Question – I’ve been re-re-re-watching Young Justice and a lot of the time, the Team is facing groups of villains. Most of the examples I’ve seen (and the one time I’ve played) have a team of kids facing a single foe, or occasionally a squad of mooks. How do folks manage things like the Team vs the Injustice League where there are lots of folks handing out Powerful Blows.
Also, and I may have missed this, is there a mechanic for “and then you both get gassed and wake up in Harm’s dungeon”? In other games, I’d hand everyone a Fate / Drama / Hero point. Should I award Team for that?
Lastly, I know that one could easily make the YJ Team with playbooks, but I’m fuzzy on making villains. Has anyone thrown together villain cards for the various villains in YJ, just so I can get a handle on how to adapt the fiction to the rules? The Villain Deck is awesome but I’m not sure how Rampage (Villain Deck) compares to Solomon Grundy or the Abomination.
If you make cards for the Team, you have my thanks.
On consequences like “you get gassed and wake up in Harm’s Dungeon”, you have a very easy and direct fit under your GM moves, as Capture Someone. There’s also some very applicable ones on the playbook-specific moves lists. However, remember that one of your principles is to make your move, but misdirect: sometimes you can make this happen, but the “getting captured” part is only a convenient change of scenery, and your real trick is something else. Maybe you bring them together, and now Proton and Ghibli wake up in the cell, tied back to back: they used to be together until last session, but then they had a huge fight and broke up, so the situation is tense and awkward, and being prisoner isn’t even their main concern. Maybe Ragnarock really really REALLY wants to defeat Nightshade, and she goes all in on this: her roll fails, but you think that just having nightshade escape again would be boring, so you make her pay a price for her victory: she rampages and wipes the floor with her rival, but the collateral damage is massive, and the Aegis team dispatched on the scene decides to stun her with their sonic cannons and bring her in alongside the super criminal, because they think she’s too dangerous.
In general, you don’t really need the mechanic of handing out a Fate point or similar for this kind of situation; simply, the flow of the game is quite different from other games.
In Fate, you could come out of the blue with “You’re gassed and wake up in a cell – I am compelling the traps everywhere situational aspect, accept it and get a fate point or reject it and pay one”. You’re giving them something back because you can pull this basically out of nothing.
There is no such mechanic in Masks, because the flow of consequences and difficulties for the characters is regulated by the flow of the conversation and the exchange between character actions (and moves) and the GM’s reactions and GM moves. In Masks – or any PbtA really – you can’t spring something like that on them out of the blue: you either set it up, and bring it to bear if they don’t do anything (“more guards are coming, and they’re carrying what look like heavy metallic nets full of electrodes – what do you do?”), or hit them with it if they give you a perfect opportunity (“I rush into the room” “are you sure about that? do you take your time to look around?” “nah, I’m too worried about Firebird to think about that” “ok, the corridor seals shut and green gas starts seeping up from holes in the walls. Your vision blurs. You wake up in a cell…”), or if they fail on a move (like the example with Ragnarock above).
I’ve found that two or three villains, or a single villain and their nameless henchmen, often make for a more engaging battle than a single villain alone, especially against a larger group of heroes. As long as the team didn’t start the fight with a lot of conditions, I don’t find myself needing to pull my punches very much–remember that villain’s actions are governed by GM moves and the conversation so that two villains don’t really get to do much more than one villain does mechanically. The difference is that it gives you a wider variety of options when you are called upon to act as a GM, and it makes situations were the heroes want to use their powers to trap or blockade the villain more resolvable.