Yesterday I’ve looked through the Deck of Villainy. I enjoyed it a lot, especially the various drives. But one thing surprised me: When I made the villains for my campaign, I always made villain teams. That only occurred to me, when I found the villains from the Deck being all loners. They may team up if course, but they are created separately.
How do you do it? Can you see a difference between these approaches?
Teams are more busy to handle, single villains can be easier overcome.
This is to say: sub
When I do more than one ‘villain’ it is often an actual villain and a group of henchmen, but I have done some stuff with more than one of them. Lots of villains makes spotlight management harder.
Part of it is also how many conditions do your villains have? Three with one condition each should be easier than one villain with 4 (even if numerically that is 6v5 to take them out as my villains know to flee).
Masks is unusual among supers game in that it isn’t regulated by a traditional RPG action economy. You may have had plenty of games where the players had tough fights against single villains. Now the villain team in comics is traditionally formed in response to the hero team, or when villains gather forces and face off against the heroes (ex: Sinister Six.) If you players had tough fight against a series of villains, imagine the look on their faces when they team up.
A thing to be careful about: Masks doesn’t use traditional action economy, but you are still adding a ton of conditions the players have to overcome in a conflict. You may need to make sure you give players fractures to exploit in the villain teams. Just like in the comics!
I think the rules comments are solid. In narrative terms, they aren’t all written as loners. In most games I have seen, the GMs have made the assumption that the top villain could offer something to any villain they wanted to put into play.
A number of them are written as “for hire”, or could be interpreted that way: Shell, Carlo the Assassin, The Snapping Turtle, Centipede, and Gearmaster being at the top of my list for that.
While there are not many preset teams, there are some exceptions… Facet works for Rosa Rook for instance, while The White Cobra is written to be a mentor of younger criminals (such as La Espada).
So long as the team still has a drive and 1-5 Conditions total, they work just fine
Jason Corley Actually, I tend to give each member a separate drive.
Vera wants to show how stupid the Heroes are.
Retail wants to take money from the rich (and considers herself poor)
Itching wants to have friends.
Vane wants to fix downtown
They are somewhat compatible of course.
I usually throw teams of villains at my heroes…or have the heroes caught in fights between multiple “villains” of one sort or another. But I also am generating these characters on my own, without using the deck of villainy. I’ve found it makes for better fight scenes in general if there are multiple threats with various aims and abilities for the heroes to take on.