Masks Review, and lessons from intentional game design

I won’t even lie. When I first heard of Masks, a hyper-specialized game for running teenage superheroes in a fairly generic DCarvel-ish setting, I thought, ‘Well that’s an idea. Not a good one, but certainly an idea.’

And sure, I’m biased. My ideal superhero setting/story is Worm, my gaming preferences tend towards the hardcore, grueling survival, and if there’s not a TPK the first session I’m probably not having fun. Masks is explicitly not that. I watched some playthroughs, I read the playbooks, and it just didn’t pique my interest.

So I don’t know what changed.

I read through the playbooks again recently. I don’t even remember why. But it just clicked. I think it was paying attention to some of the more interesting narrative-driving mechanics that make the playbooks come alive.

I bought the book a week later, and ran a session a week after that. Mixed group of experienced and inexperienced roleplayers, played over discord. Here are my thoughts.

I’ll start with a rating.

…Is it bad if I give it a perfect 10? I promise I’m not a Kotaku reviewer passing out 10s like magic items in a 3.5 game.

And ok, the Rulebook isn’t perfect, there’s some additional things that could’ve been in there, some organization and index issues. But Masks isn’t arguably the most popular Powered by the Apocalypse game out there for no reason. The author understood what the original Apocalypse World did that made it worth copying, understood the genre he was trying to actualize, and leveraged the above into a game that achieves his design goals. The vast vast majority of PbtA games out there fail to do one, if not all three, of the above.

The Playbooks

read: Character Sheets. One thing I love about PbtA games in general are the character sheets. It’s all there. Everything the player needs, presented in a multiple choice format. They just go down the sheet, circling the option they want, no cross-referencing books, barely any GM instruction needed, and they have a perfectly built character. The hands-down best system I’ve come across for introducing new players to the hobby. The key things here are the options for how your character looks, the leading background questions, and the way even the mechanical choices help define the character.

Look, I know it’s hard to remember back to your bright-eyed, innocent days of cracking open your first roleplaying book, filled with boundless excitement but lacking a clue. If you can remember that feeling of excited energy stifled by the paralysis of having no clue what you’re doing, just know that these days, new roleplayers probably have it worse. If you got into roleplaying over 10 years ago, you were probably already a huuuuge neeeerd. You didn’t know the rules but you probably knew enough to know you wanted to be a brooding half-elf with a bow sitting in the corner of a bar. You could picture your character’s fine elven locks and grey-tinged skin from their edgy Drow parentage.

These days trpgs are quickly becoming mainstream, and not everyone who tries one out is going to know the genre staples enough to begin picturing what their character looks like in their head. That’s even if they’re playing a fantasy game. Obviously, there’s a lot more out there.

Long-winded rant to say, those silly suggestions for how your character looks? The ‘forced’ backstory and relationship questions? Those matter. They’re important. And why I think even the PbtA games that aren't as good as this one are some of the best games to use to introduce new players to the hobby.

Getting back to Masks, I linked my players the Playbooks and they all, including the new one, blitzed through character creation, barely any questions asked.

With the Masks Playbook sheets, you’ve got a good 45% of everything you need to play the game. The design is sleek and clean, makes good use of space, and includes the excellently done comic-inspired art that’s found throughout the book. I could make a whole new blog post discussing and rating the different playbooks. But they’re all well-done in that they exemplify the different character archetypes commonly found in superhero, and more broadly, any fiction featuring young protagonists with heavy responsibility. Taking that a step further they, the playbooks by design guide interesting narratives and character development. The player chooses certain actions that bring The Doomed playbook, evocative of Raven from Teen Titans, closer to their demise  in exchange for power. The Delinquent skirts the line between on the team and off the team, hero and antihero, until, during their Moment of Truth, they decide who they are and face the consequences.

The Moves

PbtA games frame everything through the concept of ‘Moves,’ and it’s a great mechanic for what PbtA games attempt to accomplish for a lot of reasons. With just the moves alone, you’ve got another 45% of everything you need to play the game.

From the player’s side, you have a list of moves that pretty much account for all the rolling mechanics a player will have to worry about. New players can look to the moves and find direction in the possible avenues they can take, while experienced players can do what they’ve always done, that is, say what their characters do, and the GM will say when they need to roll for a move. I think this helps reinforce a concept that a lot of rpgs out there don’t do enough to emphasize: not every action a player takes requires a roll. Some things they can just do. You don’t need to roll to walk in a straight line nor check to see if your character can see the thing right in front of them. But when a player does something that meets the requirements of a move, they roll.

