So how are other GMs going about enforcing limits on their players for how powerful they are? Some of these powers are very open ended, by design of course, but that is giving me some trouble in the game I am running.
Let me start by saying our group has a meta gamer. Every game we play he looks for a very optimal build because that is how he has fun. When we started I pushed heavily that this will be themed around teen super heroes ala Teen Titans, so they would not be wanting to murder people, they would be trying to apprehend people to bring to justice. I also encouraged people to set their own limits on power because it is more fun when those limits get pushed and broken, so our Legacy that can open shadow portals can only do it in shadows he sees (story related, another member of his legacy got trapped going through a portal to a shadow that he knew should have been there but wasn’t), our telekinetic cannot lift anything heavier than 100 pounds at a time, ect. I told them I would not force limits on them since the rules didn’t, but encouraged stuff like this.
So what happens every fight is our Trickster, with Illusion and Emotion control abilities, is invisible, has 500 illusions of himself, evil clowns, or other players active and interacting with the environment because he says his powers do not require him to sustain the illusions after creating them, and he is making all enemies suicidaly depressed. (He also has stupid good luck when rolling dice, so his plans pretty much always work)
What this leads to, especially in our recent session where I had them playing super powered keep away with a ball, is everyone feels so left behind. He has an answer for everything and needed no effort to get there. If I force a nerf on him he will stop having fun, but right now he is the only one that really is.
How are other people avoiding this or dealing with it? Surely there must be people with gravity control that are just turning their enemies into puddles or something else just as OP, how do we avoid that in this system?
What started as an absolute blast of a game to play has become something that I don’t know how to proceed on, or convince most of the group besides this one person to play again.
Drive your NPCs like stolen cars, man. He makes a villain suicidally depressed? That villain blows his own brains out in a messy grey mass that lands literally in the lap of teen-team’s most compassionate and caring member.
They can’t beat the story (or the MC) by beating the NPCs. That’s not how PbtA games work. If he strikes you down, you will become more powerful than he could possibly imagine.
I don’t limit the powers in any way reall. I ask them about how their powers work and they can set up their own limits. Otherwise the moves will do enough checking on their own.
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Remember that, mechanically, the description of the power set (and its limitations) is fairly meaningless. It provides color and scope, but not effectiveness.
That said, if the illusionist/depressionist is the one who ends the fight by getting that last condition on the bad guy? Yeah, have the bad guy act on his depression. He monologues a moment, thanking the team for showing him the light, that life just isn’t worth living…
…then steps in front of a city bus. Or sets off the explosives even though he’s still in the kill radius (along with a bunch of bystanders). Or any number of other, very permanent solutions to what most people see as temporary problems.
When this happens often enough, the city is going to start viewing the characters as very dangerous to have around. Think Spidey had it bad with. JJ Jameson at the helm of the Daily Bugle? That was a cake-walk.
The Unleash Your Powers move and Directly Engage are your limits. If the hero is inflicting damage, he needs to roll to directly engage. Other power uses should always require a Unleash roll to activate.
It sounds like your power gamer does not get that in Move Engine games, fails are opportunities for drama. Some players are fail averse and this doesn’t mix well with Move games. Also, in Masks, if you never fail, you will advance very slowly.
Another thing to try is going bigger. If the threats are too numerous and big for one hero to solve, then he’s going to have to get help. “What? There’s a giant robot attacking the stock exchange AND robot bees are swarming the financial district AND our team psychic tells us neither of these are the biggest threat? Oh my.”
Remember your villain harm moves. These are things they do to react when they take consequences. Also, the MC moves specific to each playbook are awesome. Your illusionist needs to get hit with a hard move that challenges him in some new way.
Finally, the other heroes should be allowed to have some reaction to this guy’s antics and fallout to any awful things he does. Make the world real. There are consequences to being a psycho “hero.”
“do not require him to sustain the illusions after creating them” >> that’s a call for escaped sentient illusion copy of himself (who certainly won’t be affected by his powers).
Also, people telling him to do/be something that his stat doesn’t reflect “you’re the best of the team, so why don’t you become the leader ?”
Add robots who don’t give a shit about emotions nor illusions
Add illusions that affects negatively the public (why didn’t you protect the old grandma and get +1 Savior ? What, you gave her a heart attack !)
Play on the unwilled use of emotion control (Empath/Magma). How will he react when rejected by the beautiful boy/girl ? Specially if he is angry. He don’t have powers to really break things, suggests him to destroy people, relationships with his power instead.
Broadcast the emotion he send on a telepath supervillain on his own team, so they also feel violated from the inside by their own teammate
I don’t seek to limit player character powers, but i do seek to find their limits in play. The theory being that we are trying to push these young heroes, we need to push against something.
When a player character does something super powerful, i tend to ask “oh, so you can do that? What’s the cost/drawback/side effect?”
Last game, my player with The Doomed revealed that his power, basically a symbiotic parasite, could form tendrils to steal the rifle from a sniper 200+ yards away. I was taken aback that he had that kind of range, but instead of saying “no, the shooter is too far” we established that he can do it, but has to concentrate to maintain his powers at that range.
Now we understand that his symbiote is tied to his concentration. Next time we play, i can hit him with hard choices between focusing on controlling his symbiote while using it at range or in other strained circumstances. I suspect at least a little collateral damage in the future….
The only problem i have is when we get inconsistent expectations from one another. As i said, i was taken aback that this character’s powers work at great range. I was also surprised that The Delinquent can use “hacker” powers to telepathically interface with computers at touch and control them with thought, rather than interfacing through some device. But that double-edged sword opens the door for me to interface with HER the same way, because that’s how she wants the world to work.
It becomes the job of all the players, GM included, to make sure these characters are SUPER, but that any discovered limits are meaningful and can be used to improve the game experience by making things exciting.
This thread has lots of good advice, but personally I wouldn’t try to solve this issue with mechanics. Your Trickster player has fun by being ultra-effective and powerful, but their fun seems to come at the other players’ expense.
Have you talked to this player? Sat them down and nicely asked them to reign it in a bit? Rather than nerf them mechanically, politely explain your problem to them and ask for help.
I’m with Chris; if this is an issue of them making the game unfun for everyone but themself, that’s the thing that needs addressing.
In Dungeon World we are told to make the 16 hp dragon dangerous in the fiction, since mechanically he is weak. Here somebody told us not to worry about characters having way OP fictional powers, since the moves Unleash and Directly are mechanically (relatively) weak. Wether you destroy a city block or just make a snide remark when you Directly Engage, you chances of inflicting guilt or some other emotion on your opponent stays the same. The fictional destruction of the city is purely incidental, since just saying something has the same outcome for the antagonist.
In AW all player characters are both fictionally and mechanically OP by design, but importantly the fiction and dice mechanics correlate.
I find the different nuances interesting, and have not formed an opinion yet. I feel that incidentally destroying a city just to inflict an emotion on somebody else may not be my cup of tea.
My problem with power gamers is that they often don’t have emotional attachment to the game. They throw their weight around because they can, and when you try to confront them with something emotional in game it often falls on deaf ears.
I think you should ask this player what his character cares about. Try to pin that down in a meta conversation. Also, ask the player what they are trying to explore with the character. Try to understand what they find interesting, and challenge them on that.