two who may try some Guise-esque shenanigans of "In my origin I totally killed The Devil and so I have his Horn, and that allows me to summon 10,000 demons to wreck this guy" and, if they told me ahead of time that they were going to be doing it in the vein of Guise of Deadpool, fine, I'd live, but they'd be playing a character closer to Fanatic in terms of "Serious Story" and then pull that sort of stunt which might make it hard to the other players during that scene.
I know some systems have the GM spending some resource or giving something (I think Fate Points is an example) when they have to do this, and I wondered if this system accounts for it in any way.
"You can call on each of your collections once per session, using previous experiences to help you and marking off that collection as you do so. This has one of several effects:
After rolling, you can change the number on one die to any side of that die you choose. Determine Min/Mid/Max after doing so.
Establish one fact about a scene your hero is in, based on a previous issue. (Yes, just make something up, as long as it isn't ridiculous and is rooted in the events of lessons from that back issue. If your idea is out of line, the GM will veto it and ask you to think of another one.)
You can invoke your collection instead of taking a minor twist, provided you can think of an explanation for how it's relevant to the situation.
However you use it, you have to justify how that previous adventure helps with the current situation."
So, yes, the GM does have final say and the players are warned to not use it to conjure up a Horn of Satan to summon 10,000 demons, unless they actually found a Horn of Satan in their previous issues.
I think you'll find a great many of your questions will be answered once you have the Starter Kit in front of you. :)