So tonight I’m running my second session of this for some friends – having never played with the PbtA rules before, which is it’s own set of challenges – and at the end of the session, the players managed to talk the villain down from his diabolical plot, and then let him walk away. Obviously, this seems like a prime hook for a session about the reaction of the city and the superhero community at large (‘why did they do that?’ etc). While I’d appreciate any advice on how best to make that happen, I was looking at the way you create supervillains, and wondering: could you use these to create other threats for the group, ie, an antagonistic television persona looking to stir up this story for ratings, or some other J. Jonah Jameson type?
So tonight I’m running my second session of this for some friends – having never played with the PbtA rules before,…
So tonight I’m running my second session of this for some friends – having never played with the PbtA rules before,…
yes, and in fact I am doing things like that with my interpretation of this game.
And, a television network might be modeled with the Fronts mechanics (think, “linked threats”) found in Apocalypse World and Dungeon World, applied to this game system
If all this stuff was caught on video or something, then there would definitely be public backlash. The city’s media would be asking a lot of questions. Social media would be ablaze with speculation and stuff. The Blogosphere might be trashing the heroes or whatever. If there is a Legacy character, an Outsider, a Doomed … they’re are going to have to face that decision in the way people are going to react to them. Perhaps a bit more keenly than other playbooks.
Each of these is a suitable smaller parts of a front. the news organizations sound like the equivalent of a Landscape threat (p. 135, AW) for a Front called “The News”. and the blogosphere sounds like part of a special Front type ( Home Front: no specific motivation or motivator, more faceless) possibly called “Internetz”
If you are interested in building them as Fronts, you just need a motivation to get started. perhaps someones envy threatens the group? whose fear threatens? one will strike true for you, and make the answer your first threat for your Front (and each Front should have 3 or 4 threats)
I don’t know if you should punish the behavior too much. What are the positive reactions? Less villains fighting to the death, probably. Villains FINDING the team to have their voices heard. Heroes coming, discreetly, for advice.
Thanks for the help, guys! Afraid I wasn’t able to do anything with fronts, due to only really having access to the beta rules and not really anything else pbtA..
But it went well! They ended up on a pundit’s show, I played then as being quite confrontational and so on – at this stage I figure it was just the shoutiest people kicking up a fuss. Won’t go into too much detail or this would be an actual party, but I’m happy to report that building Caroline Cryer as you would a supervillain worked very well, as did having the combat be a debate!