Super Masks Style by ThatAceGal, is a supplement for Masks, the New Generation. Masks is a personal favorite game of mine and my gaming group. Even before starting this project I had had this supplement on my itch.io wishlist in hopes of buying it one day and using it to maybe do a one shot wrestling story in Masks. I’m glad I only bought it for this project.

Super Masks Style is a PDF of 10 moves and a new condition. The new moves are openly inspired by moves from World Wide Wrestling. If you want a feel of what it is like reading these moves, imagine if every time I talk about a mechanic in this game, there is a little This was inspired by Nathan D. Paoletta’s World Wide Wrestling sentence afterwards.

With the kind of micro details I will get into in this review, I am worried that this critic will come off as more mean spirited and technical than I wish to be but there is a point to it. Powered by the Apocalypse games, which Masks is, has a reputation online of being mostly shovelware. To me, PbtA is a niche in an already niche hobby so it makes little sense to make actual shovelware for it. That said, it is really easy to tell when a PbtA game is made without a complete understanding of what makes PbtA work as an engine, that juice that separates games like Masks or Pasion de las Pasiones from the rest.

While Super Masks Style has few trademarks mechanically of a phoned-in game, its writing does leave me with the impression that the author doesn't fully understand pbta or Masks in particular.

Not understanding Masks does make some sense as the moves are openly inspired by World Wide Wrestling. (This was inspired by Nathan D. Paoletta’s World Wide Wrestling). Well, to be more accurate, several of the moves are rewrites of moves from WWW. While wrestling and superheroes have lots of overlap and cross pollination, what works in one doesn't always work in the other and all but copy pasting does not help to overlap.

The biggest example in this supplement of not overlapping is its new condition: Injured. Injured doesn't work in Masks. Brendan Conway talks in Masks about how conditions are a register of your emotional state so the game can have normal humans alongside invincible aliens and have them both make sense within the health system. There is one move you can take in Masks that adds another Condition similar to injured: Broken from the Newborn playbook but that is class specific, meant to illustrate the Newborn’s completely artificial nature. Adding a condition to Masks meant to measure every character’s physical well being isn’t just missing the point but adding something antithetical to the game you are supposed to be supplementing.

What makes Injured frustrating is that it actually could work in the context of a wrestling supplement: make it a worked injury. Mechanically the condition already gives -2 to the wrestling moves and it can be cleared by not wrestling for a session. This *is* actually really fun and thematic game design. Having to choose between wrestling or healing up is a real thing real wrestlers ask themselves every day and I think that with a little tweaking, Injured could be a great addition to the game. As is though, you can become Injured any time you would take a Condition, meaning that it represents a real injury and making it a worked injury is ignoring the rules as written.

Another example of not utilizing Mask’s mechanics and implications is the Role Moves, lifted almost verbatim from World Wide Wrestling, here somewhat confusingly renamed to good-guy and bad-guy instead of face and heel. I guess knowing wrestling terms was too much for the type of audience who would buy a wrestling supplement for an indie trpg.

The main problem of Role Moves is that to activate the moves, you need to spend Potential, the XP of Masks. This is odd from a thematic point and a mechanical point. Thematically it makes little sense for what it represents. I can see it representing your character intentionally limiting their growth by going back to old stereotypes of how they think of themselves. Very high school but this isn't supported by the mechanics which purely provide benefits. My interpretation could work if it provides a benefit and a drawback or was a risk to get a benefit. As it stands, it feels like you spend XP simply as something to spend.

In World Wide Wrestling, the Role moves are activated by spending Momentum, a temporary pool you get to spend to increase your rolls. Hey wait a minute! Masks already has a resource that is both temporary and spent to increase your rolls: Team. Team is pool of points you can spend that represent your characters jell with each other and can be spent both selflessly to provide someone else a +1 to a roll or spent selfishly to shift your stats before a roll is resolved, changing yourself and fucking someone else over in the process. Spending team to activate your role moves would work better thematically and mechanically: its points that will go away soon anyway so you might as well spend them and depending on your roll you can either spend them to help out your teammates with a Good Guy role or spend it selfishly with a Bad Guy Role.

In addition to spending permanent character advancement points and not the team points that would make more sense, the role moves commit a major sin: they are boring. The only difference between them other than what it takes to activate them is that the Good-Guy role can gain influence over their opponent while the Bad-Guy role can take influence away from your opponent. I like these! It fits the flavor of wrestling while also working in the mechanically framework Masks already provided. The rest of the choices for role moves are the same no matter which role you and that's such a shame. As well, the only option of the roles that would be close to worth spending 2 XP on would be to automatically take control of the fight. Otherwise you can shift yours or your opponent’s labels (a mechanic the game is built around), or… get +1 to your next roll. Yay.

However, even the good option tells of another flaw in this game: assuming you what Masks to act like an entirely different book.

As I mentioned, one of the options in role moves is to Take Control of the Fight. Now in World Wide Wrestling, this has a specific mechanical implication that the game is built around but here, in a list of moves for a different game, it does not.

That’s crazy, right? I shouldn't buy a supplement for a game and be implicitly expected by that supplement to do homework about another game with much better written rules anyway.

And even if you do this homework, if you do add in the extra bits this supplement forgot to add, it still doesn't work with Masks general “figure it out in the narrative” structure because retaining control of the combat is the opposite of what Masks’ combat is about. Combat in Masks is chaotic with the villain getting to use one of their moves each time they gain a condition, meaning that even if you never roll a -6 or even a 7-9 on rolls in combat, things will still get out of the character’s control. Again, World Wide Wrestling is a necessary book to have read in order to understand these moves for a different game.

I expected to like this supplement. Aside from my love of Masks, the worlds of superheroes and wrestling do have a lot of crossover, especially when you experience it through the trpg medium. And I think there are ideas here that could work really well as a wrestling focused supplement for Masks. But this supplement feels like an incomplete draft, from its uninspired and too long move names, to how the wrestling moves themselves are just poorly written rewrites of moves from a different game. I think a version of this game could be good, but this version is not.