Hello all. I’ve never played an PbtA game before, but am considering introducing UW to my group.

Hello all. I’ve never played an PbtA game before, but am considering introducing UW to my group.

Hello all. I’ve never played an PbtA game before, but am considering introducing UW to my group.

Can someone explain how descriptions effect the game? A lot of weapon and vehicle upgrades don’t seem to have rules, just descriptions. Also clothing types, follower descriptions, wound descriptions etc… Is this all color, or is there some AW convention I am not understanding?

Secondly, t does not appear that the GM can adjust the difficulty of a roll besides requiring a Face Adversity before the intended action. Is there precedent for giving players penalties for environmental effects, injuries etc…, or are all rolls the same difficulty, with the consequences for failure upping the stakes in difficult situations?

Acquisition for example: a Class 4 item is just as easy to find as a Class 0, assuming the Market sells both. Right?

9 thoughts on “Hello all. I’ve never played an PbtA game before, but am considering introducing UW to my group.”

  1. Descriptions are core to the game. When you’re playing, you’re having a conversation at the table. There is a world of difference between what a beam weapon does and what a ballistic firearm does — one is energy powered by a battery of some kind, the other is gas- or magnet-propelled metal… One burns and cuts, the other shreds and drills and causes bleeding. You can track a blood trail… You can’t track a burn.

    Someone dressed in cultural garb can go among the people and move freely. Wearing a military uniform will make you stick out like a sore thumb. Wearing nice clothing gets you a good table at a fancy restaurant where you can eaves drop on a crime lord… Wearing the cultural dress of the oppressed minority gets you a table in the back, making the job harder.

    When you play this game, you’re talking about these things — descriptions are all you’re talking about. Descriptions make the difference between having to smooth talk a rookie military officer who doesn’t trust you and your hooligan party, and being given the keys to the castle because you blend in… It’s the difference between having to clean a scene of blood and gun casings to disappear someone, and just throwing the beam-fried victim in the trunk and flying off.

    The convention to understand is: the fiction is what the game is about. The descriptions cue you about How things happen and what the Obstacles or Repercussions of your actions may be.

    Next: the GM does not change the target numbers and does not hand out modifiers or penalties. Don’t do it. Difficulty isn’t arbitrarily weighting your players towards success or failure. Difficulty is warning them “if you screw up hacking this system, your finger prints are going to be all over the network… You know that these guys have VICIOUS malware packages just waiting to fuck up all challengers. Your system will be mangled. What do you do?” Difficulty is saying “okay, cool, so you’ve got these guys over here suppressed with your assault rifle… But Sergei is no push over, right? He’s a veteran from the Centauri Resistance, yeah? You get these guys suppressed and THEN you notice the snipers on the balconies, when they frag you and you drop your rifle.”

    Difficulty isn’t boring numbers. Difficulty is actual, meaningful events in the fiction. The enemy is too well-armored to hurt, the governor has the dock authorities in his pocket and your ship will be impounded if you go question him, you got away with the AI from the enemy’s database but they installed special quantum tracking software in its “brain” and it’s transmitting right now…

    Difficulty is baggage that complicates and creates hard, meaningful choices. Not +1s and -1s.

    So, a market with Class 4 and Class 0 (unlikely because Class 4s are hyper rare, but for this example sure) — no, they’re not equally easy. If a market has BOTH? Then, fuck, don’t even roll for Class 0. I mean… Why? This market is SO good, so flush, it’s not going to risk any money to get a Class 0 wrench or pants or knife. This market is overflowing with wealth. Just give the players what they want. But that Class 4? You’re going to need to roll… IF you can find the market… IF someone there will trade with you… IF you have what they’re willing to trade for.

    Fiction, descriptions. What is the world like, what is the market, what is the specific Class 4 good, how does it all tie together… THAT tells you how hard or easy something is to do.

  2. I think it’s worth adding one way to handle difficulties in combat is to get down into the details of what needs to be done. If you’re sneaking up on someone with powered armor and you only have a knife, even a completely successful Launch Assault will probably only disable the soldier by jabbing a weak point in the elbow.

    Now you’ve got a soldier who can’t really use his rifle, but what’s your plan for close quarters brawling when every punch from the soldier’s good arm has extra mechanized force behind it. (Both are still just Launch Assault rolls mechanically, but against a tough opponent goals could only be incremental, and more rolls increase the difficulty because there is more chance of failure.)

    The key is to make it clear in the run up what even a full success can look like. Success against powered armor with a high caliber sniper is different from success with a knife, assuming success with the knife is even possible (you might be well within your rights to say it isn’t).

    Edit: You could use the same logic if the PC is the one injured and suddenly in a brawl. Your legs are broken from that fall, so you’re already on the ground, the first launch assault is to grab onto the leg of your attacker to trip them up. The next is the wrestling match on the ground to see if you can come out on top.

  4. Incremental actions, hard choices, and repercussions.

    Sure, there’s the incremental actions of: “Before you can Launch an Assault on power armor guy with just your knife, you need to figure out how to do it… you should probably Assess the situation to look for an opening. You found one? Cool, so now you’re going to need to Face Adversity to get under his pneumatic 2-ton punch. You did? Cool, okay, Launch Assault.”

    But there’s also modulating the kinds of hard choices you offer players: If you are trying to disarm some thug in an alleyway and your Face Adversity is a soft hit, the GM should offer gentler choices than when you get a soft hit while trying to grapple Cybernetic Moon Ninjas.

    And there’s meting out repercussions that follow from the fiction, so: If you miss when trying to hack a journalist’s personal terminal, they’ll probably just catch you and get in your face and threaten to call the space cops while throwing you out. If you miss when trying to hack the personal terminal of space!Jason Bourne (Space-on Bourne), you probably get whacked over the head and wake up bound and gagged in an empty apartment with your suspect and his terminal gone.

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