We played our first game last night, doing the first of the Baron Blade scenarios, in which Blade has to run around the city power splicing and the heroes chase him.
I played Blade, and just equiped his teleporter and battle suit, and decided that attacking was a losing battle - just move around a lot, splice, and focus on defense. Near the end, the heroes (Unity and Absolute Zero) finally incapacitated me... and as far as we could tell, all it did was reduce me to one power for a turn. So, I teleported off, and finished all of my power splices.
Did we miss something? Does incapacitation usually have more of a cost, like losing a turn?
Nope, it's really more of a "stunned for one turn but then you shake it off" than a real "incapacitation". We argued about the proper name for what was happening during playtesting, but since incapacitation was already a thing with SotM and we couldn't think of a solid replacement, it stuck.
Spiff's SotM site: www.spiffworld.com/sotm
You did it right. Baron Blade played right will win that scenario a lot, the heroes have to chase him all over the place and he has no incentive to fight them.
I definitely played him wrong! lol. I got completely destroyed playing Baron Blade.
Teleport! Teleport everywhere! Swap between armor/kinetic or your oneshots to taste.
That's how you do it. Make them chase you down.
Taking this topic heading in a more design direction, I also noticed that inapping is more like slightly inconviencing. It doesn't even seem like stunned for one turn. I was a little surprised that it wasn't something more along the lines of your next turn consists of standing up, filling your health, putting one card in play, and rolling your movement for next turn. You don't get any other actions.
I'm definitely NOT trying to say that I disagree or the mechanics are wrong or not good, but I am curious what the conversation was like for the cost of reducing someone to 0 health. Was it decided that loosing a whole turn was unbalanced? Was it just not as fun? Did it have to do with the fact that counting multiple incaps is often a goal in the game?
The problem with essentially skipping a turn is that the now-un-incapped character is a huge target for the opponent. If you don't have chance to retaliate or move away or dodge or something you're going to get whacked really hard that turn, maybe even incapping you again or at least significantly damaging you. And that doesn't seem fun.
It's likely to snowball too, so whoever gets the first incap is at an advantage for the whole game.
How about a compromise, maybe standing up with one fewer actions than normal? Then you don't get a "full" turn but you can still move or dodge or attack.
Just assume I'm always doing that.
Damn it, Ronway!
One less action? I like it.
Scenario bonuses (getting to do something when your enemy is incapped) is a better way I think.
The problem is skirmishes don't have those.
So what if an incapped opponent gave the character scoring the incap (team choice in friendly/environment death) could gain a token of choice, or maybe even gain an extra action their next turn.
In this scenario, sure! Baron Blade is all alone in Megalopolis, without his Battallions or Turrets. If he fights the heroes head-on, they will surely prevail. The Baron knows better than to let the heroes set the tone of the engagement, though -- he will strike with full force when the time is right! (Continued Next Scenario)
The very first game of the proto version of Sentinel Tactics, there wasn't any recovery at all. If you were incapacitated, you were out. We tried lots of different penalties for being incapacitated: losing your next turn, losing an action, having to roll to recover, starting with less health. Consistently the problem we ran into is that not playing the game isn't any fun. Each round in Sentinel Tactics takes a decent amount of time, and that feeling of "it's finally my turn but I don't even get a full turn" was the worst part of the game. Eventually somebody said "What if there wasn't really a penalty?"
So the big issue with that is, then what's the point of attacking? Attacking should have a point. The game is about attacking. In skirmishes, well, you win by getting incapacitations, so that's fine. But what about all these cool scenarios? And thus the concept of Scenario Bonuses was created. Instead of taking the fun away from the incapacitated player, let's give rewards to the attacker. Now there's a purpose again to attacking, even if that's not how you win that specific scenario.
On a side note, there is still losing your powers and accrued tokens as a penalty for being incapacitated. This matters more for some characters than others, of course, but Absolute Zero, Omnitron, and Baron Blade especially care quite a bit about all those turns they take to spin back up.
Getting a victory point is the scenario bonus in skirmishes. In a skirmish, there's not the issue of "why should I bother attacking" that some scenarios could have. (Also, Dawn's one shot cares quite a lot that those points are scenario bonuses.)