Directly Engaging In Verbal Sparring.
Directly Engage A Threat seems to lean more as a physical move than a social one. I know that you can Take A Powerful Blow based on hurtful words, but is this the result of a Directly Engage or just when it would make sense in the fiction?
If you are going to use Direct Engage for a verbal fight, would you still roll + Danger? It would seem to me that + Superior would make more sense (using your smarts to figure out what would hurt them).
Not sure, but my vibe is that Danger is danger, so if you’re bringing the pain, that’s what you use.
You can’t Directly Engage from a position of superiority! You have to, in the words of Kid Rock, get in the pit and try to fight someone.
To me, it appears that the important distinction between Directly Engaging and Provoking is intent. The former is an attempt to hurt and the later is an attempt to motivate.
+ Danger is not a measure of how hurtful you can be emotionally though. Nor does + Superior measure how much better you would be at physical confrontation. I suppose you might argue that + Mundane would tell you how well you can relate to people, which would in turn inform you of where you can punch them in their emotional gut.
It’s totally too bad that influence is only a binary state. If it could acrue, that would be my go to answer for what to roll with.
Like Adam said, directly engage is only really when it’s a rougly-equal mess of a situation and you want a dice roll to sum it up or figure out the aftermath. Danger is the “being threatening” label, and with as rare as the verbal engage situation is it works about as well as anything else would.
The first query was right both ways though: drop powerful blows whenever it seems appropriate. It’s a great move, and it’ll probably work this way most commonly since most arguments are just roleplayed dialogue without dice involved anyway.
Your last two points were so close to the solution in that area of the design: namely, Mundane already does tell you where to emotionally hit people, in the form of pierce the mask and specifically the “how can I gain Influence over you?” question (or “how could I get your character to X?” works, too). Coupled with the take advantage of your Influence over someone options — particularly inflicting a condition — you can ask where someone is vulnerable and then immediately exploit that information in a hurtful way to make them Angry, or Insecure, or whatever else you were trying to get out of it. The team can actually take down villains solely through words in this fashion, too, which is wonderful after-school-special material. 😛