help! So I am still a little new to PbtA games, I may be doing something wrong.
My players have been trying to trap the bad guys at the beginning of the fight. They reference page 60 about Unleash your Powers where you wrap your villain in a metal cage. They use their powers in a creative way to cage the bad guy.
It is bringing what could be epic battles to a quick halt. I know I can create some villains that escape this kind of situation, but I don’t want to make every villain like that. That would feel cheesy.
Are we doing this right? Or should they have to beat down the villain before being able to trap her/him?
First, unleashing their powers is dangerous – if they can’t hit the 10+ result then they have to mark a condition; this can be the villain blasting them as they do it or whatever.
Second, most villains that don’t have the powers to break out of a cage have other powers that allow them to be effective even inside it. Mental powers that let them take over police officers to shoot at the PCs (or themselves?), a big group of Science Minions roll up to laser beam the PCs (and cut the villain out), etc. So just play real rough with them. The villain’s not down unless they mark conditions and unleashing their powers doesn’t make a villain mark a condition.
What makes a superhero battle epic isn’t the powers of the characters (Batman v. Riddler, c’mon), but what’s at stake. “Release me from this cage or YOUR BOYFRIEND goes into the PIT OF SPIKES” or “Ha ha ha, you may have captured ME, but my ROBO BEASTS will still tear the hostages apart!!”
If the “villain” doesn’t have the power to get out from a metal cage or be effective within it and they’re going up against PCs that can do that, maybe they’re not the real villain, maybe they’re like, the villain’s little brother, just let the PCs wreck them.
You’re not doing anything wrong: it’s legitimately hard for a 4v1 (or whatever) superfight with somewhat freeform powers to feel balanced and challenging.
At the root of the issue, you have to let your heroes have the effects of their powers, if they’ve earned them. If it’s within the scope of their powers and they’ve nailed their dice rolls, you have to let them have it. Otherwise you’re cheating your players and it’ll quickly become an unfortunate situation at the table. If a hero can make forcefield boxes and lands a 7+ on their unleash, they make their forcefield box. As said, some villains might only be inconvenienced by that instead of stopped, but if that starts applying to all of them then it’ll feel like cheating the player out of their powers again. So contingencies becomes the goal.
To that end, henchmen are my favourite tool in all of Masks. Henchmen, or zombies, or robots, or mutants from beyond the moon, or whatever. A group of henchmen on the scene solves a lot of potential problems in Masks, the locked-down-villain situation included. They let you threaten a wide area and a wide number of targets, creating a more dynamic and interesting scene with many avenues for both you & the players to make moves. They let you divide the heroes’ attentions so they can’t necessarily assist each other on every roll (opening up more 7-9’s or misses for you to play with) while also potentially highlighting the team’s moral choices and loyalties. And they let your heroes be awesome and creative without it immediately ending your big crime scene — having 4 gun-toting goons get trapped in a forcefield is awesome and cinematic, but having your only villain get trapped with no way out is just kinda awkward and anticlimactic.
They make scenes more fun for both the GM and the players, and in my experience few villains should leave home without some kind of goon squad on call, if not immediately present.
Cool. I was pretty much using the whole mob to help free the BBEG or continue to cause hell for the others.
I didn’t want to cheat my players of their powers so I let them do it. In some fights it felt anticlimactic, but that was because it was just an evil villain and his sidekick.
Since they went down really easy, I just made them a joke that would keep popping up from time to time.
Thank you for confirming and the additional tactics.
Yeah, PbtA is intentionally designed not to do “combat for the sake of combat” well. Instead of thinking of fights as mechanical challenges for your players, think of them like a storyteller would. What does everybody in the fight who isn’t a mook want, and how far are they prepared to go to get it? What’s at stake if the PCs fail? Are there any wild-card factors in play which might influence the outcome of the fight? Is there anyone invested in preventing this fight from happening? Will anyone profit from it? And so on.
One thing you absolutely should not do is artificially extend the length of your fights to make them feel “epic,” because that’s the surest way to make them feel perfunctory. If your players roll a 10+ and trap your villain in a metal cage, and your villain doesn’t have metal manipulation powers or whatever, then your villain is trapped in a cage and the fight’s over. Move on to the next scene. You can always make a new villain.
A lot of great suggestions above.
The only thing I might add is when you have them using their powers to solve problems ask them what THEY think might go wrong if they fail or get a 7-9. This allows you to work in the space of the player agenda instead of imposing reactions on them from the rolls.
In Masks this is important because how the characters feel or what they fear is very relevant to the game. Use that to inform your condition markings and spend some time talking at the table about those items. It will make the “conversation” of pbta play far better and keep the rolls from feeling like they solve everything in 5 mins.
And Minions. Yeah minions. Use them…a lot!
