[MASK] Ordinary villains against extraordinary heroes

[Callan S.]

Hi Marshall,

That's not what the game is about at all.  I don't understand where you're getting that.*snip*

The reason that the strength of the villain's plan is an issue is that the hero is powerful.

I'm getting it from the second line, where the hero is powerful, even while it blocks getting to that stirring up part. He actually has to be powerful in mechanical terms, for you to believe and imaginatively respond as if he is a powerful hero? If so, my help involves saying the problem you say you have, is that your putting things in the way of yourself.

[Marshall Burns]

Callan,
That's not what I'm saying.  The hero is powerful in fictional terms, and the crook needs to be a worthy opponent in fictional terms, and the mechanics need to reflect this.

If I was okay with those sort of mechanics that hinge on narration trading (particularly to the point of narrating for other people's characters), it wouldn't be a problem, but I'm not.  I like mechanics that have abstract numerics, but require concrete character actions at the immediate scale.  But those actions have to make sense.  And the standard of "making sense" in this particular game is higher than in most of my stuff.  If I wanted this to be a "comics" game, it wouldn't really be a problem, but I don't want it to be.  I want it to be a crime game in which there happens to be a vigilante with powers and/or gadgets who puts on a costume.  Not because "heroes have costumes," but because the costume (and the gimmick as a whole) serves a purpose in the hero's war on crime.

[Vulpinoid]

Marshall,

I could be reading things wrong, or maybe just reading them from a different perspective, but you seem to have already addressed the issue you're concerned with.

The hero and the villain have the potential to be equally powerful, but just in different ways. This is addressed in the naming of the different attributes for each character type within the story.

For example, if the hero has a "gadget" that overcomes certain effects, then the villain could have a "game" that generates completely different effects. One has a single shot weapon that neutralises a crowd of 50....the other has a crowd of 60. The gadget has certainly played it's part in the situation, but instead of eliminating the problem completely, it simply goes toward leveling the playing field between the herop and the villain.
 
If the villain's game generates effects that are overcome by the gadget then it's easily overcome, if the villains game generates different effects then it's not so easily overcome. It comes down to an effect like scissors-rock-paper. Cunning and strategy become a part of the cat-and-mouse dynamic between the hero and the villain, and this sort of thing is all part of the genre isn't it?

V

[Callan S.]

It has to make sense, even if the session was actually getting to human issues?

[Marshall Burns]

Callan,
Yep.  You can do both.  The Rustbelt does both; it just has a different standard of making sense, due to a) the fact that everyone in it has superhuman potential if they're willing to hurt themselves in the process, and b) all the phantasmagoria stemming from the Rust.

V,
Heh.  Yeah, as I've said, it's entirely possible that I'm just worrying too much about this.


There's a little mechanic idea I've come up with in the past few days, and it warrants being posted.  It governs the "free play" between Crises (which is the term replacing "Conflicts"). 
So, as I said earlier, the guy with the initiative moves proactively, and the other guy moves reactively.  At any time, one of them might bring something up that needs to be addressed somehow (i.e., things that would call for rolling in most other games), but it's not a good time for a Crisis.  Like I said, the proactive player gets authority over outcomes in this stage, but within boundaries.  Those boundaries boil down to this:  to address something, use something with equal or greater Significance.  Everything on the hero's Gift, Gadget, and Gimmick lists has Significance, and everything on the crook's Game, Gun, and Guile lists has Significance.  You've also got a pool of extra points that you can spend to temporarily increase the Significance of something, or permanently give some otherwise unSignificant thing some Significance (in the latter case, this thing could eventually be turned against you; thus its permanence is self-balancing).

But there's another way to meet the Significance of an opposing thing, and that's to be injured or otherwise compromised by a Significant enough amount.

I'm not sure if this is staying in or not.  I like the way it looks, but I'm not exactly sure of the impact it will have.