7 thoughts on “How are super powers / abilities handled in Masks?”

  3. In the playtest I did, each playbook had different powers to choose from. My Janus had Stealth and Gadgets as powers, where as my friend the Nova had Electrical Control, the Legacy could Teleport and use Telepathy, and the Apprentice (not sure if that is the playbooks name) had Gadgets and Weapons I think. The function of powers in Masks was primarily narrative, in that they gave permission for your character to affect the story in certain ways, rather than a scale against which relative might could be measured.

  5. Jason Cox In that regard it sounds very similar to Worlds in Peril which is also super heroes PbtA.

    The mechanics in that game are mostly concerned with emulating the Comics media and tropes into something you can use at the table to tell hero stories. Not at all what Masks is doing since it’s mostly concerned with how young heroes view themselves in light of others expectations of them.

    Note: I freely admit to loving comics and their stories more than many people.

    SuperNote: You can take my money anytime if you have a supers RPG. 🙂

  6. David Andrews: Jason Cox got it! Each playbook has its own list of abilities (not called powers, only because some playbooks have abilities that are not so clearly “powers”). They’re catered to the playbook’s theme and issues, so the Nova has open-ended powers like “Telekinesis and telepathy” or “Elemental control” or “Sorcery,” while the Bull playbook has strength, toughness, and unique skill at fighting; you get to choose the exact form that each of those takes.

    You’ll pick some number  of abilities from the options (varying with the playbook), and go! When you do something crazy with your powers, you might trigger the basic move unleash your powers to see what happens, but you’ll also be using them to defend teammates, or directly engage dangerous foes. Unleash your powers is the key move for getting away from having to define specific things you can do with your powers; this is the piece of the game that lets Spider-Man periodically create crazy things with his webs, for example. 

    Hope that gives you an idea of powers in Masks! Let me know if you have any other questions!

  7. I wrote this comment elsewhere as well, but I thought I’d expand here as this is a discussion about abilities:

    I love that the playbooks are thematically about ‘how you relate to your powers’, but my big criticism so far is that the playbooks only give you a list of powers to choose rather than something (sorry) a bit more like Worlds in Peril that gives more of a framework for defining your own powers/abilities.

    Like, the bull is about how you’re brash and spoiling for a fight, it can make sense whether you have super strength (as the playbook states) or batman style gadgets and kung fu or iron man style tech suits.

    The first Iron Man movie for example, he is pretty much exactly The Bull. In fact, depending on which interpretation you choose to play, a great many heroes could fit multiple playbooks.

    If a couple of the playbooks shifted slightly, you could incorporate player defined abilities pretty cleanly without too much trouble or re-design.

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