Author: Nikkitty Empress

So, latest session in a fun game I’ve been playing in: My Beacon (Hawkeye style archery + acrobatics) and the Legacy (mythical object wielding hindu-deva descendant) are teaming up against a very powerful asura villain [think pseudo-darkseid, full on evil god], while the rest of the team are stopping meteors he was raining down on the city. My Beacon is, predictably, pretty worthless for a good amount of the fight – I do a lot of provoking and assessing, as she works as support, spending team in the form of distracting archery shots to help the Legacy.

Then the Legacy Goes Down Hard, and is taken out of the fight from conditions – but through discussion, convinces the GM to make a new custom move: Thus is born –

Take Up The Sword: When you are removed from battle, and a teammate takes up your weapon in battle, despite the odds, they roll + Savior. On a 10+, they can use two of your moves. On a 7-9 they can use one.

Nothing was stated explicitly for what a 6- would do

So my Beacon takes up his mythical weapon, which could only be wielded by those with a Pure Heart, and gets a 10+ – taking Fight The Good Fight, and Never Give Up, Never Surrender. She then proceeds to fight one on one with Darkseid-alike, finally forcing his retreat, getting knocked up and forcing herself to stand up, again and again, and does not fail a roll in like, 8-9 rolls.

Just as the smoke began to clear though, and she holds up an arm to celebrate, her vision gets blurry, and as her team lands, she collapses next to the Legacy, entirely drained and unconscious. Bam, now she’s in a coma, because it turns out using a literal god’s weapon when you aren’t at least part god is… well, kinda draining and dangerous.

But hey, she saved the city.

Next session the Doomed sorceress is going to take us on a JOURNEY INTO THE REALM OF MIND AND SPIRIT as they try to rescue my character’s soul from what will surely be an eventual death. And I’m helping the GM set up story points, as they traverse a world that is literally her soul.

Any suggestions for how I can encourage my Bulls to switch their Love/Rival more often? I’ve run 3 seperate games and played in four more, and in not a single one of them did they ever switch their Love or Rival.

So one of my big complaints with the Nova playbook is that it never actually becomes better at Flares – due to it running stat agnostic and instead based on Conditions, it always has the same chance of failure, whether they’re fresh out of creation, or they’ve gone through a lot of hardship and been around the block.

To alleviate this, in my own personal game I am running I’ve added on to the Moment of Truth for the Nova – after unlocking and using it, they now roll their charging up move at +1 base, and then after the second Moment of Truth at +2. 

I felt this made both mechanical sense and fit with the story of it – after taking full control of their powers in a way that lets them warp reality, they gain a little more control, even if it’s not as complete. It means they’re less likely to blow themselves up, which is nice. And lets them get more use out of their flares, which is more fun for the player too.

So, what are everyone’s favorite playbooks, and why?

I love Transformed and Outsider. The feeling of not being comfortable with yourself, as well as the feeling of not belonging that the two have respectively is really powerful for good pathos.

Kirby Craft is waayy too good a move, to the point where over 4 games with separate people and characters, in every one of them the Outsider, Delinquent, and Protege would take it asap. In one game we had three people with Kirby Craft because it is such a good move. Narrative limitations and weaknesses are one thing, but it’s still a single move that acts as a stat switch for three moves.

Compare it to other stat switch moves and it becomes apparent how good that is – especially when superior is already one of the better stats with Assess and Provoke being really, really good. 

So the Legacy ‘s Never Give Up Never Surrender move seems kind of weird to me. The new clause seems to, and in play has, made the move more or less useless for a Legacy choosing some of the iconic packages (the detective one less so). But it’s an even more amazing move for Beacons now, since their whole thing is being less powerful than… everything.

I think codifying power levels into allowing you to use a move or not is a bad idea. There should be a more entertaining and evocative requirement for the move if you don’t want it to just be a replacement move, that doesn’t make it a better move off skin than on skin.

Power levels and who is strongest should remain only info in the narrative, and shouldn’t influence what the mechanical abilities of someone are. Otherwise you get weird things like a Beacon being told they can’t take Unstoppable, since they’re not actually a super strong beast.

So in my game I’m in, the Doomed (daughter of Basically Trigon) is 1 point off from their final Doomsign and death. The Legacy (descended from Literally Angels) just took their Moment of Truth, because thus far the story between the two of them has been that the Legacy is in love with the Doomed and vice versa.

The book says nothing can stop it, but it also says that during a Moment of Truth a character does the impossible and takes full narrative control. I’m thinking of allowing the Doomed to take their final Doomsign, be rescued by the Legacy, and potentially switch to another Mask, rather than dying, because I’d like to let them have a happy ending.

Opinions?

A rules question: Does the new Bull’s Heart mean that you choose one for each [aka I can be a Friend of my Love, and a Defender of my Rival] or choose one that applies to both of them?

It sucks that my first post here is kind of a complaint, but I’m not sure how I feel about the new wording for I Am What You See. Whereas the previous move [which got an okay amount of use between friends and I] encouraged our Janus to be really readily shifting Labels, it seems like its been changed massively in how it triggers.

First of all being that it doesn’t require influence to trigger.

Second of all that the Janus has to, presumably, be in their civilian identity and hanging out with their teammates still, to talk about their teammate who is totally not there?

The latter seems odd to me, because in many sessions of the game, I can count on one hand the number of times our Janus really hung out with people in their civilian form – we always played with their civilian stuff happening off screen, or them getting interrupted at their jobs/schools when stuff went down, and they suddenly had to be heroes.

Is it supposed to be more common for the civilian identity Janus to just hang out and have fun with their teammates? Because their team isn’t supposed to start off knowing their identity, so it just seems… very odd.