The player moves also help reinforce the type of game and narrative you’re playing through. In a game about teen superheroes, you roll to Unleash your Powers in a major way, hopefully without catching civilians in the crossfire, and to effectively Comfort or Support a teammate after a tough battle. But a speedster doesn’t have to roll to see if they can run fast. In Apocalypse World, a Mad Maxy game about survivors in the apocalypse, you’ll find moves to Do Something Under Fire and Go Aggro.

From the GM’s side moves make the whole ‘GM’ thing make sense. See, GM’s get moves too, moves that naturally create interesting superhero stories (like, of course, Put Innocents in Danger) and the creation of GM moves in PbtA games might just be the best example of a rulebook teaching you how to GM in existence. A lot of traditional (read: fantasy) rpgs out there will give you a hundred rules about how hard you fall from different heights, how fast you can swim, how much damage you do when you’re standing next to an ally unless your ally is blind and charmed and oh yeah your foe is invisible so- And in all that they forget to teach you how to run a game. A fun game.

Masks gives the GM tools to fun a fun superhero game, and if you’re playing Masks that’s what you’re here for. Header because we’re segueing into

Rules

The rulebook teaches the GM how to run a fun, satisfying game, and there’s not much better that can be said about a rulebook. From the suggestion that you frame scenes like a comic book strip (my players commented that they loved this) to the agenda and principles that guide play. Not only do you get GM moves, which are basically the answer to, ohmygodmyplayersarealllookingatmewhatdoIdonow, but, almost as important, you get how and when to use them. There’s also detailed guidance on how to challenge player characters (beyond how strong do I make the next monster) by playbook, so that they face interesting decisions in a way that engages their character.

Now as much as I want to give a perfect 10 rating (for the memes) because of the excellent guide to GMing, the rulebook has its problems. Organization is decent, but I had trouble finding some pretty key mechanics in the middle of play, even using the handy cheat sheets you can check out for free. There’s an implied, unduly generic setting city, and the few pages description of it isn’t even enough to make the default superhero city we’ve all seen depicted in movies 20 times in past 10 years come alive. Suffice to say, it doesn’t come remotely close to the levels of at-table usability that modern game books coming out of the indie scene display. I would’ve liked tools to help me make the city feel like a living city to the players. Random tables, pictures, even the boorishly long info dumps utilized by the more mainstream developers would’ve been better than nothing.

Conclusion

Alright, I started ranting. Everything I said aside, I guess here’s what I’m trying to get across.

When I sit down to run a session of most other games, I panic beforehand, overprepare, run the session well enough (players are rarely as critical of you as you are of yourself), maybe with a few panic points. And then after comes the anxiety as I go back over every single thing I did wrong in my head and what I should’ve done better and why I didn’t prepare more and

Maybe I’m the only slightly neurotic GM that does this.

With Masks, I barely planned anything beforehand, ran the session well and had fun doing it, and basked afterwords in a sea of contentment. Running the game was fun. I enjoyed doing it, and want to do it again. Heck, right now if I had the players. Want to play? And I really believe it’s because Masks gives you not only the tools, but also the guidance to run a fun game.

I mentioned before that a lot of the fantasy rpgs on the market give you hundreds of rules but no direction how to use them. Rules by themselves are like building blocks without guidance how to put them together in a shape that doesn’t look like an eldritch horror. Experienced GMs can weather this. They know the tools and common building patterns to put together a game that looks good. 

But new players? They’re left surrounded by a mess of pieces that barely make sense and told to, in addition to reading a giant rulebook, go spend hours seeking out advice online on how to actually run the game. And maybe then they can put together something decent. But you know what happens then? Everyone’s building the same thing, the barest variations. When someone proposes something truly novel, they often get shutdown. The assortment of rules are supposed to inspire people to build their unique own stories, but everyone ends up doing the same thing.

A group of random flops sitting in an inn then someone tells them to go do something and they do it. They kill some stuff, get stronger, save the local ruler from some nefarious plot, there’s a prophecy somewhere in there, all the way until they (save the cheerleader) save the world. Wooo.

Masks doesn’t give you an assortment of tools to do anything with. It’s laser-focused and clear about what it’s for. But despite that, no two Masks games will start the same. The team’s origin story is created organically at the table by the players. The presence of one playbook in one game and a different playbook in another game sends the emerging narrative off in separate directions like pool ball collisions as different playbooks pursue different drives. And you end up with stories as distinctive as the various superhero media that’s come out in the last decade. Of varying quality, sure. But how many series and movies is that? At least a few good ones? And consider, if you’re just counting DCarvel shows you’ve barely scratched the surface of superhero media. There’s an iceberg underneath. And that whole iceberg is Masks's storytelling potential. 

If you've seen The Incredibles, I think Edna's already got it covered on the dangers of getting those superhero cloaks tangled.