I MC’d my first session of Urban Shadows yesterday, and I absolutely loved it.
My group and I have been playing AW and some hacks for some time now. We used them only because they were rules-light, but never really adopted to the “play to find out” philosophy. Basically, we used moves as skills and all the GMs (we rotate at GMing) prepped their railroady adventures in a traditional way.
When I suggested we try playing the true PbtA way, there was some resistance because “we like it this way” and “I don’t want to read rulebooks”, but everyone accepted in the end.
I was a bit scared to not prep any story, but I trusted the system and everything clicked really good. After the charactrer creation we only had less than two hours to explore the city, but a lot of things happened. The PCs engaged with all four factions and I managed to set cool scenes based on answers I got from the PCs. It all seemed to connect in a more meningful way.
For me, as an MC, it was ten times more fun than GMing a traditional game like D&D!
My players liked it too, and I hope they’ll like it even more when the story heats up. Only one of them seems to be struggling a bit. He tends to choke up when improvising on the spot in a non-mechanical way (meaning: other than using his skills or spells), and it looks like the collaborative storytelling part is putting even more pressure on him than usual. Any ideas how I can help him?
I’d help that player in two ways:
1. Hone your questions more. Instead of like “the wolf is coming at you, what do you do?” maybe aim for “the wolf is coming at you, do you think you can take it or are you gonna get out of the way?”. The latter is basically saying “are you going to unleash or maybe mislead/distract/trick?”. It’s giving them mechanical choices but asking them to answer in the fiction first.
2. Tell them point blank to put their character sheet away. Tell them you know the moves and you’ll call them out when they happen.
Overwhelmingly, the best thing to “improvise” in situation creation is just to pick the Most Obvious Thing. So when they Hit The Streets, just have them pick a name off the list of names that are in front of them and say “what kind of person would know what you want to find out” and they say “uh, a detective?” (or whatever) and boom you have a detective. Make it clear that they don’t have to be wildly inventive, just say the first thing that Makes Sense.
Thanks guys. I tried to suggest options. It worked with other players but not him, because he always wants to do his own thing. And then he has a block. I’ll try with the Most Obvious Thing, it might do the trick. Maybe I should just have a little talk with him to try to just start simple and build on that.
The great thing about the Most Obvious Thing is that in a group of diverse people, you actually will be surprised by what others think is the Most Obvious Thing! It’s really fun. Good luck.
When I GM and players are not very clear on what they want to achieve I’d ask support question on meta-game level like “what do you want to achieve?” or “If you succeed what will happen? do they take damage or … (put here some other stuff that I think could happen as a result)”.
As for general improvising you can ask player as above for intent and then “please describe how do you go about doing it.”.
You can also give that player a more focused task by having NPC call in a debt for that character go and do something specific to advance that NPC agenda.