Author: John McMullen

A clarification in the Beacon playbook. In drives, you choose 4, and then you choose another 4 (8 in total). It says “When all drives are exhausted” — but that’s all 8, right? Not every drive in the list.

Yesterday we tried a session of Masks. It was fun, though I suspect you need three players and a GM to really bounce stuff around. (We had two players and me.) I’ll do an actual play at some time in the future. A couple of things came up. (I’m trying to separate the wheat of actual questions from the chaff of being unfamiliar with any PbtA games.)

First, can a Nova generate burn and spend it in the same turn? In the end, I allowed it because it was the end of the session, and it saved a life, but it didn’t feel “rules-y” to me..

Second, how many Team can a PC spend in a single move? I can spin it both ways: you can have the cool destroying move that inflicts four conditions, or everyone gets to apply a condition (for example).

It might be nice in the final product to provide some kind of advice for either introducing NPC heroes onto the team or changing/limiting options if there are only two or one PCs.

V. briefly, we started with the Nova and the Outsider (Beacon and Rev) having a fight in an upper-class suburb with Scarlet Songbird, who it turns out is allergic to the youth serum that lots of Golden Generation villains use. But he got so mad at their fumbling attempts to stop him that he escaped and decided to set up the old villain group the Injustice Agency again. Much of the rest of the session was devoted to trying to find a home for the family whose house had been burned down in the fight. In the course of that, Beacon and Rev stumbled upon the auditions for the Injustice Agency, and Cygnus, who the PCs had worked with in the canonical First Team-Up but who had decided to go to the other side. Chaos ensued.

Fun was had. One of the players is looking for a supers game to run his group through so he wondered when the actual product would be available; I have no idea, so I said maybe late in 2016.

I think (I hope, anyway) that I’m incrementally closer to an understanding of how to run this thing. Anybody have sample villains that they want to share? There’s the one example in the GM PDF, but I’m looking for other examples, hoping to broaden my horizons…and with a second example (perhaps not too far from the first) I might be able to tackle it.

I suspect that when I run a session (tentatively scheduled for Sunday), I’ll have a two-condition villain to start in medias res, let them defeat that villain (suddenly I’m thinking about a two-condition guy from the golden age who has busted out of the retirement home because he’s immortal and he wants to die, dammit, so he’s hoping a nice exertion will make his heart explode. That might be too dark for a first playtest), and the consequences of the first fight, whatever it is, will lead into the second fight. Or do folks normally start in media res but with the session’s big bad?

Okay, old dog trying to learn new tricks.

Been roleplaying for umpty decades, which I can tell is an impediment here. Never read a PbtA game before. Probably thinking in an old-style way, and the couple of actual plays I’ve read have been heavy on the fiction rather than the mechanics, so I’m confused. If someone has a resource that has this written down, I’ll happily go there.

Basic resolution mechanic is 2d6. 7-, fail; 8 or 9, fail forward or fail in a “Yes, but” kind of way, and 10+ is a success. Only players roll (so if villain attacks NPCs, it’s a GM handwave what happens: the fiction determines it).

The fiction shapes everything: rather than the roll and creating the fiction based on it (that is, roleplaying is often a kind of pareidolia), we create the fiction and see if we need to roll.

Damage. Damage is inflicted by imposing conditions. Okay. How do you as a player inflict a condition on a villain? Is it a move, and which move is determined by the fiction? Is there a point where a character is out of the scene, or is that determined by the fiction? If a villain gets all their conditions marked, then they’ve lost…is there an end of scene version for the player characters?

More questions to come, I’m sure.