A look at Masks

Here's a brief look at Masks, a PbtA game which had a very successful Kickstarter, and which I expect will be published in 2016.

I've never played another Powered by the Apocalypse game, so I'm a virgin there. I've never even owned one before, so I have no idea how it goes.  But there's a call for playtests on Masks, so I had a look at the playtest materials.

Currently, there are three PDFs to the playtest materials: one of the ten basic playbooks, one of the basic moves, and one of GM moves. I and my gang have been playing RPGs since 1980, so there is clearly some unlearning that has to go on, and unfortunately the skeletal nature of the playtest material doesn't help. Fortunately, I can look at the DungeonWorld SRD for some of the connective tissue. Unfortunately, it's a bit different.

Part of it is the terminology (what is the difference between a soft move and a hard move?) and part of it is the formatting (the PDF they supply is clearly in format for booklets, but figuring out how to print it isn't in the remit, apparently). Still...

The playbook for a character is also the instructions for creating the character. It lists the various decisions you have to make and the moves that are unique to your character type.

Premise

The characters are teen superheroes in Halcyon City. They are a team: they all want to be superheroes and they all want to be together. Reasons might differ, of course.

Players define their characters' backstories and then the players together define how the team came together.

Mechanics

It turns out that saying "powered by the Apocalypse" goes a long way, but not far enough. It basically covers the resolution mechanic and the approach to storytelling. But there are a couple of other things that are involved.

Characters don't have hit points; they have emotional conditions. It might seem limiting to say that the character has only five hit points, but emotional conditions are more fluid than hit points typically are, and there are ways to relieve an emotional condition, either in the scene or for the next scene.

There's an influence mechanic that affects your rolls against a character, but you can trade your influence in for something more momentous.

There's a team mechanic that can provide benefits to the entire group or to an individual at the expense of the group.

The game works best with three or more players and a GM (whatever they call the GM in this system...referee?). You can make it work with two, but it stutters, and I can't imagine how it could be done with a single player without some heavy alteration of the rules.

Encouraging the Tropes

The game has a number of clever things that really encourage the tropes or cliches of teen team comics. (You'd probably have to make changes if you wanted to be the Teen Titans as written by Bob Haney, but frankly, I'm not sure that Bob Haney's mind could be contained in any game.) It would handle the Wolfman-Perez Titans brilliantly:

• Robin/Nightwing: Protege.
• Starfire: Outsider.
• Raven: Doomed.
• Cyborg: Transformed.
• Changeling: Okay, Changeling I have trouble slotting into a playbook. I feel certain that he'd fit, but I don't remember all ten of the character types right now. Emotionally, he feels most like the Beacon playbook to me, but his powers don't match the description they give at all.

The biggest problem (as shown above) to me is that the playbooks are essentially classes, and sometimes you end up choosing a class because there's a power you feel is neat. In the full game, I hope there's some discussion of fitting powers to the playbook. I don't have enough experience with PbtA games to know where I can hack, yet

An unfocused rambling look at problem powers

SYSTEM: SUPERS! REd

There's a post on the Supers! board about problem powers, and since I can't get to the board from work, I thought I'd pontificate here.

My first thought, deliberately contrarian, is, "What problem powers?"

In one sense, the player chose it and you agreed to it, so there shouldn't be a problem. An attitude of letting everyone be excellent at something goes a long way toward this—everybody playing wants to be cool at some point, and they should. It's a superhero game, not a game of existential failure. So, yeah, in an ideal world, there would be no problem powers, and you see that in games where the powers are purely narrative.

At least, in some games all powers are equally the same amount of problem—the powers can be limited by the fictional reality more than the game mechanics (or the game mechanics refer to the fictional reality, I guess). Marvel Heroic Roleplaying approaches that kind of game, I think. So does Masks.

But it's not an ideal world. For Supers! and ICONS and Mutants & Masterminds and DC Heroes and so on, there can certainly be problem powers.

I think that problem powers are rare, but if you're in a problem situation, it won't seem that way. Problem powers are really a combination of things, because for some groups or some players, these problems aren't problems at all. It's an intersection of player, GM, character, and the way the power is written.

It seems to me, though, that the problems happen when this power wrecks the fun of players (including the GM). Some powers make things too easy in a way that the GM didn't anticipate; some powers destroy niche protection so that no other character is special; some powers have consequences that are just mind-blowing. This was suggested in the Supers! thread: what if a character with time travel wants to pop back in time to the beginning of the fight and change the conditions? I doubt you planned the fight with that in mind.

Off-hand, I can think of the following problem powers, in no particular order.

Time Control. Usually the base form (speed yourself up or slow others down) isn't too bad...it becomes a pain when you introduce time travel into the mix. What if someone wants to pop back two combat rounds and help himself? What a book-keeping pain.

