I’m interested in running Urban Shadows, but the characterization of Factions and the way they’re baked into advancement rubs me the wrong way. Long reflection below.
I believe I’ve seen this expressed in other discussions, but the idea that advancement requires meaningful (i.e. mechanically marked) interaction with each Faction confuses me. Essentially, it seems to say, “I gain experience and become a more powerful Wolf/Oracle/etc. because I know more about how everyone else works.” I understand that it reinforces the social/political focus at the heart of Urban Shadows, but I find it hard to grok a system that ties personal advancement entirely to political maneuvering, rather than personal experience. For example, Apocalypse World rewards experience for social interaction (via Hx) but also by ability usage (highlighted stats). Along the same lines, as a MC I’d be concerned about having to constantly involve members of all four Factions in every conflict, to the detriment of the story. I recall a thread some time back about a MC who was concerned by the fact that their players’ corruption advances were far outstripping their regular advances, and the advice to them was generally to find a reason to involve every Faction in every story. That’s all well and good for many stories, but I think an important aspect of exploring modern urban politics is dealing with intracommunity issues. The RAW seem to punish this interest with mechanical stagnation.
Furthermore, I feel that this mechanical feature imbues Factions with an awkward narrative reality. Because players must engage with every Faction in order to advance, and Faction membership seems to be a largely mechanical concern (a Wolf is in the Night Faction until they spend an advancement to change it), it seems to tacitly encourage thinking of Factions as actual institutions. As in, every Wolf by default thinks of themselves as sharing more in common with other Wolves (and Vamps/Spectres/Revenants) than any other kind of person. This concern has been exacerbated by both some sample US maps, which literally split up cities into four color-coded blocs connected by their Faction-ness, and Dark Streets, which does much the same thing but along social rather than geographic lines (i.e. every Faction seems to perceive themselves as a united front, like an actual fictional faction).
I somewhat like the idea of Faction “scores” to represent how well you can socially maneuver with different supernatural/mortal types, but to me it represents a more baseline social instinct than, say, being a member of the Wild Faction in good standing with much clout. In this way, I think that the idea of Factions I desire is more akin to something like Identities. I think this would also open the door to having more nuanced factions in the fiction, such as cabals of wizards and vampires or a drug ring composed of fae and their hunter enforcers, rather than the United Faction Fronts that puts all the Vamps in this corner and all the Tainted in the other.
Which leads me to my actual questions. Am I missing something core to assumptions in US, or do the game design and I simply have divergent concerns? More importantly, how can I hack the advancement system to represent a system that rewards both social engagement and personal experience, without adding new stats? My instinct is to award experience for debt moves for the former, and for the latter adapt one of the more popular PbtA experience methods (on a miss, highlighted stat, etc.), but I’m not sure which one. Moves that currently read “mark Faction” will instead mark experience. Any unforeseen snags I should look out for when I hack in this model of advancement?
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There are two means to power in US, not one: community and evil. You absolutely can get more powerful through corruption. In fact I would argue that, largely, all the stuff that makes you a better Wolf are corruption advances, not ordinary advances.
I don’t have details, but a more typical pbta experience system does work. If you want to reward social interaction, perhaps use some sort of modified experience cues from Blades in the Dark. An example from the Hound playbook:
* Every time you roll a desperate action, mark xp in that action’s attribute.
* At the end of each session, for each item below, mark 1 xp (in your playbook or an attribute) or 2 xp if that item occurred multiple times.
* You addressed a challenge with tracking or violence.
* You expressed your beliefs, drives, heritage, or background.
* You struggled with issues from your vice or traumas during the session.
Two reminders that help with marking factions that don’t come up as often.
1) The start of session roll always uses (and marks) a faction that you don’t already have marked. So, in the absence of any other actions, one advances for every 4 times one makes a “start of session roll” (my group does not do that roll literally every session, we do it each time a set of stuff has finished up).
2) Cashing in and honoring debts mark the appropriate faction.
The mechanism seems to be there to deliberately drive the game to be about the politics between all of the kinds of supernaturals in a city.
The main thing I might worry about if you replace the advancement system is a change of perception in the session-start move. I really like that move because it helps spawn stories and get characters involved in things that they normally aren’t tied to. If you keep that (while removing the marking of factions), then you might get people rolling the same factions over and over for that move, narrowing the story and making it harder to get pcs involved with each other. If you keep that cycling between the factions somehow, then the players might not be happy when they have to roll factions that they are bad at for the start of session move (when normally they’d at least get xp for it).
