Hey! I am getting ready to run a Masks game, and i would like it to have a “Boku no hero academy” vibe, let me explain with the pitch:
“In halcyon city, there’s a highschool built to train the next generation of superheroes. This highschool is set on high standards, and not everyone can fit the requirements to go here. Here, they will learn how to work on team, use their powers and be a real hero. In teams of 3, they will be tested all days, in order to get ready for the real world out there.
Every team of heroes in the city is watching for this new generation. They don’t have a name yet. They are the new generation. This is their story.”
So, i was thinking about mixing this highschool thing with their personal stories coming out of their booklets, in order to bolster the identity issue without forgetting the battles and being a hero.
Could this work? How should i prepare for my first session then? Could i make a villain that is a teacher on this school testing them? Help me, please!
I’ve tried running a superhero high school setting in Masks, and to be blunt it doesn’t work at all. Masks relies on a certain separation of the hero life and the mundane life, and it needs periphery characters who present conflicting advice on what being a hero means and whether the PCs are doing it right, or should be doing it at all.
In a super-high setting that all goes out the window. You can’t have a separation of your mundane and heroic life because they’re one and the same. This especially sucks for the Janus, but it’s not really great for anyone. And you remove a lot of the variety of opinions by putting everyone in a school like this too; most of the adults they interact with will by definition be supportive of the PCs’ heroic endeavors because they’re here to teach them how to be heroes.
That level of automatic acceptance screws with some of the other playbooks too. It’s hard to say that the Transformed is alienated for being a superpowered freak when they’re attending a school for superpowered freaks. It’s hard for the Doomed to feel Doomed when they have such a large support network. It’s hard for the Beacon to feel like they don’t belong when they’ve already been accepted into the hero school.
Also it’s a lot harder to have the PCs fighting supervillains in this kind of setting, which is a real shame for a game about superheroes. If you’re attending the school, then you should be training rather than actually going out and heroing because you’re not supposed to be doing the latter until you graduate. So any fights pretty much have to be villains invading the school, which is hard to justify more than once or twice and also introduces the massive headache that is other heroes fighting alongside the PCs.
And so on. I know it sounds good on paper, but in practice there are a lot of things that don’t really fit.
If you set the heroes in a regular high school, though, you can make it work.
I actually played in a very successful PbP game with that setting (pre-Masks), and I’ve often wondered how much better it would have gone had we used that system (IIRC, we used M&M 2E to write up the characters).
James Etheridge i feel like you need to go watch My Hero Academia/Boku No Hero Academy”. It’s possible, and the show does it to the point where I briefly considered writing a blog on how much the show nailed the idea of Masks.
Your complaints are not wrong, but they miss a lot of opportunity. They’re attending a school to be certain heroes – not because they are heroes. Everyone might have different interruptions of what that means, and that becomes conflict. Teachers don’t have to agree with everything a student does – a common trope is the teacher that hates a character and doesn’t want them to succeed. And honestly, if your school experience was everyone in the school wanting you to succeed… I envy you. Mine wasn’t even close.
Beyond that, the playbooks can easily work around it. Sure, the Beacon was accepted… But do they really belong? Their peers can fly, and shoot lightning, and shapeshift. The Beacon? They have a few gadgets, and nothing else to speak of. The Transformed? Bullying is a problem in any and every school you might step foot in. The Janus? They can’t speak of school, or they pick other aspects – like family.
Villains? The first act of a PbP I did was literally a high school superpower games. You can have rivals that aren’t necessarily comic-book-level villains.
There is no reason it wouldn’t work just fine. It’s just that DM and players need to lean on entirely different tropes than they’re used to.
I’ve watched My Hero Academia up to the sports tournament arc; I still stand by what I said. Masks is geared for a different style of play, and the tropes are baked deeply into the mechanics. You can do a high school setting, just like you can do a lot of things that don’t really fit, but the game will fight you.
Separation of “super” and “mundane” lives: Just don’t make it a boarding school. Let them go home to their normal (or not-so-normal) lives. Maybe even have “extracurricular” power use be against school rules, if you want to further emphasize the divide (I also question whether that divide is even necessary to anyone but the Janus).
