In my quest to be the most prolific poster here, I ask you:
How much adult interaction goes on in your games, and how does it play out?
I am asking because one of my players is suggesting there needs to be more (I tend to have brief interactions at the beginning of sessions and then the team goes on a mission and then everyone has to go to bed, so unless they were fighting an adult, it’s just that beginning one). And I am unsure how to make that happen.
In my game the majority of others supers (hero and villain) are adults plus there are parents, teachers at school, and so on. I’m having trouble picturing only talking with an adult to get assigned a task, but my guess would be it is just a difference in how our tables are run.
Are most of the assigned tasks in your game “go punch Burgle McRobberson” with no investigation or banter? Do you only focus on their in cape lives and ignore things like a character getting asked on a date in their normal life?
In my game, I use adults as a gauge of how the world itself is reacting to my Heroes actions-they’ve got no access to opinion polls. You need to have adults to show them what to aspire to, to defy, the limits they are breaking, or what mold they are fitting into. Adults should always have an opinion-by the time you’re an adult most of them are set in stone-and be very vocal about it, especially against young heroes, who by the fiction they have influence over. The young Heroes want to change the world. The adults are the world that is being changed. They are going to react.
For me it varies by character. My doomed doesn’t have any major adults in his life so he doesn’t interact much on his own. My Janus, Star and Legacy all have family and mentors that they are dealing with.
Over half of NPCs in my game are adults, so adult interaction is very common.
I kind of read the game like Arc Gamedirector: the amount of adult interaction depends on whether your playbook demands it. Every session there’s SOME interaction, but 3 sessions in, I am finding it hard to figure out why the whole team would ever interact with the same adult (except adult supers, which I just haven’t been able to fit in yet), and in online games with this group, I have found that extended interaction with just a one or two players makes the other ones really bored and disengaged even if they get equal spotlight, so I instinctively shy away from it.
I guess I will probably have to change my approach to fit the core activity of the game though.
Andrew Matiukas Oh they go on their own missions as a reaction to stuff bad guys are doing. They’re supposed to have a “Den mother” that’s an adult, but that character is absentee due to time constraints on actually getting stuff done in the game. We’re lucky if we get 2 hours of play in, and it’s online, which slows some stuff down.
One trick I’ve learned to keep players engaged while other characters are having one on one scenes is to make the other characters the topic of conversation. The conversation becomes more interesting when it’s about the legacy’s dad bad mouthing the doomed.
Christopher Hatty Arc Gamedirector In addition you can also give a player a NPC to play, players can play things other than their Hero.
Andrew Matiukas Was pondering this. I’d be inclined to assign a “hook” NPC to each of the players, with how they want to move the labels of the hero(es) for whom they’re a hook. Does this seem rational, or crazyyyyy? Also making hooks is either easier than it looks or really hard and I am not sure which yet.
Christopher Hatty you can do that, but I’ve also seen things like: Heroes A & B are checking the scene of a crime, so player C gets handed a detective that wants to solve the crime by the book. They interact for a bit with player C getting to set some details on the crime scene while lecturing heroes that this isn’t just a punch the villain thingy. After a bit Crime Scene Technician/Editor butts in with a clue that was found (which can lead to the next scene).
This lets player C participate and insert junk into the fiction. In addition if players (not characters) like the detective you have set up an adult to show again, though next time it may get handed to player A, B, or D rather than just back to C.
Considering chapter 9 spells out hook design as a major feature of session preparation, I’d say that the game features interaction with adults pretty centrally. Personally, I’d shoot for enough interaction to have one adult try to shift each PCs labels at least once per session. Ideally, at least one or two of the PCs will have both hooks you had planned for them show up in a session.
We’re playing online, which makes interaction a little slower, and I am not really sure how to role play interactions significant enough to trigger a label shift and then engineer a scene transition for every hero and still leave time for much else (we get at most 3 hours, and that’s if no one is kibitzing).
I am not saying your approach is wrong. In fact, it’s probably dead on. I’m just beginning to think Masks, at least as it’s intended to be played by the game’s creator, is a bad match for my circumstances.
Fair enough. Maybe you can offload some of the interactions to “offline time”, sort of like the “love letter” format. Give the players a quick email/PM talking about their interactions outside the group before the session starts.
I sort of did that by accident this past week. I told the Legacy that Hercules was proud of him for kicking ass and burning stuff down, and to encourage future such behavior was going to loan him a Thunderbolt of Zeus (basically 2 of the Nova powers and 3 Burn to spend on them) if he were willing to shift Danger up and Savior down (He’s very savior heavy). Making the choice ate a ton of time, but I didn’t RP it much at all. On net it was fun and had an impact.