Masks: A New Generation is my favourite tabletop rpg ever and it’s not even close. i think more people should know about it, so here are the things i like about it.
cool superpowers without complex rules
if you’ve ever added your Caster Level or Wisdom Bonus or Power Tier or some crap like that to a roll, or upcasted using a higher level spell slot for +2d6 damage, you’ll know the pain of having to do math and jot stuff down on your sheet and remember exact rules in order to do superpowered stuff.
masks doesn’t have that. in masks, your powers just work.
in a fight, you describe what you do and the GM either tells you ‘that’s awesome, you totally knock that goon out with your chi blast’ or ‘yeah, Prometheus isn’t gonna take that lying down, directly engage him’. if the first one, great, your powers feel awesome. if the second one, great, the villain feels like a real threat and the die roll from directly engage is going to tell us if you kick his ass, get your ass kicked, or both at once–and any result makes some more cool shit happen immediately.
if you’re not in a fight, and you have super hacking powers, you’re never going to have to spend 45 minutes making a plan to get information only for it to fail on a single die roll. you have super hacking powers. you know if the CEO of EvilTech is corrupt or not, or if you don’t, one simple roll resolves it. and if you fail that roll, it doesn’t mean your hacking powers crapped out at a bad moment–it probably means a superpowered EvilTech enforcer just kicked down your high school club room’s door, and now you gotta fight them.
in masks the system trusts the players and GM to adjudicate crazy superpowers in a way that’s fair and fun for everyone. its rules are there to make sure that whatever happens with the superpowers, it’s dramatic. they aren’t there to limit you; they’re there to maneuver you into having cooler, better, more interesting ideas for what happens next.
i had a character in my group with ‘vitality absorption’ once and he just started stealing people’s powers with it temporarily, it was awesome. he was punching robots unconscious by stealing their strength. later, he stopped being able to touch his cursed boyfriend or it’d slowly kill him. all that was written on his sheet was ‘vitality absorption’. there were no numbers. that’s Masks.
make your own superhero comic
in Masks, a huge chunk of the book is dedicated to making your game feel like a comic book.
i mean a huge chunk. the entire GM section. all of character creation. every single character option. the book isn’t built around making balanced superpowers or villains or whatever. it’s built around making a tabletop game, with your friends, that actually feels like a comic book.
describe the panels of the comic as they come along, and make sure to throw in sound effects, impossible camera angles, and splash panels! make sure that characters’ personal dramas and their superpowered battles always coincide! when innocents are in danger, flag it–because that’s what comics do! when two characters get in a fight, they totally beat each other up and escalate the situation–because that’s what comics do!
every single rule is bent towards the task of making the action feel fast, snappy, emotional, dramatic and high-stakes the same way a good comic book does. the GM section doesn’t waste time on loot tables or what stats aliens have–it tells you how to set up character and plot hooks and weave them together the way a well-written comic does. the player-facing rules only give you options for the kinds of things people do in comic books. nothing else matters.
even the types of character you can play have personal struggles that you tend to see… in comic books. secret identity crisis! transformed into a monster! from another planet and not handling it well! pissed off government experiment with a heart of gold (hey wolverine)! mistrusted former supervillain! time traveler who needs to fix the future! outsider who has trouble fitting in when they know they could just drop everything and leave!
this stuff is gold. it’s gold not because it tells you what to do, but because it tells you what not to do. restriction breeds creativity. characters in this game aren’t brooding antiheroes who kill people all the time (the book says this outright). they’re teenagers, with friends and families, who are new to this, and who always try to save everyone they can, and that means that the characters in the comic and their interrelationships will just keep mattering and mattering and mattering. characters in this game aren’t “whatever you want, but in a superhero world”. they are “pick a cool comic-book conflict and build a character around it, with these restrictions to refine your concept”.
if you play this game correctly, you will always–always–come out with an experience similar to reading a tightly written comic starring characters you love. or at least, you’d better love them, ’cause you made them. this isn’t my bias from having run it a half dozen times, either. time and again, my experience tells me one thing and the rules tell me no, and the story ends up better because they did. most games can’t do that.
beating you over the head with your feelings
everyone has met that one player who, faced with their hometown about to be annihilated by the lich’s army unless the party rides for three days and nights to warn them, says some shit like “but we’re too low level” or “can we stock up on healing potions first”. no joke; i had the second one happen to me almost verbatim in a life-or-death time-sensitive scenario in D&D 5e.
and this happens because like, sure you’re playing a person who exists in a fantasy world but emotions are stupid and inconvenient. it’s like, way easier to just be a brick with no feelings. all the time. except when you’re having a stakes-free roleplaying scene, then you have feelings. but as soon as you might get hurt or inconvenienced by playing a person with emotions, the emotions get tossed overboard in favour of what’s Optimal.
Masks punches that shit clear out a fifth-story window with a satisfying ‘pow!’ sound effect the minute you start playing.
guess what? your emotions matter and you can’t get away with it! did you get your ass kicked in public? great! tell us how your character feels about that (and ‘they don’t’ is not an option)! oh, they feel angry? well, now you’re angry. you’re worse at empathizing with people now. way worse.
want to try to empathize with some people anyway, but you’re still angry? let’s check the book. oh, to stop being angry (and get your roll for emotionally supporting your friends out of the toilet), you’d better hurt someone or break something important. clock’s ticking. go find an actual, meaningful angry outburst to have, that has real consequences, and then you can stop being angry.
this is genius design. your character gets their feelings hurt all the time, whether from a fight with the Green-Eyed Monster or pushing your friends away when they tell you you’re not being the right kind of hero. you can’t control that this happens, because people in real life can’t control it either (especially teenagers, who are the kind of people you play in Masks). all you can do is decide whether to bottle those feelings up and suffer from it as they eat away at your strengths, or let them loose and deal with the consequences.
you are no longer a bunch of stats. you are a real person, with emotional needs. your friends can help you, comfort you, make you feel better. being a hero, saving people, can let you shrug off these small hurts. but one thing you can never do is ignore them. because the mechanical penalties for being an emotional wreck who ignores every feeling they have are nothing short of brutal. the game doesn’t tell you you can’t pretend to be Captain Optimal, who Never Has A Feeling Ever. it’s just that pretending to be that guy–just like in real life–will hurt you, and hurt you, and hurt you. and dealing with your emotions, even if it sucks at first, will save you.
and let’s not forget influence. influence, in Masks, is whether or not what another person thinks about you affects your self-image. that’s a big deal, because, get this:
in Masks, your self-image and the stats that determine your success or failure are the same thing. that’s right. your super-stuff is powered by who you think you are. if your super-mentor tells you you’re dangerous, you get more dangerous. if your friends tell you you’re just like them, you get more normal.
in Masks, emotions and feelings and interpersonal relationships matter because those feelings and relationships directly tell you whether you will succeed or fail at saving your friends, or the city, or whatever it is this week. being invested in the game means being invested in characters’ feelings, in who they are as people. being successful at super-stuff in Masks means finding a way to regulate difficult emotions.
Masks has the most genius design of any game i’ve ever played. i will continue to run it when i can probably for the rest of my life. go check it out. it’s worth it.
red-headed android 