I’m having more trouble running Masks that I thought I would. Said as someone who adores Supers games (and I adore Masks). My inclination is to lean into the supervillain bwahahaha and have them oppose the characters. The players continually ask to do more interpersonal scenes - which I’m accommodating. The last session was fallout from the big bad battle the game before.
They’re enjoying it - but internally the pacing feels wrong for me - anyone else faced this or have any advice?
One possibility: Let them have their kind of fun, let it build to a dramatic situation. Let it pass some times, but at other times, make a move when the tension is high, letting all those emotions inside while going against the villain, or fighting among themselves instead of the villain could be priceless.
I’ve had this problem with other PBTA games. I kept feeling like I needed to inject adversity or move things along.
My advice is: get comfortable with a slower pace, because your game will get better as a result. When the players are pinging off each other, and your villains aren’t centre stage, that’s a good thing. It means your game has so much energy of its own, it doesn’t need your help to keep going. And you know, those battle scenes aren’t half as interesting as the players roleplaying their characters together.
With that said, a technique I learned from @BeckyA, which she describes to great effect in Bite Me! (plug, plug) is to deliberately prevent players from resolving their interpersonal issues by separating them. Then needle them with material that reminds them of the issues they aren’t resolving. I think that’s a neat way to break up the interpersonal scenes but still contribute to giving them more pathos and energy.
Give them interpersonal stakes with the villains. Then the battles carry social consequences. You should also push hard on getting them to keep their personal stuff relevant during the fights as opposed to putting that ‘on hold’ for the punch-ups. Be brazen about interrupting dates with muggings they need to stop, but make them talk about those date-feels during the collar! This is classic Stan Lee Silver Age stuff, and it works.
I think that often PBTA games have a move cascade effect which can be at odds with the aspect of personal drama. For example in apocalypse world the hex relationships often take second fiddle to everything hitting the fan and getting out of control fast. I’ve struggled to see sex moves happen in AW for that very reason - because the action cascade means no-one has time to get their kit off before the next hail of bullets starts flying.
That action cascade effect might be what you are thinking of when you say that pulling back for interpersonal drama feels wrong to you. Plus I do think that as GMs we feel like we are not ‘doing our job’ if we let the players sit and talk to each other - surely we should be throwing in a wandering monster or something…!!!
So I think there are a few things to unpick…
I love it when the players have interpersonal scenes, but if you are feeling left out as the MC player you could create an NPC who would be brought into those interpersonal scenes. In many ways it is an awesome thing if you do that anyway as then you not only get to play more character scenes but you have someone ‘on the inside’ who can really mess things up even more deeply for the PC group!
It is that you have internalised a sense of ‘I must be creating something’ when actually you don’t need to be - and it is a question of you getting comfortable with that.
Or it is that you enjoy games MCing which have less interpersonal drama and more action, if so then cut the game short and pick something that either encourages less of those scenes or get a different player group 
Yeah, there’s also the fact that with Masks you’re emulating a genre, and may need to take a moment to clearly communicate genre tropes and expectations. There are some folks who’d happily turn every game into a dramatic stage play, but if you signed up for a teen supers game, you should be prepared to embrace the silly Cosplay brawls as much as the romantic angst.
Becky sounds like a devious MC! Love it!
Games with interpersonal conflict is probably my specialist subject as a GM
Well the good news is I had already implemented the sage advice of Jim, Josh and Becky. A lot of it is finding the pace and keeping the world intruding on them. I’m running another arc then we’ Switching the ‘writer’ this will also allow me to have some player fun.
I found that with Masks it is worth remembering that it is emulating a distinctly different sub-genre. It isn’t terribly well suited for the comic book battle scenes (unlike, say, Champions) but I don’t think that is what it is truly aimed at. I think it is especially emulating the more talky and angsty stories.
I played in a game of Masks that tried to be a traditional superhero game and it didn’t work all that well.
So when I had the chance to run a game, I decided to make the focus very much on playing with the labels rather than playing with the fighting, if you see what I mean. Super villain monologues are great for ‘an adult telling the heroes something about themselves’ and thus shifting labels. Police react and tell the heroes what they think of them. Parents tell the heroes what they think of them. Heroes tell each other too
I’m not saying that you must play that way, of course, but once I decided to make a Masks game one about the labels with superheroics as a backdrop, rather than a super heroic game with labels as a backdrop, it really began to sing for us.
Cheers!
I’ve found that actions such as burning influence can be a good way of having action scenes fuel emotion. They may be helping a teammate, but are severing a tie somehow. This got literalised in our group as the Legacy saved the Newborn’s life but lost them an arm. The angst and drama spinning out of this was great.
The same goes for the MC moves which remind the heroes of why they aren’t up to the job, why they don’t fit in. Also the Conditions, which fuel some good ways of blowing off steam between the action.
What @Alex is saying.
And yes to allowing your game to breath a bit… but you can still have adults come by and influence your heroes. Their parents, teachers, mentors, people on the streets… I feel like they telling the PCs who they are should be a constant that ties hanging out in the parking lot of the local mart together with the big climactic fight on top of a sky scraper.
I have heard other folks say this, but it’s not been my lived experience with GMs who know the rules well and have an understanding of comic book pacing and scripting. I’m pretty sure that Brandon would tell you it’s ‘truly aimed at’ both emotional play and engaging action scenes, and I’d be inclined to agree. The system doesn’t walk you through every discreet second of a fight the way Hero does, and it’s entirely true that they arrive at the same place by very different routes, but if you engage the system fully with a solid grounding in the genre there’s no reason it can’t deliver the same result.