Part of the answer may be player buy-in. It will be way less awkward, story-wise, if the Wolf is looking for an excuse to interact with that hunter or wizard they met last session so they can mark that faction.
I think the other part is that it’s mechanics vs story, here, rather than mechanics with story. As you noted, it suits the theme of the game to stay involved in all the politics, not just internal politics with other Veterans/Tainted/whatever. So you advance for pursuing the story with an eye toward the core activities of the game, even if in practice that means you can shape shift faster because you gave a debt to that Fae.
Finally, I don’t see the Factions as internally unified so much as on the same page. I can listen to a couple of criminal lawyers arguing about, say, the wording of a jury instruction, and I may or may not care or take a side, but I know what they’re talking about – that’s my people. I listen to someone I know who works in finance talk about tax consequences of what sounds like two different kinds of trusts, and I just accept that this is something terribly important to whatever it is they’re talking about. So Factions aren’t unified, they’re just composed of sufficiently similar outlooks to be able to talk to each other. Back to our hypothetical Wolf, when her interest in her territory shifts from its hunting potential to how she can benefit from it, that should be reflected mechanically as a change from the predatory Night to the ambitious Power. Conversations with Vamps about whether somewhere is hunted out just don’t hold her attention the way what that Oracle is saying does. At least, that’s how I sell myself on it.
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I have a thing that may get you a part of the way there: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17qNLCkLg97_-RcRs-PKoV1IYGhFmud0HUx-Dd81C6LE/edit
But I think if you’re looking for a game that doesn’t reward involving yourself in group politics, maybe you want Monster of the Week instead of Urban Shadows. US is a game predicated on involving yourself in various communities and using alliances to solve problems. The advancement systems encourages this.
I don’t think advancement is about honing specific archetype skills, but is more about furthering the plot – as a season of a TV show goes on, the main characters involved in things show off more powers and abilities.
You can mark Faction by interacting with the other player characters, no? Surely that isn’t so hard to make happen.
I came to Google+ just now specifically to ask if anybody had any suggestions for alternate advancement mechanisms. Nice timing, apparently!
Don’t get me wrong: I get that Urban Shadows is about community and citywide politics, and I appreciate the way the advancement move is supposed to work in principle. I just found that, after over a year running Urban Shadows, the advancement mechanic as written never really gelled for us. Players felt forced to metagame it in a way they never had to do with corruption (which I think is an excellent advancement mechanic), or any other game’s advancement system, really. The problem was not that it was too hard to do—the one player who was most dedicated to metagaming it advanced so fast he ran out of advancements and glumly started looking at other playbooks. I think the problem was just that “mark each faction once” acts as a gate rather an enticement. You end up thinking, “Well, I guess I have to go to the mob instead of to the vamps,” just because advancement is a thing players feel like they have to do. I suspect the intention is just to prompt you to remember all these different corners of the city, not make you feel forced to do anything, but that’s just now how it ever played out for us.
I like Steve Moore’s alternate suggestions, though Aaron Griffin’s require less custom writing and preserve the intent of the design more. Maybe we’ll give that a shot next time.
The guy who ran out of advancements should retire; he clearly tore his way through the city again and again and surely has achieved what he desperately needed?
The guy who blew through all his advancements played the Tainted, and his goal was to get out from under his patron’s thumb. Got it in the season (or maybe series) finale. He’s kind of a power gamer and optimizer at heart, so I feel like this probably isn’t the game for him in some ways. It felt very weird when he would publicly proclaim he was cashing in debts for inconsequential stuff just so he could then announce he advanced. But then again, he did an awesome job narrating how he switched playbooks to the Vessel (stating that he didn’t get his soul back after his patron died), so it’s not like he’s oblivious to story or roleplaying. He just exploited a system that didn’t really work well for us.
I’m not saying advancement goes too fast in this game, though. My wife’s character barely advanced at all because she was unwilling to visit Power’s turf on a weird, dangerous subway line—but I’m not saying her example shows it was too slow, either. And I am glad some groups feel like it clicks for them. But in my group, it never clicked. It felt like you needed to be thinking about your character sheet more than your character if you wanted a neat new move. I’m glad it’s not just another “mark XP when you fail” system, as that would feel out of place here to me, but I think I might need to tweak it slightly before I run it again. “Mark 4 factions, but have more than 4 factions” might just do it.
