Pawel Solowczuk – Page 2 – Powered by the Apocalypse G+ Archives

So I’m having a bumpy ride with GMing UW.

How do you prep to a session as GM.

Do you prep like a mission jump point with few questions like the example from the book or from “21 jump points”

or do you prep a mission by yourself

or do you let your players drive the narrative and you are there to react ??

Today I come to you with a MC and player conundrum.

Beware – it’s a long post with a twist.

Overall question is how to make PCs interact for a reason other than PCs are together because they are PCs?

I totally understand that PCs are together in Dungeon World because that’s the genre this game is about, a party of adventurers vs the threats of the dungeon and monsters.

In Urban Shadows there is this MC principle “Give everything a price, even friendship” plus US is also very political game with debts and factions etc. The genre the game is about (for my understanding) is politics and factions. I find it very super weird for a hunter, a wolf and a Fae to stick together just because they are PCs.

And I play with a group of individuals who think like me. We play together for some time, but we realized that sometimes there is a session where we don’t interact with another PC at all or very little like one short conversation and it started to bother us.

Each of us has his own political game, his own enemies and allies. Each one of us is (sometimes) playing his own campaign solo between him and MC.

When we do interact with one other it is short, usually debt exchange “I need you to do this for me” and then “I’ve done this for you, we are now square”.

Where have we gone wrong? Is it our PCs job to connect our political game or is it MCs duty to make our stuff connected?

Do we have wrong setup? should we discuss what is our political game about and have each player somehow attach himself to another player political game?

To give you some concrete examples.

My Vamp tries to play a local Hunters to assassinate Vamp clan leader so he can take his place.

A scholar is exchanging magical items left and right and tries to find a good husbands for his granddaughters.

A Veteran wants his revenge on Vamp clan leader as well, but so far he was working on stuff for Vamp or Scholar because we used debts we had on him.

Mostly the disconnect is between Vamp and Scholar – our political games don’t mix and interact in any way.

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Conclusion and question:

Why should PCs be working together? Why are they working together in your games?

Is it because they want to get debts on another PC or is it because PC used debt on anther PC to get them involved?

Is it just PCs stick together because they are PCs?

Space Combat.

Playing a sci-fi games makes me really want to try a space battle in Uncharted Worlds. I’ve seen characters boarding moving vehicles and doing other crazy stunts, but we always avoided space battle.

Have you seen space battle in any AP or podcast or blog?

Have you played it yourself and can share with us, what was the setup, what actions players took to overcome particular challenges, what was the table feedback and feeling regarding space battles?

I’ve read the section about running Villains from FBH, but I still cannot picture in my mind how such battle can play out.

What are your good practices for setting new campaign?

By comparison, UW doesn’t have much private property or other setup like Apocalypse World has. I’ve recently started a new game in AW and just pure setup of Maestro’D and Hard Holder creates so many moving pieces on board, friends, clients, gangs, enemies etc. I find it a bit lacking in UW.

What we have are setting and factions, but I like tangible faces and places.

My idea to which I ask you feedback and thoughts is:

Firstly to have a physical or virtual piece of paper and start drawing the region of space where game will take place.

To ask every player not only to assign a debt to a faction, but also describe how he came to be in debt to that faction, did he blow up factory of that faction, did he scam them for money, did he crossed an important persona.

To create existing members and places of that faction instead of owing anonymous faceless entity.

Then to have everyone create a place in the near by space, a crazy space station, a unique planet, a base on the moon. We can then assign those places to factions.

Of course half of it will not be used, but other half I hope will be an evocative awesome place to visit, where players would like to be excited to go and visit / mess around.

Lastly to create a conflict, a situation that is happening and highly destabilize the situation in the area – alien invasion, cue in one of the major factions. Players have to be interested in interacting with the situation, maybe they are partially responsible for it.

Thoughts and ideas?

How do you make your UW games going?

One of Wolf transformation options is “You are all but immune to magical attacks while transformed”.

What does it mean, as wording “all but” is quite often very confusing??

Have you had it in your game and what was it’s influence??

It allows Wolf to almost blindly jump on anyone dealing that type of harm and chose option to take damage on Unleash while being immune to it??

Refusing debt.

Let’s imagine a situation:

Rose(PC) is asked by Trevor(NPC) to transport some cargo from harbor to his warehouse because she owes him for other deal few nights back.

Right at that moment Rose has opportunity to Refuse the debt, say how she is playing it, then roll the dice and choose options.

But what if Rose accepts the deal but start second guessing it while doing it.

What if Rose learns that the cargo she is transporting are humans that Trevor intends to sacrifice to the dark goods of his

What if the cargo container eats two rockets and is totally destroyed, people inside are all dead.

Have you had a situation as above at your table, if so how did you handle it, or how would you handle it should such situation occur ??

Would you allow Rose to roll Refuse debt then, would she roll +Heart or +Nothing(because she initially agreed so now she is at more disadvantage) or do you play it in the fiction and do what fiction demands ??

Hit the streets.

Sooner or later comes the time when PCs decide that they just have enough of particular NPC and time has come for that NPC to be crossed out from the list.

Assuming that it is not a very powerful NPC, how do you handle player’s ambush on an NPC?

1. Allow them to camp outside NPC home and wait?

2. Use Hit the streets to set the scene?

– NPC having what is need can be interpreted as finding opportunity for an ambush

– juggling their own problems can be for example – a not perfect ambush opportunity, there are some others all the time nearby target, it is highly uncertain situation with a lot of variables

– cost more than anticipated means players give debt or other favor to an NPC that helped them set an ambush

How do you frame such hostile interaction between PCs and Factions where you know that violence will be involved as well as fangs, claws, clubs and guns ??

Hey.

I look for one player to join our group and play Urban Shadows with us.

There are 4 of us now, 3 players and myself as MC.

We played some PbtA before and we look forward to playing US now.

At the moment idea is play a short campaign (6-10 sessions).

We will use Hangouts for audio and roll20 with video only. (you don’t have to be using web cam, however some of us use them as we like to see each other)

Game will be played every other week, occasionally we will play week by week to compensate for people going for holidays, so that we can keep with about 2 games a month. We will set schedule together month to month.

Game will be played on Mondays 6-9pm CET (12-3pm EST).

I have a question about Get Involved that has been on my mind for quite some time.

Uncharted Worlds was the first PbtA game where I’ve seen help move that pushes the result entire category of success up or down. In my brief MC experience in UW it means that when two characters cooperate then most of the results end up being at least 7+, very often 10+ on whatever move was being made.

This gave the games I where I was the MC a more heroic feeling as there were almost no missed rolls, as a byproduct we had a lot of scenes with characters cooperating which lead to good fiction and fabulous Get Involved descriptions.

Question: what is the designer intention behind such power in Get Involved move compared to other PbtA games where help is usually a +1?

A quick question. I’ve been searching the core rulebook left and right but haven’t found it.

Data point are spend before the roll or can they be added after the roll as well?

Kind regards.