Author: Marcus “Chaosmeister” Burggraf

Hi all,

we have now played the third session of UW and my players are loving it. There is just one area that does not work for us, probably because I am doing something wrong, and that is combat.

We had the situation that my players had to engage an enemy who was behind cover in upper ground.

I am sure I did it totally wrong, but the first player attacked the guy to kill him and rolled a 6. So I concluded that he did not succeed in his plan to kill him, but instead exposed himself to fire and suffer harm. So the sniper was still in play engaging the players. The theme continued though with every player trying to attack him and failing. It was a tense moment and they did enjoy the shootout. However I am sure I did it wrong.

Now, the root cause is probably our deep seated approach for combat from decades of playing “traditional” RPG with hit points, combat rounds etc. as that feels “normal” to us. And I am also sure the biggest issue is my take on how combat flows.

So I wonder if any of you here might shed more light on how to do this better? How I can wrap my head around how combat should work here? Because I get what happens when a player wins the engagement, that is easy. But if not? What then?

Hi All,

pondering running this at a convention. Anyone got tips for that? I have around 4 Hours and in the experiences I had so far thats not quiet enough to cretate Setting + Characters and finish an adventure. I will propably use the Derelict Jumppoint and Pregen Characters. But how do you handle the Setting questions like “What ship just appeared” etc?

We started some preliminary discussions about our campaign and quickly realized that everyone had a different idea. One wanted human only like Firefly, another High Tech with lots of aliens like Mass Effect and a third Trans Human stuff with living spaceships grown from their pilots DNA in a symbiotic relationship. To avoid too much problems and divergent visions I created this. This is just a starting point and each section can be refined or amended completely . But it gives a good baseline to work from and gets everyone on the same page. It is not super detailed but gets the flavor across without really defining anything too specific. Looking forward to work on it in our session 0. What do you think? How do you get them all synchronized?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9xbfAd2Rj8rNUt4RmMxdGJNemc/view?usp=drivesdk

The newbie with the questions again. The tips I got in my last post are invaluable, thank you for that! Question for today: Has anyone Created/Gathered custom Origins or Careers?

I love the approach used here: http://tangent-zero.com/map_gen.htm of tagging planets with origins. This will be a great Starting point to get the creative juices going instead of a total blank slate.

I am looking for custom ones because… Currently there are a total of 15 Origins and 17 Careers (Including FBH) These numbers are horrible to roll. 🙂 I know many of you will probably find that weird, but as someone who loves OSR and it`s approach of randomly generating content I always try to get stuff in roll able tables. Especially since I am really not a very creative person while I prepare stuff, it comes super easy to me during play, but not in isolation in front of my monitor.

When it Comes to Careers I specifically miss a real “law man”. The clandestine works only for a certain subset, especially with his skills more geared to subterfuge and murder and less on investigation and tracking fugitives.

http://tangent-zero.com/map_gen.htm

Me gain! Thank you for all the input on my questions so far You are great! As a GM and group new to PbtA there are issues we have to work out still. One worry a player communicated was: “If we all create everything together just form thin air, how can we properly explore a universe together? It doesn`t matter if we go left or right because there is only stuff there we make up!” I feel this may be a valid issue of PbtA games that rely heavily on player input like UW. Has that been a problem in your experience? How do you handle this? Do you actually let the players decide everything together with you or do you prep stuff for your own so they can discover it?

As said we are new to this kind of game, having played mostly DnD and the like in the past where I as the GM did most of the worldbuilding.

Hello all,

my players want to play in a longer game. They choose from 8 different Games and UW won out! So, we are heading into a longer UW campaign, the first PbtA game I will ever run pretty much. only played once. I read so much and watched so many actual plays already I think I understand how it works.

The Question I have are:

What are the most common mistakes you made as a new UW/PbtA GM?

What did you miss out on campaign creation and wished you had done?

What area of UW you found lacking and felt the need to houserule?

I would love to hear from many of you.