Category: Urban Shadows RPG: Discussion

So I just ran Urban Shadows for the first time.

I liked it a lot! Somehow Corruption didn’t come up very frequently at all. I need to push harder on that, but almost every roll was at least a partial success. Faction Moves flowed much better than I expected. I used Debts quite a bit, but should use them still more.

I really missed “Read a Sitch” from Apocalypse World. Also, “Keep Your Cool” seems much more focused than “Acting Under Fire,” to the extent that I wasn’t sure how to handle a few things.

In AW, when someone is trying to overcome obstacles between them and someone else order to do violence to them, it would generally be Acting Under Fire. But Keep Your Cool seems much more reliant on the player wanting to avoid something in particular. I used it just as I would have used Acting Under Fire, and it worked fine, but I am unsure if I’m doing it right.

I need more system familiarity, but it was still lots of fun for me and, I believe, for the players, too.

Thanks for the help!

Players should be putting a name to a face or putting a face to a name pretty much every time they meet someone that’s not completely out of the blue, right?

Maybe even when someone is out of the blue?

Looking at the Debt moves, there’s one choice that I don’t know how to represent in the fiction: giving you a Debt they hold on someone.

When it’s something like hard, like currency or an item, it’s easy enough to say “give it to her, not me.” But when it’s a favor, how do you represent that?

It seems very useful in tying PCs and NPCs together in unusual ways, mechanically speaking, but I don’t know how to say “hey, I’d like the Debt Frank owes you.”

I’m running a game tomorrow, so prompt responses are especially appreciated!

I’m thinking about running a game with the latest revision, and there’s something I’ve seen mentioned in the discussions that I don’t see in the current Moves list that Mark Diaz Truman said in a comment from July:

“If someone cashes in a Debt, both parties mark the other’s Faction.”

Has that changed? Without that, it appears the game slants much more towards being GM-driven, as the Faction Moves are the only way to advance.

I’m a fan of the idea of settling Debts between players triggering XP. It seems like that would encourage that much more involvement with the whole Debts system.