Here are few thoughts on my new PbtA GM experience:
I like games where I don’t have to mechanically do very much as the GM. Uncharted Worlds only has me guiding on the Moves and considering what the 6 and 7-9 range dice results might mean, what choices or consequences might follow.
Forces against the players are just a number of ‘Threats’ which, depending on them and the tools at the players’ disposal, defines what needs to be done to eradicate them.
Action is over in one, or at most a few, dice rolls. Once the threat is understood, action is described and a Move is carried out. You then simply describe what happens together based on the result.
As the game is mechanically so simple, you are just left with making things up, prompting and describing the action. There’s not much ‘game’ to fall back on, so it really is, mostly, a conversation
I went in with the sketchiest of outlines and prompted the players for details as I went. I didn’t know who had sent them to Near Dark or what they had been told they were extracting. I don’t know how they are going to find the extraction, but I will work with them to find out.
I don’t have much of a safety net and my prompts might be too ‘big’, but I’m learning. I described things as I saw them in my mind, raw and straight away.
I noted down things as I went and typed up a quick report on the session so that we had something to build on.
One of the players noted that there were really only 5 ‘skills’ – the main attributes of the characters. Yes there are ‘Skills’ in the game that function rather like stunts, allowing certain advantages, narrative power and rule tweaks, but at the end of the day it’s 2d6 and add a Stat.
If you are looking for any measure of game crunch then this sort of game is not for you. Really, apart from kits and data points, it is usually just down to adding your Stat, see where you fall on a Move range and describe the results. I don’t think that I’ve missed anything.
Most of us liked the experience, but not all. We thought that this game would be great for beginners, clear of game history and associated expectations.
How is it for you? Am I far off the mark?
Disclaimer : I haven’t started playing UW yet as my group is still in the midst of an Apocalypse World campaign, but I know PbtA games.
From what I read, you seem to have a good grasp of what makes PbtA games work.
There’s only one thing I don’t agree with you.
I’ve been MCing AW, DW, MonsterHearts and a couple of AW hacks for very experienced players (with 30 years of gaming under their belts) and I can assure you that many grognards love the simplicity of PbtAs.
Many (including mysel – I starded gaming in 1984) like the fact that our creativity is no longer hindered by cumbersome simulationist rules.
For us, PbtAs are liberating.
Of course, I also know people who prefer crunchy games and are not into PbtAs, but the length of their RPG experience has nothing to do with it.
I’d go so far as saying these modern kids like more rules crunch then us oldies do Philip Espi as is evidenced by the popularity of wait for it – FATE – I mean mechanics for how you feel or if the lights off, or how fire burns, pfft. Lol.
I’m finding I’m charmed more and more by simple rule sets OSR, Cortex+, Traveller and PbtA games.
Graham Spearing it sounds like your “doing it right” and having fun. I’d check with the crunch monkeys tho’ because if they love crunch they can bring that into the narative and get it front and centre. If what they are looking for are neat meta game combos and dice tricks maybe they need to play more Yahtzee! 😜 I’m with you it the game is fun and the goals are being met ( you can meaningfully resolve contests, conflicts and support a milieu with the mechanics) why do you need …more..? I’d question that need.
Personally, I think you’ve got the major points down. The “engine” itself is designed to be very free-form and minimalist. The small resolution window means a lot more happens during a session (I grew a bit tired of 3-hour combat sessions). The game is the conversation, there just happens to be a semi-random resolution to stated actions (the mechanics are prompting the flow of the conversation)
It’s funny you should mention the Skills: not many people notice that the Skills are character-building/tone-setting devices, rather than purely mechanical “crunch”. It’s dressed up as “super moves”, but really they are there to alter a character’s behavior, making them prone to certain courses of action. Again, tying back to the idea that The Conversation is the important part.
That said, I also totally get that some players might not like the style. I’ve had players who would build complicated spreadsheets or macros to calculate bonuses or whatnot. Different strokes.
While I wouldn’t say it’s for “beginners” per say, I do entirely agree that coming into a PbtA experience with a lot of high-crunch baggage will understandably cause a bit of a culture shock.
Re : The Skills :
in UW (and all PbtA games), fiction comes first and simulating reality comes a distant second.
Therefore, UW skills and Moves are mainly there to orient the fiction according to the PC’s archetype principles.
They are not really here to adjudicate the results of a PC’s action, as in traditional skill systems.
Even the Common and Stat Moves won’t force the GM to adjudicate a failure on a 6-. They could as well decide the action succeeds, but at a terrible cost or with considerable strings attached (debts), because moving forward the fiction trumps simulating reality.
Thanks to all for responses. 🙂
I’ve been at this since ’81. I did a lot of FGU in the 80s and tarried with GURPS. I still enjoy streamlined traditional skill systems, most recently of the European and Scandinavian houses (Symbaroum, Shadows of Esteren, Yggdrasill). Traveller and BRP/D100 have been by my side throughout, in most incarnations. I wrote Wordplay as my take on rules light narrative focussed play, where phrases and traits have game power without the need for a meta game economy to govern them.
