Category: Masks: A New Generation RPG: Discussion

Question that came up tonight: under the Influence rules, we have “*When you take advantage of your influence over someone,* surrender your influence and… .” Cool. But if you do that to a fellow PC, do they get to reject your influence?

My stop-gap ruling was yes, since I feel like you should always get the chance to reject influence when it comes up, but the way that the rejecting influence move works behaves a bit weirdly when it comes up against the  above stuff instead of “being told who you are or how the world works.” You could choose to clear a condition that they just spent their influence to give you, or cancel influence that they don’t actually have since they just gave it up, or on a miss have your labels shifted, which wouldn’t necessarily be on the table if you hadn’t resisted their influence in the first place.

It worked out in the fiction this time, but I think that may have been because the inciting player was basically telling the receiving player who they were, in addition to what they were mechanically trying to do by surrendering influence. Goth lashed out and an innocent got hurt during a mission, so Command Line called her out on it and spent influence to have her mark Guilty. Goth tried to reject it and failed, so Command Line shifted her Danger up and her Savior down; she had a “crap, maybe I am out of control” moment. We discussed this briefly afterwards, and I figured that Goth would have marked the condition regardless, since C.L. spent the influence for it. But if you can reject influence, I could see ruling that a successful rejection cancels the attempted ‘cashing in’ of influence both in effect and in cost.

So, clarity: do you only get to reject when someone is telling you who you are or how the world works, or any time they exert their influence over you? Is it perhaps intended that any time someone exerts their influence, they are also de facto telling you who you are or how the world works? How have you ruled on this, when it’s come up?

Thought: Masks shines when it highlights the PCs’ inner struggles. Questions of identity and ethics, as driven by their playbook’s theme, general growing pains and heartbreak, and so on.

Problem: while the GM has a plethora of tools to proactively push those buttons, particularly playbook-specific GM moves, the tools on the player side are comparatively limited. Influence is fairly generic (not inherently a bad thing, but it does lack the character-specific flavor of some other games’ relationship mechanics), and Team Moves require the character getting highlighted to initiate the highlighting.

Proposal: Add in Flags, as described here: http://walkingmind.evilhat.com/2015/09/07/from-bonds-to-flags/

This puts character-specific issues on the table in a clear, mechanically supported way, and rewards players who put their fellow heroes in the spotlight. It also addresses the recently-broached topic of Masks not having a reliable income of Potential, in a way that fits with the general theme of earning Potential by growing closer to people.

I don’t think it’s a strictly necessary addition, but I think it would be a good one. I’m going to propose it to my play group and see how it goes.