Struggling background

Games Sentinel Comics RPG
#21

It’s hard to argue with that :smiley:

Out of curiosity, how did they handle Overcomes?
Assuming a Principle is used, and also assuming the Zone die is equally a d8, a 8-8-8 pool has a chance of roughly 33% of a flawless success, while a 10-10-8 pool is at 57% - that seems like a vast difference; mostly because the ‘8’ mark is right at the upper limit for the d8.
I am aware that twists aren’t a bad thing per se, but they still add complication that needs to be dealt with…

Maybe the psychologie works the other way round: I know that I myself was toying with many a character that would start off struggling, and many of the responsibility Principles lend themselves to very sweet narrative hooks.
But I’ve seen myself constantly hesitating because of the bad dice perspective, and swerve off to law enforcement (good dice) or even Upper class (great dice) - compromising my concept for that. Or going to Unremarkable and shoehorning the character into Marksman, compromising again. Or mitigating by deliberatley picking MIN die abilities, forcing my hand even more… and getting one lonely decent die from the Source step seems to make for a sad one-trick pony.

In theory, that is. :wink:
I’d love to hear more about how your group handles the (mathematically existing) challenge of a weak-die member.

#22

Headlong, the ostensible leader of Daybreak, the “first time players learning group”, is a “struggling” character.

I’d be curious how many people played through the Stolen Legacy/Urban Infestation modules and felt like he was some sort of “drag” on the team?

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#23

Thanks, Slickriptide! Great catch! :smiley: I never even noticed that. :smile: I’ve run Urban Infestation at cons quite a few times and never felt like Headlong was less effective or had anyone raise a concern as Headlong’s player. (Can’t say that is going to be everyone’s experience, though, so take that for what it’s worth. :wink: )

(And apologies for not replying, yet; I’m trying to get the character sheet for instance I GM’d to provide context for my thoughts. :relaxed:)

#24

I can’t help feeling that the “Struggling = Bad” position in this discussion is a “you gotta min/max all your dice or you’re failing as a player” position. Maybe I’m misconstruing the arguments.

“Struggling” gives a hero a choice of three of “Banter”, “Underworld Info”, and/or “Physical Traits” and assigns d8, d8, d6. How frequently is a d6 in Underworld Info ACTUALLY going to matter to overcoming an obstacle in a dust-up with super-villain minions? If the “struggling” character has a d6 in Stealth and no other characters in the group have Stealth at all, isn’t that better than nothing?

It seems to me that all of this talk about min-maxing your dice and only pulling your weight if every die on your character sheet has the maximum possible number of sides (so that you can make sure you overcome any imaginable challenge) is missing the bigger holistic picture of the character’s entire profile of powers and qualities, as well the general point of the game which is not to crunch numbers but to create a collaborative story.

This line of thought inevitably leads down a road where you can only take certain powers, because other powers have smaller or fewer dice, and you can only take certain backgrounds, because others are “weaker” or “limiting” and the game becomes about “solving” character creation instead of about realizing the character you want to play.

Well, I suppose for the min-maxer, the “SuperDuperMan who is immune to all damage and handily defeats every single challenge he comes across” might actually be the sort of hero he wants to play, but personally I’d find it a bit boring to be that guy’s sidekick.

#25

Well… while you’re certainly not all that wrong, there’s a bit more middleground between min-maxing and completely ignoring probability levels. :slight_smile:

It’s actually d8, d6, d6. And then another d8, d8, d6 to carry over to the Power Source step, where you get a large part of your Powers and Abilities keying off those powers.

I certainly don’t mind a spread of various skills. But on the other hand, I’d say there are moments when you are best off playing to your probabilistic strengths; and in those situation it might help to actually have any…

Also, I’m not saying it is impossible to play - what I’m saying is lower probabilities makes things mechanically harder to overcome.
If those who played a Struggling character say that this isn’t really an issue, all the better!

