I skimmed the playbooks this morning and they look boss. My love for the game and fervor to play continue undiminished! However, two things did stick out. Firstly, I don’t recall any shape shifting powers listed, which seems a shame given Beast Boy’s prominence. I would probably add it to the Delinquent and drop technopathy. Secondly, it is a bummer that the only role that emphasizes gadgets requires a mentor. My playtest character actually had the fact that nobody supported his capability in that regard as essential to his background, so I am sentimental about it, and it seems very limiting in a broad sense. You COULD be a tech adept… Cyborg and Spider-Man really just have a decent Superior rather than a gadgets power. But the idea that the ability to create is tied to mentorship fundamentally bugs me.
I skimmed the playbooks this morning and they look boss.
I skimmed the playbooks this morning and they look boss.
The character I’m going to be playing in a Worlds in Peril game next week (converted from another system) is basically a junior version of Tony Stark. A teenage super genius who functions as the team’s tech guy and armoured hero Without the deep seated damaged psyche).
It’s a character type I don’t think is currently buildable.
Transformed has transmuting flesh which sounds like shapeshifting. If so, that would be the Playbook for Beast Boy.
I imagine there’s going to be a few edge-cases where a player comes up with a character that personality and drive-wise fits one playbook but ability wise fits a different one.
David Andrews Yeah. I’d love to play this as my character from a few previous games that either died or I had to drop out of. She’s a telepath/telekinetic, so the Nova would fit her best powers-wise. Personality and themes-wise though, the Janus is a better fit for her.
So looking again, I found The Outsider has “radical shapeshifting”. I am not sure Beast Boy fits that role, but it is there.
I think it is possible to adapt some of the playbooks easily enough to Power Armor. At some points Stark has been The Doomed (late Ultimates, when he was dying of cancer), or The Outsider (as written by Orson Scott Card), and it is easy enough to adapt the powers of those playbooks to fit.
I wonder if it might make more sense to describe the powers in a general sense, as with The Bull, or to give examples of the kinds of powers common to a particular playbook, rather than to offer a prescriptive approach. Might be too much freedom? I dunno.
I think both of those are symptomatic of a bigger issue, which is a kind of confusion about what the playbooks actually represent.
I feel like the playbooks want to be about how you relate to your powers, and what they say about your journey to adulthood. If they’re a tool by which you protect yourself and take guff from nobody, you’re The Bull; if they’re a big frightening well of potential that you don’t quite have a handle on, you’re The Nova; if they make you straddle that line between being an individual and just being alone, you’re The Outsider, and so on.
But because there are all these things which say what your powers are and do instead of just what they mean, it kind of muddles that idea. It also, as you point out, implies that if you don’t have mechanical permission to have a particular superpower, then you can’t have it (and might give you powers that don’t really fit your character vision, too).
The Bull is really cool in this regard, since it leaves basically everything open to interpretation. I’d like to see the rest of the playbooks do things along those lines.
Edit: I could also, of course, be totally off base about what the playbooks are supposed to be.
James Etheridge Of course, its hard to determine the tone and meaning of a game just by looking at its character sheets 😉
David Andrews I think James Etheridge has the gist of it, at least from my understanding. That is one of the things I like about the playbooks, that they are more based around how people relate to one another than how they function in a combat situation.
So on the one hand the powers are not really meant to be the focus, but on the other the powers are inherent to the characters themselves as expressions of identity. It does create a curious stress.
I think James Etheridge has the right of it, but I think it is going to be a problem that haunts the game forever. I see the same thing in Monsterhearts, where people make playbooks around monsters, not around the teenage issues that the monsters are supposed to mirror. Luckily, we all don’t have to play the same way to have fun and I am sure there are going to be people who play and love Masks that bypass teen angst to focus on superhero fun.
I love that about the playbooks. How you relate to your powers, but my big criticism so far is that the playbooks give you a list of powers to choose rather than something (sorry) a bit more like Worlds in Peril that gives a framework for defining your own powers.
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.