Can you “Take Advantage of your Influence” to reduce the roll of “Take a Powerful Blow” by -2 and thereby save them from the Powerful Blow? There has been a lot of disagreement about this at my table and some of the people (Including the GM) thinks the concept feels wonky, and it seems like the most mechanically powerful method of using the rules. To the point where I don’t see the point in giving up your influence in literally any other way. One of the worst ways that A villain can hurt your team is with this move so there is literally not a reason to do otherwise.
Also it seems like the situation causes both the Influencer and influencee to receive benefits. The one using their influence to take advantage gets what they want (You to not fail the Roll and keep fighting) and the Influencee gets the added benefit of passing the roll and not having to worry about influence from the original character anymore. In the other cases of this rule it seems like only the Influencer gains any benefit with the Influencee being high and dry or feeling pretty shitty about the whole thing.
Also, It seems like taking advantage of your influence over someone is generally speaking not very helpful otherwise. Inflicting a condition doesn’t guarantee a result on other PCs, taking +1 on one roll seems pretty useless when compared to just keeping the +1 roll all the time and risking not having the bonus at a critical point in the future.
An oft forgotten rule of Masks is that players can’t USE moves. Moves are always TRIGGERED through events in the Fiction.
Your interpretation is sound and correct. Yes, you can take advantage of your influence to give a penalty to someone else’s powerful blow, and thus benefiting them. The real question is how does someone go about triggering that in the Fiction.
Q1: A Villain hits The Outsider, hard, with a giant hammer. She takes a powerful blow. What does The Transformed do to trigger ‘taking advantage of influence’, in order to give The Outsider a penalty?
Q2: A Villain says something really mean to The Outsider. She takes a powerful blow. What does The Transformed do to trigger ‘taking advantage of influence’, in order to give The Outsider a penalty?
There’s also a case to be made of, ‘Why not just trigger Defend to negate the powerful blow entirely?’ But a big difference between the two methods is that Defend is something that is rolled for, with a potential failure. While taking advantage of influence will always produce a -2 penalty.
How, fictionally, would one be using their influence to affect the Take a Powerful Blow move though? Especially when the Take a Powerful Blow move is triggered usually as a reaction to a hard move, it seems the situations where one would have time to use their influence for it to affect the reaction would be very few and far between. Are the players merely looking at the mechanical effects, and not the fictional triggers?
What do you mean inflicting a condition doesn’t guarantee a result on PCs? You spend Influence, they take a Condition, there’s no intermediary step. Ditto on NPCs. You spend Influence, they take a condition, done.
Similarly, I think you misunderstand spending Influence for a bonus: When you spend influence for a +1, it’s on top of the +1 you already have. Note that it says “(after the roll)” so you have already added +1 from having Influence — now you spend the Influence, giving you a net +2.
Typically, I would wager that PCs don’t have advantage over each and every villain and so even if you think this is very powerful, I’d wager that it probably isn’t. Let’s look at a specific example with some of the uses of influence and the opportunity costs. Imagine a villain with only a couple conditions. Assume you have influence over the villain. You can take a +1 to EVERYTHING you do vs that villain. Or, you can expend your influence to inflict a condition and take them half way out of the situation altogether already. Giving up your influence is like taking a -1 to everything you ever try to do with this person – ever. That seems big to me compared to “I can pass this one roll.” I think that option is probably balanced. It would advantage the influencee but only in the sense that it gives up their influence. Perhaps they would have rather landed the blow though, especially if it did something like remove you from a fight or something like that. It is all so very situational.
A strict textual reading seem to indicate you can give the penalty on any roll, even if it’s a Roll low. But there is no logical link between:
*giving up control of how someone thinks about you
&
*them being in better circumstances after getting hit.
I mean, If you are in the position to “Help” someone taking a powerful blow, wouldn’t that just be triggering a Defend on them? Where if the defense is successful they don’t take the blow.
Example: Tammy Emotional is zapped by Deathguy McMustache’s Phazer Lazer, Tammy Has a Ton of conditions so she rolls a 12, but before she picks anything Jonney Savior Says “As it approaches her I jump infront of the laser. Bob the GM Says “Roll to defend” if Jonney rolls a Miss, he’s not fast enough and Tammy Picks as normal. 7-9, Jonney exposes himself to danger and takes the Laser Head-on, Taking his own powerful Blow, but Tammy is Safe On a 10+ He just Tanks it and protects Tammy. All of these are more interesting than just taking 2 off Tammy’s roll as in this case anything but a miss has SOME effect guaranteed, where a Roll reduction would do nothing here.
I can think of one way the fiction would have this make sense.
Your character has influence over a character that technically has the ability to negate whatever’s coming their way (think Hulk transforming, and shrugging off literally whatever). But the other character doesn’t like using their ability, and generally refuses to.
You could Take Advantage of your Influence to force them to utilize their ability (make the Hulk transform), where the character would then brush off the attack.