Play Report
We had our first session today. Overall, it was positive. Our GURPS player decided he liked PbtA and wanted to try more of it.
Family and character creation made some excellent story threads for me to pull on, and everyone really got into creating our homeland.
During play, we got along well and moved ahead easily. But the game wasn’t without it’s hangups. Here’s where we struggled:
– Starting Tech and Data was confusing; we didn’t know if there was supposed to be any and they began with 0 in both.
– Surplus and Needs were easy to determine, but when to get a new surplus or need didn’t seem like it was covered in the rules. I winged it.
– Gear was awkward. If a family doesn’t have gear as an asset, do they not get that at all? (If you don’t select a weapon, do you not get any weapons? We had a couple of unarmed people.)
– Not having a “discern” type of discovery move felt odd when players tried to look around the scene. I decided it wasn’t important to the game and let perception and stealth just happen, unless they were under pressure.
– The options for Fierce Assault almost always included added chaos and terrible harm to foes. So much so that a player commented that more interesting choices would benefit (I suggested he choose them. Lol)
Finally, as predicted, the difference between families and characters felt awkward at first, but I started to get the hang of it. It’s still confusing why players would ever venture out to fight a force when their families could just do it, but maybe they’re meant for smaller activities? Our group assaulted a camp of cannibals while zoomed in, and it felt like the family may have been the ones who should have done it. Choosing between which would act was difficult.
Most of those things stemmed from our inexperience with the game. Overall, we had a ton of fun and are looking forward to our next game.
Lack of an investigative move means that it’s up to you to respond with GM moves. This is a common hangup in some PbtA games.
Urban Shadows, for instance, has no basic investigation move, which seems absurd for urban fantasy. What this means in practice is that investigation is simply a back and forth conversation, with the GM side being GM Moves.
—
“Ok is there any sort of panel I can access near here?”
Yeah, there is, but the screen looks busted (show an unwelcome truth)
“Crap, ok well, hmm is it possible to repair?”
Yeah, of course, but you’d have to go get help from Big-T (offer an opportunity, with or without a cost).
“Ah shit, Big-T hates me. He’d never do it. What if I used my comm unit to transmit control of the panel back to my family’s base of operations?”
Oh, that’s a cool idea. Yeah, you could totally do that, but it won’t last long, so you’ll need to get back there asap (tell them the consequences and ask)
Etc etc
Re: Surplus and Needs. Sounds like you did it right. As long as there was some sort of cost or effort involved in getting it.
Thanks for the tips. What about gear? If you didn’t select your family’s weapon asset, do you never get weapons when you tool up?
I don’t know about the 1.6 gears rules, as the ones for my hack were done in parallel. My understanding is that tooling up allows you to add tags to what you have such that you may have zero weapons, but can add the melee tag or something to get some crowbars or whatever.
That said, I would want to make two points: 1) if one family chose to be unarmed and is then surprised by being unarmed, then just go back and change the original choices so they’re satisfied; and 2) not having weapons shouldn’t stop you from overcoming obstacles – you just can’t do it with force.
Good points.
Thanks for the feedback! I’ll ponder the rest of these, but for gear: you always have access to weapons with just the melee or ranged tag, or outfits with just the utility, camo or regal tags. Page 63-64 of the core book, or page 40 of the handouts.
James Iles I missed that. Cool. Thanks.
Ryan M. Danks would you mind sharing the families and how their chocies shaped the Setting? I am also keenly interested in the Character x Family relations.
Families shaping the setting was probably done wrong. We used it the same way that Fate uses the Trio. We had Lawgivers, Masquerade, and Merchants. The choices helped detail Homeland and Wasteland (we just followed the book on this part), and the motivations of the families helped players buy in to what they were supposed to do, but that was about it. The fact that families were supposed to do more than that, to the point of rolling, was super difficult for my table to grasp. They’ve expressed a desire to have families be setting details that grow as the setting “advances”, but they aren’t interested in having the families as active agents in the setting.
I’ve been using the treaty system as a means of earning favors from a family that you can call in during the game. But the characters are the active agents, not the families.
Ryan M. Danks huh, interesting. I suppose the game should work like that, effectively staying locked into the character level. Are you still using Surpluses and Needs to motivate characters and affect the kind of gear they can call on, or keeping families strictly in the fiction?
Well, if the game works for you guys like that, great! But it’s a pity, since they will enjoying less than half of all it offers.
I believe that they will need the softest nudges as the fiction evolves to prompt Family action.
James Iles, yes. The families have become a means of motivation using surpluses and needs, and delivering story context via their moves. But my players just can’t wrap their heads around “families are agents of the story” very well. The closest I’ve come to making that work is having the players act on the character level to “allow” the family to make a roll to determine an outcome. They don’t seem to mind that route, and enjoy it even.
Sounds good! Families as backup for the player characters is a perfectly valid way of playing the game – you won’t so much go into the grand strategy level of diplomacy, wonders and map control, but if your group’s having fun you’re doing it right.