You’d think this would have come up before now, but it hasn’t! Please excuse
Spent the last few days on a trip with many friends. Ran some Masks.
One of the characters (with a high Savior) used Defend every time someone else was going to take damage. He could move at the speed of light, so as long as he was in the area it was feasible. My question here is: What can you defend against? If I am trading blows as a result of directly engaging a threat can you defend me? If the GM does a Hard move as a result of me failing, can you defend me against that?
One of the examples in the core book suggests that, usually, another player cannot defend you against taking a blow as a result of trading blows on a directly engage.
In general, I think the GM has wide discretion about when defend can be used. Personally, I’d be very willing to be pitched on a defend after I make a soft move, putting someone in danger. But I’d be much less likely to let someone intervene with defend before someone takes a powerful blow after I’ve made a post-miss hard move.
Alexi Sargeant that was how I tended to play and got player revolt. But I think that is the intent of the rule book and I think it makes for a better play experience.
Related to this: if I do a soft move set up (ShockJock charges up his electric blast and looks menacingly at Jane Dough) and no one reacts in a way that prevents the attack, does that count as the players handing me an opportunity and thus lets me inflict a condition or whatever on Jane?
You could push the downside of this approach. Have adults they save try to shift savior up past 3 for conditions. Have villains target their weaknesses, such as with icy surfaces. If they are known for this, those are natural consequences. It is why Samaritan, Superman, and Flash take hits: they can’t be everywhere, even though people think they should be.
Make Jane take a powerful blow.
As Alexi said, Defend can’t be used to stop a hard GM move. In fact, pretty much the only time I see a hard move being defended is if a playbook move specifically calls something out (Nova’s Shielding, Innocent’s replaced Defend move, etc.) or there is fictional positioning involved.
Example: A PC tells me at the beginning of a fight that they are on full defense, and they haven’t had to intervene yet, I would likely give them an opportunity to act to prevent my hard move due to fictional positioning and it gives an opportunity to switch the spotlight.
The goal of our gaming is to have fun and complications are part of that. Being able to simply remove the threat of a hard move is far too exploitable to be done without some sort of cost.
That being said, if this was something the character did all the time, I imagine villains would catch on and find a method to exploit it (put friend in peril, when lightspeed mcfast intervenes, trap springs).
Some of the solutions here are what I would probably employ in campaign play, but this was basically an extended one shot. even the other players were getting upset with this player jumping in every time they were about to take some consequence.
Even with +3 Saviour, there will be a problem 41% of the time.
Sounds like some adult hero should tell them who they should be and shift Savior down.
Or just one of their teammates could lower their savior by flipping out how “It’s not all about you! I don’t need you protecting me from every little thing!”
Grey Kitten but where do you stand on when the Defend move can be made?
Christopher Hatty Yes, they handed you an opportunity only if you asked “What do you do?” If you rely only on a pause in your description of the action and expect the players to interrupt, they might not realize that was an option. I had this problem with some of the early games I ran.
If you get player revolt at not being able to avoid hard moves, I guess explain that that’s how the game works – you can’t just arbitrarily do what you want as GM, but when you make a hard move it is a hard move. It’s simply not a game where all consequences can be avoided, especially after a failed roll or if they ignore a stated danger (like your example of a soft move – yes, if they don’t prevent the attack, they are giving you a golden opportunity for a hard move).
I had a recent session (only the 3rd session, as I’m pretty inexperienced as well) where the team was fighting a statue of King Midas that was turning everything into gold. Towards the end of the fight, the Legacy tried to set up an attack for the others (they had discovered they could run electrical current through the ground to affect the statue without getting too close) but failed. As a result, I had him turned to gold. He protested – didn’t he get a roll to avoid that? And I said no.
I felt confident in the move I made for a few reasons. The first was that I knew there would be another (magical) hero coming in to take credit, so the gold status was temporary. Second, he had failed roll and I was making a hard move GM move, “capture someone”. Finally, I was following my principles (“make threats real”). I didn’t get much pushback after the initial protest but if I had, I would have explained that, except for the knowledge that someone else would save him. He told me after the game that he expected that to happen, because he trusted me to not do something to permanently disable his character in a way that cheap and anticlimactic.
In other words, the key (in my experience) is your players have to trust you to make hard moves that make sense for the game and accept that they are a part of the game. That also goes for trading blows, which isn’t quite a hard move but if the player that rolled it doesn’t fail and doesn’t choose “resist or avoid their blows”, they are choosing to take consequences.
I wouldn’t let one PC defend another from consequences from trading blows.
Follow the fiction.
A speedster who runs around defending everyone will be taking a lot of powerful blows on any 7-9s and 6- rolls. Yeah, you defended them, but you put yourself in harms way.
Don’t forget, you can do “attacks” that are verbal/emotional, and being a speedster gives you no edge on defending against that.
When you make a hard move, it’s happened. There’s no time to intervene, only react to the new situation.
Make sure to go over the agenda and principles of the game with the players. A selfish player who wants to do everything all the time and always succeed needs to be reminded that this is a game about a team, about struggling with identity.
An idea that occurred to me is that the Defender is running around stopping people from engaging and trading blows. It would be like Superman running around and stopping Batman from doing anything Batman wanted to do. No one’s fighting because the speed of light person keeps intervening. It’s like you can give the player’s a choice…
Whose action count?
Is someone Directly Engaging a Threat and accomplishing what they’re doing? Or is someone Defending?
You can’t Defend against Take a Powerful Blow. That’s a move… it’s outside the game. You Defend against actions taken in the game…
Does that make sense?