A few esoteric rules questions:
If you have a label locked and the GM tells you to raise or lower it, you take a condition. Right?
So, if you have two labels locked, and the GM tells you to raise one and lower the other, you take two conditions. (ouch)
If you are fighting someone you have Influence over, or with a +1 forward, and you roll Take a Powerful Blow, you add +1 to the result– on a move where a higher result means worse for you. Is this correct?
Because that doesn’t seem very correct…
You have the Adult Move Empathize. You are in a fight versus a team-mate with two locked Labels who you have Influence over. You empathize with the fact that they want to kick your face in because you’re a jerk (or something else far more story related), and roll a 10+ on Mundane. They must now reveal a vulnerability or mark a condition AND you take influence over them again, so you choose to shift their two locked labels, giving them two more conditions. You can also take advantage of your influence on them, giving them another condition when you do so.
That’s one condition away from being out of the fight— one 7-9 on Provoke, with a desire of “Them to give up” and they must mark another condition and go unconscious. The only condition that’s easy to clear in this situation is Angry (by hurting the person you are fighting) so it’s tough to see how the mechanical side of this is supposed to really work, especially without a good move to reconcile what we should be really doing here…
Someone tell me what I’m missing!
Take a powerful blow targets you, not the other, so the +1 forward would not apply.
Oh, that makes sense.
Not sure if this is the intent, but I got the impression that locked labels should be invalid targets for being shifted. Because you’re at home enough with that label that outside factors won’t change how you view your relationship to it, those same factors shouldn’t get under your skin enough to give you a condition either.
E.g., Spiderman knows he’s not a Danger, so Jameson yelling about how dangerous he is doesn’t really bother him anymore. Contrast the Daredevil movie (sorry), where Matt terrifies this little kid. He’s already at Danger+3, so he becomes Guilty instead.
Put another way, locking a label seems like a narrative cue saying “this character arc is done, let’s look at another one.”
Mind you, this is heavily informed by characters being unable to lock more than one label. Even if you can lock more than one, though (e.g., if changing archetypes lets you do that), and if those labels can still be targeted for shifting, I’m pretty positive that being told to shift one up and the other down would only give you one condition. Most of the mechanics for shifting labels (all of them aside from +/-1 Forwards and advances, I think), require you to shift one up and another down. Presumably if you can’t do one, you shouldn’t do the other either (otherwise you’d end up with a label pool that’s got too many bonuses or penalties in it), yeah? I can’t imagine needing to take two conditions every time that comes up–so I’d say one condition per instance, rather than per label.
…Of course, I’m not Brendan Conway, so I could be completely wrong!
You can’t shift locked labels. At all. They are out of the discussion.
I agree with James and Tim, above. As usual, follow the fiction and the game’s internal logic: labels shift because the character’s self-image shifts. They don’t know yet who they are, and what’s their place in the world. When a character locks down a label, it’s because they know who they are under that specific point of view. As Tim said, Spidey knows that he’s not a danger. That piece of the character’s self image is out of that drama.
Good questions!
James Etheridge, Alberto Muti, and Tim Franzke got it. Locked Labels aren’t even on the table for shifting, period. If a label is unlocked but at its maximum (+3) or minimum (-2), then it can still technically shift, in general, but in this case it can’t go past where it is—so no shift at all occurs, and the PC marks a single condition. But a locked Label can never shift, ever, one way or another. So the PC never has to mark a condition, even if normally an NPC would be shifting their locked Label.
It’s absolutely right to think about it as “Your character arc, regarding whether or not you are this thing, is over; you know exactly where you stand with regard to that Label, and it won’t change.”
Take a Powerful Blow should never be modified by a +1 from Influence, because you’re the one rolling, and it’s all about you, not the other party. (You might take a powerful blow when a tree falls on you, as a result of a random weather event—another actor isn’t necessary for that.)
And if you have a +1 forward, generally speaking it shouldn’t adjust Take a Powerful Blow, for exactly the reason you stated—+1 forward is bad on Take a Powerful Blow!
For the Empathize situation, not being able to inflict conditions by shifting locked labels should solve a lot of this. But also, I’d push on the idea that you can really Empathize in that situation—the overriding rule in these games is “To do it, do it.” I’ll try to make Empathize more clear moving forward, but this needs to be something active and open, something involving talking to the other party, truly empathizing with them externally. So in the middle of a fight, this would have to look like a character ceasing to fight and saying, “I understand why you’re fighting me. Really, I do. I just think we can talk this through, though, instead of punching it out.” That could change the situation entirely!
Then, they get to choose whether or not they reveal a vulnerability or mark a condition—so they could respond by saying, “No, you don’t understand! No one else can understand what it’s like to be unable to touch anyone because your skin is made of ice! No one! I’m alone!”—and then they could even punch you back!
And then finally, the GM should be shifting the spotlight in this slug-fest between two PCs. They’re both important, and being a fan of both means that they both get a chance to act! So it’s absolutely appropriate for the ice-hero to then get to make their Directly Engage, which could further lead to a significant change of the situation.
The final thing I’ll say here is that if Empathize seems powerful—it should! It’s an adult move, and it’s pretty tough to unlock in the first place.
Hope that helps!
It did, thank you! And thanks everyone else for telling me things. My PCs are very “letter of the law” so it’s good to get a response that helps pre-clarify most of the issues I saw. : )