Yeah, adding another faction (or re-adjusting factions so that vampires are just Mortality folks in a religious cult or whatever) is one thing, but I would really, really really hesitate before I did something that would throw the community versus individual power advancement decision out of whack
Thanks for all of the reflections, everyone! BitD advancement, as Steve Moore suggested, might be a possibility, but it would require major restructuring, possibly integrating the Crew xp and the personal xp from that game (mark xp if you expressed the essential nature of the city, etc.). Aaron Griffin, I like that custom system (reminds me of the Sprawl), but I feel as if it narrows of the game a bit much. I might use it to generate factions collaboratively, however!
Jason Tocci, the concerns you outlined above are similar to my own. I don’t anticipate anyone in my potential group attempting to powergame advancement, but I do believe they’d come to resent the RAW forcing them down certain social paths because they would /want/ to advance. The advancement system feels meta and unyielding in a way I don’t think I’ve encountered elsewhere (at least in PbtA). It feels like, in other PbtA, advancement flows from the fiction, but in US advancement actually dictates the fiction. Some people might enjoy that, but it’s not my cup of tea.
Crucially, I interpret US as a game about individuals operating in a community, rather than a game that’s actually focused on that community. In this way, US feels similar to Apocalypse World, albeit with a different communal structure. If I wanted to play a game focused on the community itself, I wouldn’t focus on PCs; I’d play a game like Kingdom instead. But a game like US with a definite cast of main characters should, to my mind, reward those characters for doing what they do best. Ultimately, I don’t want factions that are mechanical realities; I want fictional and fractious institutions that characters are driven to interact with as a result of the story, rather than with a mechanical boon.
Okay, but “doing what you do best” is in the context of start of session moves where factions you haven’t interacted with substantively in a while are up to some serious shit and it’s either a major problem for you or a major opportunity for you. Like…that IS the story (that and the desperate need).
listening
John Ratz Maybe you can help me understand the problem a little better. You don’t want factions mechanized with a mechanical boon that draws players into creating fictional relationships with them, but you do want players to be able to earn mechanical advancement and enjoy mechanical boon to engage with having their character do other things–be it social interaction with other PCs, failing rolls or just making moves with highlighted stats.
What is it about factions that make them less appropriate places to place mechanical incentives? None of these systems are strictly logical; they’re timers right? You’re not suddenly learning more about how to be a Wizard or a Wolf because you rolled Hot five times or reset Hx with enough fellow PCs … so I’m struggling to understand how that’s different with factions.
To be clear I believe you that the system as written won’t work for you! I’m not trying to convince you otherwise if you’re pretty sure of that. But in order to make a good suggestion, I would like to better understand what about it you don’t think will work because so far a lot of your explanations seem like they would apply to many of the other options available–not making fictional sense, leading people to do things because of mechanical boon rather than because of interesting story opportunities, etc.
I’d be tempted to suggest that perhaps you don’t want mechanical advancement at all, and are really looking for something more deeply fictional–something more like the Mastery Move in Legends of the Elements or just a more freeform interpretation of that concept. When you learn more about how to cast spells, you can take more spells. Certain advancements outside of your playbook will need stronger fictional grounds (not necessarily more effort or positioning, just more explanation) even though the checkbox is right there in the same advancement section; more rarely, in-playbook moves will require additional justification. In this way, when you have a Sanctum, you use the Sanctum move. It’s more demanding to run the game this way, but in some ways it’s more straightforward.
Another option is to follow the FATE way of doing things and have Advancement happen every so many sessions give or take a bit to make it fit around Milestones in the story arc. This is probably the easiest and most streamlined solution to problems with the advancement system.
Firndeloth Dinsule I don’t necessarily think factions are an inappropriate place to locate mechanical incentives, but I feel that making them the sole source of mechanical advancement is an unreasonable amount of focus.
You’re right that any of these advancement schemes has potential issues vis-a-vis story vs mechanics, but I’m far more comfortable with a system that rewards a character for activating social connections they value (i.e. Debt Moves) and for using their own abilities (highlights, misses). In contrast, US seems to force PCs into a narrative round-robin in order to grow as characters. I’m sure that feature has lead many players to creatively work in Factions where they wouldn’t otherwise appear, but I’d rather not take that meta approach. It doesn’t feel like being a fan of the characters, it feels like I’m giving them a laundry list of required encounters.
Basically, while the concept of Factions is interesting to me in theory, in practice I find their place in the fiction poorly defined. I wonder whether a given Vamp, in a standard US setting, would say “Yeah, I’m a member of the Night Faction.” I hope that’s not the case. If it isn’t, I think “Faction” is the wrong word; I’d transition to defining them as “Identities”. It’s not a perfect fit, but it feels better to me. I find the compelling feature of US to be Debts, rather than Factions, and as such I’d like to remove the latter’s direct influence on advancement.
