I GM’ed my first session of Masks last night, and found that even a five-condition supervillain didn’t present much of a threat to the PCs. If your Danger isn’t negative, your “directly engage a threat” roll will come up with a hit better than half the time, which means you can often choose the option to avoid the enemy’s blows. My players took down their supervillain with only two of the PCs taking one blow each. Not an impressive showing for the supervillain.
Can anyone suggest something I might have missed? Or is this in line with everyone else’s experiences?
I’ll be curious to know what other peoples experiences have been, but how many PCs did you have Don Bisdorf?
Five PCs.
I’ve only run one session of Masks so far, so I don’t have a lot of experience. But from running other PbtA games, I would guess that most villains would go down if all the PC’s just directly engaged one after the other. Is that what happened?
One player used “provoke” to draw the villain out from his hiding place, and one player had to use “reject influence” at one point to block having her Labels shifted, but apart from that, yes, it was a lot of “directly engage”.
My other PbtA experience is with Monster of the Week. In that game, the 7-9 result lets you trade harm, but doesn’t give you any extra effects. You have to roll 10+ before you can take the option to reduce harm, and even then you can only reduce harm.
The tone of Monster of the Week is different, of course. Any fight in Monster of the Week is supposed to be dangerous and bloody. I certainly don’t need supervillains to leave a trail of broken PCs in their wake, but I didn’t expect the PCs to triumph quite so easily.
Were you using hard moves after the villain gained conditions? When the heroes succeed in hitting a villain and she gains conditions, that villain then uses a move, which allows you to shift the fight and make it impractical to just keep directly engaging. If you threaten innocents, give them difficult choices and make serious threats, it forces your players to approach the fight differently.
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My experience has also been that one villain slugging it out with a bunch of PCs goes down quick–so find ways of making the scene more interesting than one villain vs. a bunch of PCs. Give them bystanders to protect, fires to put out, barriers that prevent them from simply engaging the villain. The rules say to mark a villain’s condidtion when they take a powerful blow, and that’s subjective. When I put my players against a cosmic-level villains, I tell them that their punches and zaps aren’t enough–which means the players have to think their way around the problem, or use their moment of truth to triumph.
I had made some villain moves in response to conditions gained, but they may not have been hard enough. For my next supervillain, I’ll plan to rain down more serious fire and destruction in response to villain conditions. The advice about adding extra elements of danger to the scene also seems sound. Thanks for the advice!
We also had lots of fun with pairs of villains, which split the focus of the party a bit.
Joel Pearce got it.
It’s not how tough they are, how long the fight is.
A 5 conditions Villain is an NPC that will do five hard moves against the heroes.
Use those unblockable moves.
Hit them, hit them in the feels and on the relationships using the moves.
Force them to choose between saving loved ones or protect teanmates, force them to witness what they care for being destroyed because they went and fought, make them fear the villain enough to consider crossing moral boundaries when fighting them.
It’s not about how you put down the villain, heroes will always best villains, it’s about the consequences.
If all you’re doing is having your villain attack the PCs, of course they’re going to go down quickly. You need to give the heroes compelling reasons to do other things – threaten civilians, try and capture a mcguffin, take advantage of the setting to limit some of the heroes’ ability to get to where they can attack you directly.
This is an example of the 16 HP Dragon, one of the best PbTA articles ever written. http://www.latorra.org/2012/05/15/a-16-hp-dragon/
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Along the lines of the 16HP article another thing I do is functionally stop the heroes from directionally engaging to begin with.
Can’t directly engage if:
-They have to take care of a force field first
-They have to avoid debris just to get to the enemy
-The bad guy is literally tougher than they are (super tough alien powerhouse being hit with a normal arrow) meaning they’re not really “directly engaging” without some creative power uses first