Basic Moves 2.0
Oh man, these are hot.
In order to get experience you have to mess around with every faction, generating plot? Excellent.
New debt stuff? Way clearer. And the refuse to honor a debt is going to make players squirm.
The only thing I’m not sure about is the way your faction scores go up and down. First, I think you should explicitly cap it at some point— max +3 seems logical. Second, UF protagonists tend to collect knowledge, pull and influence almost as quickly as they collect magical powerups. I feel like there ought to be some way to increase one without decreasing others. Maybe that’ll be handled in the playbooks?
Hey Jeff. Glad you like it. Factions do cap at +3, we didn’t make that explicit but maybe we will. The static nature of the overall faction stats is meant to show that you can never truly keep up with one world without the others being ignored. Hope that helps clear that up a bit. 🙂
I do like the idea of certain playbooks being able to get higher Faction scores, though. It would be neat to see someone like the Wizard have a corruption move that would let them add +1 to a Faction stat as a result of their supernatural knowledge. 😀
I love the new faction moves and debt system! 😀
But I agree with Philip Burge that factional advancement might cause some problems. Now every player will try and have their character make a move or settle debts with every faction every session (simple interaction does not suffice). With four players, this might get distracting.
I suggest letting Lending a Hand with or Getting In the Way of a faction move suffice to mark a faction, to reduce the number of “advancement scenes” required.
Philip Burge, I think it is fine since it is a way to advance, not the only way to advance.
I don’t think that it’s going to be all that tough to get the faction XP, given the requirements—you don’t need the plot to be centered around a faction to get the check. Settling a debt or hitting the streets can be done in a single scene and then be brought back in later when the plot comes around to that faction.
Using Harry Dresden as an example, in Storm Front he hits the streets, summoning a fairy called Toot-toot (Wild) and confronting the Red Court vampire Bianca (Night) to get information. Neither faction plays a major role in the events of that book.
(He also puts a face to a name when he encounters Marcone (Mortal) and in the final confrontation with the main villain (Power) but those are more integral to the main plot.)
So, putting my copy editor’s hat on (it’s what I do for a living), some of the language around Debts is still a little unclear.
For instance, in the sentence “When you cash in a debt, remind your debtor why they owe you to…” there really should be a prepositional phrase after the terminal “you”, something along the lines of “in order to” or “so that you can”.
The re-written sentence would then be something like “When you cash in a debt, remind your debtor why they owe you [in order to/so that you can]…”.
Also, the sentence “The MC can cash in Debts owed to NPCs on PCs (and other NPCs) using these same moves.” would probably read better as “The MC can cash in Debts owed to NPCs by PCs (and other NPCs) using these same moves.”
Hope that helps, and really sorry to be that guy.
Seán Harnett – Thanks, Seán! We’re grateful for the help! Please feel free to point out more stuff in the future. 😀
Thanks Sean. We’ll go over that this week and see what we can do there. 🙂
As to some of the criticism around the advancement moves, we really appreciate the feedback. We’re going to be playtesting a lot of this, and we encourage you to try it as well! Your feedback now is valuable, but it’s even more valuable once you’ve tried it out.
Our thinking is very much in line with Jeff. The new advancement rules don’t encourage equal participation, but they do try to prompt players to engage with the wider world a bit more often. In our playtests, we found that players didn’t Hit the Streets as often as we would like, and that spending Debts wasn’t as common as it should be. We’re hoping these new changes fix that!
Mark Diaz Truman Don’t tempt me! My inner pedant is on a short enough leash as it is! 😉
Mark Diaz Truman Are you balancing that with letting players play how they want? Make debt and factions fun so they want to use vs forcing them to use?
Tommy Rayburn – Um… yes? Ultimately, AW design is about giving players incentives (and limiting options) to tighten up play and keep things focused. This is another step in that direction, where we’re pushing on the mechanics to produce tighter play in a specific fictional space. Obviously, players will do what they want to do within that space.
Mark Diaz Truman Quick clarification …. is that the only way to gain an advancement?
Tommy Rayburn – The individual playbooks will have additional ways to advance, but this may not be universal among all playbooks. 😀
Does “settle a debt” apply to either side, or just the debtor’s? e.g. If Harry calls in a debt from Murphy, does she mark Power, or does she mark Power and he marks Mortal?
It applies to both sides. Both Harry and Murphy would mark Factions as you described.
