Has anyone tried anything in a fourth wall breaking playbook? I would normally consider it ban-worthy if a player actively meta-gamed at my table, but there could be some room there for a Deadpool (without the X-card worthy moments) inspired character. Not sure if you’d want them knowing they’re in a comic book or knowing they’re in an RPG.
Has anyone tried anything in a fourth wall breaking playbook?
Has anyone tried anything in a fourth wall breaking playbook?
I’m planning a villain that has the 4th wall breaking!
I’m not sure if a full playbook would be necessary for a player… Possibly a custom move or… Dare I say it… Compendium Class?
What’s a compendium class?
The Doomed, and their Doom is the comic/game ending.
Benjamin Davis A Compendium Class is something from Dungeon World that basically is like either a Prestige Class or a little mini-class! I’ve been playing with the idea for Masks
“ban worthy” yikes, man
Aaron Griffin ha! Sorry for being overly dramatic. I’m exaggerating a ton! I do like to gradually move PbtA players into speaking in terms of conversation and not in terms of moves. PbtA is a kind of meta game system though. You’re aiming for narrative beats rather than simulating a physical world
Not sure why people regard “metagaming” so poorly. It is entirely possible to be transparent and oprimize fun and fiction at the same time.
Opened up a lot more with an offhand remark in my original post than I intended! I agree with Steffi Kyle and Mo Jave , and it kind of shows the difficulty of coming up with an explicitly metagamed character, as its kind of part of playing an rpg in the first place
Sebastian Baker I think that premise (A fourth wall-breaker Doomed by the end of her comic) is the basis of the last issue of Gwenpool! avclub.com – Gwen embraces villainy to avoid cancellation in this Gwenpool #24 exclusive
Jim Crocker That’s a good point, characters who have any kind of special relationship with the fourth wall tend to either take over the spotlight or be relegated to comic relief.
If you really want fourth-wall-breakage, the best way to handle it might be to let everyone do it, although at that point maybe you should play World Wide Wrestling instead of Masks.
If you actually look at what comic relief characters do, you realize you don’t have to make any changes whatsoever to the rules or playbooks of Masks….just let them start doing it!
I would say, though, that the function of the fourth-wall breaking character in comics is fulfilled, in a RPG, by the players simply cracking jokes with each other.
Stepping out of the game slapping the GM, might fit a Moment of Truth.
I would say it would be allowed as flavor but not as overpowering. For example, somebody with item creation powers can get a zoom in on their characters and then escape the frame to draw the object he’s creating. The rules are the same as item creation, so no rules are broken, but the feel of it is different.
A character with a psychic talent for seeing the future could be seeing some pages away, which could still be in first draft format. Again it’s about flavor and not mechanics.