So I’m having a great time with masks as a GM narrative wise but I’m having a hard time using it mechanically for combat and social interactions.
Both me and my players are starting to feel like it’s getting stale mechanically and I’m kind of at a loss on how to freshen it up. We’ve been playing for several months now and the group is good in the stories fun but all our combat seem to go the same way. The challenge is setup player 1:assesses the situation. player 2: directly engages the threat. Player 3: directly engages a threat or defense’s one of the other players. players 1or2: use Playbook move. Player4:finishes it by unleashing powers,directly engaging a threat, or rolling defend to save civilians. sometimes someone might Pierce The Mask but that’s rare. that turns into our whole combat usually.
They usually don’t fail any of they’re rolls and by usually I mean 95% of the time. The only time they take a powerful blow is when they choose not to resist the blow from the bad guy but then they always succeed at taking a powerful blow so it doesn’t affect the players at all. They also always succeed when it comes to resisting influence when they choose to. Story-wise I’ll say bad guy does X and they’ll just stop them mechanically which means they stop them narratively. In the end my villains conditions get filled up fast.
granted there a lot of really good story elements that players deal with outside the combat but it just feels like there is no mechanical challenge in the game.
Is anyone else having this problem?
Do players just usually fail more of there rolls so people don’t have this problem?
Should I focus less on mechanical conflict and more on narrative conflict in battle?
Do I create my own mechanical moves and interact more mechanically even though the players succeed?
most of my villain moves tend to be narrative. villain one gets punched in the nose so they throw rocks at civilians, put a hero in danger or ratchet up the verbal aggression towards the hero. is that right or should I be creating moves that I’m going to roll for that can hurt the players mechanically?
sorry if this post seems rambling but I just thought I would see what people’s thoughts were and what their experiences were and whether or not I could get some pointers on what I might be doing wrong.