Here’s my post about Session 2 of my Urban Shadows playtest.

Here’s my post about Session 2 of my Urban Shadows playtest.

I won’t do a full Actual Play run down like last time, but here are a some situations, moves and rulings we thought worth mentioning here:

– The Quick Start Guide definitely helped, even just reading it a few minutes before running the session.

– After watching the demo on Indie+ I saw how awesome/important Put A Face To A Name is. We didn’t use it at all first session, but this session it happened a lot and was a fantastic source of story, hooks an debts between PCs and NPCs (creating PC-NPC-PC triangles when one PC rolled 10+ and the other 6 for the same NPC).

– Session Intro was weird this time around. We were in the middle of a story, so rolling to hear a rumour or get wind of an opportunity seemed forced to us and I actually forgot to come up with and tell anyone any rumours and we were all fine with that. Already had so much going on.

– We used combat a fair bit this episode and it went well. It was easy to understand and the PCs felt power. Perhaps a little too powerful? One thing that somewhat troubled me was I had created these big scary tough fae but the PCs did so much harm they took them down easily even with them having 6 harm per monster.

Perhaps this was because it was 2 PCs vs one NPC. I think it may have more been due to me – correctly or incorrectly, I’m not sure – treating the monster like one from Dungeon World and not having it attack unless they failed or partially succeeded on a roll or left things wide open.

I wanted a tougher fight than what we encountered. I’m not sure how I could’ve fairly done that, as I had the creature dealing 2-3 harm and having 6 harm worth of hp. Perhaps I needed to give it some armour.

– We had one advancement and the Wolf took some great transformation options, beefing him up really well. That helped take down these monsters too. He only advanced because someone marked Wild for him at the start of the session.

I’ve seen some comments to this effect and we found it too: the advancement seemed forced and strange. We had fae in the game, but they were monstrous. No other ones had been introduced yet that seemed reasonable to use Faction Moves on. I now realise I didn’t “Name everyone, give everyone drives” for these creatures. Perhaps I should’ve done that, but it didn’t quite seem appropriate for these hulking monsters.

In any case, it was challenging and felt a bit contrived to have every player interact with every faction, when the plot was not about every faction. No real Wild NPCs existed till the very end. Few mortal NPCs were encountered in this area, and while Putting A Face To A Name gave the PCs Debts to settle with them, they didn’t come up yet.

So, I’m curious on how quick the advancement is intended to be. Except that we had one each of Power, Night and Mortality PCs, I don’t know that Power or Mortality would’ve come into the plot that much at all. What do you do when it’s a pack of Night PCs dealing with a Night plot? We felt it’d be difficult to advance in some circumstances without artificially including other Factions.

– One PC promised and reneged on an NPC Debt. He planned from the start to not uphold it, so we ruled that when he actually took the action of not upholding it, that was when we used the Refuse To Honor A Debt move. He got 10+ and it made sense to weasel out of it.

– Another question we had was if Let It Out is the only way to “take hold” of something. Two PCs wanted something and it didn’t seem they needed to exactly “let out the power within” but we couldn’t figure out what other move to make, as they wanted to take definitive hold of something. Both rolled it at once and both took definitive hold of the same thing. So, that was a stalemate. Is that how it’s intended to go? Like two people seeing the same object at once, lunging for it and both succeeding.

OVERALL FEELING FROM THE GROUP

– We had heaps of fun! It was great!

– Put A Face To A Name is a vital piece we were missing from the first time around. It really created action and tension. Great move!

– Like last time, my favourite part of this session was two PCs struggling over Debts. They had both killed a Spriggan and had grabbed onto the gland behind its heart that creates illusions. One cashed in Debts, the other countered. So they grappled and Unleashed on each other, but still were matched. One cashed in more Debts and the other Persuaded her to modify the terms. It went well, I think, being a tense struggle between semi-allied PCs with different values.

– We think the Advance move may make some things a bit tricky for us, but are nevertheless looking forward to playing more.

– I’m happy to give more comments or explanation of needed, but I think I’ve gone on long enough for now.