Do MCs here have any advice for pushing the characters together, especially in the first session?
(I welcome you to respond just to that question and ignore the rest of my verbose background explanation of why I ask.)
I’m about to run my first session of Urban Shadows with a group that’s played a few other PbtA games. They’re all great players, but they sometimes have trouble justifying to themselves and one another, “Why would I ever cooperate with this person?” when they make PCs with dramatically different goals and personalities.
The starting Debts should go a long way to answering that question for most of the archetypes they’ve chosen, I think; the Veteran, Oracle, Wizard, and Vamp all have links that imply that they’re friends, or at least somewhat dependent on one another. The Fae’s starting debts feel a lot more impersonal, though, and the player who picked that archetype has something of a history of unwittingly making PCs that are hard to mesh in with the rest of the group.
In other RPGs with factions (like In Nomine), I’m used to saying something like, “Your immediate superiors want to see cooperation between factions for this situation, so you’ve been ordered you to work together.” That seems like maybe not the best fit for Urban Shadows, though, when there are likely to be multiple, potentially unrelated threats rather than a single, clear antagonist … but maybe I am misunderstanding what the game will end up looking like! I wonder if I should prompt them to answer this question up front for themselves (e.g., “Where do you hang out together when you have downtime? Where do you meet up when you need to compare notes on a job?”) or if I should just let that evolve more organically.