I started a campaign, and one PC, a Nova, has sorcery as ability, which rekindled a doubt I had for a while: usually, how do you manage general powers like that?
With “general powers” I mean that powers like sorcery, contrary to others, don’t have a defined scope, but could be anything: superstrenght gives you superstrenght, if you want to teleport you can’t, while sorcercy potentially could do anything: “I use my sorcery to teleport myself”, or “to increase my strenght” or whatever.
If you happened to have similar powers in your games, how did you manage them? (If you limited them somehow, or if you let them free to do whatever came to mind, etc.)
I don’t mean just as MC, also as player is interesting.
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I always make the general powers less reliable than the normal ones. Blowback is much more severe the broader the power is. Or you could create a narrative complication. The sorcerer stuff has to come from somewhere (or something!). Maybe it had a drawback to being used (a race or group of demons that home in on sorcerers to consume their tasty tasty souls).
This should always be done collaboratively, of course.
Usually dice in PbtA games don’t resolve tasks, they resolve risks. You shouldn’t be rolling to see IF the sorceror can teleport or IF they can cast a fireball. You’re rolling to see if the risks of the thing occur and to what degree.
So basically: if they are using sorcery to do something that’s not risky, then who cares? Be their fan! There’s plenty of comic book Sorcerers who behave similarly. But once there’s a risk, bring it on. “Whoops, you teleport three nearby people with you too” or “the fireball is five times as big as you expected”.
Two things:
1 – When they say they do something like that, you say “wow, sorcery can do that, huh? any drawbacks or limitations that you know of?” and then write that down for evil badguy sorcerers
2 – The consequences of Burn are enough to, in practice, make a limitation.
Personally, I played a Nova in a previous campaign with Mauro Ghibaudo, and his powers came from a group of spirits from the Nova’s ancient people out of Aztecs memories. That alone gave a lot of golden chances for our MC to complicate my Nova’s life, creating a really gorgeous story arc for him and the team.
And yes, burn’s complications are just ok, but I think Mauro was speaking about basic moves like Unleash your powers.
By the way, our analisys of the play situation as it happened in the campaign at hand is that the player isn’t too accostumed to insert fictional problems for the character (it’s like “well, can I change the world at will? Cool, let’s play the Nova!”).
Might be some guide could be added to the Nova’s ability (and others like that), maybe with questions to answer, to put less expert players on the right path, easing the MC’s work in getting juicy fiction out of the player.
Assuming they can’t hit 10+ all the time with unleashing their powers, they bring their own limitations there too.
Ask what kind of sorcery it is. The style will come with a negative or five if you think on it.
If they do hermetic circles and rituals then yeah their powers can teleport, or do damage from across the city, or temporarily grant fantastic strength. However when they see a car speeding down the road at pedestrians pulling out some chalk to draw with and chanting aren’t really going to cut it.
If they call spirits to do things for them there are going to be costs. Yeah the spirits of deer and rabbit can increase your speed, but they are herbivores so that after fight hotdog doesn’t agree with you. The fire elemental can totally “catch that henchman”, but you just sent a walking house fire to chase someone through town (and if going dark you didn’t say anything about what to do after catching the person so it just holds them).
Basically ask the player details about their sorcery and discuss what kinds of limits or consequences that brings.
Thanks for your replies!
John Henry, for me it’s not a balance of powers, but of scope and spotlight.
Scope as in, if the Nova can do anything, she has a way greater scope she can cover with respect to the other PCs, so the level threats they can fight could be on a too different level.
Spotlight as in, if the Nova can do anything… what’s the point of other PCs? Like a Doomed: marking the Doomtrack a Doomed can – with Infinite Powers – use one time any ability, if the Nova can do – with sorcery – basically the same thing, but without the same cost, what’s the point of the Doomed having that Doomsign? Their fictional spot could be diminished.
Aaron Griffin, you, you’re right; I never make them roll for something not relevant: they want to teleport where the action is, and there is no reason for this to be any risky/fictionally interesting? Sure, they are there, no roll involved.
The problem is fictional/positioning (see above), not about bringing about risks: last time the Nova wanted to make metals aging, and as side effect (for unstable Unleash Your Powers) she basically crippled half a block (lamp posts, skyscrapers, people, etc.); my point was more fictional: giving that any powers come with risks, I was wondering how people managed a general power, beside using that broad scope in the consequences. I hope now is clearer what I mean.
As of origins, the Nova got her power naturally: in the setting sorcery is natural and very rare (as in, a handful of people in the world); it can be learned, but a much lower level.
