Team-Updates #6: Unbreakable
Good morning, super-team members!
It’s been an entire year since we started Team-Up Moves, and we’ve made friends, we’ve learned, we’re still learning, we’ve got an entire (metaphorical) costume closet, a growing list of super- and super-adjacent games to try out, exciting guests (including one of our favorite podcasters, recording soon!), and four boxes of dice we’re still expecting to use in one or another future game.
We’ve spent June catching up on our non-gaming lives—yes, we do have non-gaming lives (she admits, reluctantly) and getting in some travel. In particular, Stephanie spent the first weekend in June at Phoenix FanFusion, the largest con and the first con of its large kind that she’s visited for more than a couple of hours. She loved it.
Since she is writing this newsletter and I am she, I’ll switch to the first person now to tell you all that Phoenix is hot, dry, and welcoming, with little spritzers of water that cool you off when you pass under the awnings of fancy buildings or hotels; that the Phoenix Convention Center is a massive undertaking several city blocks in length and width, with a food court and escalators all over the place and a giant reflective sculpture between escalators that seems designed to bounce the sunlight out so the building doesn’t turn into a greenhouse; and that, alas, I missed the one panel wholly devoted to indie RPGs, despite the presence of an ambassador from the venerable Steve Jackson Games. Nor did I take half a day to sign up for one of the tabletop RPGs in the half-ballroom set aside for tabletop RPGs: almost all were playing Dungeons and Dragons, and—as parents like to say—we don’t need to go out for that: we’ve got plenty at home.
It’s known as a good con for authors, and our little knot of authors and author-friends moved from panel to panel with some glee: I had the good fortune to pop into panels with once and perhaps future Team-Up Moves guest Rachel Gold, who played Micah in our run of Mutant City Blues. Rachel and I and other writers, including E. K. Johnston (who wrote a D&D movie tie-in novel!), got to chat in front of microphones about the expanding, but still not big enough, world of queer and trans representation in fantasy fiction, and about why we write fanfic, and about why we play games.
Since I got home I’ve had the chance to run one more issue of the Masks campaign I currently GM, and that issue turned out to fold in two climactic moments in two player characters’ arcs: our Protege accomplished a playbook switch and became a Nova, to his own surprise, and our Reformed confronted the master villain who’s been taking credit (wrongly) for giving her super-powers.
These moments got me thinking about the top of a player character’s story arc, and about the way that Masks as a system hands the reins to the player at that point, asking the GM—maybe—to step away. Masks can only do this sort of thing because it’s a relatively rules-lite system: a player character in a Moment of Truth can do almost anything they put their mind too, unless the GM steps in to disallow it—no rolls, number-crunching or chart-checking involved.
GM’ing in a game like that means guiding players who tell their PC’s stories, making sure those stories keep intersecting and moving forward, creating conditions for the whole table to create together, keep characters going, and have fun. I was taken aback momentarily when our Reformed used her geokinetic powers to affect half a city at once, raising magma and lava and earth to stop a supervillain’s giant device from towing a land mass out to sea. Normally you’d have to be a Nova to do that. Or, at the least, you’d have to roll for it. But in a Moment of Truth? It’s up to you.
And, after that moment, it’s up to the GM to integrate what you did back into the story, where every solution might just give rise to a new, perhaps lesser, perhaps greater problem. What if, having saved the city, you become so popular that you can’t deal? What if the Star’s fan base decides that you, who saved the city, are the cool one instead? What if the volcano god who helped you out decides that you owe him a favor? Every story’s resolution is a chance to make a new story begin.
Our Annual discussion episode, featuring some listener questions, will be out soon, and then in July we’re starting the first run of our second season: S. Donnelly and Hannah Rodgers’ Marvelous.
Thanks for listening!
— Fiona and Stephanie