Had a great first session of Urban Shadows! I did come up with one question, none of the four players actually checked off all four factions in the course of the session. The session was maybe 4-5 hours long and got through a good amount of the rumors that they provided in the beginning (3 out of 4 ain’t bad).
Two players were 1 faction away (different factions missing) and the other two were 2 factions away. I know that the beginning of the next session will make two of the players ding, but wasn’t sure if this was other people’s experience as well. From Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts I expected slightly more advancing, but it’s highly possible the group was just playing oddly!
How often do you folks find players are advancing?
I think that’s a bit on the slow side for me. One thing I try to keep in mind as a GM is that I can push advancement along with Put a Name to a Face. Basically, if I see someone is close to advancing, I’ll throw in an NPC who comes from the Faction that they need…
In general, I think I hit about 1.5 advancements a section per player, sometimes more if the players are getting clever, i.e. “I’m going to go cash in a Debt to get my advancement!”
That is def normal, advancement is supposed to be a slower burn in Urban Shadows. Players will adapt pretty quickly imo and that should pick up over time (not unlike early play throughs of AW for me). If you wanna pick things up a little, you can add in some custom moves to accommodate this: you can allow Lend a Hand and Get in the Way to the advancement rules is just one way.
I’ll go with the dudes that actually wrote the game. Kinda.
My experience is the first session or two tend to be a bit slower, and as folks get a hang of how important, and powerful, debts and faction moves are they tend to advance faster.
I’ve also sometimes seen an up and down swing on the rate. Like, I remember one set of five games where we’d see no advancement for a session, then three in one, then none, then two, then none again. If I remember right this was mostly because of mass debt spending and lots of hitting the streets.
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I think one thing to note here is that players have TONS of control. It doesn’t feel like it at first, but between Debts, intimacy, and Faction moves, players can push for advancement anytime they want. Encourage that! They will get in plenty of trouble along the way…
That all makes quite a bit of sense! I didn’t think to throw specific faction NPCs their way (though honestly, I think they invented all but two NPCs that were included in the session), but that could be a handy trick if I see a certain faction isn’t well represented! I think I probably need another Night member or two.
I can definitely also see the game speeding up advancement a little as it goes. To be clear, my players didn’t seem distressed about it, I just wanted to get a good pulse of what was going on!