The Nova is a natural, who when younger touched spell books and literally absorbed their content, giving a boost to her powers and giving her spells.
As using powers goes, she just do it: she concentrates on the effect, she gets the effect, so not much to work on there.
Now we are discussing limitations / effect / means of using the powers; my main worry is fictional and of interest: fictional as explained above, of interested because in the long run powers able to do anything could diminish Flares (and, so, the Nova in herself) and the interest in using the powers themselves (because if I can do anything there will never be a situation which I can’t try to solve with them, or which I have to get creative with what I can do to be able to use my powers).
I think the point of the Nova is not whether they can do something but rather how bad the fallout is from what they do. The collateral damage they do could make a whole other scene.
You’re right, my doubt indeed isn’t simply about they doing “too much”, but rather about the fictional effect (see my previous reply) and the fact that a too all powerful ability could diminish the Flares themselves.
Sounds like a trust issue. You don’t trust the player and expect them to “do it wrong” or even “cheat”. Why not talk to them: “Hey man, I’m a little concerned that your power is better than your built in Flares. Is there anyway we can sort of dial it back?”
The story potential here is off the charts. Magic always has a price, even superheroic magic. Zatanna must be able to speak, otherwise she can do anything. Dr Fate can do anything, even on a cosmic scale, but he is a slave to Nabu the Lord of Order. Magik (Illyana Rasputin) is a powerful sorceress but her soul is damned to the Inferno… Stuff like that.
The Nova is dealing with barely controlled power that is tied to her emotional state. She can remake the world…but at what cost.
Much as the Doomed shifts the tone of a Masks game simply by being present in it, having a Nova with enough strength will shift the power level of your game up. I run a game with a Nova and I often go “right, she can just take this villain out”. It certainly shifts the game – one of the major threads is the fact that a future version of her took over the universe, and that’s worried all the adults.
My suggestion: have her powers work unreliably or with too much force if she rolls poorly. If her powers don’t work that way (and it’s no fun for you), then MAKE them work that way. Have her get attacked by a magic-disrupting chaos entity that leaves her scarred, or make a consequence of getting captured by the evil corporation involuntary mind-impeding implants, or have a consequence of a non-resisted blow be a blow to the head that leaves her dazed.
Aaron Griffin, I am speaking with the player about this, it’s not a trust issue: it’s just she didn’t even thought about this, and I myself am not very used to the MC role, so I was looking for ideas about how other people manage this.
Troy Ray, it could be that in this case the issue is just that there is no price, no condition, beside the built-in mechanics common to all the characters (i.e., missing a roll), so she can basically do anything without even having to roll Burn (and so losing the tie to her emotional condition). Sure, if she missed there is a price, but it’s the common mechanic, and it kinda look to me like undermining the Nova – since the Burn is diminished by the ability.
If you look at the Burn, it’s always better (and crazier) than the basic ability. They will be charging up their powers to do things.
That’s part of the issue: if sorcery can do anything, it can also do things part of the Flares can do.
I know the Burn’s trigger is they charge their powers, but nothing prevents a player from saying “Hey, I use sorcery to create a golem to keep the villain busy, so I have time to save people”; that’s overcoming an obstacle, so Unleash Your Powers can do it – but that’s also a Flare, Constructs.
And yes, players can decide that with sorcery you can’t do what you can do with Flares, but that’s a limitations, and limitations are part of what I was wondering about.
The character absorbed a spell boom. Each time a spell is cast it is erased from the Tome written on the PCs soul. She can only do an effect once (unless it’s a Flare).
Give her another spellbook or three, one with nasty spells that want to be cast, so her magic is trying to use her instead of the other way around.
Give her enemies with magic defenses that can turn her spells back on her, and undermine her confidence, then follow-up on that with a taunt or influence to shift her labels around.
Power up those villains to give a reason to risk using flares to boost the sorcery magic, with all the risks that comes with.
Call for the occasional Unleash Your Powers rolls when she does something new with her powers where consequences for failure matter.
Throw lots of villains at the PCs at once to make sure no one player can dominate the fight by one-shotting a single bad guy; give everyone something important to do. For example, in the Justice League movie that just came out, there’s a large cast of supers with varying degrees of powers: Some of them focus on fighting the Big Boss, some focus on handling a nearly infinite supply mooks so their buddies on the boss aren’t overwhelmed, and some focus on getting civilians safely out of there. Each role is important and the whole fight cannot be won without the teamwork.
