My group is having difficulty understanding The Mask move from the Janus playbook – what exactly does it mean when it says:
Once per session, you can affirm either your
heroic or secret identity to switch your Mundane
with your mask’s Label.
My group is having difficulty understanding The Mask move from the Janus playbook – what exactly does it mean when…
My group is having difficulty understanding The Mask move from the Janus playbook – what exactly does it mean when…
When you create your character, you choose which label your mask embodies. By affirming one or another of your identities, you can switch the values you have in Mundane and.
I suspect she’s asking what “affirm[ing] either your heroic or secret identity” is meant to look like in play. From the core book, pg. 101-102:
For The Mask, affirming your secret or masked identity means doing something that firmly plants you in that role. Leaving your teammates to go save your sister might affirm you as your secret identity, even while you’re still wearing your mask. Doing the opposite, going off to fight the Blue Hydra instead of rescuing your sister from the Centipede, might affirm you in your masked role. Affirming your identity should always be a meaningful choice or action in the fiction, something with ramifications— good or bad—moving forward.
Does that help?
So, the big thing for the Janus is the struggle between being a hero and being a teenager. They have to balance the mundane obligations of their secret identity with suiting up and protecting the city, and they’re constantly question which is more important to them, which identity is really them.
That move is about making a decision about which identity is more important, at least in the moment. It’s for those times when Batman decides to be the dark knight and beat the crap out of a villain, or when he decides to be Bruce Wayne for a night and try to pursue a relationship with someone.
That’s why you switch Mundane with your mask’s label; typically, if you’re deciding that being a hero is more important then the switch makes your mask label higher than your Mundane, and vice versa.
Yeah, any action that leans on your decision as to which identity is more important to you, or you “really are”.
On the topic of this move, anyone know how would one go about handling this move in regards to a stat that’s been locked through leveling up?
I think, instead of switching, you take a Condition.
Probably not a good idea to lock either of them.
I think the best example of this is Spiderman. The character is continually pulled between his personal life and the life of a superhero.
Chesh Ameoba I couldn’t find any advice in the corebook about that, but I think you can extrapolate from what locking labels is supposed to represent.
The reason your labels can shift is because you’re still growing up and figuring out who you are. When you lock a label, you’re growing up and saying that one identity struggle is behind you, and also that one type of identity politics has pretty much run its course and you’d like to move on from it as a player to focus on others. There’s no more confusion about how Dangerous (or Superior, or Mundane or whatever) you are; that question has been answered.
So keeping all that in mind, my instinct is to say that if you lock your Mundane or your mask label then you’re saying the interplay between those two labels isn’t interesting to you anymore, and that your hero has outgrown it. So, going forward, you should be looking at either changing your mask label (think Red Arrow becoming Arsenal and focusing more on Danger than Superior), or transitioning out of the Janus and into another playbook. And in the interim, it makes the most narrative sense that you can’t switch those two labels anymore.
Also, to amend Benjamin’s point, attempting to shift a locked label doesn’t give you a condition; the shift just doesn’t happen. If you’re over the struggle enough that someone exerting their Influence on you can’t shift the label anymore, you’re over it enough that they can’t give you feels about it either, and that idea extends to the other label shifts peppered throughout the system.
Really? I thought any time you had to shift a label and couldn’t, you got a Condition instead. Or is that just for going over +3?
Benjamin Davis From the locking labels section on page 118, emphasis mine:
“Pick one Label and lock it—it can’t move up nor down. If that Label would shift, ignore that effect in its entirety.“
So for locked labels, you ignore any effects that would come from trying to shift them, including marking conditions. The only time you mark a condition is if you try to shift a label above +3 or below -2; the section on shifting labels only mentions marking conditions in that context, too.
Well how about that. I’ve been misunderstanding that this whole time.