Masks and death.

Masks and death.

Masks and death.

I’m finishing my first read of the PDF, and it occurred to me that I didn’t see any mention about character or NPC death, except for the Delinquent moment of truth, where it’s hinted that only he may be able to make a choice other PCs can’t make, and the Doomed ticking clock of doom.

Regarding PCs, the nearest thing I found is the 10+ choice in “take a powerful blow”, but it’s far from death and it’s always a PC choice.

How much death (PCs, NPCs, villain) should be present in the game? I get that the game is not about the epic heroics: what should the tone of the game regarding death?

11 thoughts on “Masks and death.”

  3. As per group preference is my read.

    Some groups and GMs love the idea that death is always a risk and on the table. Others find PC death is less a matter of cool story to tell and more a matter of paperwork (creating and approving a new character) and slowing down gameplay (diverting plot to introduce new character.)

    As you might be able to tell, I’m generally in the camp that gets frustrated with player death because it slows everything down, interrupts momentum and cuts off plot threads that I may have been interested in.

    This isn’t to say that I have not had interesting character deaths that I like telling stories about. But those are the exception generally. Mostly I find if a character dies unexpectedly that things get more frustrating.

    As such, I’m unlikely to press character death if its not something the player is interested in. If there is a player that is looking for a heroic death I try to work with that. And there have been some characters I played where I was, indeed, planning a heroic death.

  4. Like most questions about tone, the answer kinda boils down to “whatever your table thinks is enjoyable”. Though page 36 of the rulebook has this to say as a hard-coded rule when creating your team:

    —–

    You aren’t killers. You’re a fairly young team, and you may have made some mistakes and blown some stuff up. Your actions might have led to deaths. But you aren’t killers; you don’t solve problems by killing those on the other side as if it was of no consequence. If your team is interested in pursuing more drastic measures, you might grapple with the complexities of killing as a solution to difficult problems. But so far, your team hasn’t gone down that dark path.

    —–

    For my take on it, with the presented tone of Masks, I think death — any death, be it PC, Villain, random civilian — should be serious. That’s not to say it can’t happen, but like that bit of rules text above, I don’t think it should happen lightly. Masks characters are impressionable young people on a mission to do good in the world, and killing someone — or having someone close to you die — is an incredibly traumatic experience that, played authentically, is probably going to rock the world of your average teenage hero and have a pretty dramatic influence on your game.

  6. There’s no one way to play obviously, but my interpretation of Masks’ tone and the conventions of the specific superhero genre it is trying to emulate is that death should be extremely rare. PCs should only die if and when the player decides, in keeping with how conditions, the “damage” of the game can’t actually kill you. Likewise, villains should only die if the PCs have made the deliberate decision to kill them. NPCs can die, but generally only as the hardest of hard moves in response to particular recklessness or negligence on the part of the PCs.

  7. As like others have said it depends on the table, but I got the feeling that the chance of anyone dying is supposed to be something that isn’t there without tons of pre approvals. At one point I remember warnings about even allowing the doomed playbook because it really needs death to be a possibility (and this tone issue is why I’ll only ever run Masks with warnings to players to expect death to be there, this super safety is something that bothers me).

  8. Thanks to everybody, I’ll talk about it to my players at the next time I see them, as an example about how this game is meant to be different from most games they have experience with.

    Should then villains too limit themselves from arbitrarily killing people?

    I guess that a death related to the players (eg, a relative, a friend) should be a very tense moment, and related to player misjudgment or inaction (uncle Ben anyone?), but still I think that a villain that avoids civilian death might seem out of place.

  9. They probably don’t consciously avoid civilian death. And there may be some off screen (or even on screen if you want to have a hero take a powerful blow mentally/emotionally) but the civilians that would normally be seen are those that (saints be praised) the heroes manage to save.

    Think about Young Justice. Bystanders almost certainly died in several instances of that show but it almost never showed up on screen. And it was only slightly less rarely talked about.

  10. To add on that, the only “young superheroes” comics I’ve read it’s been the Morrison’s new xmen run…

    And my players didn’t even read that – they are much more used to Marvel cinematic universe, so I need to establish a strong baseline

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