I’ve played some Dungeon World before and am almost through the rulebook of the sprawl. My group and I have gone through half of the preparing to play and we’ve gotten a pretty solid Sprawl built to play in. A cyberpunk Vancouver that was once a hub of Russian invasion on America. I’m very excited to get going but I need some advice on how to structure time in the game. I think I can get them started easily by just saying “where are you guys hanging out?” or something like that. But I’m wondering how I can smoothly transmission into the getting the job move. I’m just starting into the chapter about missions but I’m just hoping for some words of encouragement about how to link scenes and stuff. The “putting it all together” of CH. 9 helped a lot! Anyone got tips for a rookie MC for PbtA.
I’ve played some Dungeon World before and am almost through the rulebook of the sprawl.
I’ve played some Dungeon World before and am almost through the rulebook of the sprawl.
Tip 1: Zoom in and out a lot. Part of the fun/challenge is that the result of a move can affect the next 5 seconds or the next five days/months/years. If your group has fun hunting for a job (which can be interesting, sniffing around seedy bars/clubs/drug dens/abandoned construction sites and interacting with shady/bizarre/criminal/not-entirely-human people) zoom in and play it out. If not, just ask them how they like to approach this or who they have worked with getting jobs before, zoom out and “fast forward” to the job move.
Tip 2: Read Apocalypse World. All of it. Especially the MC sections. It helps a lot. Most PbtA hacks explicitely or implicitely assume that you just know how things in Apocalypse World work. (The notable exception (I know of) is Urban Shadows which is the only hack which really explains in detail how things are supposed to work in PbtA.)
Tip 3: Dungeon World hacks and Apocalypse World hacks are very different beasts regarding flow/pacing of the game, scale and detail of combat/challenges and especially character interaction and PvP. It’s great fun digging into the subtleties of the different systems (if you’ve got the time).
This is great. I can’t say that I have the time to dig in and read Apocalypse World, though that recommendation does pop up from time to time. Tip 1 seems to be very helpful though. I’ve GM’d a fair amount of cyberpunk2020, and I know the people I play with really enjoy just exploring the environment, trolling around the city, and they love planning heists. So it’s cool to hear that the mechanics enable me to stretch out those things the PC’s love doing. I’m guessing that a few people I play with will really want to stretch out the legwork phase of missions.
Another one, wich may be the most important. Being the GM/MC for a PbtA-game sometimes seems terrifying when you are used to more “classic” formats like D&D, Shadowrun, CoC etc.. There is a lot less control for you as “play to find out” combined with high player empowerment makes for very unpredictable games. If you try to fight this and “stay in control” you games will become very tedious and unfun very quickly.
So here is magic Tip Nr. 4 : Trust your players! Run with them and they will make your story great!
It is essential that the players understand this, too! Make it clear that having a good game is a shared responsibilty, especially in PbtA games. Players have a way more active role in sculpting the story as in classic systems while the MC, on the other hand, has to be way more reactive. (Warning: some groups have a hard time adapting to this paradigm shift. In other words: PbtA doesn’t work very well with certain groups)
Tip 5: Don’t skimp on player handouts!
Just because you are not allowed to plot the story beforehand doesn’t mean you can’t have handouts ready. Print out:
a) a list of names for people/places/gangs/companies- this is absolutely essential and nonoptional. I would put some addresses there, too. (Agenda: name everything, make things real)
b) some maps of places which will come up sooner or later. There is a great selection at drivethrurpg.com for cyberpunky stuff like night clubs, run-down tenements etc.(this helps to put focus on important scenes, make the players wary (map of something = possible combat/danger?) and in general just makes your game better )
c) hunt the web for character images that you can use for NPCs. deviantart or pinterest is a great stop for those. Just print some out and assign them to important/interesting NPCs that come up during the game
In doing this you can have play-to-find-out games with the same “production value” as more classic games that have all these things provided in a ready-made scenario package.
This is all excellent advice! thanks for taking time to help get me going. I think that I’ll adjust to it nicely since my GM style has always been to make it up as I go along, for the most part. I love that I don’t have to plan every aspect of a story. I like what you’re saying about trusting the players to help shape the story though. Thanks for your time.
I’d also recommend start right in the action and then do cut scenes back to the planning stages when applicable. So your at the CryoTech Amalgamated hq, the guards are checking your access badge which you just pray checks out. The guard hesitates, looks at the screen, looks at you and then frowns. We flash back to meeting Nightshade, the shadowy hacker that imprinted and hacked this indentchip with the appropriate codes. She seemed on edge and a little put off having you there. She seems to be stalling in the creation of your chip. What do you do? Then depending on how the scene plays out dictates how the guard reacts. If that makes sense.