Also, don’t forget that feelings are a huge part of the game. If the Nova is handling everything, her teenage teammates should totally whine about it, getting pissed off about feeling unnecessary, and saying hurtful things to shift her labels around. They’re supposed to be a team, put it on her to make the other teammates feel like valued members.
Reality Storm, Shielding, and Worship are the only ones that still require you to roll (and then only with Freak).
The other ones are guaranteed successes, no roll needed other than the ‘Burn’ roll itself — except you get 2 burn even when you fail that roll.
The “balance” to the Nova is that when things go wrong, they go horribly, terribly wrong – so I’d suggest focusing on that.
If you use Unleash to create a golem to distract the villain, great, but if you fail that roll, maybe now you’ve created a new villain in the golem, and have made the fight twice as difficult.
If instead you use the Constructs flare, then maybe you flubbed the burn roll and are now fighting the villain in a hellscape of uncontrolled sorcerous energies, but you still created the golem, and the villain is distracted. (Also you get a +3 to your next Burn roll 🙌 )
Players, don’t read this.
What if… her powers were sentient? I was thinking about Grey Kitten ideas, and this came to mind:
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When you unleash your powers, on a 7-9 something’s off, the MC will tell you what.
On a miss, you don’t shape your powers – they try to shape you: roll to reject their Influence. [I’m not sure about changing one Flare on a miss: on one hand, it directly conveys “they try to shape you”; on the other, it’s a noticeable change of the character]
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Just a quick first draft that came to mind like two minutes ago, but the idea is giving an agenda to the powers themselves – if she uses Burn she can control her powers, but unleashing them gives them some degree on control over the caster herself.
Uhm… (Again, players don’t read.)
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On a miss [on unleash your powers], you don’t shape your powers – they try to shape you: roll to reject their Influence. On a miss, your powers overcome you. The MC will tell you what happens.
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Which doesn’t necessarily mean you destroy something… but your powers do get to pursue their agenda, no matter what you wanted.
(The difference being: if you succeed to reject their influence, you still pay missing unleash your powers, but your powers can’t get hold of you and do their bidding.)
Obviously this would mean I have to understand what her powers want, which I have no idea about XD
(Or maybe also without the rejecting roll? On a miss on unleashing your powers, your powers overcome you?)
Before you start doing this, play the Nova as written once. Believe me, none of this is necessary
Take care that you aren’t just recreating the Doomed’s playbook.
Yes, sorcery is wide open and can do a lot of things, but any action that triggers a move still has a chance to fail, and sorcery failures already allow you to make GM moves to show that magic has a price. As Jason Corley suggests, you don’t need to write up custom moves just yet.
Flares are still useful because some flares allow for spending of burn to accomplish awesome something without a roll, as the risk is baked into powering up the flare in the first place. Some of them allow you to roll with Freak instead of the normal stat, so there’s risk there, too.
For example, let’s say that the bad guys put up a force field around the area where crime is going down. A Nova could use her sorcery to Unleash Her Powers to teleport past the force-field, but on a 6- she doesn’t make it through, and on a 7-9 there’s something unstable about it, like maybe dangerous portals ripping reality apart popping up and collapsing all around. Or, if she really needs to get past it and doesn’t want those risks, she could spend one Burn and get right through. Of course, to get the Burn in the first place she’s had to risk taking on a bunch of conditions, or already has a bunch of conditions to give her pluses to her roll.
As another example, if the Nova is trying to cast offensive spells to take down an enemy, she’s rolling with Danger just like anybody else. Freak is probably a higher stat for her, so if the enemy is managing to counter everything the heroes are throwing, she might want to switch to spending a Burn to use Reality Storm – now instead of tossing little fireballs, she’s ripping the earth open underneath the guy and hitting him with lava, rolling with Freak instead of Danger. Assuming her Freak is higher than her Danger, she has a better chance of succeeding, but the consequences and collateral damage are higher, too.
For now it isn’t really working, I have a PC who with one roll basically solves every situation: last time the PCs were about to start a fight with three villains, then the Nova used Burn to Unleash with 10+ and make them all asleep – problem solved.
I can keep throwing things at her hoping sooner or later for a miss or for her to take enough conditions to pay the price and see if it works out, but at the moment I’m not really sure what to do in fiction.
I’m confused, none of the Burn options seem to be able to do this.
Sorcery as ability, Unleash to use it, Burn + Overcharge to hit with 10+; as long as a spell effect is possible with Sorcery, it works.
Yeah, Worship is the closest Flare to that, but it doesn’t make people sleep – it makes them be in awe of you.
