Bought the game, loved reading it… And couldn’t get past the first session. World creation, character creation, first hour of play, and that was it, experiment failed.
Neither the players nor me managed to make it work. As a GM, I felt lost and oppressed by the imperative of thinking about the moves and applying them and interpreting them according to the situation.
As players, they complained about not being able to immerse themselves in the game because they always had to think in terms of moves, they felt restricted to limited options, and thinking in “moves” destroyed their immersion, they weren’t able to just “be their characters”.
The Apocalypse engine turned out to be incredibly hard to understand, impossible, even. We’re not D&D players, we play a variety of mainstream and indie games, but none has stumped us like AW did. This is very frustrating. And nothing I’ve read on the net helped me. The book itself was already doing everything it could to help me and it didn’t work.
For this specific game, I think I’m one of these GMs who need to play it first under someone who knows it like the back of their hand. Concrete examples, concrete situations, lived and played instead of read about. Which means it’s never gonna happen, I don’t have such a GM around.
But, guys, seriously : reading the game was great, and if only for that pleasure, I’ll never regret buying it !
As I understand it, AW players are supposed to just “be their characters.” Moves kick in when the appropriate stuff happens in the fiction; they’re not limits on what you can do or something players constantly need to be thinking about.
You don’t have to think in moves. You do whatever and then the GM says “hey that sounds like you’re Letting It Out”. Then you roll.
As for feeling restricted by GM moves – literally anything that you wish to do can be covered by a GM move. What’s more important is the WHEN of your actions.
Can you give us an example of play that happened and we can discuss what was good and what went wrong?
Yup. I suck at AW because I look at the moves too much. You just have to grab the playbook, get an idea of what and where you are in the world, and start pushing towards your goals and dealing with your problems (or letting them fester until everything catches fire).
If you reach a point in the conversation where there’s a pause, or a maybe, or a question of significant chance, then grab the dice. Don’t hold them until you really need them.
I understand the frustration, and the temptation to “think about the moves”, but in general, with PbtA games, you don’t want to think about the Moves until it’s time to roll the dice, at which point you match the Narrative to the Move. Ideally, players need to do this less than the MC does, as the MC should be able to say “It sounds like you’re doing X, roll + Stat” The moves tend to be widely applicable for a reason.
I’d actually recommend watching Roll20 Presents Apocalypse World or The Sprawl on YouTube to get a feel for the system. The MC, Adam Koebel, was one of the designers of Dungeon World, and he really does a good job of showing the flow that PbtA can have. He also does his GM Prep on camera, and those are fantastic videos for seeing how to integrate some planning with the improvisation that’s needed during the game.
All of this said, I’ve struggled with Urban Shadows myself. I may not have had the best group (for the game, at least), or I struggled to find narrative hooks that kept people working around one another, but my game also petered out. It was also my first attempt at running a PbtA game, which added to the struggle.
” As players, they complained about not being able to immerse themselves in the game because they always had to think in terms of moves, they felt restricted to limited options, and thinking in “moves” destroyed their immersion, they weren’t able to just “be their characters”. “
I’ve heard about this from a number of people. It’s an especially big grief over at rpg.net. It seems to be a really common issue for some folk, though for the soul of me, I don’t know why. (The other big one, for some reason, is people thinking that PbtA is about characters making life intentionally difficult for themselves for the sake of drama, and not just solving an easily-solved problem. I don’t know where the heck that comes from at all.)
As others have said, you don’t think about moves. You just advance the fiction. Certain events in the fiction trigger moves, and those get mechanized; the rest don’t, so you don’t.
Think about it like DnD: you say your character takes a shit. You don’t think about what mechanic allows that – you just do it. Then they boil water. Then they go out for a walk. Then they run into a goblin – do they see them?! That question has a mechanical trigger in DnD, where you pull out the d20 and roll a perception check. At no point does anyone stop and ask “where’s the rule for taking a dump? where’s the rule for walking? Argh, I want tea; I can’t find the move for Make Tea.”
