9 thoughts on “I’m thinking of running Masks at a con.”

  1. I suppose I should add “…and make it all feel worth it in the end” — maximizing the fun is the key, of course, whether that’s making chargen faster, funner, or more fulfilling…

  2. There are some pregens that are not completely filled that serve pretty well for a quick game. If you have access to the Deck of Villainy you can also say that each of the characters needs some sort of non-combat connection to a villain. Brendan suggests against using The Doomed, because it is a character that kind of needs a longer amount of play to come to fruition.

  3. When I ran games for my group during the beta, chargen only took about an hour, including the teamgen questions. Have a few villain ideas and some general-purpose alternate identity encounters that you can improvise with, and I’m sure you can fit a good game into the 4-5 hours of remaining time.

    I played in a Dungeon World game at GenCon, which had a similar chargen process at the beginning of the session, and we had plenty of time for the game.

  5. I played Marks twice at Big Bad Con in I believe 5 hour slots. It was fantastic! The GM was Carl Rigney. I don’t think he did anything not directly from the books. He might be able to give hints.

  6. What I did, knowing I had only 3-4 hours, and a group of 7, was make sure that everyone had their playbooks in advance so that they could do the character creation bit in advance. The actual time spent on going through everyone’s characters on the day probably came in at about an hour and a half before we were able to properly get started? After that I guess we spent about 6 hours… with LOTS of needless “planning” conversations….on the first encounter over the course of two sessions.

    I think if you were to be ready to provide examples or pre-made NPCs/villains for characters, know enough about the playbooks to be ready to advise on the best moves to select, and during play made sure to be super conscious of keeping the action going and not letting players just sit and talk about what they want to do, then you could happily get everything done in that time and it be a fun encounter!

    One thing I’d personally suggest is perhaps taking any of the more complicated playbooks out. Delinquent can be jarring for a one-shot I feel, Nova is a character I still have to somewhat explain to one of our players, and Doomed adds a whole level of stuff that might not really be worth going in to for a single game.

    Assuming you’re running for the amount of players the rules suggest (4 I think?), I’d go with offering up, of the core playbooks, only Beacon, Protege, Outsider, Janus, Legacy, Bull and Transformed. But that’s just me, looking for a slightly easier life 😉

  7. For a one-shot game, I try to tie PC backstories together. If you can get every character deeply related to 2-3 NPCs/groups, then the story for the one-shot can focus on those NPCs interacting. Villains teaming up, or a hero/civilian captured by a villain, etc.

    That way it’s one story that’s important to everyone at the table.

  8. Zed Lopez 5, including a 14 year old with severe ADD, and his father (with nearly as severe ADD). And, it was an on-the fly start-up, because we had a missing player at a really important spot in our normal campaign. Nobody but me knew the rules or system going in.

    Our ‘villain’ was a custom creation of my own, called ‘The Collector’. (She’s from an alternate timeline that ended in some absolutely horrific catastrophe, possibly the only survivor, and her powers involve time travel. She’s slowly driven herself mad trying to find, and collect, the ‘right people’ at/from the ‘right time(s)’ to avert the disaster. She has swarms of minions (robotic spiders in this instance) that she uses to find and capture her targets.

    My group fended her off, and one of the characters got a glimpse of her future when he decided to pry into her mind. The fight tactics on both sides changed drastically right there.

    The fun thing was deciding that, for some reason, she was very familiar with the powers of one member of the team, but not the others. We didn’t get into it yet, but at some point in a very closely related timeline (maybe even this one, it’s so very hard for her to tell any more), she had very close dealings with just that PC. But she had never eve heard of the others.

  9. Pre-fill the moves, let them choose abilities and re-choose moves after the first fight. Don’t do the “Why we came together” without pointing it to a villain you want to embody.

    For that long a session, I’d do 3 five minute breaks for leg stretching and to let you recombine what you hear. Breaks are godsends to DMs.

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