Good luck!
And don’t forget that, because the conditions aren’t physical injuries to the characters, or can threaten the PCs, and inflict resulting conditions without ever harming them.
They’re focused on the big-bad? His minions are knocking down walls, putting bystanders in danger, kidnapping people, etc. They’re so focused on the big-bad that they don’t stop those minions?
People are hurt (or even die?), chaos happens. Mom/big bro/a friend is in the crowd and gets kidnapped? The local homeless shelter is now a pile of rubble? Now they’re insecure, angry, afraid, etc.
All sorts of stuff can happen, even while the villain is ‘caged’ (literally or metaphorically).
No, I get that they are dealing with more than just the big bad. It just felt weird that if they came in wanting to punch the big bad to control him, they would need to go through 2-5 conditions (depending on the bad).
OR they could get lucky with a Unleash your Powers roll.
Again, it may just be me being new to PbtA games and that is why it feels weird. Now that you guys have confirmed I am doing this right, I feel better about it.
Thank you.
With the ‘caging’, the heroes are taking away options from the villain. Typically, this includes mobility, maybe utility of short-range powers, etc.
Also remember that as your heroes repeatedly make use of the same tactic, the villains will be more and more prepared to deal with it. Especially if they’ve tangled with those heroes before.
is tangled a pun? 😛
I mean, read comics. Heroes try their best stuff right at the beginning, but villains have counterplans.
It is time to make the villains smarter. Show this strategy are making the villains more prone to use counter measures. You can capture the vvillain, but the whle city block is demolished because the villain was taken away from the remote control distance before he could do anything to stop.
Or it is time to the villains play with the heroes insecurities and fears saying “I let you get me, just I want to kill yhat, that and that guys at the jail before I start a jaul riot which will release the Legion of Destruction out from the jail to make Halcyon city a ghost city” And at the next session let the pcs learn what the villain said is real and right now the Legion is out of the jail and theey are ready to destroy a whole neighborhood where a loed one lives
Lots of good stuff above. To add one more consideration—practically always, villains can talk. And if they can talk, they’re dangerous, if only to the PCs’ sense of self.
If the PCs are in a fight with a Joker-style villain named Satin, and they catch Satin in a forcefield box in a couple seconds with a lucky “unleash your powers” roll, then perfect! Satin’s in a box. But Satin can still talk. And since by default, Satin has Influence over the PC, Satin can still say something like, “Oh, this is cute. You do know that once you turn me over to the authorities I’m just going to escape eventually, right? This is all for nothing, unless you’re willing to take more permanent measures. And we both know you’re not.” Thereby using his Influence and requiring the PC to respond accordingly.
And that moment can snowball—if the PC accepts Satin’s Influence, then later on another adult hero can say they made the right choice, while another adult news personality might take the PC to task for not taking necessary steps, and so on and so forth. All of which forces the PC to respond, either shifting their Labels around or forcing them to reject Influence.
The point here is that your job as GM isn’t specifically to provide challenging fights that take a while to resolve. It’s to find out who the PCs really are. If they try to defeat bad guys by just putting them in forcefield boxes, great! That shows who they are, and gives you plenty of fodder to play with for consequences.
(And then every now and then feel free to throw in, like, Thanos or Darkseid. “What, you think this forcefield can hold me? Yeah right, kid.” Remember, if they can’t do it in the fiction, then the move doesn’t trigger…and sometimes, it’s not inappropriate to say, “Yeah, no way are you webbing up Galactus, there, Spider-Man. Good try, but you’re not really even unleashing your powers here. He just snaps the webs, he’s got the power cosmic.” Don’t spring it on them without warning—you’re a fan of these PCs—but don’t hesitate to enforce the established fiction. “Yeah, Batman, but how exactly are you directly engaging Darkseid when he’s basically immune to your fists, your batarangs, and everything you’re carrying.”)
To speak to your final point, about why your players would choose to directly engage a threat instead of unleashing their powers…firstly remember that their fictional description dictates what they actually do, no matter what. So if they’re punching the villain, they’re directly engaging, one way or another.
Then, the PCs might prefer to directly engage a threat because their Labels are set that way, or because it’s a much more surefire way to make the villain inactive. Unleashing your powers might put the villain in a forcefield box if you have the right abilities, but that’s also only consequence free if you roll a 10+, and the villain can still act. They can use their other powers, they can talk, and heck, they can try to escape. If Green Lantern put Solomon Grundy in a box, Grundy would try to escape. And while that shouldn’t happen instantaneously, it’s also fair to tell Lantern, “Hey, if you just let him keep pounding, eventually he’s going to smash out of here.”
Through the mechanics, inflicting conditions will, eventually, take that threat out, without question—and that’s never as certain with unleashing your powers.