Okay, so last question actually revealed that I may have been trading harm incorrectly, so I want to ask about that here.
The heroes are all going against Scare Chord, the musical terror! With music that literally terrifies, he assaulted the heroes while they were partying at the Sidekicks Lounge, a local nightclub.
Modern Villain
Drive: To perform and share his art with the world.
Conditions: Angry, Afraid, and Insecure. Scare Chord doesn’t get Guilty or Hopeless.
Moves: Cause mass panic with a strum of his guitar.
Send a sonic wave of terrify and batter enemies.
Push a bystander into a ‘fight or flight’ reaction.
Here he is! Pretty straightforward, m y thought was he’d hand out afraid conditions like they were candy to help keep the heroes from engaging him directly. (5 on 1 is just not fair!)
So, first his big entrance, in which he inspired mass panic-making the crowd freak out and try to run. (Give the heroes a crowd to calm and save!) Mahina and Amalgam were on this-Mahina Unleashing her Powers to Temporarily calm the crowd and ease their stress, while Amalgam used Defend to protect them from harm and direct them outside. Amalgam had to expose himself to danger, so I just asked-does he let himself get put into a bad position while arranging this, separated and unsupported, or do they mark a condition to push themselves to try and get people out? They chose to put themselves in a bad position (and I mentally noted to make sure they couldn’t help with Team that little phase) and moved on.
Next we had Peekaboo and Triplepoint both charging in to take out our villain head on. Peekaboo opted to create an opportunity and to take something away with there 11 total (making Scare Chord lose their guitar).
Now, trading harm, I decided that since Peekaboo hadn’t resisted harm, that meant Scare Chord got to hit them full on-so they strummed thier guitar as it was pulled away, and hit them with a powerful wave of fear-making them mark Afraid and then rolling to take a powerful blow. Which is second sort of question-do they do both? or are they supposed to ch oose one or the other?)
And w hile the team did struggle to take down Scare Chord, should he be doing more things actively instead of just when directly engaged? I don’t think he ever attacked anyone or inflicted any conditions except when heroes got a miss-could I just have him decide he didn’t like TriplePoint knocking him through walls anymore and hit him with a sonic wave to make her quiver in her boots?
They take a powerful blow when they get hit by the guitar wave. When they mark a condition they choose what condition they want to mark.
See also discussions here:
https://plus.google.com/+TimFranzke/posts/XAncFWENKF3
and here:
https://plus.google.com/103338054187217183319/posts/NkCXRuhgZQJ
Your villains should be doing stuff always. Don’t wait for the characters to make moves at them. Make your villains do things and have the characters react to you!
For a bit more on how to handle making your villains do stuff you might want to have a look at the Dungeon World Guide: http://www.curufea.com/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=roleplaying:dw:dungeon_world_guide_pdf_version_1.2.pdf
It’s at least adjacent rules wise.
A bit more: It usually would start with the villain making an entrance and showing their devious plan.
You ask the players (or rather a specific player) what they want to do. They start doing something but the villain still is free to act right? So they attack civilians. What do the heroes do now? Protect the innocents or remove the threat? They probably split up to deal with both.
Remember that every time the players look to you too find out what happens you HAVE to make a move. Msot of the time you make a setup move. You tell them of something terrible that could/would happen soon if they don’t react. If they roll a 6- make the thing happen directly. That is a hard move. It can’t be revoked. You also make a hard move to when they didn’T follow up on your setup.
Someone destroys a bearing wall of the museum and the heroes don’t fix it? It comes crumbling down around them and innocents get hurt.
For more on how to make moves, on hard and soft moves check out:
http://mightyatom.blogspot.de/2011/05/apocalypse-world-guide-to-hard-moves.html
Okay. Been reading this more or less constantly. There is a lot of good advice here, and thank you so much for putting together a list of items! I’ll be sure to use this as inspiration and reference point-the bit with Dungeon World was especially helpful. +1 .