Author: Scott Cohen

So this Thursday, I’m going to be running my first US game. While I’ve never played it or run it, I’ve watched everything I could get my hands on in the form of videos of actual play and have read over the books, etc.

Question for you guys:

In mentally going over my prep for the session, I’m thinking up situations with actions that don’t really have moves for them like “I want to kick in that door” or “I want to pick that lock” or “I want to hack a security system.” The way that I understand the game, I have several choices.

A) Use a move that already exists – Unleash to kick down that door (even though the description specifically says it’s not for that).

B) If the move becomes prevalent and important in the campaign it may be time to create a new move.

C) The action really doesn’t mesh with what the system is trying to accomplish with it’s move rolls, which is to say don’t worry about picking that lock – if it should happen, then it happens in the fiction without the need for a move. Or that it’s just not appropriate for the type of story that Urban Shadows is trying to tell, like hacking for example.

What is your general advice on situations like these? Thank you for your help!

So I’ve been reading Urban Shadows for a while and am thinking of starting up a game. I am concerned a bit about the concept of corruption. It seems that the PC gets to flex their true supernatural (etc) muscles or roll badly 30 times in the entire lifetime of their character, including taking the remove corruption move advance, before it gets retired.

That just seems kind of harsh to me. I really expected more rules to mitigate corruption than just the one advance when I first began reading up on the game.

Something like a penance move. Or am I missing something?

Do you guys find this limiting of the fun in your games or am I overreacting to how much and how quick the average character will burn through those 30 instances?

Thank you for any insight! 🙂

Brand New To PbtA Games

I’ve been an RPGer since I was a kid (35ish years ago).

I’ve been looking around for new systems to try out lately. I’m favoring game systems like Cortex Plus that are quick, easy, and involve the player at the table more in the narration.

I stumbled onto PbtA games and hacks and want to learn more before I get my hopes up and buy.

In looking at PbtA games, Urban Shadows stuck out. Very World of Darkness with one rules system (as far as I can see). I was a WoD fan from day one, but one of the things that I disliked was the fact that each group (vampire, garou, mage, etc) was almost its own game when it came to rules about their specialties. An expert in Vampire may very well have been a failure when trying to understand Mage rules, and so on.

So my questions to the community here are:

1. How fast is action resolution? I prefer Cortex Plus’ one or two rolls then done over rolling dice for four hours to accomplish ten seconds of action.

2. How much is the player at your table involved in the narrative process of an adventure?

3. Is there a single general rule-set that defines each supernatural class or, as I mention above, is each class a brand new set of rules?

Thank you for your time and your help, all! 🙂