“Automatic acceptance”: Yeah no, you don’t get that at all in high school, especially fictional high school. Even if you don’t want to bring in a nasty Professor Snape type (and why wouldn’t you?), even the most accepting teacher can be intensely critical and judgmental, and is in the perfect position to tell the kid heroes how they “should” change. That scene in the entrance exam where Aizawa calls Deku’s quirk “impractical” is a good example.
Transformed and Doomed: Again, acceptance is in no way guaranteed at high school, and neither is a safety net. Sending them (and the Outsider too) to super-school and having the other super-kids treat them like outcasts would really hammer home that they’re the freaks among freaks.
Beacon: There are a couple ways to do this. They could have just barely gotten in need to work twice as hard to keep up (like Deku), they could have gotten in not by power but through some other influence (like Tyler from PS238, a powerless boy who goes to super-school because his parents pulled strings), or they could have lied, faked and cheated their way in because they want it so badly and aren’t going to let a little thing like lack of power stop them (like Jaune from RWBY).
Villains: You could easily assign them “homework” patrolling for crime, “field trips” to battles against major threats, and “internships” as sidekicks to active heroes. But even if the teachers aren’t willing to recklessly endanger their students (and what kind of super-teacher isn’t up for that?), I have never once ever seen a superpowered school get through a semester without getting attacked by villains at least once. From grudges against teachers to wanting to take out (or worse, convert) students while they’re still young and vulnerable, it’s easy to imagine villains attacking the school, either directly or subtly. And then there’s always the possibility of classmates abusing their powers but not getting caught by the teachers, forcing the PCs to take justice into their own hands…
I’d say ignore the naysayer and go for it!
There’s a reason “superhero academy” was a stretch goal setting hack: the base game doesn’t do it well.
Lex Permann If it’s just a new setting, wouldn’t that imply the base game could do it?
Sebastian Baker “Phoenix Academy is our first Masks playset, a setting for the game that comes with new rules and setting material to run Masks in a high school called the Phoenix Academy.”
Source: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1277034820/masks-a-new-generation/posts/1369055
So, not just a new setting. The playsets are all slated to include rules changes to help the game work in new settings.
James Etheridge Ah, that makes more sense, thanks for explaining.
Is that playset still happening, now that the Kickstarter is over?
All the stretch goals are still happening, but it’ll be a while before that playset in particular comes out. The pdf version of the Halcyon City Herald Collection was just finalized a couple of weeks ago, and the print version still hasn’t shipped yet. The next book will be Secrets of A.E.G.I.S., which we’ve seen some preview art for but still haven’t gotten any playtest material on, let alone anything approaching an ETA. The Phoenix High playset will be in the book after that one, Masks: Unbound.
So, all things considered, I’d guess late next year at the earliest before that playset sees the light of day. Magpie delivers quality stuff, but they have pretty long production cycles.
I ran a Masks game at BigBadCon on Saturday set in a superhero high school and it was one of the single best role-playing sessions I’ve ever had.
It might be a bad fit for the Janus. But I’m not seeing trouble with the rest.
We had a Legacy, a Nova, a Delinquent, and a Beacon. The Nova boarded at the school and the rest went home to their parents.
I had toyed with the idea of making superhero high school an explicit premise of the session, but decided to stay blank slate. When the Nova’s player described a horrible event of her powers going awry in infancy and hurting her family, resulting in her being found and placed by an organization dedicated to helping super-powered children, I suggested the high school as where she might have ended up and the players all liked the idea.
Maybe I’d find problems in a campaign I didn’t in a one-shot. But based on how well the one-shot went, I’d be happy to try it in a campaign.
A plus for a one-shot was that it made it really easy to start off with an action sequence to familiarize the players with the rules — Danger Room training session against four other students (who had a reputation for playing rough, of course.)
I played in a superschool game using masks. Works fine. Just don’t pick a playbook thats antithetical to the premise.
Jim Crocker I don’t think that’s a good assumption to make. I mean, if you look at Apocalypse World, you’ve got playbooks where the default is usually to leave them out (the Quarantine, the Space Marine Mammal/Landfall Marine, the Macaluso, possibly the Child-Thing), because they automatically bring implications about the setting that the GM might not want. Saying “don’t play these playbooks, or if you do be prepared to tweak them to fit” seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I also don’t think the Transformed, Doomed or Beacon actually are antithetical to a super-school setting, but explaining why would just be repeating myself.
Jim Crocker The Beacon is a core Masks playbook.