Debt moves mark Faction though.
Maybe the vampires in your setting wouldn’t say they’re in a faction, but they are all situated in the city because they were once human, and then something happened to them, and now they’re not.
It kind of can’t be a “laundry list” of encounters when the players may Hit the Streets or Put A Face To A Name at more or less any time they wish. If you make a shitty Vampire that’s boring, it’s fine, they won’t go back to him, they’ll make up a better one.
I have not read Dark Streets, so I will base my answer on my long campaign where I played.
Factions ware not united entities at all ( except Wizards and Oracles which formed a committee led by a notable and powerful NPC Wizard, but they had a lot of in-fighting between themselves ). The worst enemy of my Tainted was the leader of cult for another patron. Vampires had plenty of problems from Wolfs raiding their territory during day when Vamps could not defend.
And I find it interesting, Faction score represents how good a PC is in interacting with a certain Faction, how well does he understands to behave like a predator when interacting with Night.
I think there is no perfect XP system as in AW I had players try to read stuff all the time just for sake of getting XP for doing so.
It is true that I feel forced at times to go and interact with faction I have not yet marked, but it does give me feeling of playing a political game.
I was also power-leveling so I had my 10th advance by the time others had 4 or 5.
I think US encourages short and meaningful interactions rather than long scenes with plenty of basic moves.
I think my advice would be to make XP track like 6-8 points and instead of marking a faction you would just mark XP.
That way players can still farm a single faction for XP but they just need more of such interactions.
However it might lead to game becoming hermetically sealed inside one group – we had one player with Night+3 and all other faction scores at negatives who was interacting mostly only with Night.
As it stands current XP system does enforce interaction with all 4 factions in some way and thus none of the faction will fade into background of any game.
John Ratz you say “in practice” but the topic indicates you haven’t yet run Urban Shadows. Which is it?
Aaron Griffin I’ve only run one-shots of US, but I have experience with other PbtA games. I also have a pretty good read on how my players react to concepts. As such, I’d like to get this resolved to my satisfaction before I try to play a longer game.
Pawel Solowczuk that actually strengthens my preference for Identities over Factions, which is how I conceive of “how well does he understands to behave like a predator”. That’s why I’d like to reframe it. I’m actually fine with a faction “fading into the background” if none of my players are interested in interacting with them.
John Ratz First a long note on Factions:
At worst, they’re described as “loose political groupings.” Even there the rules aren’t trying to say they all know each other or vote the same way. Rather, when you do something that helps or hurts a member of Night … your reputation grows as being the kind of person who does things that affects Night folks. Any time someone gets a debt with a Faction or gains/loses favor with a Faction, try to think about how word gets around, and what word gets around. What do the more specific factions that fall under Night within your city want and need and how did the player just get tangentially involved with that when they changed Faction reputation? Which NPCs might not care about that as much?
Wolves and Vampires might hate each other, they might get along well, they might ignore each other. But they face a similar problem: they aren’t really mortal anymore. They want territory or prey that requires crossing individual mortals, but they usually can’t afford to face Mortality as a whole. Further, despite not really being human, they are still fundamentally animal and earthly, unlike demons or Fae. Whether or not they’re friendly with each other, there’s a similarity to how people of Night engage with the city on a fundamental average. You advance by learning not how to be more like those Factions. You advance by exploring the supernatural and getting a more complete sense of the city’s ecosystem. Advancement allows you to have periodically learned things about your abilities or acquired knowledge/stuff along that exploratory path.
Remember, too, you don’t have to have every werewolf represent Night–that’s just the default unless there’s a specific reason these werewolves aren’t Night. You might be spending most of an arc hanging out with Vampires, but the Faction system is telling you: there can’t just be your city’s stereotypical vampires. It’s a city. People and factions from other Factions will get involved even if they’re not the focus of the story and you’re always thinking off-screen to sort out who wants what and which wires are getting crossed. The Faction system requires that there not just be multiple literal factions (say, the Red Court and the White Court from Dresden Files) involved in a given story arc, but that you include people with entirely different approaches to the city and the supernatural. Mortality is usually a freebie. Factions your characters are part of and/or have Debts with/on at present get dragged along by the character sheet. So that leaves you to answer, say, how do I get Wild more involved here? Who or what in Wild is involved with the Red and White courts? What do they want?
