Back when I ran the playtest, I used the session start move as a way to come up with ideas to run the session (or series of sessions). I’ve never been one for planning and have always been more likely to improv stuff that I come up with on the spot: I’m lazy that way. That works very well with PbtA and the session start move just made that style easier.
Thing is, there wasn’t a lot of rules for threats and fronts back then and I’ve never been one to use them in PbtA games out of laziness. I got by just fine,. but I do feel I wasn’t playing poker with all the cards, if you know what I mean.
With the session start move, I can see it being a little harder to use in this title.
How do other GM’s balance setting up threats, custom moves, countdown clocks, etc. when ideas for the session don’t come up until the beginning of the session?
Well for the first session, or even the first few sessions, you shouldn’t even be thinking up threats or custom moves etc. Those come when you have a real feel for the characters, and established things about your setting.
Think of the first few sessions as learning what’s normal in the setting, establishing it with the players. Once you and the players have figured out the current status quo, threats, storms and custom moves can be used to disrupt the status quo. Something is coming that shakes the boat, or pre-existing cracks in the city structure finally hits a breaking point.
There’s no point establishing a werewolf revolution, until you’ve already established the werewolves are unhappy, and deal with that state of affair. Makes the players more invested in that way, since they care about the status quo, one way or the other.
Well, AFTER the first session, I play around a lot with names and concepts. I put NPCs and important concepts (poppd oout from 1st session) on a star (5, 7 8 pointed) and think about connections. This generates other concepts, which I use to get nearer to the actual threats. It’s fun, and keeps me from MAKING PLOTS, which is against the rules.
Caveat: I’ve played one complete Urban Shadows game and had never played PbtA games before.
I didn’t think about threats until just before our third session. In the first two there was a lot of following the characters around, seeing what they were interested in, generating fiction from their footsteps.
Each player had a lot of backstory for their character before we’d arrived at the questions stage of character creation, so that helped me to think thematically about what was coming up, how to braid the disparate things their characters were concerned with into something larger. I didn’t make plots those first two games, totally no prep, but in a choice between two equally likely improvs I chose the one that favored the already emergent themes.
After organizing the existing NPCs into threats, I could guide the start of session moves a bit more, making meaningful debts, etc.