Hi. New around here. Great looking game. Can’t wait to get the books.
A few questions about combat. Specifically the Directly Engage move, inflicting conditions on villains, and villain moves.
Directly Engage includes “trade blows” and “create an opportunity” and “impress/frighten”. Is it just a simple matter of “trading blows” to inflict a condition on a villain? Seems villains are quite weak then with a max of only five conditions. With a decent-sized group even the biggest-bad could be down in a single round.
My reading is that you need to “create an opportunity” to set up another PC for that “gets hit hard” that’s mentioned in the Villains in a Fight section, and only then will they take a condition. Is that right?
That frighten bit from Directly Engage, does that mean inflicting the condition Afraid?
Lastly, Villain condition moves. PC clear conditions when they make their condition moves, do the villains also clear conditions when they make their condition moves?
Sorry if these are answered to death. A link to prior discussion would be greatly appreciated if they were.
Thanks.
EDIT: Also, a question about Influence. Every adult automatically gets Influence over the PCs… including the villains (if they’re adults)?
Trading blows: I’ve been playing it that every time a villain gets hit with Directly Engage, they take a condition, and it’s generally worked well. Thinking of it in terms of ‘going down in a single round’ is oversimplifying, I think. Mainly because, in order to trade blows, a hero has to actually be able to directly engage the villain in the first place, and a villain fight that’s set up well will have a lot of other things that they need to worry about besides the villain. Often there are civilians to worry about, and even in somewhere without them (like an abandoned warehouse, which is where our last villain fight happened), there are environmental hazards and other concerns to worry about. PCs ignoring those problems and going after the villain is a golden opportunity to make moves that make the scene more interesting. Every time a villain takes a condition the GM also makes a hard move that escalates the situation in some way, which helps a lot.
Side note: a pattern I’ve noticed, now that I’m actually getting to run Masks in a campaign form instead of just one-shots, is that the Danger label creates an interesting rhythm. If a PC has high Danger, then they tend to do well on Directly Engage, which helps mitigate the fallout. This tends to make people exerting influence on them say that they’re not actually that Dangerous, meaning that the Danger label goes down, making villain fights messier–prompting people to say that they are Dangerous. So the cycle goes. The takeaway being that if villain fights start seeming to go too quickly–which is actually fine, as the heroes get to be heroes and you can accept that certain villains actually aren’t that threatening–in addition to the stuff from the above paragraph the Influence mechanics provide a way of turning that around. I hope that makes sense.
Frighten: I haven’t been reading it that way. Take note that ‘frighten’ is also accompanied by ‘impress’ and ‘surprise,’ and you as the GM decide which is most appropriate. I’ve used frighten to make a villain’s henchman scatter, surprise to put a group of villains off their footing for a moment and allow the PC more fictional space for a follow-up, and impress to make a cocky villain see a hero as more of an equal, all of which have lead fights in interesting directions. Besides, inflicting two conditions on a single hit would only aggravate concerns about squishy villains, and only having a specific choice for one of the conditions, and not the others, seems backwards.
Villains clearing conditions: I don’t read it that way. Villains already have actions that they take when they have conditions inflicted on them, so using the ‘clearing conditions’ rules on top of that seems redundant. I just assume that they clear any conditions while they’re off-screen, though as noted in the ‘villains in a fight’ section the heroes could also help them clear a condition with Comfort and Support. Haven’t seen a PC do that yet, though.
Villainous influence: yes, absolutely! That way villains get to do their taunts and Hannibal Lecter speeches to get under the heroes’ skin. I got to see that in action a couple of times this past Sunday, with Command Line questioning his own Asimovian ethics and Nightjar listening to what the villain Thrush had to say without telling the team about it; it was pretty great.
Is Nightjar named after that guy from Shadowrun: Hong Kong?
Nah, they’re a thinly veiled reference to Robin. The character is a Protege to Owlman; Thrush was the latter’s previous sidekick, in keeping with the small bird theme. Our references are totally shameless, but we’re making our own story anyway; it’s pretty cool.
It isn’t until 9:58 when I googled Nightjar and found out it was a bird, not a jar