6 thoughts on “+1 if everyone has the same purpose in the fight”

  1. Show me to the media.

    Test myself.

    Try my new powers.

    Rescue aunt mary.

    Try not to get hurt.

    Manage to lead the team properly.

    …

    No, hardly all members would be fighting for the same reasons.

  2. Even if they’re going for the same thing and nobody has any ulterior motives, different heroes might have different priorities, too. One might focus on capturing the bad guy, while another might focus on rescuing the hostages, for instance.

    So no, they won’t always have the same purpose. How strict you want to be about that is kind of a table question, though. If the team is working like a well oiled machine and you want to highlight that (possibly before throwing some bleach in the oil), be generous and give it to them. If there’s some cool interpersonal friction going on and you want to highlight that (possibly before providing them opportunities to clench their teeth and work together when the chips are down), maybe be more discerning.

    Or, you know, best answer is probably to just ask the players. They’ll probably be pretty honest about how on-the-same-page they are.

  3. At first I was generous, but after their first major victory, I would have liked to increase the difficulty and be more “picky” (the same way I increase the difficulty of the opposition adding more indirect dangers)

    Asking players, I think I went too “tactical goal” and less “higher purpose”, as exposed by Oscar, and that it appeared unfair to them to not get their bonus. This led to “I will see with the authors/community” ^^

    So thanks for your answers

  4. usually, in my group, we’ve rarely managed to have the same purpose. We’ll have them coming up with a plan to deal with watchmaker, and the self styled team leader will say this is a stealth  mission, and then others kinda go ‘huh?  Yeah no, I’m punching everything’. Or they fought the recurring villain Pandora who was releasing oathhounds to attack people and we had several go ‘focus on the summons to save the people’ and one person adamant about taking down Pandora herself to stop it from happening again. 

    Like, t he same end goal in general is important and what is being prioritized. Maybe its just my group, but when they were united in purpose it was always a kinda shock/oh thank goodness moment, since they rarely do so. 

  5. (I love these answers!) What I like to do:

    (1) Make sure you know who the team leader is, either in that exact moment, or in general. (I love making them pick a leader early, because it absolutely becomes a point of contention.)

    (2) Ask the team leader: What’s your purpose in this fight?

    (3) Watch as the other team members either nod and agree, or balk at that answer. If they nod, they have the same purpose. If they balk, they don’t. 

    (4) Profit.

  6. My group had this discussion after last night’s session. 

    During the session, the players quickly identified a team leader as they moved out to respond to acts of villainy (the first player who had their character say “let’s go!” – despite the fact he was emotionally estranged from three of his four teammates at the time…).  As they approached the team, they moved to confront the villain, and the leader rolled the team mechanic (a stunning failure!), and then everyone proceeded to do their own thing as they started off under-fire.

    In our post-game debrief one of the things that came up was that we really weren’t making use of the team mechanic as a driving force to the fiction.  We were missing out considerably on the “feel” of the game.

    Our thought was that the team should pick a leader, whether it’s a standing leader or changes by scene. As the team heads up against a threat, we need to have the leader clearly identify a plan of action – and we’ll carve the fictional space to accomplish this act in some way, whatever is going on.  Depending on the fiction it may be a dialogue, or it may be issuing crisp orders to the others.  Either way, we now know what “the plan is”.

    The benefit will be mechanical, fictional, and thematic: a) assessing the buy-in to the plan from team members to help determine bonuses/penalties to the roll; b) giving clear fictional prompting for those team members that want to spend Team by going off-plan; and c) help players frame their actions in the context of superheroes fighting as a team (even when that means going off-script).

    Of course, no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and we won’t hold the fiction dogmatically to the plan as events spiral out of control, but at least we will have a firm grip on how the characters intend to coordinate, and i think it will give them some fictional position to attempt to recover from hard moves as well as how to narrate their actions and interpret the results of their moves, such as giving each other opportunities.  

    Most importantly, we players will be watching a team rather than a collection of disparate acts of individual heroism.

Comments are closed.