How do folks handle the Team pool when the Team doesn’t have a leader per se? Not because there’s a dispute, just because it’s not how they roll. Seems a shame to penalize them because they’re going for an alternate young superhero style, more like Runaways than Teen Titans.
How do folks handle the Team pool when the Team doesn’t have a leader per se?
How do folks handle the Team pool when the Team doesn’t have a leader per se?
In the context of the Team mechanics the “team leader” is just a temporary position relevant to the present circumstance, not the declared leader of the supergroup itself. Sometimes those’ll overlap, but they don’t have to.
In the absence of an obvious figurehead when entering battle against a dangerous foe as a team, you can give the title of team leader to whoever’s been telling other people what to do, or whoever came up with the plan, or whoever has the most vested interest in the current situation, or even just whoever was first through the door. Whatever makes the most sense in the moment — and if nothing does, you can just nominate a leader at random and carry on to answering the criteria questions. 🙂
If they’re all prepared to acknowledge that a character is the leader right now, they’re the leader right now.
Mechanically, the “leader” designation only matters for that one move (entering battle against a dangerous foe as a team), specifically when it triggers. The designation is partially there just to ensure that not everyone triggers the move—it only triggers once per time you “enter battle against a dangerous foe”—and it’s there to push the team, as well, and make them think about whose lead they’re following.
Even on teams without explicit leaders, when they get into conflicts, they’re generally following the lead of one person (like Alex Wilder or Nico Minoru in Runaways). And “leadership” can shift from conflict to conflict—there are great moments in the first Teen Titans show when the team is clearly following Cyborg, not Robin, for example. (Plus, the whole “WHO IS THE LEADER?” conflict is a classic one for this fiction.)
So you should always ask who is the leader in that specific moment, regardless of whether anyone has that title explicitly and always. The explicit named leader might not be the leader for this upcoming fight!
If the team isn’t sure whose plan they’re using or whose lead they’re following, then the final choice falls to you, the GM, based upon who you think is most in the lead…probably, who proposed their plan of action, or who got them into this mess…and generally, since nobody else really agrees, it means they’re all going to choose to mistrust the leader or the team.
Fictionally, the “leader” title can also be pretty valuable, such as when adults will come to the team and say, “Who’s your leader?” And if the PCs say, “We don’t have a leader,” the adults will say, “Oh that’s cute. No but really, who’s the leader? Is it you? You’re photogenic. You’re the leader.”
It’s a great way to use NPCs to change the team and their self-image, forcing the PCs to define themselves in opposition to the choices of their elders. That’s part of why it’s useful to ask “Who does the media call the leader?”, regardless of whether the PCs think they actually have a leader or not.
What everyone here has said.
In my campaign, in our opening scenario — a bank robbery by some old school golden age villains — the “leader” was the hero who just happened to be on-scene when the robbery started. They had the best grip on what was happening, they called in the team, they were the Leader for the move.
In all the examples I’ve heard of people playing Masks on podcasts… when there is no leader, they don’t get that Team point for the pool. Then the GM goes forward with the rest of the questions and gives them Team based on the players’ answers.