Author: John Leibee

Some moves and moves-language I’ve used in my games that might be up for some discussion:

“When you save the city and get credit for it, roll +Savior. On a 7-9, the city likes you; take a +1 forward towards the next normal person you roll a move on. On a 10+, the city loves you; take influence over the city and its mundane crowds of nameless inhabitants. On a miss, the city doesn’t trust you; tell me why, and gain a condition.”

I used the Team-generating “When you lead the team into battle against a dangerous foe” move for when the group went to a big party thrown by a rival team. Does everyone trust the leader and the team? Yeah, we do… Do we all have the same purpose here? … NO!

My reasoning for this one: Even at a party (with this game, ESPECIALLY at a party) people are going to be rolling moves like Defend (for when the Transformed tries to make small talk with a girl and gets told he’s gross and the Beacon comes in to tell her she is too) and Directly Engage (when the Outsider and the Doomed are having an argument because they’re both crushing on the same girl) and Provoke (when the Legacy is trying to get a girl to make out with him in the broom closet) and Change Self-Image (for when the Beacon rallies the Transformed, pep-talks him and sends him after the girl that the Legacy, Doomed and Outsider are all squabbling over…).  There’s a lot of moves that might go out! The theme of this game is twofold: “Hurting people’s feelings and then apologizing” and “We are a team”, and the team has each-other’s backs. The best way to really show that is to have Team in the pool so people can spend it to have eachother’s backs.

“When you go to the big Sky City party, decide: Do you mingle with people who have similar interests, or people with similar powers, and roll +Mundane for People and +Freak for Powers. On a 7-9, choose one. On a 10+, choose 2. — Someone wants to meet you; — You gain influence over someone at the party; — Someone at the party loses influence over you; — You learn something about a person, place or thing you didn’t know before.”

“When you take a powerful blow from the Laughmaster, you’re breathing in his laughing gas. On a hit, you see your worst fear; on a 10+, you have to struggle against it to continue the fight. After the fight, if you’re Afraid, you can clear Afraid by sharing what your worst fear is with someone else (likely by sharing a vulnerability or weakness at the same time).”

“When you seek the wisdom of Athena, you can roll to Assess the Situation with +Savior. If you do, the team can choose one character to ask a Pierce the Mask question of you, and you must answer honestly. That character knows the answer to that question intrinsically and without explanation; mirrors reflect the truth, but they also reflect part of yourself as well.”

How does your group feel about custom moves and which ones have you used? Have you used any regular moves in weird context? Let’s talk about it.

So, my group has a mechanics conundrum. We’ve got a few NPCs joining the main PCs team while they help rescue their allies from a psychopath villain.

What kind of mechanics would you suggest to continue to put the “Team” theme farther out there while not narratively letting the NPCs fall by the wayside?

I was considering adding more Team to the pool (“Red team” since we use blue stones) that when you use it puts the NPC in danger ala Dungeon World, or specifically making a move per NPC (When you directly engage a group and Dynamite is present, roll +Danger) or for the NPCs as a whole (When you engage the enemy with allies who aren’t part of the team, decide what label they stand for and roll+that), or something else…

What do you guys think?

So, we had a really good first session! A Transformed, a Doomed, a Protege, an Outsider and the Legacy, in the future of an old superhero setting we played in for a long, long campaign. It was great!

The Legacy (Icarus) was in a fight against a plant-controlling woman named Rose Red with the Outsider (Lava Lass) and the Transformed (Kaiju). When Icarus took a powerful blow defending Lava Lass from a monstrous tooth-flower, he chose to lash out verbally at a team mate (he didn’t see the ; there in the description, but this isn’t about that).

I was like, “Sure! How are you doing it?” And he jumped in as Icarus, shouting “Do something! Don’t just stand there, come on! What the hell are you doing?! Why are you so useless?!!” and I was like, oh, use Directly Engage! So Icarus did and got a 10. Then, Kaiju defended Lava Lass, sticking up for her, giving Icarus an 8 instead. He chose to “Resist or avoid her blows” so that she couldn’t respond (or if she did he didn’t care), but she wasn’t intimidated by him. This was a great moves spiral that took the focus of the fight off of Rose Red and the vine monsters and onto the interpersonal teen drama, so I loved it! It helped push the hard move from Protege’s 2 on the Team Roll to enter the combat (Convey to him his mistakes).

After Rose Red escaped, it ended up with Lava Lass taking a powerful blow from Icarus telling the Doomed “At least you did something– not like LAVA LASS OVER HERE” in earshot of her– !! It was super amazing. I am loving the system and how it can effortlessly switch gears from superheroics to teen drama.

Now, the question:

Later the PCs told me they didn’t like that arguing was Directly Engaging and they don’t think it works. I think it does! Resisting their blows, creating an opportunity, taking something from them, frightening or impressing, it’s a shouting match! And that’s what happened right there. But they don’t think that Danger is the stat for arguing, but Superior, so the whole thing doesn’t work. I was thinking that a lot of arguments I’ve had have been solved by not who was the smartest or the smuggest but by the loudest! The other person’s implied or overt anger steers the argument faster and harder than actually being right.

What do you guys think?

A few esoteric rules questions:

If you have a label locked and the GM tells you to raise or lower it, you take a condition. Right?

So, if you have two labels locked, and the GM tells you to raise one and lower the other, you take two conditions. (ouch)

If you are fighting someone you have Influence over, or with a +1 forward, and you roll Take a Powerful Blow, you add +1 to the result– on a move where a higher result means worse for you. Is this correct?

Because that doesn’t seem very correct…

You have the Adult Move Empathize. You are in a fight versus a team-mate with two locked Labels who you have Influence over. You empathize with the fact that they want to kick your face in because you’re a jerk (or something else far more story related), and roll a 10+ on Mundane. They must now reveal a vulnerability or mark a condition AND you take influence over them again, so you choose to shift their two locked labels, giving them two more conditions. You can also take advantage of your influence on them, giving them another condition when you do so.

That’s one condition away from being out of the fight— one 7-9 on Provoke, with a desire of “Them to give up” and they must mark another condition and go unconscious. The only condition that’s easy to clear in this situation is Angry (by hurting the person you are fighting) so it’s tough to see how the mechanical side of this is supposed to really work, especially without a good move to reconcile what we should be really doing here…

Someone tell me what I’m missing!