You should check out The Gauntlet and try an online game with one of their GMs – they’re really, really good. I think you’re absolutely right that you’ll play it once or twice and it’ll click for you.
There is also an odd alchemy to gaming groups and Powered by the Apocalypse games. I had the hardest time really “getting” Dungeon World, and then when I read Monster of the Week and World Wide Wrestling, so many things clicked into place for me.
That said, I’ve run good, solid, rewarding games of Monster of the Week, World Wide Wrestling, The Sprawl, Action Movie World, and Masks—but when I tried to run Dungeon World for my regular Thursday group, instead of a bunch of strangers at a convention, it fell a bit flat.
On one hand, it really is a simple as just having people tell you what they are doing and deciding if you want to map that action to a move. The GM moves aren’t so much restrictive in what you can do, but in why you do them. That’s really what the flavor and the principles provide–not solid examples of actions, but context for those actions. But it’s also a little like a cartoon character running off a cliff–once you “look down” and see the moves or the principles, it can be easy to fall out of the narrative because you are thinking too hard about if you are using the rules provided the right way.
I really, really want to get a chance to run Urban Shadows, but I’m hesitant to try it for a convention one shot because I feel like it’s calibrated better for story arc play. I need to get a group that likes the system, likes the genre, and can commit to a few sessions before I feel like I could give it a fair shot.
Oh, yes, please don’t think you and your group are the only ones who had a hard time grokking it. I had to read four or five different AW games and some discussion about them before what I said earlier became clear to me, and I haven’t actually gotten to run an AWE game yet because of reactions like the one you got.
Pbta uses very different principles than a lot of games. In most books the advice and examples are spot on, but that doesn’t mean any person can go straight from a FATE mindset to pbta. Sometimes it’s best to play in a session or two with somebody who knows the ropes before running yourself.
Moves are incredibly broad; you think of what you would like to do in the narrative and then find the Move that fits the action, not the other way around.
Lex Permann I don’t think that’s a good way to say it. You think of what you want to do in the narrative, and then do it. If it fits a move, apply the rule, otherwise they are “looking to the GM to see what happens” and the GM responds with a move.
Not all game styles are for all people but it sounds like it could just be a lack of familiarity that could pass with more experience.
I’ve also encountered this problem as a PbtA GM in the past, and I think it generally comes from players feeling like the game and/or the GM is “out to get [them].” They treat the moves like D&D traps – things they have to avoid in order to get what they want and play optimally. They think the GM has all the power to affect the narrative and they have none. In my case, I’ve even seen them explicitly contrast this to trad games like D&D, wherein you can “do whatever you want.”
Which is weird, because a PbtA players have far more control over the narrative and the fate of their character than they do in D&D, and the GM’s authority has strict and explicit limits which aren’t there in trad games. Yes, there is a random element, but it is always triggered by player actions, and a PC can almost always recover from the results of a single roll with a little elbow grease. The GM is putting pressure on the characters, of course, but the same is true of just about any roleplaying game with a GM one could name. The characters in PbtA are also always competent, only being laid low by the consequences of previous actions or the vicissitudes of cruel fate; they never vacillate between supreme competence and utter incompetence the way they do in more traditional roleplaying games.
I dunno, it’s a weird and multifaceted problem.
I think Dungeon World is an easier transition for players, because the genre is what most players have already played. There are a couple of other things you need to be very aware of in AWE. One is that low rolls happen all the time and need to be embraced as part of the game. It’s important for the GM to describe such rolls in terms of complications rather than failure, otherwise it just feels, especially for new characters, that they are useless.
The other issue, which I haven’t really resolved, is how players deal with moves. If you’ve got a +2 stat, in Int for example, then you’ll find after a while that you tend to describe things in terms of Int. How do you avoid the dragon’s breath? I’ve made a study of thermodynamics and worked out that if I stand here, the shape of the cave, combined with the cross-breeze, means that this point will not be covered in flames. To a large extent I think this is associated with the first point. We’re used to failure being deprotagonising, so we try to avoid it. AWE demands that you engage with the fiction, but not worry about such things. It’s very much a change in mindset for players, and requires good GMing to handle well.
