Do MCs here have any advice for pushing the characters together, especially in the first session?

Do MCs here have any advice for pushing the characters together, especially in the first session?

Do MCs here have any advice for pushing the characters together, especially in the first session?

(I welcome you to respond just to that question and ignore the rest of my verbose background explanation of why I ask.)

I’m about to run my first session of Urban Shadows with a group that’s played a few other PbtA games. They’re all great players, but they sometimes have trouble justifying to themselves and one another, “Why would I ever cooperate with this person?” when they make PCs with dramatically different goals and personalities.

The starting Debts should go a long way to answering that question for most of the archetypes they’ve chosen, I think; the Veteran, Oracle, Wizard, and Vamp all have links that imply that they’re friends, or at least somewhat dependent on one another. The Fae’s starting debts feel a lot more impersonal, though, and the player who picked that archetype has something of a history of unwittingly making PCs that are hard to mesh in with the rest of the group.

In other RPGs with factions (like In Nomine), I’m used to saying something like, “Your immediate superiors want to see cooperation between factions for this situation, so you’ve been ordered you to work together.” That seems like maybe not the best fit for Urban Shadows, though, when there are likely to be multiple, potentially unrelated threats rather than a single, clear antagonist … but maybe I am misunderstanding what the game will end up looking like! I wonder if I should prompt them to answer this question up front for themselves (e.g., “Where do you hang out together when you have downtime? Where do you meet up when you need to compare notes on a job?”) or if I should just let that evolve more organically.

16 thoughts on “Do MCs here have any advice for pushing the characters together, especially in the first session?”

  1. I usually tell everyone that they should make at least one of their starting debts (from the playbook questions) to another PC, and that it shouldn’t be a crappy little debt — it should represent something that was important to both characters and gives a sense of history. 

    So it isn’t just like “hey, you protected my secret that time that I cheated on my driver exam” its more like “hey, you lied to the vampire godfather to cover for me the time after I killed his childe because she was about to murder my wife and I owe you huge.” 

    That way the characters start out already having worked together, owing each other, and complicating each other’s lives in simple triangles with NPCs.

  2. I’m going to let what we wrote in the book speak for me, but…

    I love the idea of “All of your bosses have cashed in a Debt to put you in this room and working together on a problem they care about.” Especially when it’s revealed later that one of the bosses is behind the problem and wants one of the PCs on the case as a double agent… 😀

  3. I was about to reply that there aren’t any real “bosses of characters” roles in the setup but actually that could be a really cool pointed question for a game setup:

    “Someone comes to you with something they want you to do. You gotta do it. Who is it and why do you gotta?”

  4. I have also found this to be the biggest hurdle in running US. I have been getting round it by simply stating upfront, before PC creation starts, that players should ensure that they have a reason to hang out with the other PCs. Then I simply let the players work out what works for them.

  5. Great, thanks all for the input. 

    This reminds me of a related question: Do you typically use the session start move in the first session or only in the second and subsequent sessions?

  6. Last time I played US, this was a huge problem. In fact, it ruined the game. I’m pretty sure the problem could have been avoided, but cooler heads did NOT prevail in this case.

  7. I like using the start session move in the first session, as it helps set the scene. However, I don’t use it in later sessions until we hit a natural pause or transition in the story, so we let those story elements play out.

  8. I didn’t know how to use the results of the start-of-session moves in my first session. Two of them connected to one another naturally, but the other two were completely separate and I couldn’t think of how to address them in the intro without having a couple of other PCs off on their own solo tangents. 🙁

  9. In the game as written it is perfectly fine to have solo tangents. You will eventually pull it all together because the tangential player will frown at some point and say they want to Put A Face To A Name and that’s when you point to another player and yell “It’s his vampire mom!!!!” Then everyone marvels at how well you are pulling it all together.

  11. The challenges we faced – and I should point out that this was in an online game where I did not know all of the other players – were simply that the group did not become cohesive at all and it threatened to make some of the characters unable to interact with the others. Honestly, had it all been handled better, it might not have been a problem. I’m afraid I can’t go into much more detail.

  12. Okay, thanks!

    The player who was looking at the Fae is on the fence about a few archetypes, as it turns out, so my concerns may end up not being a big deal. We’ll see what happens!

  13. This is turning into a bit of an issue for my players too. It’s hard, with 5 players, to keep them all engaged when they aren’t all together, but US doesn’t necessarily feel ‘right’ when the players think like a party. I encourage them to call in debts, and think of out of character ways to include each other, but it’s rough.

  14. We just had our first session yesterday. I explained to my players that this may be a challenge for our usual way of playing, and that I’d appreciate their help in coming up with starting rumors and debts that gave them excuses to hang out and draw connections between the various schemes going on. (This might have worked a little too well; they basically designed a Storm while I was on a bathroom break, but declined to tell me the details lest it bias my own ideas for twists.)

    I see this question of how to organize amongst themselves being something that comes up from time to time, but they did at least help generate a scenario so alarming that it makes sense they’d turn to whoever they can for help. I encouraged them to focus on starting debts among PCs more than NPCs, so they’ve already got some shared history helping each other out of jams, coming to each other for advice, and hanging out in the emotion-feeding Vamp’s cafe with an angsty open mic night, “Ennui.” The rumors they generated with the starting session move were so wild and potentially terrifying that they basically started the game in an emergency meeting after hours in that cafe to share those rumors with one another and brainstorm what they could look into before things got dangerous.

    (In case you were curious: After years of relative stability between the factions, we’ve suddenly got faeries and demons searching for a powerful artifact, the highest ranking local wizard reportedly dying from a mysterious illness, the usually frozen and predictable Winter Court venturing all the way across the city for an apparent power grab in turf already contested by werewolves and vampires, supernatural beings “sleeping with the fishes” due to a rumored mafia resurgence, and a portal to the land of the dead in the Wizard’s sanctum, through which the Tainted’s demonic patron can sometimes be seen doing something suspicious.)

    We’ll see how it goes from session to session, but I am hopeful, and my players are being good sports about working with me on tying things together.

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