Telepathy. It's really difficult to run any kind of mystery when the character can casually walk in and read minds. "Ah, Ozymandias killed the Comedian. Concentrate your search there."

Wizardry. How do you preserve any kind of niche protection when one character can do anything?

It's true too that some powers are fun-sucking when taken to the logical extreme. There's a lovely piece out there about how control of feces would be an incredible super power. Or the ability to speed up time on others is horrific if you limit it to chemical reactions, or grant them half the power of the Speed Force but not the "protects your body" part, so they rip themselves in two. Those would be problem powers.

The solutions or workarounds that I've heard of or used are:

• The power is off the table. This is the easiest for the GM to use. If the power+player combination is problematic, don't allow it. As Gerry Saracco said in the thread on the Supers! board, just because the power is in the book doesn't mean you have to allow it. This has the advantage that everyone sees it and everyone understands it. The disadvantages are that cool ideas from non-problem players can be dropped on the floor, or that you didn't know that the power was going to be a problem when you okayed the character.
• The power has limitations. This is the opposite tack and it can be applied retroactively. For some reason, the character can't do those game-breaking things. Steve Kenson has explicitly said this about Super-Speed in Mutants & Masterminds—the superfast character doesn't clean up the entire fight before anyone gets there because that's not the way things happen in the comics. It's a genre limitation.
• There are consequences to the action. Look, if the character casually scans minds, he or she is going to learn some unpleasant things about people, like what people really think of the PC or become the target of a shadowy conspiracy by learning something that was best kept hidden. The character is constantly blipping back in time to fix things? The timestream police come near and want to have a talk with the character...and they have specifically made themselves immune to his powers. (They've had eternity to research them.) Though I hate to use game mechanics for an in-game solution, you could take away a disadvantage (and its points) with the claim that it's entirely consistent with the character that he went back and fixed the problem in another timeline. (That last one seems kind of obnoxious to me, so I doubt I'd use it.)

It can be a very effective way to apply limitations by having the player create them. Say, "Using your timeshift power to travel back in time to the beginning of the fight is too tough for us to do. It's okay if you declare you're stunting duplication or something at the beginning of the fight, but suddenly saying, 'I go back and help myself' doesn't really work. What reason is consistent with what's already happened?"

Reasons could be the idea that you can go back in the past, you just can't be seen and change remembered history (he can timeshift, but he has to be careful not to be seen by the characters, so he puts the item they need in the potted plant...it's effectively a retcon, but the story is that he used his time powers), or it's very difficult to go in the past where you are, or the magic doesn't work that way.

Maybe the power only affects a certain mass, or volume, or the effects last only a turn (every power has a wreck-other's-fun rating that determines how long it lasts?) or it has side-effects that only show up a week later. It might not affect blue things, or green, or work in any room but the one where you did it previously.

If the player determines the reason, they're more likely to be happy with it.

In the meta sense, most people will change if you say, "Dude, you're wrecking everybody else's fun. Find a reason why that won't work." In the X-Men comics, Logan complained and complained about being on a team...but he stayed there. There was always a reason.  (If the player is still looking for ways to make you personally miserable after inventing a limitation, well, why are you playing with this person?)

On the bright side for the player, limitations might give the character more spotlight time. This is the Kryptonite rule: Whatever the character's weakness, it starts to show up much more often in the campaign. If your N-ray vision can't penetrate iridium, there's a lot more iridium in the world. Giving the GM a limitation is an invitation to create situations to your character.

As a GM, you have to be wary of the Kryptonite rule. And that leads to the last "workaround." Sometimes, the PC can just do it, because that's not what this adventure is about.

That's one of the big ones: If the character can do something, letting the character do it is fine, because the adventure is frequently about something else. If the character is super-strong, you never complain, "He lifted that car I put there and de-railed the entire adventure!" You put the car there to give him a chance to show off. If you need him not to move the car or rip the vault door open, then the car is attached to a bomb that will kill all the normals in the area if moved, or the vault door is made of Questonite, or something else.

As a GM, you're already used to thinking about when a power is important. My sense of consistency is such that I don't want a power that waffles in its abilities so I try to enforce consistency, but sometimes we hand-wave in order to get to the real story. ("Yeah, you can find rope in this barren warehouse and tie them up. Now the sigils on the floor tell you....")[1]

EDIT: I've gone back to this several times to try and clean up various sentences. Nothing major, but I do struggle to make this clearer. Partly, of course, because it's a jumbled mess of thinking.

1. I think it's Robinson Crusoe where the hero swims naked out to the shipwreck and then stores useful items in his pockets for the swim back. Revision was less common in the eighteenth century.

Adventure Seeds on a Theme

I have no ideas today, so we're going to take something and I'll riff on it, and see if we can produce one or more adventure seeds that way. This might be a bountiful harvest of ideas or it might be awful; if I edit this, it will be for presentation or spelling, not for content.

