Does anyone else feel Masks doesn’t do a great job of giving PCs a reason to be heroic beyond the social contract, and that the rulebook doesn’t explain how to handle villainous PCs very well?
I’m aware that allegiances frequently shift in the source material and that the game is all about PCs finding out who they really are, but I’ve always wished that there was a little more incentive for the players to stay on the straight and narrow. I’ve found in multiple previous campaigns that players who seem committed to the game’s theme in theory deviate from it pretty rapidly when they realize the game doesn’t explicitly prohibit that.
Does that make sense? Is there anything I can do as a GM to mitigate the problem when it comes up? Am I being too precious about genre emulation?
What reason would a game give you incentivize being heroic? Can you give an example of the issue as you see it?
I would think that if the players are on board with the narrative of the fiction that is the game’s basis, that they would come up with a motivation themselves for their own characters being heroic instead of criminal. This in addition to the normal “across the board” motivation of teens wanting to be taken as seriously as the adult heroes that populate the city.
Influence and use of Hooks are two wonderful tools to help with this: having the Chief of Police try to shift your Danger up and your Mundane down after you torched a major public building can really mess with your day! As is a Silver Age Crusader for Justice dropping by to firmly remind you that there are things that Just Aren’t Done. There are also the narrative consequences to consider: even if there are no mechanical effects, those still happen.
If you have certain playbooks on the table, things aren’t going to remain neat and clean in any case. The Bull, Delinquent, and Doomed make things a bit murkier just by being themselves.
Besides the mechanical, have you made sure that your players are on the same page with you about this expectation? Have you defined the straight and narrow to which you expect them to cleave? Have you gotten their input about what they think they should be doing?
If they want to play utter villains in the first place? Masks is not the right game for that sort of thing, any more than it supports a bunch of lone wolves who refuse to be a part of a team. That social contract you mention is kind of key to the whole framework. And if your players won’t buy into that, then this is not the right game for them.
As someone mentioned, it’s part of the social contract, an integral element of the genre.
At the risk of sounding blunt, I would say to the players, the game is about teenage superheroes. If you don’t want to be one, why are you playing it?
Player buy-in is needed for any game. What reason does D&D give to kill monsters and take their loot?
Perhaps not a great counter-example, Aaron; D&D gives you XP and loot.
The person who doesn’t want to leave the tavern and adventure isn’t a D&D character. The young adult who isn’t heroic isn’t a Masks character.
Benjamin Davis are you suggesting Masks does not have comparable mechanics that encourage heroic behavior?
It has xp for much less direct activities than “kill monsters” though, which is my point.
Benjamin Davis your point is flat. Masks awards XP for different things than killing monsters and taking look, as D&D does. It gives XP for failing at a move.
Therefore, if “you get XP” is your answer to what encourages D&D folk to kill monsters, it is also the answer to what encouraged Masks folk to make more moves and fail at them. The XP encourages them to be “heroic” just as D&D’s XP encourages killing
No, my point is that Masks just takes a more subtle route to the same sort of “do this thing that the game wants you to do – > get rewards” engine.
And it sounded like you were saying that D&D doesn’t reward you for killing things and taking their stuff, because you said that player buy-in was necessary. Which is nonsense, because obviously it does.
Benjamin Davis player buy in is still necessary even if the game has a built in incentive system
I know that, it just sounded like you were saying that D&D didn’t.
.I don’t think heroics is the point of Masks personally. It’s about relationships, and all those outside relationships are probably the built in incentive for heroics. Protoges and Legacies have strong outside forces to encourage heroism. Beacons are heroic by nature. But if you’re group doesn’t have any of these, does it really need to be ‘heroic’? People with powers dealing with problems, which could lead to heroics but it also could be vigilanteism or just plain survival.
I agree with Henry de Veuve . I always tell players when starting a game of Masks that this is a game about a heroic team of characters. Those terms are essential. You don’t have to be goody two-shoes or the best team player, but being a hero and caring about being on the team are required for buy-in to this game. If you want to play villains or characters who don’t have reason to be on the team, this is not the game for you. For that reason, I don’t think the game needs an incentive to be heroic built into the mechanics.
I think the social contract that you mention Wright Johnson is probably the best tool. Make sure everyone is on the same page and is down for the same definition of heroic. I’ve seen plenty of superhero games get into a lot of problems over the same issue. It’s a lot harder to fix it after Captain Bloodkill puts a bullet in a villain’s head than it is to talk about it before it ever goes that far. Talking about expectations. If everyone knows the expectations, then rewarding them like Steffi Kyle suggests is a great way to reinforce them and help ensure the game goes in the direction that everyone agreed to in the beginning.
I’ve curbed this from the get-go with an addition to the timeline. In the 90’s there were a series of very public, very violent issues with vigilantes who went too far. This lasted 2 to 4 years depending on when folks reckon it started. It was finally solved when AEGIS and the Exemplars formed a joint effort to, “watch the watchmen.” Any heroes who, “go 90’s,” or even exhibit behaviors that seem like they could lead to them getting there, are watched closely. I’ve already had AEGIS give our delinquent a gift of a brand new smart watch that registers his use of powers and reports his activities back to them to determine whether it was an acceptable use. This happened after he used his powers on a civilian to solve an altercation.
At the end of the day you as the GM make the story around the players. Make it more perilous for those deciding to be villainous, and in turn force the group to conflict by having to decide what they are going to do with their team member gong rogue. This could lead to an interesting redemption story, or something that leads to some other revelation.
But at the end of the day, as many say or allude to above, this is about how you set the expectations of your players. There shouldn’t be some hard coded “be heroic” mechanic because that limits creativity. What should happen if you setting some ground rules, and if the player starts deviating from what you are comfortable GMing, or from what other players feel like they can RP alongside, then it’s time to pull that player aside and work out what the end goal is for them and how you can facilitate getting them to that point without alienating your other players or creating a poor experience for yourself.
Nice discussion!
I should mention that I’m fully aware of my responsibility as GM to set expectations upfront and confront the players with the consequences of their actions. I also don’t mind PCs becoming villainous, and agree that mechanically enforced morality can become a straitjacket. I’ve just felt in the past that while the game hews to its theme really well, the mechanical impetus for genre emulation feels slightly lacking. I think implementing Steffi Kyle’s solution would solve that problem, though.
Thanks for the responses!
In my opinion, there is no direct mechanic, but there is a complex influence system that can handle this, as people will start saying how they see that character, the team should talk about it, the press should ask Hero or Villain? and the older generations might want to step up to make the character see the light.
Jim Crocker Well, no, obviously not (unless it’s the last session and the schism has been building for a while). I’m saying that if everyone is playing the game in good faith and we’ve all agreed that a face heel turn for the team is logical, I don’t mind if the whole team goes rogue. Masks is first and foremost about relationships rather than heroism, a face heel turn is in-genre, and the mechanics of the game allow for the possibility. For similar reasons, and with similar caveats, I don’t mind PCs who betray each other, work at cross purposes, ally with villains, and so on.
Were one PC to attempt to go full Plutonian in the middle of a campaign, however, I wouldn’t allow that, because it’s not fun for anyone else and outside the scope of the mechanics. The character would become an NPC villain immediately, and the player would have to make a new heroic PC.