We had a brief session the other day, but tonight we are starting session one I think. After we get through the prep, I want their first job/mission offer to come in.
Do you think it would be okay to let them choose the target?
Here’s my idea. The fixer of our group gets a shady message posted to her holoboard, that says something like: Interested in a job? The target its… and then let the players choose which corporation is the target. Then I have very basic mission packages prepped for which ever one they chose. They are these:
-if it’s vayu, they have to steal a new arosoul compound from a R&D lab
-if it’s the syndicate, they need to intercept a shipment of weapons at the docks
-if it’s the MOT inc. they need to find and extract someone who’s been taken by them
-if it’s hidiki steel they need to disrupt operations on the orbital platform (up in space) they’ve been working on… this can go various ways (remote or on-site attacks)
I won’t show them this list, they will just say: the target listed is Vayu, MOT, Hidiki, or The Syndicate. Then after they respond to the message and make the Get the job move, I’ll give them the directives. For the first mission I want them to decide who they are going to be getting involved with, that way the table can explore the corp they are interested in right now.
Thoughts?
I would probably do it like this:
“You are in your car, rolling through the dark streets of the Sprawl. Just an hour ago, you checked your offers and had to decide on a target. Which of the four did you choose and why?”
Keep asking follow up questions on the “why” until you are satisfied (according to common theory, it takes about 5 “whys” to get to the bottom of things, but three should give you enough detail).
Follow up on the answers and you are all set.
I like that Oli!
Prepping five missions for them to choose between sounds like a lot of work, cortex jackal, but if you can make it easy on yourself (or if you just want to!) then it sounds like a cool plan.
In terms of the smooth transition you asked about in your OP, in a one-shot, I usually pick a player (often the Fixer or Soldier, or someone +owned by a corp) and ask “how do people usually contact you for jobs?” Then I run with that. It lets them set up a little bit of the world, establish something about their character, and provides an easy way forward.
Thanks a lot guys, these have been so helpful. Trying them tonight. I’ve never run a PbtA game so I’ve been nervous to get going but we’re gonna give it a shot tonight. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Report :
Excellent first session. My players really like figuring out the mechanics and flow of the game with me. They were also very forgiving of the times I needed to stop and think about what came next. The flow was very, very fast paced but that didn’t seem to be the problem that I thought it would be. I attempted to give them a mission straight off but our fixer was busy with other tasks and “couldn’t be bothered just yet”.
I was expecting it to flow like the “the first session” section of the book but it didn’t too much. The mistake I made (that actually ended up being awesome) was starting the characters all off in different places. I didn’t want their joining to be contrived so they each began the game doing what their characters would be doing. I was able to balance the spotlight well enough to keep the characters interested by shifting to another player right after I gave one of them a hard choice or put them in a spot somehow. Eventually they started to come together but we spent the whole first session kind of exploring the world and the mechanics.
This was good because it allowed me to get comfortable making moves and knowing how and when to make moves, as well as the small tweaks you have to make to moves to keep the fiction believable.
By the end of our session the characters had just gotten the job and started to come together so the next time we meet up we will likely be digging into the legwork phase of our mission. Which is to steel a new Aerosol compound from Vayu Transnational.
I have an infiltrator, a fixer, and a killer. I’m just worried about how to keep the killer engaged other than just kicking ass on the mission (which he will do obviously). I’ll probably need to hook into his directives somehow and complicate the mission for him that way.
Our Fixer also wanted to have a substance abuse problem so I made a custom directive that says: whenever her substance use hinders the mission, mark XP, but wondering how that can look in game. Any ideas?
Thanks for your time! This game is so fun!
That directive sounds fine. Have you read Chapter 12 on hacking? I use the example of drugs to discuss different ways to introduce new mechanical elements.
It sounds like you’re on the right track with the Killer. Also bear in mind that if someone plays a playbook called the Killer, they probably want their character to kick ass a bunch!
I haven’t read chapter 12 yet. I haven’t touched that chapter because I’ve been learning the basics but I’ll take a peek today.
I totally see what your’e saying with the killer though. We’ll make sure he does a lot of gratuitous violence.
Be sure to throw in some non-gratuitous violence too!
Hahahaha of course! Also I’m thinking of laminating my gaming aids, like how you had yours done for the gaming con. I can see how that would be useful.