Alright. So I have ran a couple of sessions of Masks so far. Its been a blast and I’ve loved it to death, though tripping over the ‘share a moment of celebration with someone’.
So, w hen I saw this, I thought it was kinda a personal moment. Like ‘you two both did something cool or you got a personal triumph’. But in game the players have been using it basically as an end of session move-they dealt with the giant robot gorilla and got the poor girl who summoned it to safety, and they trade high fives and everyone goes through their moves.
Moreover, second session they dealt with a villain called the Watchmaker who was making villains more and more angry. They dealt with two villains who were relatively quick fights (and wanted to trigger that after each of them) and when they got to the watchmaker they flubbed a few key rolls-and while they beat t hem, he managed to trigger his aggression bomb through the city, instigating mass riots and anger-and proceeded to trigger their moment of victory again because ‘at least they beat him up and he couldn’t do something worse than that’.
Am I reading this wrong? Are they right and you can use it after each fight? Are they using it gratuitously?
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My gut reaction is that it’s always gonna be a really fictionally-determined situation, and not a stock-standard every-time end of session thing. I think the first robot gorilla situation is a fine use of it. Beating a giant robot gorilla and whisking a sorta-innocent person involved to safety sounds both triumphant and worthy of celebration. The second one, I think if I were GM I’d not be letting ’em triumphantly celebrate until said riots and mass-hysterical violence were sorted out, ’cause “everyone in the city’s fighting each other and trashing everything” doesn’t sound like the kinda “job well done, let’s go get shawarma!” closure I’d expect from the words triumphant celebration. Unless they’re a team of completely indifferent jerks who only care about their direct mission and not their collateral damage or the actual safety of the people in their community, in which case, sure guys, celebrate away, you totally nailed it. 😉
My own query about the celebration thing is how it plays out when there’s 3+ people involved. As you say, a lot of them seem really personal, but in such a heavily team-based game the opportunities to triumphantly celebrate as a team seem pretty common, and I don’t know how the rule plays out in that circumstance. The way they’re written, I don’t think making it apply to everyone present works, so maybe people are meant to pair off & hug it out while the odd-ones-out get shafted and feel horrible about themselves and inevitably Grow Away From The Team at the end of session? 😛
Actually, I spoke this over with a few others, and I think one of them hit on exactly what you’d need. Which is making it a moment of celebration-what are you doing to celebrate? Do you hit Games&Hotdogs to chow down and play video games as a group? HIt the mall and have a good time shopping and spending money and do what teens do? Even just hit netflix and binge watch a show cause you ‘earned it’. If you are having a party and during it you have that moment with someone, then done, thats a moment of celebration.
If you aren’t able to do that or don’t feel it’d be appropriate, then really it doesn’t count as much.
Something that I would do:
When they all trigger the celebration move together at the end of session, don’t do the end of session move too.
They kind of do a similar thing there and can be too bookkeepy.
Need to test this more though.
Both of those are great insights. 🙂
I see triumphant celebration as more intimate, allowing to explore relationships between 2 PCs, trying to switch the subgroups in the team to justify it.
But following Tim Franzke ‘s good advice, I think I will substitute it to the “Grow closer to the team” end session move option as I have redundancy problem (shifting labels + gaining influence when you already have : Bull is in love with Legacy, when they celebrate and make end session move, Bull must change its labels 3 times… )