I’ve gone ridiculously big on Modiphius’ Kickstarters for Infinity and Conan 2d20…
So, I have been on a journey, and PbtA games are now solidly a part of that. I heartily agree that these games can be picked up and enjoyed by the old lag too. I am crumbling evidence of such.
I think most of the games I have have jettisoned any notion of simulating reality. In their own way they seek to emulate a genre to frame the dialogue at the table. I would be too much of a curmudgeon to claim that PbtA is a case of ’emperors new clothes’, as the central principles are as applicable if you are playing any game. Though I think there is truth there, I like the way these games push the ethos right into the foreground, with thematic Moves being one of the tools to keep the focus there. I love the elegant simplicity, and may I say that Uncharted Worlds does a particularly fine job here. I have pimped the game lavishly, and one gaming chum has stated that UW is the first PbtA game that he really understands!
Looks up, gosh what a ramble… I’m committing to more PbtA at conventions this year, with UW in the mix. My deep colour hardback will be my flag. There can be no shortage of action. the stripped back Moves will ensure that. If anything, I may not drive the pace enough. My ‘What do you do’ will need to be honed. But even if we sit back and enjoy the ramble of the conversation too, I think we aren’t doing it wrong.
I’ve had only a few real sessions of a PbtA game (Dungeon World), although I was also tempted to buy Spirit of ’77 too for gonzo 1970s Blaxploitation/Kung Fu/Good Ol’ Boys Driving Around in a Car Heedless of the Political Connotations of the Flag on the Roof…haha.
I was impressed by the fact that the DW character sheet also had the rules! There was not a lot else to worry about as a player, but the story details are still the responsibility of the GM. Don’t go in with just a few threads on your parachute.
You had a lot of experience as a GM to back it up. But others might not be so lucky. They should map out the game in advance, think of what happens if a PC encounter goes very well, and what happens if it goes badly. The UW rules mention that untended situations are going to get worse. The rules also mention you can turn questions back to the players, but maybe use more sparingly than you seem to be doing. Organize it by locations, hoping the players will pick up clues and useful items in each place to culminate in some grand show-down somewhere else.
I learned a kind of graphical tree-note structure which really helps my adventure creation and aids my geometric memory of the possible events, better than point-form notes would.
http://downstat.homestead.com/files/Temp/TreeDiagrams/Cyberpunk_tree-diagram_notes_1.jpg
Uncharted Worlds resembles, as I say often, Traveller rolls on the front-end (2d6+assets) but Fate on the back-end with GM decisions. The GM has a great platform to improvise but may want to create a good foundation in the adventure.
Ask yourselves: what do SF fans want? Fabulous locations (prepare a spellbinding capsule description in advance, only as much as PCs could take in at a glance), weird aliens, awesome gear. How does all that work together? I was of the old-school rigid Prussian school of GMing; you would have fun but it sure was my railroad. Now these days I try to loosen up more. In a Cyberpunk game a while ago, the players decided that they would recruit punks from gangs to help against the evil big Corporation. So I went along, then they ended up recruiting EVERY gang I charted on the city-map. But the gangs don’t like each other; old rivalries were poking up, so they had a grand old time holding these troops together!
Re : “Don’t go in with just a few threads on your parachute.”
I’m going to disagree with Pierre Savoie on that one.
This sentence might be kind of true for DW, but from my POV, the play experience is better in AW and MH if you don’t plan too much in advance, because the Moves create so much fiction that it will derail any kind of preparation you made pretty fast.
In fact, one of my AW campaigns blew up because of overpreparation. My players didnt’t like it. They felt too restricted.
OTOH, my best memories of MH come from Con’ games without any kind of prep.
I’ve read UW rulebook twice and I think UW is closer to AW than DW on this one (but I may be wrong).
Anyway, let the MC’s agenda and principles guide you and the “succed at a cost” or “fail forward” mechanisms of the Moves feed your fiction.
Play to find out what happens.
I am going with Philip Espi and will play to find out. The evocative descriptions though, I’ll work on a few to place as required in the narrative tomorrow.
This week I printed 4 images from Pintrest that I thought might apply, wrote a few descriptions, and lightly plotted the big picture if I needed to direct them a little. Took about 30 minutes. It was plenty.
Did you do it before your first session or after ?
Were those images strongly related to the emerging fronts and threats or did you decide to go another route ?
I’m just curious about the way you handled your preps and whether you did it “by the book” or not 😉
I’ll not check the book before I reply… 😉
We’d left the last session with a bar encounter with a faction contact. I printed out an image of the bar (which provoked some amusing narrative in play), a combat droid (because it was time for a faction to make a move) and a street (because I wanted to give flavour for the location of the forthcoming extraction).
The nature of the security, the surroundings of the vault, the escape from the bar, the amusing emptying of the bacta tank etc, that all emerged in play. I didn’t know it was going to be Trojan Securities that ran the facility, I just made that up and suggested it was a low grade, local and inexpensive company. I prompted by asking what one of the weaknesses of Trojan’s operations. I got back that they employ low sentence criminals as a stepping stone to the Union Army recruiting posts. Nice.
How am I doing? 🙂