American Thanksgiving is coming up, but my (Canadian) Thanksgiving was last month. So, being between Thanksgivings, I'll take that as my theme.

Thanksgiving is traditionally a time of family togetherness. What if some big bad villain escaped from detention but it's actually so that he or she can spend the holidays with the family? Maybe Dad is dying or something, and this might well be the last Thanksgiving they spend together. The villain can't get out without the help of some others, so there's a whole group there (some of whom don't care about the holiday, so they're happy to loot or whatever, and when caught, they point the finger at Villain's family house. It might look like this:

The PCs are looking forward to their own festivities when the Midnight Throne escapes from his maximum security prison, with the help of several supervillain associates (past villains from your campaign or perhaps Dark Silver, Chicle, Solar Flare, and Limpet, to invent some names). Limpet and Chicle are easy enough to catch because they're busy hijacking a teleporter to get out of the nation, and they eventually point to a quiet suburban home, where the Midnight Throne is having Thanksgiving dinner with his two associates and his family. The ensuing fight puts Throne's father in the hospital--will the PCs let Throne go there to say goodbye?

Mind, there might be some juice to be gotten from avoiding a family get-together as well.

Lots of the team is off enjoying Thanksgiving but several people have volunteered to be on watch duty. They don't actually want to go home. The problem is that even the crooks seem to have taken today off. The PCs respond to an environmental emergency, and that's good, but there's still nothing. Else. To do. They're about to break out the D&D books (and really, don't you want to roleplay your heroes roleplaying D&D?) when the alarms go off. Someone is inside the base!

Now, it could be a story where their companions have decided to bring them some turkey and pie, or even one where the villains bring the food, but in the tradition of Kitty Pryde's Christmas, I'd rather it were other-dimensional invaders. The bad news is, there are a lot of mooks. The good news is, the interdimensional gateway has opened in the hallway on the same for as the Disaster Dungeon, where the team does its training. If they can't beat the invading force directly, maybe the Disaster Dungeon can do it (once they disable the safeties).

And I'm out of lunchtime, so there you go.

There's no I in Team

The first superhero game I played repeatedly was Champions. Champions, like D&D, encourages tactical play, so teams tend to have types: there's the lots-of-damage-melee guy, the damage-at-range guy, the hits-what's-hard-to-hit guy, and the oddball, who either does damage to folks the others can't touch, or has some sensory thing that the others can't duplicate, or works as a support person. Your fighter, your wizard, your rogue, and your cleric, in other words.

And in terms of gaming, that's certainly what I did for years and years and I don't even want to admit how old I am.

But that's not the way that teams work in the comics.

Teams, as I've said elsewhere, exist between one of two poles: the IP parking lot pole and the Peyton Place pole.  An IP parking lot is a place to put characters just to prove that the Intellectual Property is being used; and Peyton Place is a foment of internal passions and discord. In the first, the villain is essential; in the second, the villain is, well, secondary and exists primarily to point out character things. ("This is why our love can never work, Moonsilver: Because you were not horrified when Amy Geddon said she wanted to kill everyone and start over...")

These distinctions are hardly absolute: the deMatteis-Giffen era Justice League tweaked personalities so that the interaction of the characters was primary and the villains were secondary, but it would be hard to find a purer example of an IP parking lot than the Justice League. On the other hand, the freshly-Kickstarted Masks RPG has a set of personalities and powers are almost irrelevant: what's important to the story is how the characters are going to react.

Most traditional games approach it from the tactical end. Each character has a role. In games such as Champions, the role is about what the character does. In games such as Masks, the role is about what the character is or how he/she/it reacts. A game with random character creation is more like an IP parking lot because you have no idea what's going to show up. It might be the burrowing guy with the magic staff, the interstellar cop with the light sabre, the speedster who has trouble hitting Mach 1, and the cosmically powered witch.

I assume that most players want something in the middle. They want something that isn't just tactical, but the idea that the villain is secondary isn't quite their cup of tea either. So how do you fit them together?

If you don't know what characters you're getting, maybe the answer is to take a page from FATE (and sort of Masks): Powers are irrelevant to working together. What they have are Aspects or disadvantages. The Aspects or disadvantages are crafted to make the team work together (or to create friction while making the team work together).

For instance, the X-Men all have the mutant disadvantage. It doesn't just mean that they show up on bioscanners that the bad guys have...it also means that the world hates and fears them, that there are strong social pressures to keep them with the group. Most of the X-Men are young, so they fit into the school setting. That's an example of social pressure holding them in place, and perhaps it could be gamed that way.

Did they ever do the road trip with X-23, Sabretooth, Logan, and his son Daken all trapped in the car for a long journey? Because that's pure comic book: that's four people with essentially the same powers but different ways of reacting.