Oh was it Overcharge? That’s Unleashing, though and you usually don’t Unleash against baddies like that, they’re not simply “obstacles”.
Overcharge only lets you overcome obstacles. She could use it on, like, a big gang of minions (I often conceptualize low-end crooks as obstacles rather than villains), but a main bad guy is different. She could still use her powers on him, but it would be engaging him directly.
By the rules, if they are low-end minion it’s fine to avoid roll, also if they are a horde (page 57), so I didn’t really used them in that situation because they didn’t feel like a threat.
As for engaging them directly, I have three issues: the first is the villains weren’t as yet aware of the PCs presence: they knew the PCs were in the base, they didn’t yet know they already were there, and PCs were invisible. And using a sneaky spell isn’t exactly directly engaging someone.
The second is that move assume you exchange blows, but if the spell is successful the villains have no way to do that, they just fall asleep.
The third is, if they fall asleep, the choices doesn’t really seem to work as intended: they can’t throw blows, also because they don’t know yet where the PCs are, so nothing to avoid; but let’s assume they can before falling asleep. Then they’re asleep, so you automatically get to take something from them (they are asleep, so they can’t oppose) and you create an opportunity (again, they are asleep, so they can’t defend themselves). So that could work, also if it feels awkward to have falling-asleep villains giving blows to heroes nowhere the be seen.
Buy then, if they are asleep, you can just go on, capture them and save the day.
So, since the player rolled 10+ (I’m using her Burn roll as if it were for directly engage, and it was 11 on the dice), nothing really changes.
If, on the other end, also on a hit they aren’t asleep… what’s the point of using the ability that way?
I understand villains aren’t just obstacles and using directly engage could be the solution, but it seems to fit awkardly, at least in this situation; and also using it doesn’t really seem to change the situation, unless also on a hit the player doesn’t get what she wanted (like “Yeah, they are sleepy, but not asleep, since they still have condition to mark”; which is not what the player wanted to get with her powers).
Triggers in PbtA games are not negotiable. If the trigger says “when you directly engage a threat” it triggers regardless of if you’re invisible or not.
In your specific case, Unleashing with a 10+ could have taken out a bunch of minions, leaving one or two big bads left that needed to be Directly Engaged to take down. That’s how I’d have run it.
See the bottom of pg 58
That’s the problem: to me, “I’m using a silent spell on an opponent unaware of my presence” isn’t directly engage a threat; it really doesn’t seem that direct, to me, nor really a threat, since they are unaware of my presence.
Edit: Maybe this will make clearer my problem with the trigger of Directly Engage: from the rules, “Directly engaging a threat is the move for straightforwardly duking it out with something”; using a silent spell on an unaware target isn’t exactly what I pictures when I think of “straightforwardly duking it out”.
Moreover (sorry if I didn’t say this before), the villains were there to stop the PCs from freeing a captive – so they were an obstacle towards the PCs goal, hence the roll to overcome an obstacle.
Just to be clear: I’m not saying directly engage isn’t the right move, I’m just saying that the trigger in this case seems wonky, and also using that move I’m not sure if anything would be different: on a hit, are the villains asleep?
If so, nothing really changes, all of them are out of the fight with one roll.
If not, then the player doesn’t get what she wanted with her powers.
So hold on here. You posted saying “I have a problem” and when people tell you what the problem is, you… Argue against it? Cool man, enjoy your game then.
In comic books, if (say) a psychic tries to get someone to fall asleep, sometimes the person powers through it and is Hopeless (“oh god, they’re in my mind!”) or Angry (“how dare you”) or whatever. So you can directly engage with a sleep spell, succeed, and not immediately take out the bad guy.
However, if you just made the bad guys an obstacle instead of a full set of villains with their own priorities and Conditions, then the rule has worked properly and the obstacle’s been overcome by a sleep spell! If you don’t like this outcome, don’t make the bad guys only an obstacle (or don’t make them only one obstacle – maybe there’s a second squad or whatever.)
Uhm… I am not arguing against it, I’m explaining my doubt about the solution you’re giving.
I’m honestly explaining my doubts about both what I did (I’m not saying I’m right) and what your’re proposing (and, as I said, I can accept that’s the right move, just I have doubt and I think I give reasons for them, I’m not just saying not), so to better understand.
I’m not saying you’re wrong – rather, I’m asking how to use that move, for example asking what would happen on a hit: do the villain falls asleep? Are they just sleepy? I’m not sure how this should play out, so I’m asking, also because if they do fall asleep it doesn’t really solve my problem.