So in a recent run of DW, my wizard failed his spell rolls pretty much every time at the start. That didn’t stop the spells working, but it did a massive amount of collateral damage that got my guy a bad rep, which was fun. You have to make low rolls fun too.
Hey.
Luckily the technology of 21st century is here to help you overcome that problems.
Before my first time playing any Apocalypse World or any of it hacks I watched hours of actual play on youTube, in earlier comments were perfect examples of which campaign to watch. I then came to play, then started to GM, but I still have problems GMing for my local group of friends, who just don’t seem to get it.
I definitely advics searching youTube for US games, I can recommend this one “Intercontinental Urban Shadows” it is nice and friendly however a bit less dark than US wants to be. On Indie+ channel is also US one-shot with one of the game designers.
If you cannot find another local group that plays US, play online. Join Gauntlet Hangouts (although it can be couple of months before the game comes up on a roster) and head to Roll20 site to watch for any games looking for players.
Ask the friends you tried US with to also watch the same youTube actual plays as you, then discuss them and give it another try.
Games like US takes time to adjust, so take it slow 🙂
Good luck 🙂
I’ve got few more ideas and thoughts to use when you decide to come back and give it another shot.
The way I understand GM moves is that they are there to spice things up. Sometimes characters will leave from a meeting with an NPC they will be standing on the street and don’t know where to go next, one of the things that could happen is a car drives by and characters are shot at, by who? why? They need to take action to find out, you also don’t have to know who or why, however make note that someone wanted to eliminate them or scare them.
Sometimes things are already very hot like in the middle of a fight and after characters rolls a miss you feel the need to make a hard move because the book says so, so you look desperately on the move list and think (at least I sometimes to it like that 🙂 ). Easiest advise I can give is to look at the situation and pick something that comes from what is already going on. A player wanted to attack an NPC and misses, maybe the NPC takes few shot at the character first and character hides behind cover after taking harm, maybe another NPC comes charging at the character, tackles him to the ground and begins to make a mess of his face with his demonic fists.
Whatever you chose just build the action, build the story in way it makes sense and give characters something to react to.
Also sometimes it is ok not to make a hard move, but a soft one, sometimes it is ok not to make a soft one when nothing comes to mind, just this once in ten times characters get it easy.
As for players moves, I was thinking moves as well at the start. Important to note for them is to just be free and say what they characters are doing and moves comes from that. Moves comes when something is at stake or when you think result is uncertain, they don’t have to roll move to ask a guy on a street what time it is or a bouncer to let them inside the club.
Then at some point you as MC will think “so is this NPC going to just do what characters want, I’m not sure” then it is a move, ask yourself or the character is he persuading or misleading or distracting. It’s ok to meta-game here to understand player intention and leverage.
If character says to a bouncer “let me in now or I will crack your bones” it sounds like persuade using threats, but if you ask player “do you intend to follow through with violence if it comes to this” and he says no, then he is more like tricking.
A miss on a move sometimes means that players still get what they wanted, the bouncer will let them in, but off the stage he will call some muscle to rough up the characters as they will be leaving.
Kind regards.
Thanks for all these detailed answers ! I’ll try to go further into things.
Someone asked me a specific example of what had gone wrong : one of the player complained that asking him to determine “who is that” or “what’s your history with this place” ruined everything for him because he felt like the world around was just a shapeless goo, made up as they went along as in a virtual reality with not enough RAM to display distant things.
Just to be clear, these are mechanics I’ve done before on my own in more traditional games (asking players to come up with stuff and building from there), including him, and he had no problem with that. I’ve been at the Feng Shui school of gaming, where you make shit up all the time as you go along to make things cooler. But he felt like this time, the world really hinged on these, instead of just being a nice little add-on from times to times, and it upset him.
