In a situation where Character A has Influence over Character B and then gets more Influence, can Player B choose to Reject Player A’s Influence in that moment?
If so, does Player A end up with no Influence over Player B?
Thanks!
C
In a situation where Character A has Influence over Character B and then gets more Influence, can Player B choose to…
In a situation where Character A has Influence over Character B and then gets more Influence, can Player B choose to…
So, the book says that a pc can reject someone’s influence whenever they want, even unprompted;
However, I think it’s important to remember that moves don’t happen in a vacuum: the guiding principle is if you do it, do it, meaning that they can’t just roll to reject influence. What happens in the game’s fiction and in the flow at the table? What fictional event means A gains influence over B, and does it make sense that B could react and deny them? If you don’t trigger the move within the fiction, you can’t use it.
Furthermore, it really depends on why A is gaining influence on B. If it comes as an outcome of a move (one of the options you pick) or a hard GM move, it may well be that it’s just that, it’s just happened, and they can’t do much about it. Characters are teenagers, and sometimes they’ll care deeply even though they wish they didn’t.
In general, I’d say that it depends on how/why it’s happening, both mechanically (what pushes this?) and fictionally. Though personally, I think in most cases it wouldn’t really work, and I’d discourage players to try and avoid it like that.
Thanks. The situation was that we were doing the end of session moves. Everyone had Influence on the Legacy already, and he chose Grow Closer, picked someone, and then realized that that would result in a label shift.
My own feeling is that if he felt he had grown closer to person X, narratively speaking it’s unlikely he’d reject the influence.
You can always reject influence. In a situation where more than 1 influence is gained, I believe the person gets to shift their labels. And, depending, I may give them a plus one going forward next time they decide to utilize a skill in that character (pierce mask/comfort/etc).
Christopher Hatty why are they afraid of a label shift? They should be moving around every session, often more than once.
Also by my memory Rejecting Influence is if someone is using influence on you, not “here have influence, oh you already have it never mind”. I’d need to look over the wording again if it came up in my game, but really the bigger question is why the player is trying to avoid it.
You can’t do a move inside another move. Therefore you can’t reject Defend, Team Move or End of Sesh influence.
Adam Goldberg is right – i should have highlighted that more strongly.
Also, in this case, it’s the end of season move – so you’ve stopped playing, so you can’t really trigger a move.
Yeah, the only time you can get influence over someone in an End of Session move is if you specifically are saying “I felt welcomed and it was effective, so I grew closer to the team”. If it wasn’t effective, you shouldn’t have said it was! They’ve already admitted the influence of the character hit home.
I am not getting the “move inside a mode” part. Query: Does trying to tell someone how the world works (aka Shifting Someone’s Labels” count as a move? I know sessions moves count as moves because they are called out as moves.
I don’t get that either. Masks actually has all kinds of move results that immediately (can) lead to other moves, like people Taking a Powerful Blow and using their Influence over teammates, but maybe the teammates try to Resist that influence, etc.
Moves can LEAD to other moves, but they resolve fully before the next move starts.
Back to Influence and labels, and maybe Magpie Games knows the answer to this: on p. 137, in the Take Influence Over Someone example, where Champion shifts Sureshot’s labels, can Sureshot reject that?
I don’t think so since it is the result of a GM move, namely, taking Influence over someone. If they didn’t want that to happen they shouldn’t have missed on their previous move/given a golden opportunity/etc. etc. However, if the GM wasn’t “completing” a move, but just setting it up, they could have said, “He says, ‘always nice to meet a fan’ and begins to turn away…like you’re just some regular fan! Since he already has Influence over you, that might feel pretty Mundane if that just happens, what do you do?”
Doyce Testerman I think the glitch in that explanation is that in the example, the GM is using the move “Take Influence Over Them” – it wasn’t the voluntary action of the PC that led to the Influence in the example (or, at least, we can’t assume that it was.) It might have been the result of a miss on another move.
So you know where this is coming from: One of my players is really not ok with it. He doesn’t see the distinction between shifting someone’s labels as an intentional influence-based move versus the “influence overflow” effect. He says the rules don’t support it and that all switches in labels can be resisted (as opposed to saying he doesn’t like it). As I really don’t feel like fighting I’m going to see how this plays out. Worst comes to worst I can kick him out of the game or we can all play something else. But this fact is why I was hoping Magpie would chime in, basically for a rules clarification.
Hey Christopher Hatty! Here’s some baseline answers that echo a lot of what people have said above:
– The end of session questions are not “happening in the fiction.” They’re kind of putting a punctuation mark on the end of the comic book issue. Summing up what happened, not actually making something new happen. In other words, when you pick “grew closer to the team,” you’re not saying, “I now grow closer to the team.” You’re saying, “Yep! Over the course of that last session, I grew closer to the team for sure.” You’re agreeing to that interpretation of events, which the rules emphasize with a particular mechanical effect. All of which is to say, since nothing actually happens in the fiction when you answer those questions, there’s no room for anyone to make any kind of moves at that stage of the game. No rejects, no defends, no wielding influence, no special playbook moves, nothing. You’ll get a crack at that stuff at the beginning of the next session!
So, to sum that up—no, by default, you cannot reject Influence during the end of session moves to prevent an “influence overflow” effect.(nice term, btw, I’m going to use that one more)
– Here’s another way to understand those end of session moves, though—they’re there so you, the player, can exert some control over your character. You wish one of your labels was higher? Say that you grew into your own image of yourself! You wish someone didn’t have Influence over you anymore? Say how you grew away from the team! You tell us how you interpret the events of this past session, and how it fits into your character’s overall arc, so if you want the mechanical effect, there’s a decent chance you’ll be able to reinterpret events to fit.
With that in mind, if you don’t want a particular mechanical effect, then consider if you should really pick that option. This is especially true if you don’t want someone to shunt your Labels around at the very end of the session, without having any say.
There’s a reason each player gets to answer the question themselves—you are the final arbiter of the interpretation of each session’s events vis a vis your character’s arc. Use that power!
– During normal play (not in the middle of the end of session questions), you can reject someone’s Influence whenever you actually, in the fiction, reject their Influence. You don’t just have to limit it to a response to Vanquish telling you that you’re a mortal weakling—you can tell Vanquish how much of a fool you think he is right out of the gate, before you’ve even traded one punch, and immediately reject his Influence! (On a miss, it just means that the GM will most likely have to come up with a particularly vicious barb to make sure “Their words hit home”.)
With that said, however, by default you can’t interject with “rejecting someone’s Influence” after an “Influence overflow” effect. It’s kinda like what Doyce Testerman said—it just happens.
When Vanquish says, “You are a weak and puny mortal,” there’s a moment of uncertainty, a lack of clarity around exactly what happens next, which gives the PC space to either accept that or reject it.
But when the GM decides to have Champion take Influence over you after you tried to Provoke him, and Champion already had Influence over you—that just happens. Your Labels shift, instantly. There’s no uncertainty, and no room for a call and response.
This is the built-in risk of caring about what people think—sometimes, they just plain get to change you! So if it’s important to avoid this, then that comes down to rejecting people’s Influence before they get an “Influence overflow”.
Hope all this helps! Let us know if you still have questions!
Thank you for the response! And it makes complete sense, so yes, it helps a lot.
Yeah, if this person really doesn’t like that teammate having influence over them, the end of session move absolutely accommodates that.