I must confess I find myself among the sceptics when it comes to the new approach towards character advancement. I appreciate the need to steer players towards the factions, but this approach seems a bit heavy handed to me. I kind of liked the diversity in advancement the old system offered.
Vermund, I want to first see what the AT’s offer as in advancement …. but right now from just this document …. I agree.
I think it would be awesome to see folks playtest some of this stuff. We’re hearing that people are nervous about how this is going to affect play, but my guess is that no one has actually gotten together a group to see how it actually goes. Try it out before rushing to judgment that it’s not going to work. 😀
Let’s also be clear that advancement tied to stat highlighting has particular problems in previous versions. In AW, stat highlighting works because the moves have specific costs that are pretty serious. Spamming Seize by Force is going to get you in trouble, even if you are the Gunlugger. The costs for Unleash are pretty minor, especially if you’re rolling pretty high on it. We’re trying to address that issue, and I think this is a big step forward toward doing so.
Philip Burge, I think it would be okay if you had both. Let’s you choose how YOU want to advance.
Mark Diaz Truman That is one reason I am so in love with the AW: Dark Ages way of getting XP ….. can;t spam moves for xp sake.
Quick idea (without having done any playtesting yet): What about allowing a highlighted faction to be marked twice? This way, the MC could nudge the players to interact with certain factions the MC feels get neglected, the players could put some spotlight on factions they like, noone would be required to deal with everyone all the time, and the incentive for faction move spamming wouldn’t be too big.
Urban Shadows is political urban fantasy, and you can’t have politics without engaging everybody. We want protagonists to go out there and get involved with the power players in the city, to make deals with them, fuck them over, ally with them, whatever they want to do. We’re not forcing you to do anything specific with them, just like we can’t force you to roll your highlighted stats to get xp.
As for Faction spamming, that’s not a bad thing. Faction moves don’t solve your problems, they set scenes and establish stakes and relationships. The Basic Moves are still needed for you to make meaningful change. They give players the control over the story, both in direction and pace. This not only makes things easier on the MC, but gives them a wealth of tools to implement.
If you want to play a brooding emo Vampires, go play Monsterhearts (cause frick, that game is amazing!). If you want to play a Wizard who gets mixed up in everybody’s business, welcome to Urban Shadows. This is the fiction we’re trying to push, not shove.
I should also highlight that other games do this too, quite successfully I might add. Dungeon World “forces” you to act a certain way with their End of Session questions. Sure, you can gain xp through failed rolls, a system you have absolutely no control over, but if you want reliable consistent XP, you need to resolve relationships and be a [insert alignment here] dungeon crawler.
All we’re asking is that you give this a shot and report on it. That’s what we’re doing in what little spare time we have so that we can give you all the best game possible. If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work, we’re big enough to admit that, but that decision should to be based on experience, not theory.
I don’t see the problem with Brooding Vampires if that is how the character wants to play it.
Philip Burge I find that the best politics happen within the same faction sometime.
I don’t see the problem with running two or even one-faction plotlines in this game—at least not with regards to the advancement system. Let’s take a typical WoD Vampire plot where one vampire is going to frame a rival for the death of the Prince’s pet mortal in order to put them into serious disfavor and weaken their position.
The accused rival comes to one of the PCs that owes her a debt—let’s say a Wizard—and pulls them into the situation (so they’ll be checking Night). That PC goes to another PC (an Awake police officer) and asks them to get him access to the morgue (now he owes the cop a Debt). The cop lends a hand when the wizard hits the streets with the morgue attendant (checking Mortal) only to find out (after a bad roll) that the body’s been stolen from the locked morgue. They investigate and find a tunnel clawed into the sub-basement. Ghouls. (Obviously working for the rival vampire.)
The wizard calls on the biggest ass-kicker he can think of—the Wolf (and gets to check Wild)—because he knows they’re in for a fight. And so on…
Once you’ve got a web of debts and a bunch of NPCs populating your world, I really don’t think anyone will be stretching to get their advances. They’re going to be doing it without thinking.
You are all definitely being heard, please don’t think that you’re not. We’re just trying to explain our reasons behind the choices and we’d really like to see how this all plays out in game. Like I said, if it bombs, we’ll revise it for sure. I’m going to simmer on all these thoughts, Mark and I will talk and play test as much as humanly possible and we’ll keep you all in the loop as we do. =D
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and even more for sharing potential solutions.