Ran my first session of Masks this past Saturday with six (!) players. Notes on gameplay below, with a summary of events at the bottom:
– Despite the players being evenly split male/female, there were 5 female PCs and 1 male PC. Diverse playbook art works!
– I felt unsteady on my feet at first, but the big fight that kicked off the session went well. Splitting focus between 6 PCs is a challenge, but I kept in mind that every player move requires an interesting response and everyone got something to do.
– Some interesting Directly Engage outcomes: the Nova used her biokinesis to make an enemy bruiser punch himself into unconsciousness. She elected to open up an opportunity with her 7-9, meaning taking a blow from him in return was still an option. Since she was zapping him at range, I narrated that he was staggering towards her while battering himself bloody and fell on top of her as he blacked out. She decided “Afraid” was an appropriate condition. 🙂
– More than once, there was some interesting back-and-forth between NPCs and PCs, or between PCs, that I had to pause to remind myself of the influence rules. For instance: the goody two-shoes got caught sneaking back into her dorm after curfew by the headmaster. Roleplaying the power struggle between the two was so entertaining that I had to remind myself, “Oh, right – are you rejecting his influence or letting him influence you?”
I imagine I’ll get more graceful at this with time. If nothing else, it served as a good signpost for the scene’s climax: okay, enough banter; now it’s the moment of truth. Will Nessa accede to the headmaster’s wishes or stand up for herself?
– One thing I definitely need to do is make sure the supervillains use their influence more. If every adult has influence over the PCs, they should take advantage!
– I’m sure this has come up before, but a place on the playbook to record influence would be nice! It was unclear whether it’s a player’s responsibility to record who has influence over them or who they have influence over (or both). Does anyone have any best practices on this that they’d like to share?
– This session ended with several heroes going off to investigate things on their own. I have no objection to that – one of them did it to clear a condition through reckless behavior – but wonder how the game works when the party is split up. I imagine the team pool no longer comes into play. Do challenges need to be staged down?
– I played fast and loose with the powers, as the recap might hint at. The mechanics of how the powers work (as opposed to the playbook moves) are fairly loose, so it shouldn’t be a big deal.
As for the session itself:
The setting was Boston, 4 years after a Mutants & Masterminds campaign I’d run before (which borrowed a bunch of villains and organizations from the Champions setting, to complicate things further). After a dimensional invasion wrecked a chunk of the city, a high school for superpowered teens was built on the remains of Boston Latin School. Students are taught how to live with their powers, not how to become superheroes. In fact, costumed crimefighting is expressly forbidden by the administration.
With that: our heroes were watching a Red Sox playoff game in the Protege‘s luxury box when the sound of a melee caught their attention. Power Crusher and Pulsar, along with some armed thugs, were kidnapping a woman from the adjacent box. The Nova used her biokinesis to (temporarily) jellify Pulsar’s legs. The Transformed flowed through a vent in his liquid metal form and overpowered two of the armed thugs, while the Outsider caught the third by transforming a patch of carpet into flypaper. The Janus found a woman who seemed to be directing the kidnapping via a radio, and nabbed her before she could flee. The Protege and the Legacy dodged blows from Power Crusher until the Nova could double back and puppet him into unconsciousness.
The kids snuck back onto campus, but the Legacy was caught by the headmaster. He reminded her of the school policy against costumed heroics, but she refused to promise not to intervene in future threats. The Nova handed in an incomplete math assignment, then shrugged off her teacher’s insistence that she come to office hours to review it. The Janus and the Protege passed their “drop a VW Bug off a roof” Physics challenge when the Janus “borrowed” another student’s hover powers. The Transformed spent lunch period in the library after being mocked by the popular girls. And the Outsider realized the “substitute” English teacher was a visitor from her home dimension, there to prank her!
Very curious to hear about people’s takes on Influence tracking as well.
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I find you don’t need to scale down when teammates are apart. Team encourages teammates to jump in and remind others how useful they are to have around.
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RE: Influence tracking, you pretty much only need to track who you have Influence over. I’ve seen people confuse themselves a lot by trying to track both directions, and unless I’m mistaken, there’s only three places in the rules you’d ever need to know who has Influence over you:
1. The Janus’ Game Face move, since one of the options is “make someone lose Influence over you”.
2. The end-of-session option to “Grow away from the team”, which likewise has someone lose Influence over you.
3. The advancement option on every playbook to have someone permanently lose Influence over you.
#1 is probably the most commonly-occuring in play, when it’s available, but it relies on having a Janus at your table and them taking the Game Face move and the part dealing with Influence is only one of three available options for the move. But if you have a Janus who has that move, sure, it could be useful for them to track who has Influence over them. Though you could always just ask when you make that particular move.
#2 and #3 both also take Influence away from someone, but the circumstances that make those rules come into play are heavily based in the fiction, to where I feel like knowing ahead of time whether the target currently has Influence over you is largely irrelevant to their use, particularly with how regularly Influence can be gained and lost.
In #2, if someone on your team has alienated your character to such an impactful degree that at the end of session you feel like growing away from the team best defines your experiences, then in my eyes naming the jerk responsible isn’t really about removing their Influence, it’s about following through on the fiction — with removed Influence as a mechanical cookie to support it. So in my experience it’s been perfectly natural to say “Jenny stone-cold refusing to make out with Virgil in the back of that stolen car has formed a rift between them, in Virgil’s eyes, and since they’re also superteammates that means he’s grown away from the team; Jenny, if you had Influence over me, lose it, because, whatever babe, I didn’t really want to mack with you anyway. In fact, I think you came on to me and I turned you down. Also your hair is dumb.”
#3 is similar, in that if you’re at a point where you’re spending a precious, precious advance to remove someone’s Influence over you and preventing them ever having Influence over you ever again — with this being the only person you can ever permanently shut down this way — there’s clearly some large, dramatic narrative backing for that situation. And at that point you probably don’t care whether they currently have Influence over you, since the intent of the advance is much larger in scope than present circumstance. So for as rare as it is that this situation will even come up, it’s easy enough to either ask or simply say “If they have Influence over me, they lose it, and from here on they can never regain it”.
Unless I’ve missed something, I’m pretty sure those are the only circumstances that knowing who has Influence over you comes into play. So I’d just stick to keeping an updated list of people you have Influence over, and let everyone else handle themselves too. There’s currently no dedicated space for said list on the sheets themselves, but some HANDSOME GENIUS has added an infinitely-expandable field for it on the Masks Roll20 sheet (ala http://i.imgur.com/ibV0zJ3.png) for folks using that toolkit for their online games.
Matt Morton : excellent, and I will pass this on to my players (perhaps in abridged form).
Abridge away! The take-away point is “Track your own Influence; deal with anything else if/when it shows up”. I just decided a while back to go into detail every time I post so that when someone in my group hits on an issue, I can just link ’em to a writeup and save myself re-explaining. 😛