So, I’ve been pondering as I read the playbooks, most of them are pretty flexible with the abilities and moves, and advancement. But one problem I’ve noticed is with the Legacy, where you only have 4 options, 2 of them (“Superman” and “Shazam/Wonder Woman” the first and third sets) are for big beat sticks power wise, one is Batman and the other I’m not sure but it’s like Raven.
It feels sort of limiting to me, compared to the others and I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of other Suite’s that could help alleviate that problem but I keep running into walls.
I’ve thought of a “Jean Grey” With Telepathy, Telekinisis, Teleportation / Flight, Illusions, and Force Projection / Force Field but even that seems borderline obstructing onto others territory.
Any suggestions?
The powers your character has don’t have any mechanical effect, so my advice would be to regard those power options as suggestions rather than a hard list of what you can and can’t have.
You only start with 3 of the powers within a suite, and never have to gain the remaining ones. With that in mind, you can look at the 3-power combos possible within the suites and use that to mix things up.
“Flight, super senses and eye beams” is a very different powerset to “Flight, super strength and invincibility”.
There’s nothing wrong with having the Grey family as a Legacy. Choosing Telekinesis and Telepathy as Legacy powers doesn’t mean that you step on other players’ territories. That is only the case, if they wanted to play a Telepath and didn’t expect you to use the Legacy playbook to do so. So talk about it. That is actually true for class systems in any system: They might help you in making discussion about the characters shorter but a class system with at least some options can never do it for you completely.
Good answers so far, and all I can think to add is that stepping on other characters’ toes powers wise might not be that big a deal anyway. Superpowers are only a small portion of what the playbooks are really about, and I have a strong suspicion that two characters with the same powerset could play perfectly well together because of how different the playbooks’ themes are.
I mean, it works fine in Young Justice. Nightwing and Arsenal are both athletic gadgeteers, but one is a Delinquent and the other is a Protege so they feel really different. Same thing with Kid Flash and Impulse; both speedsters, but one’s a Legacy and the other is a Beacon with a very open-minded GM (or maybe an Innocent, if that playbook had more thematic breathing room).
I mean, talk to your table, but I think it’s workable.
I think Impulse (TV version) is a harbinger, one of the stretch-goal playbooks we haven’t seen yet.
As far as the main topic, I think the thing to remember is that a full suite of legacy powers is supposed to be powerful–and I think it’s also supposed to be self sufficient–the superhero archetypes that those powersets are based on are all heroes that have headlined in their own books as well as being members of the Justice League. By contrast, telepathy almost always shows up as a support power in team-based books. So if you’re creating a power-suite based on telepathy, maker sure it’s full of both offensive capability and sticking power. You want to put the character in a situation where the members of their legacy can say “why do you still hang around with them, you’re obviously better than that”.
As others have said, don’t worry about abilities overlapping too much–because those abilities are still governed by your moves and labels, and those are going to be different from everybody else. After all, the Transformed and the Superman-style legacy don’t step on eachother’s toes, even though they’re both tough guys who hit things. Shouldn’t be any different for a telepathic legacy and a telepathic Nova.
It seems like the most challenging part of MASKS is getting folks see that your characters aren’t about your powers. Characters are about attitude. It’s about how they relate to their peers and the world around them; and how they see themselves and how others see them.