First I’d like to say I’ve never been so enthusiastic about an AW hack since Monsterhearts. So I’m translating documents in french to play it tomorrow and I have some questions:
1/What technical differences do you make between vulnerable/opportunity/critical opportunity/opportunity for the opposition ?
2/If I directly engage a threat, does the option “impress, surprise, or frighten the opposition.” has a particular use regarding the Condition the opponent will have to mark ? Could it even be mandatory or will the Conditions still be marked one after another by hitting a vilain even if there is no particular reason in the fiction ? Should the hero have to search what Conditions a vilain can have so they can see how they can affect him ?
3/My Hero is threatened by a crumbling building over is head or a death ray from from a vilain. How can he defend : unleashing his powers / directly engaging a threat with a 7+ choosing “resist avoid blows” ?
Thanks in advance for your reply.
Kal
Kalysto de la vacuité: It’s awesome that you’re translating the documents! Let me see if I can help with those questions:
1) “Vulnerable” is used to mean “susceptible.” For example, the question “Who here is most vulnerable to me?” is asking, “Who here can I affect the most?” “A vulnerable foe” is someone who is susceptible to you and what you can do.
“Creating an opportunity for your allies” is creating an opening so a teammate can do something cool. “Your opposition gets an opportunity” means you have given your opposition a chance to do something they want, because you gave up some ground.
The “critical opportunity” in Provoke Someone is similar—they make a mistake and it gives the hero a chance to do something important. Maybe it’s just the opening the hero needs to hit the doomsday ray behind the villain and take it down, for instance.
2) When villains mark conditions, the GM (by default) decides which condition they mark, and suits it to the fiction. So, absolutely—you could interpret that “impress, surprise, or frighten the opposition” means they have to mark Afraid, maybe even above and beyond the condition they should mark for “trading blows”! If you punch Toad and frighten him, you can bet your butt, he’s going to be Afraid and Insecure! That’s down to you playing the villains in a way that’s honest and fits the principles and agendas of the game.
3) If the GM just had the villain fire a death ray laser at a hero, then “Unleash Your Powers” is a perfect move to divert the beam! A teammate might also dive in and “Defend” the intended target. “Directly Engage” probably isn’t right, at that stage, because the hero’s already being shot at—“Directly Engage” is for when you’re getting into a tussle, and you’ve got to deal with the incoming laser beam before you can get to the scrapping. (You could always “Take a powerful blow,” hope you come past it, and then go straight to “Directly Engaging,” though.)
Hope those answers help! If you have more questions, please ask, and I’ll be happy to answer. Let us know how the translation goes!
Thanks for those clear answers.
4/What’s the optimal number of players ?
About translation, I just started playbooks. In the past I translated “support documents” in french for Monsterhearts, Sagas of the Icelanders and The ‘Hood, and distributed it accordingly to the autors’ wishes. It’s a little soon, but the same will certainly happen with Masks if you like the idea 🙂
5/Shielding. With this Burn, the Nova can defend himself. But reading the defend move, it doesn’t seem really tailored for this, apart from escalating the situation in exchange for not getting hit by the current situation.
Translation is made at 98% (lacking x proofreading) but I need your help for 2 sentences of the beacon.
-Drives : “Show up an adult hero” >> does it mean you have to act like an adult hero or that you must present yourself to an adult hero (and its potential judgment)
-Pretty Much a Superhero: “mistrust you moving forward” : as in “don’t come closer” or “you shouldn’t try to be a hero”
Thanks in advance 🙂
Brendan Conway any clue for me ? 🙂
Sure!
For Shielding: Hm. I’ll look at it more closely (it may make sense to take the “yourself” part out of Shielding), but at the moment, I’d flag that you can defend yourself from one immediate threat (like being incinerated by a ball of fire) at a cost. The shield you throw up takes a lot of your willpower, so you have to mark a condition! Or it escalates the situation—that fireball doesn’t hurt you, but it does explode all around you. The shield disperses the flame, and the entire building’s going up now! Some of the options wouldn’t make sense (like “take Influence over someone you protect”), but otherwise the move should generally work. I’ll definitely look at clearing this up as we move forward, though—thanks for pointing it out!
For the Beacon: “Show up an adult hero,” to me, means looking better than them. You have to do a better job than an adult hero, or disprove the bad things they’ve been saying about you. “Prove yourself better than an adult hero” would be one way to see it; “Showing them up” simply has a more teenage rebellion-y flavor. 🙂
For “Pretty much a superhero”: “You shouldn’t try to be a hero” is close to the “they don’t take you seriously” part of that move. “They mistrust you moving forward”, then, is better interpreted as “don’t do anything, you’ll just make it worse.” They do not believe you can help, and are suspicious of your attempts to try—not because they think you’re a bad person necessarily, but most likely because they think you’re incompetent.
Hope that helps!
Ok it’s clear for translation. Thanks. When kickstarter will be finished, maybe you could tell me if you want me to do something with my translation (like providing it to french public to ease play ^^) ?
For defending one’s self, against NPC, I don’t think it works well: on a hit, you keep them safe at a cost:
a/expose yourself to danger >> meaning we failed at defending oneself
b/escalate the situation>> meaning it will become worst for me (if I’m alone) or for the others
Options: taking Influence or gaining Team doesn’t seem logical, clearing a Condition is the best one, and so on 7+ we can say that I expose myself to danger (powerful blow ? or you seem to mean it’s “mark a Condition”), but I clear a Condition at the same time, so 7+ could be total win ?
Or I worsen the situation for the team and I clear a Condition for this, not very logical. And on 10+, I don’t know what second option I could take.
Awesome! I’ll talk over the translation with my team. And thanks for the feedback! I think that it’ll be simplest just to make clear that you can defend other people and things. Keep in mind that exposing yourself to danger doesn’t mean exposing yourself to the same danger you defended from, and escalating the situation just means things become more intense, dramatic, and dangerous, not necessarily worse for you—it’s not really a Masks example, but a knife fight escalates when guns come out. That doesn’t mean anybody gets shot! Just that the stakes are higher.
DITV style, I understood