Hi there!
My US group have been running for some time now, and we had a discussion about the Debts, that my players and I find both limiting and unnecessary, so we decided to let them go, as they don’t provide anything for us, that we don’t already handle.
The question is if anyone of you had any experience with this? Is just letting them go okay, or did you find other alternatives?
How do you handle people owing other people favors? Surely you write this down somehow, right?
Debts are an integral part of US and help trigger intersting fiction, in my experience. On the other hand, you own a copy of the game and you can make whatever you want from it, as long as you have fun. As much as I love the PbtA philosophy of strict rules, I think that these games can work well with the more traditional or freeform approach, too.
I find the existing debt system to be more annoying than anything else. Perhaps this is down to the way we implement it. I agree with Daniel that debts are integral to the game though.
I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but I plan to keep debts only for very big things but if someone owes you a debt you can call on them for minor favours without calling in your debt at all. Hopefully this will maintain the idea of there being a web of obligations that is not necessarily linked to the power groups but reduce the amount of actual mechanical debt system workings in each session. Since it will be rarer it should also make clearing or gaining a debt a much more interesting possibility than it has been in my games previously.
I made this a while back. While not exactly what you’re looking for, it was an attempt to solve my personal issues with the way Factions we’re designed.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17qNLCkLg97_-RcRs-PKoV1IYGhFmud0HUx-Dd81C6LE/edit?usp=drivesdk
docs.google.com – Urban Shadows: Alternate Factions
Aaron Griffin – Good stuff, man! I like that a lot. 😀
Sune Nødskou – If the game is working for you without using Debts, go for it. If you want us to help you make them work, it would be helpful for you to tell us a bit more about what’s not working with them. 😀
A clarification is in order:
As far as we can tell, the main driver behind the Debt-system is to create opportunities and NPC’s.
In my group, we don’t need neither. We have plenty of NPC’s (after 2 sessions, we had 30), and opportunities are plenty.
We’re a group of 40+ year old guys with at least 20 years of roleplaying in the book. So we don’t need help to get things rolling.
The only person at the table calling in the debts are me as the MC, and I rarely need to do it.
So we have tons, tons and tons of Debts, names and opportunities – and really no need for them.
We could obviously just skip them, and play without them, but if someone found an interesting solution to or replacement for them, we would be happy to give it a shot.
Hope that explained it a bit more.
I agree that the debts need context for the players to want to use it.
Why I like debts is because my players are new and do that thing where they don’t want to be a part of the world because they feel like they put themselves at risk (both socially as players and their characters life) by having a web of NPCs around them that they have to relate to and doing favors for NPCs feels arbitrary and not as concrete as a damage roll or a Let It Out. The Debt moves let the players know what they get if they have Debts and it’s not some scribble in the GMs margins that might give something in the future. I’m going to add debts in my DW-campaign (that takes place in a large city) and I feel like the Ark in M:YZ could benefit from that as well!
The problem I can see with not using debts is that it limits the players access to marking faction? But maybe the marks flows anyway.
Wow Aaron Griffin! That seems really cool! 🙂
Sune Nødskou it sounds like your group isn’t using the Debt system, not that you don’t need them. It also sounds like you have a type of game where the MC is driving the action of the game.
Both of these things are fine, but I think Urban Shadows really sings if you can fix these two things (and yeah, they’re related). If the players start driving the action more, they will need to use Debts to get things they want, and will incur Debts in doing so.
Remember that Debts have actual mechanical heft and should be used accordingly when a roll (or something) matters. If nothing matters to the characters, I could see how they’re not spending Debts.
Very good answer and thought Aaron Griffin. You might actually be right here. I’m a very dedicated and engaged MC, and I am really driving everything. Maybe I should give the Debts another try.
Sune Nødskou it was hard for me to “let go” and let the players drive when I first started running PbtA games. And not all players can do it – the players need to have characters that are intrinsically motivated even beyond what is happening in the world.
In my last PbtA game, we had a Vamp who ran a club and wanted to corner the heroin market in the city (he fed off emotions, but needed consent, so he used drugs to get it… yuck). Even though there were a lot of moving parts in the city at large, the Vamp would still find time to weasel in some drug related deals at the worst possible times. And it was amazing
For me personally debts are important part of US as they do few things:
– make the game political, they are consequences, players in many games are weasels that lie without consequences, here debts once made need to be paid or there are consequences
– form relationship with NPCs, often even in other PbtA games, when NPC is introduced player relation to that NPC is very undefined, in US when move gives you or the NPC a debt, that debt is a defined by what you did for them or what they did for you
I also understand and played with people who didn’t like debts, because debts have mechanical meaning and can force PCs (especially those with low Heart) to do stuff they don’t want.
But to me this is part of US (this should be talked over at the beginning of the game and players should agree that this is part of the game, that sometimes their PCs might be force to do stuff), politics are often dirty, if you want to get something, at some point in time you will have to pay for it.
I don’t think this is written in the book, but I like that there are sort of 3 levels of persuasion.
Hit the streets gives general information.
Persuade move allow you to make NPC do stuff, but there are still things that they will not do – for example a loyal butler will not betray his master secrets just because you can roll persuade.
Now fueling Persuade with using debt is the ultimate stuff, if you want that juicy secrets from the butler you better get debt on a him first 🙂
Playing US without debts for me kills that political thriller mood of the game. Debts give US this edge that Hx or Bonds just don’t have.