Yesterday we tried a session of Masks. It was fun, though I suspect you need three players and a GM to really bounce stuff around. (We had two players and me.) I’ll do an actual play at some time in the future. A couple of things came up. (I’m trying to separate the wheat of actual questions from the chaff of being unfamiliar with any PbtA games.)
First, can a Nova generate burn and spend it in the same turn? In the end, I allowed it because it was the end of the session, and it saved a life, but it didn’t feel “rules-y” to me..
Second, how many Team can a PC spend in a single move? I can spin it both ways: you can have the cool destroying move that inflicts four conditions, or everyone gets to apply a condition (for example).
It might be nice in the final product to provide some kind of advice for either introducing NPC heroes onto the team or changing/limiting options if there are only two or one PCs.
V. briefly, we started with the Nova and the Outsider (Beacon and Rev) having a fight in an upper-class suburb with Scarlet Songbird, who it turns out is allergic to the youth serum that lots of Golden Generation villains use. But he got so mad at their fumbling attempts to stop him that he escaped and decided to set up the old villain group the Injustice Agency again. Much of the rest of the session was devoted to trying to find a home for the family whose house had been burned down in the fight. In the course of that, Beacon and Rev stumbled upon the auditions for the Injustice Agency, and Cygnus, who the PCs had worked with in the canonical First Team-Up but who had decided to go to the other side. Chaos ensued.
Fun was had. One of the players is looking for a supers game to run his group through so he wondered when the actual product would be available; I have no idea, so I said maybe late in 2016.
There are no turns in Masks so the question is difficult to answer.
One team per move I’d think.
Tim Franzke Poorly worded question, I guess. Can you generate Burn and immediately use it or are they separate moves? Or does it depend on the fiction?
Trying to narrow in on the meaning of the question, I generally try to carry the conversation of the game by letting everybody have their say. Sometimes people get to move two or three times, sure–we have something we want to resolve in a comic-book way, so there are two or three “panels” or even a “page” devoted to the interaction of a character with someone else. But everybody there gets a chance to act.
So in the case of someone falling to their death and the Nova is the only one is in a position to help even though he’s out of Burn, it seems appropriate to have him generate Burn at some cost so he can help. (In this case, he gave himself a condition, which knocked him out.)
In retrospect, it could have been Take A Powerful Blow or Defending as a move instead of generating Burn…any of those would have done, so long as I’m not hung up on the idea that he needs to generate Burn to use some aspect of his powers.
Is that clearer?
It depends on the fiction. If generating burn is drawing in power and done very deliberately then it takes a while and you probably can’t directly use your powers. When it’s like Johny Storm who just goes flame on and has Burn you can start blasting away fast. It depends on the fiction.
I’d agree with Tim Franzke. If the player says they can, they can. Mechanically I don’t see any reason why the character couldn’t, so it would pass to the fiction.
Given the inherent risks of charging up, I don’t see a problem with them doing it basically instantaneously.