If you expect me to not argue also when I have doubts on the proposed solution I’m sorry, I can’t do that, because then I wouldn’t be able to use that very solution. Maybe there aren’t any issues, but I explained why I see them.
Jason Corley, so if I understand right what you’re saying, a hit on directly engage you would maybe do a simple “You’re sleepy” (or something like that), also if the intent was to put the guy to sleep directly, giving a condition for that?
You use Directly Engage against a villain. If you’re defeating villains with Unleash, you’re not playing the game as written and are going to get unexpected results.
Something like that. I would say something like “The overwhelming cosmic power of Sorceress Supreme is thrusting itself into the mind of the villain, deadening his senses and making his eyelids heavy – you feel panic and anger surging inside him as he lifts his blaster cannon…” Then maybe the sorceress pick “resist or avoid their blows” and they dodge the blast. Or maybe they pick “take something from him” and they are so enervated they drop the blaster. Or they don’t and the sorceress takes a powerful blow when he fires back. And then I have the villain mark a Condition and take a Condition move per the usual moves. It’s effective, and I play up the power of it, but the villain becomes more vivid, scary and exciting as he struggles against the overwhelming power.
Also don’t forget if they use their burn when directly engaging it usually causes collateral damage. So maybe like, civilians or another hero also end up collapsing….MAYBE OVER A RAILING OH NO!!
To put it another way, intent doesn’t really matter that much – every hero’s every action has the intent of “stop the villain in their tracks!” But that’s not what happens when they roll.
Mauro Ghibaudo have you tried my suggestion of making her awesomeness and her teammates extraneousness part of the story?
After they take down some big villain because she’s so amazing and can do anything with sorcery, have reporters interview the team. They focus on her like fangirls. They are dismissive of the rest of the team “Who are you again? What do you even do?” and even suggest to the sorceress “What do you need these guys for?”
Have the news people probe adoringly into how her powers work, accidentally revealing any weaknesses to villains watching interviews on TV or posing as reporters.
– Does she need to be able to talk?
– Does she need to wiggle her fingers in funny patterns?
– Does she have to be able to see what she’s casting spells at?
– What are the risks of broken concentration?
Meanwhile, while everyone is fawning over her, a new bad guy could start stirring up a things by pointing out that if someone like her turned bad, there’s nothing the rest of us could do to protect ourselves. Maybe this motivates him to develop anti-magic technology.
While she’s at a TV station being interviewed for her fans, the rest of the team can be called to face down against an evil version of her, letting them show how awesome they are, giving you ideas for how to neutralize a sorcerer, and fueling the anti-sorcery sentiment.
That gives you a ton of potential story threads:
– team drama, sore feelings, resentment, questioning of self worth
– external forces putting pressure on the team drama by calling it out in public
– public fear of someone so powerful going bad
– fame distracting from duty
– testing the rest of the team without their Voltron Sword
– testing the rest of the team against someone else who is exactly like their Voltron Sword only evil
I don’t have yet had a chance for that – despite this being two months old, we had some setbacks and didn’t play that much. I’ll try to put something like that in, thanks; at the moment the rest of the team doesn’t seem to have any issue with her superior powers, I’ll see if anything changes.
As for weaknesses, beside the usual Nova’s control issues, the player didn’t set any: she doesn’t need to speak or gesticulate, it’s instant or almost instant, no need of ingredients, no weak point whatsoever, etc. I tried to ask her now and again about weaknesses or conditions or “Can do you such a thing?” or whatever, but it’s just there isn’t any, at least for now.
As anti-magic technology I’m struggling with the idea: on one hand it’s a way to handle the theme, on the other it’s depriving one of the PC of their power, which doesn’t leave much for her to work with again even normal guys (her being a teenager).
One of the key elements of this or any dramatic system is that nothing works perfectly. Maybe the anti magic measures are only partly successful, or they are unpredictable in some way.
Leaving her without her normal crutch is a great chance for her to figure out who she really is. Is she useful without her magic, or is her magic all there is to her?
As a technology solution, it would be something that could be broken and deactivated – just not by magic.
As always, her flares could bypass it – that’s the Nova’s schtick, but of course there’s clearly risk built in to that.
The theme would be that having powers might be what inspired you to become a hero, but the powers alone are not what makes you a hero.
I’ll try go with directly engage (we still have to resolve the action, it was late and I stopped the session after the roll to have time to think about how to manage the situation); the trigger thing still feels wonky, but overall sounds better than the alternative. Thanks again.