Category: Monster of the Week Roadhouse

Sorry for the long post!!

So I finally got to run the team creation session of our biweekly lunch-hour game I’m running at work. Everyone was really excited, so yay for that. It’s going to be fun. Having never run a MotW game before, I had a couple questions…

1) Only one other person than me (there are 6 total) have ever played RPGs before, so I found myself prompting them a fair bit about their histories. How far do you tend to push in character creation? I tried to be sensitive to where someone felt stuck and let us move on. I plan on bringing some of this stuff back up as we play. I’m also doing a Google Doc that everyone can edit as we play through so we can flesh things out as we go. Just wondering how detailed you usually get off the bat.

2) Have others done preemptive prompts outside of the session? Sometimes private ones? I plan on preparing some players before the session with the questions I am for sure going to lead with. (We only have an hour, after all.) The hook if this mission, for example, starts with a phone call from someone (I’ve decided) one of the players knows. I was going to get that to her early so she’s not surprised. Have other people done this? Anything I should know?

3) How important is physical location? Our Crooked, for example, has “Home Ground.” And our Expert of course has their Haven. We didn’t quite get to the point where we were able to finalize the team concept (though it’s much clearer now that the histories are done). Should I let them all decide together where they’re located? The first mystery takes place in New York, so if they’re elsewhere, I assume the Haven is just less useful during that mission?

4) How tangled do you let histories get? We ended up tying a bunch of history points to an event our Crooked described. Near the end I actually intervened and suggested we try not to pile too much weight on this one event, and I’m glad I did. But maybe I shouldn’t have interfered? This one event is where the Crooked learned about monsters, the Professional saved the lives of the Crooked and Divine, and the where the Divine decided the Crooked was an abomination. When the Expert got sucked into things, I suggested they tie that to a different event. So there are two major events that tie most of the characters together.

Thanks! I’m sure I’ll have more questions as things play out. This is the most fun I’ve had in character creation in a long time. I’m sure that’s mostly due to just bad DMing, but I love the PbtA approach of history/bonds/debts. So compelling.

Can someone confirm that I am understanding harm recovery correctly? The manual is confusing because it talks about “1-3 harm wounds” as if it’s an individual thing and not your total health. The way I’m understanding it is if after an encounter a player has <4 harm, they can rest and they recover 1. "Rest" is not well defined. I'm assuming it means at least an overnight sleep or something like that. If after an encounter you have 4+ you are unstable (meaning the Keeper can make things worse) until stabilized either by a move or proper medical attention. It's not clear how quickly one can recover that. Essentially just 1-harm per rest period? Or is it really a wound-by-wound thing, in which case I'm not sure how to handle it at all.