So, we had a really good first session! A Transformed, a Doomed, a Protege, an Outsider and the Legacy, in the future of an old superhero setting we played in for a long, long campaign. It was great!
The Legacy (Icarus) was in a fight against a plant-controlling woman named Rose Red with the Outsider (Lava Lass) and the Transformed (Kaiju). When Icarus took a powerful blow defending Lava Lass from a monstrous tooth-flower, he chose to lash out verbally at a team mate (he didn’t see the ; there in the description, but this isn’t about that).
I was like, “Sure! How are you doing it?” And he jumped in as Icarus, shouting “Do something! Don’t just stand there, come on! What the hell are you doing?! Why are you so useless?!!” and I was like, oh, use Directly Engage! So Icarus did and got a 10. Then, Kaiju defended Lava Lass, sticking up for her, giving Icarus an 8 instead. He chose to “Resist or avoid her blows” so that she couldn’t respond (or if she did he didn’t care), but she wasn’t intimidated by him. This was a great moves spiral that took the focus of the fight off of Rose Red and the vine monsters and onto the interpersonal teen drama, so I loved it! It helped push the hard move from Protege’s 2 on the Team Roll to enter the combat (Convey to him his mistakes).
After Rose Red escaped, it ended up with Lava Lass taking a powerful blow from Icarus telling the Doomed “At least you did something– not like LAVA LASS OVER HERE” in earshot of her– !! It was super amazing. I am loving the system and how it can effortlessly switch gears from superheroics to teen drama.
Now, the question:
Later the PCs told me they didn’t like that arguing was Directly Engaging and they don’t think it works. I think it does! Resisting their blows, creating an opportunity, taking something from them, frightening or impressing, it’s a shouting match! And that’s what happened right there. But they don’t think that Danger is the stat for arguing, but Superior, so the whole thing doesn’t work. I was thinking that a lot of arguments I’ve had have been solved by not who was the smartest or the smuggest but by the loudest! The other person’s implied or overt anger steers the argument faster and harder than actually being right.
What do you guys think?
Sounds like a great first session!
Now for the answers:
I’ll get to your specific situation in a moment, but Directly Engage is definitely one entirely appropriate move for arguments. The Conditions are all emotional states, so of course it makes perfect sense that you should be able to inflict them with words rather than bullets. Heck, a lot of times that’s the only (or at least most sensible) arena to engage someone in, when you might be facing off against a physically invincible dude in red underoos, or a cosmic entity with no physical form, or an artificial intelligence whose body is the entire power grid or whatever else.
That said, it is not the only possible move for lashing out at someone. You might trigger Provoke, if you’re mainly trying to get them to do something. E.g., “Just go away and leave me alone!”, or if Icarus was more commanding and less hurtful maybe. Or you might not trigger anything, especially if you don’t have Influence over the person you’re getting into it with (because they care less about what you say).
The main thing with Directly Engage is that trading blows means that someone is going to be hit hard by what you say. It means that you need to be setting out to get under their skin, twist them around and inflict a condition on them–whether because it’s the heat of the moment and you think that will make you feel better, or because you’re Kirk trying to burn out another supercomputer with logical paradoxes, or whatever. Regardless, you are directly attempting to cause emotional trauma in another living being to get what you want–which is why, yeah, Danger is absolutely the right label.
Now, to finally get to your situation, the other thing to remember about Directly Engage is that it needs to be two-sided. The other person also needs to be trying to harm you in some way, otherwise there’s no trading of blows and the move doesn’t trigger. So, did you ask how Lava Lass was reacting to those words? It sounds like she wasn’t lashing back, so I’d say Directly Engage shouldn’t have been called for based on that alone. That said, those were some seriously harsh words, and the way I handled verbal abuse like that in my first session was to just have the targeted player Take A Powerful Blow.
Kaiju sticking up for her might then be Directly Engaging Icarus, depending on how the situation escalated. Or, it might have been him bolstering her, spending a Team to boost her Take A Powerful Blow roll–technically, that +1 would actually be bad for her, but I’ve personally decided to allow spending Team to give a -1 on that move. Provided they can justify helping, as usual. But we’re getting way off in the hypotheticals here!
Hope that helps, and that you have oodles of fun in your next session. :)
Thanks for the comments! We also were using Team to give Take a Powerful Blow a – 1. Another thing we used Team for was the Team roll at the start of the fight, since we had 1 in the pool from the start of the session, the Doomed ticked up the Legacy’s team roll from 6 to 7, giving them effectively +1 team and avoiding being cornered.
I wonder if you could use team on a team roll, and how you COULDN’T. It seems perfectly reasonable and unreasonable to use teamwork to determine how prepared your team is.
Mmm… personally, I wouldn’t allow spending Team on the Teamwork roll. The degree to which you’re all working together in that initial moment when you break onto the scene is already addressed by answering those four questions, no?
You’re already providing the team leader any relevant aid that you can by saying that you trust them and that you’re after the same thing and so on. Spending Team on top of that feels off to me. At least, that’s my interpretation.