Still, I’d like to point out that Headlong specifically is built with the Relic Power source, which is special in that it gives two d10 for the Archetype step. His defining Power, Momentum, is then built upon that last step. And, interestingly enough, almost all of his Abilities key off Momentum; which shouldn’t even be possible through a regular building process! So actually Headlong does not really suffer the limitations of Struggling; in my book he is rather a showcase of the need for deliberate workarounds (including cheating) to make it work…

Let me re-iterate:
I absolutely think it is possible for a struggling character to generally pull their weight. But mathematics tell that if you ever roll dice, at least some extra effort (be it during chargen, by the hero group dynamics, and/or by the GM adjusting) will be needed to mitigate the weak starting point.

And what irks me about that is not that it generally exists - but that it seems like a situation that easily could have been balanced in the first place (and I’m absolutely not saying it must be balanced by dice availability; myself I think I’ll stick with the extra Principle idea to toy with).

#26

I’m sort of just jumping in here with a thought. But is there an advantage to having Responsibility Principles that would justify this? I haven’t looked over them very closely, so I’m not sure.

It might end up mattering though, because unless the players are rolling for their character… I just let people pick what makes sense for their character. I’ve only had a very limited number of characters created, but I didn’t feel any need to limit them to which Principles they could grab. Because sometimes there is a principle that makes sense for the character, but was in the wrong section for you to pick it.

#27

Thanks for the correction!

I think the worst you could say about Headlong is that he was built using “constructed” rather than “guided” instructions. Otherwise, his character sheet looks legit to me.

Now, it’s true that Headlong is tailored to the use of his signature power, but isn’t that going to be true for any character, especially a character whose minor characteristics are weak in comparison? There’s nothing about Headlong’s description that would lead one to believe that Underworld Info is central to his character. His brother was the drug dealer and that’s the extent of it as far as Headlong is concerned. There’s nothing to suggest that there should ever be a reason for Headlong, as a character, to ever be in a position where he would be using that quality to overcome a challenge unless it was the only possible choice he had.

Let’s say that I made a Professor X character and chose “Struggling” to represent the fact that he’s wheelchair bound and even went so far as to assign those low-valued dice to three physical traits. I don’t think it would be “cheating” to turn around and make sure that my main powers were all built around Professor Zed’s fantastic mental abilities.

Headlong is a “transporter” who isn’t likely to ever draw upon his underworld knowledge and if he’s bad at banter, that’s mainly a role-playing attribute anyway. Looking at it strictly from a dice-sides aspect is ignoring the way that the game allows one to tailor around a potentially debilitating choice and still make a useful hero anyway. That’s a feature of the game.

The plain truth is that Headlong is almost never going to be in a position to make an overcome roll on his “struggling” skills, so the math really doesn’t enter into the picture.

Though, of course, the GM could take note of this particular weakness in Headlong’s character sheet and deliberately PUT him in the position of leaning on those underdevloped skills but that’s still story taking precedence, IMO.

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#28

There is no cheating. Momentum was taken at a d6 at the Relic stage. Transporter allows someone if they have a Mobility power to swap one of the dice for Archetype for the previously chosen Mobility power. So he swapped it for the d10 and then the d6 was then used to pick Speed.

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#29

That makes sense.
I withdraw my accusation of cheating!
But then again, if that isn’t an example of carefully constructing most of your abilities to key off your single best die I wouldn’t know what is. :slight_smile:

#30

You… say that like it’s a bad thing. :smirk:

In all sincerity, if a character’s concept is based around one fundamental aspect, then it’s likely going to focus on that. :man_shrugging:t2: It’s up to the GM to put the PCs into interesting situations that can challenge the characters in fun ways, help them find interesting ways to work through those situations, etc. (“Sure, I can manipulate friction to move quickly, but how does that help now that I’m stuck in this weightless environment where friction is irrelevant‽”) But a character concept is frequently focused around a specific power, so that will likely have the best die (unless there’s a quality the player sees as being more fundamental to the character, like Schmeed Schmichards’ intelligence/science versus his ability to stretch).

