Author: Grey Kitten

End of session move: Grow closer to the team.

“Explain who made you feel welcome; give Influence to that character…”

Influence:

“If you have Influence over a teammate and you would gain Influence over them again, immediately shift one of their Labels up and one of their Labels down, your choice.”

Shifting Labels:

“If you ever need to shift a Label above +3 or below -2 mark a condition instead, GM’s choice.”

When its time for teammates to shift labels, do you let your players share OOC where their labels are currently, so their teammates don’t accidentally shift them past +3 or -2 and inadvertently give their teammate a condition for what should have been a moment of growing closer?

My players hate this consequence. It sours the celebratory feeling of the end of session move for this chain of events to trigger. How do you guys handle this?

How frequently at your table do players trigger moves and roll dice?

Listening to my players objections to the too-fast pacing, I went through the last session letting them do most of the leading without new things being thrown in. (Feedback to that was positive) There was some great role play and some of the outstanding threads got wrapped up. In an 8 hour session, moves were triggered where dice were rolled only about 5 or 6 times.

How do your experiences compare?

How fast-paced are your games?

One of my players has been complaining that my pace is too fast. My Halcyon City is constantly keeping them running around. My players are a Soldier, a Newborn, a Janus, and a Beacon.

The beacon is a football player. The Quarterback, Liam Lyons, an NPC, dropped out of school to do super-hero stuff when he found out his dad was a super-villain (Dr Wrath), throwing the team in disarray.

The Quarterback’s older brother, former golden boy, Logan Lyons, is in college now. One of their classmates developed powers after attending a frat party. At first they thought it was because she was pregnant, but her gravity powers kicked in again after she had an abortion, tearing down the Planned Parenthood building with the Janus inside with her.

The team stopped Seismic Prime from wrecking havoc, and stopped La Espada from robbing a bank during the distraction. Espada told them she was doing it to take care of her sister, who was sick due to super-related radiation. The team didn’t believe that justified robbing banks and turned her in and reported her sister as being without a guardian.

AEGIS took the little sister and gave her some of Dr. Wrath’s syrum that turns normal people into powered individuals. This cured her disease, but granted her such rapid healing that one of the scientists at AEGIS went too far and cut off her hand – her hand grew back and the severed hand grew a new her. They cut the new clone in half, and both halves regenerated.

La Espada opened a portal into the Beacon’s bedroom and asked for his help breaking her sister out. He told her to suck it, she’s a villain. She broke her sister(s) out and left them in his house while she went on the run.

Hearing her story, they started to trust AEGIS a little less.

The Soldier’s parents were out of town for a mission. Carbine swept in and introduced herself as Aunt Jessie. She was making inroads in gaining the soldier’s trust by answering all his questions (whereas AEGIS proper told him things were classified above his clearance) and giving him whatever weapons or tools of death he wanted. She gave him access to files that showed his real parents were mutants killed by his adoptive AEGIS parents.

The Lyons house got found out by AEGIS as Dr. Wrath’s headquarters because of the team’s social media. Dr. Wrath was captured.

The soldier came clean to his adoptive parents while they were in the hospital after Dr. Wrath was abducted from AEGIS headquarters by Rampage, who wanted to force him to cure her. The team stopped Rampage. Also in that wing were the Gravity girl and the new quarterback who took Dr. Wrath’s drug trying to be a better player, but instead developing a power that made everyone around him drunk. Worried about the scientist who would cut a girl in half and Carbine, then instructed the soldier to get his friends out and keep them safe.

He put the girl who had just had an abortion on the lap of a horny football quarterback in a two-seater convertible. She started to have a panic attack, broke her AEGIS power-suppression collar and was about to explode the car. The Soldier broke the football jock’s collar and quashed the explosion by making everyone in the block drunk – while driving. They managed to avoid destroying the city themselves, but only barely.

When La Espada checked in with the Beacon to get her sister back (they had already hidden her with the Newborn’s “mom” – a computer scientist who developed the AI that is the Newborn), he wouldn’t tell her where the sister was, and got all preachy demanding she turn herself in for the bank robbery. So, she did, and told AEGIS that her sister had been at his house. When he came home from the football game, his parents and little brother were not there. He spent a few hours in a panic and thinking murderous thoughts about La Espada, assuming she had somehow portaled in and abducted his family to hold for ransom for her sister. Then when the AEGIS van pulled up to drop them off after hours of unsuccessful questioning, he started to feel like he should turn himself in, too.

Beyond that, there’s a subplot where someone is trying to make the cheerleaders and the football team think they’re at war with one another. There’s a C-storyline with anti-mutant legislation being lobied (the Janus’s mom is one of the strongest supporters of this).

Loto is a Beacon. He’s from Hawaii and is obsessed with supers and is looking for a date for Prom. His player has asked me for a list of all the other students at Margaret M MacIntyre Academy whose powers are public knowledge because he’d want to go with a girl who has super-powers.

Help me come up with a list of potential dates with varying degrees of abilities ranging from awesome to ridiculous.

– Aisha has conduction: she can excite the molecules of any conductive material to heat them up, which lets her do things like operating a hot-plate without plugging it in.

– Sierra can transform her body but only into things she’s eaten. So if she had bacon for breakfast, she can turn into a pig. She’s way more aware than the average person how much bug parts are in processed foods.

– Caylee is cocoa-kinetic. She can manipulate chocolate with the power of her mind.

– Jaylen is a dream walker. She is able to enter people’s dreams and sometimes control what they dream about.

– Giovanna can talk to animals. All animals love her. It’s annoying and disruptive. She’s learned that mostly what animals say is “I’m SO SEXY!”

– Danica has power over smoke. She can shape smoke into nearly solid objects that she can manipulate.

How much planning do you put in before your first session?

I admit that preparing for a first session of any PbtA game makes me anxious. On one hand, I want to have a whole cast of NPCs and villains ready to go with action-packed drama in my pocket so I can drop the PCs right into the fire for an explosive opening that will have them hooked. On the other, I want to leave a lot of blanks so that the character creation process can fill in the world with relevant NPCs that come with ties to the PCs, leaving the role of major villain to them to insert their Nemesis, spawned when they answer questions about their characters. The story needs to be about them!

How do you all balance those two to feel ready for the first session?

Follow-up, how many of you do session 0 as character generation only, and how many combine with session 1 where you actually play the characters through some scenes?