What do you think is the Core Story of Urban Shadows?
IF you look at the source material, DF is a lot more based on Harry reacting to stuff instead of going out to do something.
In AW you have awesome people fighting against Scarcity
MH is Monsters wanting stuff in High School,
DW is cool guys getting into adventures
What exactly should US be about? It’s a bit of the same problem i have with Star Wars World. I can’t really see the fiction getting created as easily in those games.
What do you do in a first session? Do you prep a lot more adventure fronts that come from outside?
That is an excellent question Tim. I feel like, and this may change as I get exposed to more play time, that the core concept behind Urban Shadows is competent and skilled movers and shakers within a city who face a constant fight on all sides and especially from within themselves.
I did no prep for last night’s session other than to spend time thinking about the genre in my mind beforehand. Then I asked for some rumours and strange events that have been happening in town lately and from there the fronts came into being.
i think that is a problem because when you play in a “modern town” you allready know a lot of stuff and it’s not so simple to create stuff on your own.
You also can’T really make people that important because most folks in Big Cities just don’t know a lot of guys.
I guess an Aware can establish the police precinct or their PI agency or something but man…
I a big city there could also be a lot of room between people, making it harder for you to interact naturally.
(i am mostly comparing to AW and MH here)
okay, Depts do a bit of this stuff but still it seems hard. Are you mostly thinking of playing a group like the Justice League Chicago/BFS or people that maybe relate to each other a bit but are not a team/group?
Also, what do you have in mind for MC moves?
If players want to interact with each other, they will make it happen, regardless of whether they are in a big or small town. If they want to tell their own independent stories, I am not going to force them into a D&D party. Last night we had the player’s stories weaving with the others at multiple points with only one scene containing them all together. That was all orchestrated by them, I did nothing to bring them together. Players know what they want, so let them do the work. 🙂
I think that like apocalypse world, where you choose to zoom in or out is important for making people that matter. We had a Doctor NPC who was introduced on a faction resource gathering move who become a huge part of the story. Multiple pc’s interacted with her and she felt like an important person who mattered. I could have easily chosen to zoom out on her and have her simply come in and patch up the injured hunter but it just went that way.
As for MC moves, I suspect the list will follow closely to AW’s list. They are so broad and fit a dramatic tone that I adore. I am working on an MC document I will post, you will see them in there when I’m done.
I think your point regarding a city and the participants knowing too much about it is a valid one. I would suggest choosing a city the players, and MC, are not very familiar with or creating a new city entirely. This lets everyone have plenty of room to create places, people and myths. We played in Cleveland last night for this express reason.
And besides, you could easily do a game on the road ala Supernatural where the city of the week changes. That would be really cool actually.
I was thinking about this earlier today, and came up with maybe an idea that’s somewhere between the idea of a Bond and a Bang (a BangBond?) A list of situations that could fit the various genres, not necessarily tied to a playbook, that the player could choose from during character creation and (if applicable) insert a character/NPC name.
*I was betrayed by ___________ and sent to Hell.
* The ___________ gang has been leaning on me/my friends too hard, they need to be stopped.
Things like that. You could even include a few specific ones with certain playbooks, if you wanted to enforce certain feels/tropes.
I can’t see anything wrong with adding that in. It would be a very useful spring-boarding point for PC’s and MC’s to use together. Kinda like a list of questions to ask like crazy. 🙂
I found that Apoc World there was a whole lot of lack of trust where as modern people are more likely to trust even if not fully as we rely on government services such as police, doctors and other essential services to help us even if we are on our in the scary world of monsters. Hence strangers are more likely to bond then say in AW where everyone is in it for themselves.