Is that abnormal to the experience of others? :confused:

#31

A bit. I have a knee jerk reaction against the “dice don’t matter” crowd because of many years in games under GMs that felt that PCs that were useless or underpowered were “better” for the story. Not saying they’re the same, but that’s where I’m coming from.

I’m not an optimizer or munchkin, but I do want my characters to feel like they’re competent. Twists are not necessarily bad, but if you’re getting twists all the time, you’re going to be a burden at the table, and if the choice is always “failure or bad/annoying/complicated stuff happens,” then I as a player am going to be asking why my character is even in this situation.

To cross game genres, escort missions are the bane of action and RPG games for a reason.

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#32

Ah, sorry you had to have such a poor GM experience like that. :pensive: (Not saying your GM was bad, of course. I’ve made significant mistakes myself, so no judgement! :smirk:) Definitely an understandable reaction.

I don’t fully agree with MindWanderer that it’s one of the other, as there’s significant nuance in how it is handled. One of my current campaigns (non-SCRPG) has folks who are power gamers want all the high stats/powers and folks who truly don’t care about their stats in the slightest. (One person is hovering in the middle, but they’re in it for the socializing so they’re pretty easy to appease. :wink: ). I have to balance that in the gameplay/challenges to ensure everyone is getting their opportunity to shine in the way they prefer.

In my opinion, it really does come down to everyone at the table understanding each other and their characters, and finding ways to make the game fun for everyone. If the GM is not taking into account that PC1 has high dice they’re going to use most of the time and PC2 has their dice scattered across a bunch of lower numbers when they come up with the challenges, they’re kinda failing to ensure the group is going to have fun – unless PC2’s player wants to frequently have significant challenges but PC1’s player wants to always be awesome… :wink:

#33

But then again, if that isn’t an example of carefully constructing most of your abilities to key off your single best die I wouldn’t know what is. :slight_smile:

But… what’s wrong with that? Isn’t that what a min-maxer is going to do anyway in order to maximize opportunity?

As it stands, every choice is going to be “sub-optimal” in some way. I started building “Professor Zed” using the guided method (though I started with “struggling”, as that’s our discussion here) and in order to get Psychic powers, the dice gave me a choice of Accident (d12/d6) or Mystical (d10/d8/d8). Psychic is Professor Zed’s signature ability, so why on earth would he choose any power that requires his “struggling” physical prowess? THAT would be deliberately hamstringing your own character, which was the original complaint about “struggling”.

Now, as a min-maxer, the game forces another choice on me here. Take Accident and get the no-brainer “godlike” d12 on my Telepathy or Telekinesis or whatever and the mediocre d6 on something else, or take the more consistent (from an overcoming standpoint) but less powerful dice from Mystical and get more powers as well. It’s not a clear-cut choice.

Anyway – it seems to me that your objection about the math is coming from a standpoint that all abilities/powers matter equally; particularly since you specifically call out the tailoring of a character towards her strengths as “cheating”. That’s simply not going to be the case, though. In fact, strengths and weaknesses are the very reason you need a team in the first place. You support each others strength and shore up each others weaknesses. I took four years of Spanish in High School but if I needed to talk to a native Spanish speaker today, I’d get a really fluent translator rather than try and overcome it with my lousy “d6 Spanish fluency.” If Professor Zed absolutely had to fire a gun or hold up a falling concrete pillar with his hands, I expect that to be major twist situation that he’s probably going to fail. If my teammate was opining about my choices in backgrounds I’d be asking why SuperDuperMan isn’t over here holding up this thing instead?

The only way that “struggling”, or any other origin, becomes a detriment to the team is if that player deliberately designs his character to have NO strengths, which I’m unsure is even possible. Uh, what was the kid who hung out with Man Thing, whose “superpower” was that his luck was so phenomenally bad that his whole life was terrible and Man Thing was his only friend? That’s the kind of character you’d have to deliberately build in order to consistently drag down your team by your build. You’re not going to get that just by choosing a “sub-optimal” background over a “most optimal dice” background.