Another thing was when I launched them into some sort of investigation about a Redcap violin maker (I was using Changeling : the Dreaming fae races for easy reference). As a GM, I felt frustrated when they arrived at the lair of the Redcap and I didn’t know how to proceed to make them enter it. I didn’t want it to be too hard or too easy. We fell into our regular habits “I’m surveying the docks, make sure that nobody’s coming” “Me, I pick the lock” and realized that it felt wrong trying to apply the AW system to a detailed process of minute actions like that.
Also one of the players remarked that if they rolled low, it “created” danger. They didn’t WANT to know that their low roll had created danger that wasn’t there a minute before because the world didn’t exist yet. They wanted the feeling that I, as a GM, had (or didn’t have) stuff waiting for them inside.
Finally, as a GM, I felt overwhelmed by the need of thinking about the moves, notice when a move was relevant, and what move was that. Telling the player “seems like [specific move] to me” looks simple but actually it means that you have the moves catalogue completely at the ready in your mind, and that it comes naturally to permute things and look at them under all possible angles to realise that this specific situation fits a specific move.
A 6- roll doesn’t create danger. It gives the GM a turn. Not all of your moves are dangerous. Player rolls a 2 trying to manipulate the loa currently possessing someone in front of him? Well the loa doesn’t have to attack and create danger. They may simply say “these mortal trivialities are nothing to me” and depart the body.
I hear what you’re saying Aaron. I guess the problem was more that the effects of the moves were too detailed about their narrative effects, and “ruined the illusion”. It’s a subtle thing to define, i’m not sure I do justice to what my players felt.
Everyone certainly doesn’t feel that way about AW mechanics, but my players did (and I didn’t, as a matter of fact, I enjoyed reading the book and how it was supposed to work)
That sounds like a difference in play style from what Apocalypse World games assume. They facilitate a higher player contribution to allow for greater player buy in, less GM prep, and more collaborative storytelling and world building. If you go into these RPGs not wanting these things, or wanting a more traditional RPG, then the game style will jar with the group.
If the players are keen to try and achieve those benefits, then it could be just a lack of familiarity which will disappear in time. If they aren’t keen to achieve those benefits, then these RPGs are unlikely to be for you.
As a final piece of advice, don’t overthink the moves. As a GM or player, your first instinct should always be to narrate what happens just like any RPG. The moves are ways of determining what happens next as a result of that narrative, not the other way around.
Thank you Luke, I’m starting to think that AW is actually just beyond the limit of what I can sell them as far as indie/narrative games are concerned.
FWIW IME PbtA games are actually a good entry point for indie/narrative games. FATE often seems easier but its unstructured play can just hide the issues until they cause more serious issues.
I would recommend first talking to your group about whether they want to achieve the style that PbtA RPGs provide. It may also help to look at a few other PbtA RPGs as well. I personally found Dungeon World, Monster of the Week, and Uncharted Worlds better first PbtA RPGs than Urban Shadows.
If its not working for you after that, that’s fair. But as someone that has gone through what you are going through and persevered, I can say that we achieved those benefits. Do you know anyone with PbtA experience who might be able to run you a session or two?
Its also worth noting that I don’t think your first time experiences with a PbtA game are in anyway uncommon, including your player’s reaction to having narrative authority that they never had before 🙂
Amaury Fourtet Not everyone has to like every RPG system there is. I agree that most of mainstream games come with a lot of lore for players to use, but I find such amount of lore limiting in some cases.
From your description I think you did good job, you could give it another try after watching some actual play on YouTube.
What is this Feng shui school of gaming?
The “Feng Shui school of gaming” thing was just a reference to the Feng Shui game by Robin D. Laws.
Before our group discovered that game in 2000/2001, we played classic games ; World of Darkness or French games. Nothing as “rule-heavy” as D&D (an argument could be made about WoD, of course), but things with long lists of skills and precise mechanics.
Then Feng Shui came along and taught us many “progressive” things. For example, that the GM didn’t have to set in stone what was or wasn’t in the battle location. That it was ok and encouraged for a player to ask “is there a ladder from which I can swing?”, and that the GM had better answer “of course there is, do that cool thing you just thought of!”
It blew our collective mind and it really was one of the cornerstones of the gamer I eventually became.