You give the players real people and real communities. The Factions simply force you to also make sure they have some fundamental variety in how they approach the game’s core concepts, not just their socioeconomic circumstances or their political views or their physical forms. Again, not all Vampires are Night (etc.) Maybe there’s something unusual about the way they interact with the supernatural and mortal world, something fundamentally different about how they approach the city. For Wild, why might a vampire be most deeply and fundamentally associated with otherworldly forces? Are they possessed? Did they make a pact? For Power, how does a vampire end up in control, to be gifted with vampirism and fundamentally human rather than driven by “dark and unnatural” changes to their former humanity? Even if you only deal with a few communities at a time, you can be thinking about these sorts of things to give the players a broader view of the city and figuring out how to involve all of these fundamentally different relationships with the supernatural.
I think Urban Shadows is a richer game when you do these things. As long as you keep them in mind, it really doesn’t matter which advancement you prefer.
John Ratz Now a short thing on hacking:
If you want advancement to “make sense” and be triggered off genuine in-fiction advancement, I’d again urge you too look into a Milestone-like system or to do advancement the hard way.
Otherwise, I wouldn’t worry as much about why they’re advancing, Remember, when you advance the fiction has to catch up to you. Your Sanctum doesn’t teleport into the scene, but the MC can’t weasel out of you having one–you have one now. The details come second. As such, don’t get too locked into what advancement represents; this kind of advancement isn’t supposed to make sense.
We just need a timing mechanism. At best, it also moderately encourages players to do certain kinds of things. The default is not going to work out for you because you want players to advance more flexibly with respect to faction engagement. But also a lot of your concern is due to the relative pacing of Corruption and Faction advancement, so let’s make sure we pick something no slower than Corruption.
To that end, is there any reason you can’t just use stat triggers? You seem really satisfied with how that is paced in other PbtA games. Hx didn’t trigger that often anyway, so it’s not even really essential that you replace it with experience from the Faction moves.
If you want to anyway, you could have two XP tracks: Politics and Personal. Faction moves/marks pop the Politics track and stat highlights pop the Personal track. Five seems like a good length for both, since that works well in other PbtA games with Highlights and the Faciton system currently uses 4 more rigidly gated marks so going all the way down to 4 might make Politics flip too quickly. It might even make sense to make Politics 6 or something.
Firndeloth Dinsule has a lot of smart shit to say!
John Ratz I would advice you to start playing a longer game and assess after 3 or 4 sessions in. One-shots are fun and cool, but in them players don’t have a supply of debts to cash in or well formed relationships with Factions and more importantly with members of said Factions.
In one-shots people want to get stuff done and quick, in longer game to set stuff up more slowly and have time to interact with Factions.
Beside I find factions moves set up a cool story, you go to meet your guy to learn about X, but damn you miss the roll and you see your guy on the run from Vamps – put a name to a face – why is your guy running from owner of the night club ?? but more importantly do you intervene or let him be eaten and take pictures to use them later as leverage ??
You also said yourself you like XP from highlights. Well a lot of information and actually getting stuff done is done by faction moves not by basic moves which will use highlights. If player wants to know why someone is doing something they are encouraged in US to sneak to his place and look around – investigate place of power, or go to his rival and ask him, he should know, hit the streets.
Whatever you decide, please share your experience later.
Maybe if you are looking for stories told inside certain groups, more like World of Darkness style – only vamps or wolfs. You could take a look at a hack by Tommy Rayburn, there should be link in the history of this group or PbtA g+ community. The hack is World of Darkness for Urban Shadows.
John, Pawel is correct. For my WoD supplement, I removed faction based XP as it did not work with single faction game play.
One thing you could do is look at the Sprawl or flags from Dungeon World hacks, they give cp for Hitting tropes.
John Ratz just to reinforce my point above that I advise to play few session in campaign first before changing stuff.
I’ve recently finished 29 sessions long campaign, in which I had a total of 16 advances. So about 1 advance every second session. Is it too slow for your game? Or just optimal?
There ware sessions where I’ve marked only one faction(one or two long scenes, a meeting, follow up fight, follow up escape), there ware sessions where I’ve marked 6 factions (a lot of short scenes, hit the streets, investigate place of power, cash in debt).
In my experience as player, I’ve seen few fresh characters join the game, PCs level fast for first 3 sessions as they have a lot of put face to a name, then it slows down and is more in player hands. After a while it speeds up again as you have debts to cash in.