#34

The problem is that this is kind of a false dichotomy, in that your telling of a story can be hampered by what the dice are doing. If you’re playing a character who is supposed to be super-strong, but your strength die keeps rolling low, then the dice are changing the story of your character from “strong guy who always performs feats of strength” to “supposedly strong guy who actually keeps failing, and will eventually get a reputation therefore”.

#35

Not to pound a dead horse into the ground, I’ll just point out that Peter Parker is basically a “struggling” character for most of his early career but you wouldn’t find many heroes in a dustup wanting to kick Spider Man off the team because of it. It would be a little silly to complain that he was cheating by tailoring his build around his web-slinging/wall-crawling abilities instead of his “can’t hold a straight job” qualities.

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#36

Okay, now that’s ridiculous. It’s not like Spider-Man was created using the SCRPG system. He doesn’t have d6’s and d8’s. He does have super-strength, super endurance, wall-crawling, danger sense, and a whole bunch of gadgetry, plus a tremendous amount of skill with science and technology. He’s hugely valuable on a team.

Besides, heroes would never kick a “weak” member off their team anyway. Superhero teams are formed by expedience and interpersonal bonds, or are put together by a third party. Their power level has nothing to do with it. (Also, this is comic books. As someone pointed out, Batman can either go toe-to-toe with Darkseid or get bloodied by a random thug depending on context.)

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#37

I wouldn’t say it is abnormal, but I could see it feeling… artificially stifling. Like, it feels like struggle forces you to find a way to get a single really good die and then build everything around that die. While there are a lot of other routes you could take that don’t give that same feeling.

It could also be said that part of the issue is thinking about things in different orders. If a player wants to play a poor character, they should pick struggling, but that limits their dice in a way that seems noticeable to some players, and begins focusing them on trying to be a character with a singular focus on the one good die they can get, locking them into being a character with this single major focus.

Meanwhile, there are people who don’t care about the dice at all, and also people who start wanting a concept where the character has a single major focus and then it doesn’t hurt them to be struggling, if they decide to go that way.

And if the player doesn’t want that story?

I’ve been the guy behind the dice who are telling a different story about my character than I want to tell. It isn’t a good feeling.

I’m not trying to say that the dice must always follow what I want, but I’m leery of any advice that dismisses what I actually want from a character in favor of random statistical averages.

#38

I want to zoom in here really quick.

Other than making sure that PC2 has easy access to boosts… what is the DM supposed to do if they don’t want significant challenges?

Unlike a game like DnD, Sentinels doesn’t have scaling DCs that you can obscure to manipulate the situation. And there is no way to get permanent buffs. So what levers would you pull and twist to help PC2 in that situation?

#39

Um, I think part of your confusion might be that you are might have misunderstood character creation. Maybe not, but the way you presented this it feels like that is the case.

When you picked struggling you got 1d8 and 2d6 to put on Qualities.

You then rolled 2d8 and 1d6 to get your power source (either accident or Mystical)

Those are the dice you are putting into your psychic abilities. At this stage there is no choice between 1d12/1d6 or 1d10/1d8/1d8. You either are delaying your psychic powers until your archetype (and hoping to role one that gives you that option) or you are hoping for a way to swap it (maybe using your retcon at the end)

This is the issue that was being talked about, your first set of powers HAS to be 2d8 and a1d6, and you already have 1d8 and 2d6, meaning you are sitting with 3d8 and 3d6 by the time you are getting to your archetype, and hoping to find a way to use your last section of character creation to utilize a die bigger than a d8. Depending on your Archetype, it is impossible for you to use that 1d12 from Accident on your psychic abilities, and a chunk of your yellow and greens are d8’s and d6’s

#40

Yes, you’re right. This business of the dice on a chart being things you apply to the next chart rather than to this chart is confounding. :exploding_head:

Given that, I’m willing to acknowledge that you’ve got a bit of a point. Let me try rolling up Professor Zed again and see what happens.

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