Mutation Nation: Family Points Musings

Mutation Nation is my current ttrpg project- playing mutant superheroes in a world that hates you, yes its inspired by the X-men, and it uses Yahtzee dice rolls to do it. One of the TTRPG designer heroes I have is John Wick. Sometimes he is hit or miss, but often I find myself back at some of his
core narrative ideas when I make things.

Family Points is very much something inspired by John Wick. In Mutation Nation, your team is your family. Found family is a big part of the inspirations of the game, and this mechanic tries to represent that. Family points reflect the strength of that family, and that strength helps you accomplish more. 

Its a simple idea: if a character does something that reinforces their family bonds, the GM adds points to the Family pool for it. Then at anytime, any member of the team can pull from the family pool to modify dice rolls, get additional downtime and other things. Its a resource the players can use, but to earn it their characters have to be a family.

 So. Then I have to ponder, how can I help players to create these moments for their characters? Often this could just be organic and happen on its own, but some players or characters might have blanks in their heads. I love story games, but often I've found some players don't do well with infinite possible options or no structure at all to go off of, and some of the best story games do have structures that help them.

Here's my first thought on a mechanic for it during freeplay time in the game between missions.

SET A SCENE WITH A TEAMMATE

You want to earn more Family points for the team, but you don't have specific idea how to do that. So you can set up a scene between your character and another character, where you the player have a question about another player's character, about your own character or about a relationship either of your characters have. Then you and that player act out a scene where you roleplay until you come up with an answer to that question.

If the question's answer can reinforce the bonds between you, you are going to earn family points for it.

WILL IT WORK?

I need to test it, but I'm largely borrowing from Microscope by Ben Robbins. Microscope's zoomed in scenes often are just answering specific questions via scenes... I'm not sure if this mechanic does that as well or if it won't fit with the design.

Another thing to test I suppose.