Maybe you can use something like that instead of saying, "Hey, we need an energy blaster."

Or, like, you can re-roll your character until you get an energy blaster. Whatever works for you.

What's the alternative to effects-based?

Okay, a lot of supers games are effects-based: you buy the effect, and then define the cause. So a blast can be a fire blast, a mystic blast, an energy blast, whatever. Usually these are point-based: you have X points to spend.

(Originally, games were menu-style, where you picked powers off a menu. You got the vulnerabilities that came with it. You had no choice. In the third edition of DC Heroes you can see the transition starting to happen there: they say that the names are essentially suggestions.)

But there never seem to be enough points to buy everything you should have.

I very much like games like ICONS where you sketch out the basic powers and the stunt mechanic lets you have the other powers you ought to have. But I have to admit that sometimes I chafe under the problem of "Well, I have a swingline; why don't I just tie him up?"

In ICONS you'd just get rid of the swingline, taking the Trouble of "no swingline" in order to stunt Entangle at the same level. But why should you have to?  Why do you have to buy/choose Blast, Swinging, and Entangle to represent that grappling gun that can be shot at someone or used to tie them up?

Is there a rules-medium to rules-light supers game that is effectively cause based? It lets you specify a cause and then you have a suite of powers that you can choose from that go with the cause. I haven't read Mutant City Blues but it sounds somewhat like the table there (apologies for forgetting the name).

The constraint might not be points but rather the number of powers you can choose that are associated with a specific power: the more powerful, the fewer powers. Between that and something like a Determination point mechanic, you might not have to worry about player balance. If you had a list of causes, you could make this relatively easy for the player. This is close to what Supers! does with its offense/defense/other trinity for each power, but that still has the problem that you have to buy Entangle separately, and that specifically is one of the problems I'm trying to avoid.

I'm just tossing out ideas, but let's model this off ICONS because that's what I'm thinking about today.

Power Level	Number of Powers	"Cost"
1-2	10
3-4	5
5-6	4
7-8	3
9-10	2

You can have between one to four causes, depending on what the GM wants to run. Something like this gives your utility belt guys lots of little powers (you wouldn't specify them, you'd just mark them off on a sheet of paper and charge extra after you hit the limit) because they get a bunch of powers at level 2 or so. Your big guns get Strength&Invulnerability (they go together so often in the comics that I'd just count them as one power, unless you want the disadvantage) and, oh, flight.

Then you tie them together with your cause. Again, you can choose the effects.

Or does that just hide the not-enough-points problem under a layer of complexity?

PDF Only Supplements

I was thinking about what I'd like in a PDF-only supplement, the kind that's never intended to be sold as a printed book. How could you take advantage of the electronic and user-printable nature of PDF?

Let's leave off the bookmarks, because those should always be there. The only time they might not is when the content is less than four pages. We also assume that end users can print material from the PDF.

First, every character write-up on a separate page so they can be printed and used directly, without having. That means that the design of the write-ups is useful at the table as well as pretty.

A reasonably-sized graphic of a character that doesn't give away the secret ID (if there is one), so you can show the players, "Hey, he looks like this."

In fact, if the same write up had space so that you could annotate it (and the PDF allowed it), that would be great.

Cross-links between write-ups and mentions of the character. If clicking on the character's name took you to the write-up, that would be nice.

Certainly there's JavaScript stuff you could add that would make it interesting...a die roller, for instance, if there are random selection charts, that highlights the rolled entry or shades (not obscures) the other entries if you want to use the PDF directly from your tablet. (Actually, if you still want to keep the page count down in case you might print it, you can add a Print button to each character write-up that prints only that writeup, so the user could choose to print only the top character or the bottom one.)

Maps on the page would be nice: a way to print maps automagically, or to print only certain layers of maps so that the GM could plunk down the map before destruction and later after destruction.

Other ideas?

Helping others

So I got the iPad version of Sentinels of the Multiverse and one of the things that struck me was that Legacy's powers are very much about helping others.

In Mutants & Masterminds, I'd do it by leaning heavily on the Usable by Others modifier, with the advantages Inspire (pretty much made for it) and I'd probably use Favored Environment (With Teammates), or, if the GM disallowed that, put together a lot of Favored Environments and Favored Foes as Enhanced Advantages, usable by others. Then you wouldn't have to worry about power level limitations. Add Regeneration Usable by Others, and then build a tough scrapper with what's left.

In ICONS, you don't have the power level limitation to worry about, but it is harder. One way to do it might be Ability Increase Extra: Affects Others. (If the GM objects, you could do it as Ability Boost, with the caveat that you suffer the ability loss because you've been "lending" your strength to others.) Again, some Healing or Regeneration Extra: Affects Others.

In Supers, you'd want Healing, of course, and I think the best choice would be Imbue with the boost for Multiple Targets.

Ideas?