How fast-paced are your games?
One of my players has been complaining that my pace is too fast. My Halcyon City is constantly keeping them running around. My players are a Soldier, a Newborn, a Janus, and a Beacon.
The beacon is a football player. The Quarterback, Liam Lyons, an NPC, dropped out of school to do super-hero stuff when he found out his dad was a super-villain (Dr Wrath), throwing the team in disarray.
The Quarterback’s older brother, former golden boy, Logan Lyons, is in college now. One of their classmates developed powers after attending a frat party. At first they thought it was because she was pregnant, but her gravity powers kicked in again after she had an abortion, tearing down the Planned Parenthood building with the Janus inside with her.
The team stopped Seismic Prime from wrecking havoc, and stopped La Espada from robbing a bank during the distraction. Espada told them she was doing it to take care of her sister, who was sick due to super-related radiation. The team didn’t believe that justified robbing banks and turned her in and reported her sister as being without a guardian.
AEGIS took the little sister and gave her some of Dr. Wrath’s syrum that turns normal people into powered individuals. This cured her disease, but granted her such rapid healing that one of the scientists at AEGIS went too far and cut off her hand – her hand grew back and the severed hand grew a new her. They cut the new clone in half, and both halves regenerated.
La Espada opened a portal into the Beacon’s bedroom and asked for his help breaking her sister out. He told her to suck it, she’s a villain. She broke her sister(s) out and left them in his house while she went on the run.
Hearing her story, they started to trust AEGIS a little less.
The Soldier’s parents were out of town for a mission. Carbine swept in and introduced herself as Aunt Jessie. She was making inroads in gaining the soldier’s trust by answering all his questions (whereas AEGIS proper told him things were classified above his clearance) and giving him whatever weapons or tools of death he wanted. She gave him access to files that showed his real parents were mutants killed by his adoptive AEGIS parents.
The Lyons house got found out by AEGIS as Dr. Wrath’s headquarters because of the team’s social media. Dr. Wrath was captured.
The soldier came clean to his adoptive parents while they were in the hospital after Dr. Wrath was abducted from AEGIS headquarters by Rampage, who wanted to force him to cure her. The team stopped Rampage. Also in that wing were the Gravity girl and the new quarterback who took Dr. Wrath’s drug trying to be a better player, but instead developing a power that made everyone around him drunk. Worried about the scientist who would cut a girl in half and Carbine, then instructed the soldier to get his friends out and keep them safe.
He put the girl who had just had an abortion on the lap of a horny football quarterback in a two-seater convertible. She started to have a panic attack, broke her AEGIS power-suppression collar and was about to explode the car. The Soldier broke the football jock’s collar and quashed the explosion by making everyone in the block drunk – while driving. They managed to avoid destroying the city themselves, but only barely.
When La Espada checked in with the Beacon to get her sister back (they had already hidden her with the Newborn’s “mom” – a computer scientist who developed the AI that is the Newborn), he wouldn’t tell her where the sister was, and got all preachy demanding she turn herself in for the bank robbery. So, she did, and told AEGIS that her sister had been at his house. When he came home from the football game, his parents and little brother were not there. He spent a few hours in a panic and thinking murderous thoughts about La Espada, assuming she had somehow portaled in and abducted his family to hold for ransom for her sister. Then when the AEGIS van pulled up to drop them off after hours of unsuccessful questioning, he started to feel like he should turn himself in, too.
Beyond that, there’s a subplot where someone is trying to make the cheerleaders and the football team think they’re at war with one another. There’s a C-storyline with anti-mutant legislation being lobied (the Janus’s mom is one of the strongest supporters of this).
Some of the best moments in Masks happens when the Team is just hanging out with nothing to do. These breaks are important for relationships to develop. If they’re only together during fights, then they aren’t friends and allies… They’re colleagues and coworkers. Likewise, if all they’re doing is superwork, then they’re more adults and paragons than teens.
This will sound harsh, but I didn’t read past the second paragraph.
Right at the beginning you say “one of my players has been complaining” meaning they’ve expressed this concern to you more than once. It doesn’t matter how fast or slow other people’s games are paced because it’s not us you’re playing with. You should talk to the player (and the other players) about how to resolve the issue.
I’m having a hard time myself as my players seem to enjoy the sort of “persona” style idea of beginning your day with something personal and then meeting up for heroing, which causes things to drag out slightly but then they tell me my arcs Tend to run long 6__6
I’m attempting to get them moving faster but its rough when you have two classes that need some of that downtime (I’ve got a Doomed and we had a Janus as well but they recently changed to Newborn which should help somewhat).
Fair enough, Chris Stone-Bush – I’m listening to my players and am working with them to give them the game they want. Fixing it is pretty easy – prepare even less, let them drive until things have been resolved.
I’m still curious what other’s experiences are. Is my game abnormally high paced? How do others manage pacing? What are your games like?
Grey Kitten how many sessions are represented in your initial post?
It’s kind of hard to tell what the pacing was like without a clear time scale.
Chesh Ameoba I know this is off topic but I’m super curious how a Janus became a Newborn
I’ve been taking things slow so far letting each session be self contained. I’ve added a few story threads for on going story stuff but for the most part each sessions main problem is solved by the end of that session.
I got a kick out of reading your synopsis (particularly the multiplying sisters story). I don’t think we can help by ruling whether the story is too fast-paced or not—you’re not running the adventure for players in the abstract, but for your particular group, so if it’s too fast for them, it’s a little too fast.
It might help to ask the player(s) who asked you to slow down what they’re hoping for instead (so you have something to aim for besides just “the plot, but slower.”).
Are they missing the chance to keep up with their civilian lives?
Do they feel like they can’t keep up/make plans in their heroic lives, because everything is driven by reacting to the villains?
One thing our GM did recently was run a sort of catchup session, where his planning was really driven by our requests (“I want to explore my sanctuary,” “I want some time for my Mentor to catch on to the fact I’ve lied to her,” “I want to check in on my civilian life,” etc).
Mind you, it didn’t turn out to be that slow, since we took the most conditions of any session so far! But we players weren’t being as overtaken by the plot.
Arc Gamedirector As a Janus he was part of a group that channeled Greek gods called Inheritors, his being Apollo. He went Janus since his sister is deathly afraid of supers after the one channeling Zeus accidentally blew up and killed their parents during a street-level fight with a missed bolt and sort of gave him the chance to channel as an apology.
We discussed it behind the scenes and I suggested that Inheritors we’ve seen so far are running at like a sync rate of like 50%-60% to their god, so if he wanted to say…jack that up to 95% and perform a power/mind meld to become Apollo Incarnate that could be a Newborn change. It comes with a lot of brain fog about his life and I’m going to make sure he forgets things or worse, mixes things up. Like why is dear old sister hiding in her room and not out on The Hunt? Who are these two adult people in this picture with me?
Arc Gamedirector 5 Session that were roughly 7 to 8 hours long each.
LTTN podcast That may be part of my problem. I have run games where each episode was a self-contained entity. For Masks, I waited to see what kinds of characters they came up with, and the world reacted to that. Each session has been just another part of the larger whole, lacking the closure that comes at the end of a self-contained episode.
Leah Libresco seconding this. We really hammered home that “there’s no looming evil threat” didn’t mean there was no action
Well… It’s almost in the players. Phase 1 is during 2 sessions. They have to go to school, you know?