Monster of the Week

I've previously struggled with Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games. In playing them I've often felt like something is missing, and I haven’t felt confident enough to run them.

Part of that is the terminology. For an old-timer like me, PbtA games are full of weird jargon: moves, holds, agendas, countdowns and so on. Although the books aren't long, they feel intimidating to me because it feels as if there is so much to learn. (And, as I mentioned before, I'm not a great one for reading roleplaying games.)

(As an old school GM, I found this summary on the Trilemma.com site useful.)

But there's lot to love. The rules are very simple when you get down to it, and character generation includes ties and bonds between the PCs.

One of the things that has prevented me from running PbtA games (and I now have a few) is how to prepare for them. Most of my roleplaying is through one-shots at conventions. With only a three or four hour slot, and five or six eager players to entertain, I've tended to fall back into my comfort zone (ie a scenario) that I am comfortable running.

(And yes, I realise that the pressure to put on a good show is entirely self-inflicted. Rightly or wrongly, I see my job is to give the players a good time, and I don't want the players to walk away wishing they hadn't sat down at the table with me. So that tends to inhibit me from experimenting too much.)

And when I've played PbtA games at cons, they tend to be the same - a scenario to be followed, but using the PbtA rules. Which is fine, but I sense isn't getting the best from the system, which is for play to emerge from what the characters want. Unfortunately that requires a whole level of flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants that I haven’t done since I had a weekly group in the 90s.

So although I've read Dungeon World and Urban Shadows and Monsterhearts, I've not felt confident enough to run them as one-shots yet. Not when I know I can run a good game using another system.

But now I have successfully run a PbtA one-shot at a convention, and that was Monster of the Week.

Monster of the Week

I do like my urban fantasy (hence being drawn to Monsterhearts and Urban Shadows) and MotW brings PbtA to the Buffy/BPRD/Ultraviolet/X-Files/Supernatural monster hunters genre.

So here's the elevator pitch for MotW: You're a team of monster hunters.

Several people have told me that MotW is one of the easier PbtA games to run, and certainly one of the things that I liked about is the familiarity of the preparation: a monster with a plan, some NPCs, some locations. Almost a scenario, in fact.

Certainly I felt that MotW was easier to run than other PbtA games I have read. (Although whether that's because MotW is closer to traditional RPGs than other PbtA games, or whether it's because I’m now more familiar with PbtA games as it's the fourth one I've read, I can’t tell.)

Play to find out what happens

In preparing my "scenario" (situation would be a better name) I finally learned what "play to find out what happens" means.

Previously my scenarios have been carefully written out and plotted so that I know how the characters go from A to B to C. (In play there's always lots of improvisation, but I've got a basic structure to fall back on.)

In MotW I decided to let go, and just create a situation with a monster, some bystanders (what MotW calls its NPCs) and places, and a countdown clock for if the players didn't do anything. I didn't try to second guess their actions, I didn't create a cluetrail. I would just see what would happen at the table.

Motivations for everything

One of the things that made it really easy to create a situation for MotW is that monsters, minions, bystanders and locations all have their own motivations. But by motivations, I don’t mean a character’s internal motivation, but their role in the scenario.

Some examples:

• Gossip - to pass on rumours (for bystanders)
• Guardian - to bar a way or protect something (for a minion)
• Breeder - to give birth to, bring forth, or create evil (for a monster)
• Crossroads - to bring people, and things, together (for a location)

I found this very helpful when writing up the situation - it clarified the role that each character/location/minion/monster played. It found it so helpful I’m probably going to use it for other games.

Actual Play

So I brought MotW to GoPlayLeeds in December, and I had four players. One was a PbtA veteran, the others were all new to PbtA.

You can download my scenario, The Seeds of Doom, here.

So how did it go?

I started by letting the players choose what sort of team they wanted to be - they chose a secret society, and one of the players chose The Initiate. The other players chose The Crooked, The Wronged, and The Expert. We worked our way through character generation, all of which went fine.

The game itself was easy to run. The players seemed to enjoy themselves investigating the mystery, and I found the NPC motivations and countdown clock very intuitive to use. (I did sometimes change NPC motivations to suit, but that was fine.)

The only difficulty I had at one point was wanting to roll for the monster to attack - it took me a moment to work out what I needed to say was “the monster lunges towards you - what do you do?” It’s just a different approach.

I gave everyone 3 luck and had them mark 2 experience. That meant some of them levelled up during the game (which was good), but it also gave them too much luck. There didn’t seem to be much downside to spending luck - being “doomed” seemed a bit too abstract for a one-shot. (I had completely forgotten about using luck to bring in someone from their past, but I’m not sure how that would have worked in a one-shot anyway.)

The hunters’ histories didn’t have much impact on play, which was a shame. I was hoping they would feature more as I feel that this part of character generation (like bonds in Dungeon World) is one of PbtA’s strength. But I may be expecting a bit much from a one-shot, as given the time constraints the plot inevitably wins out. Maybe I can make the histories more suited to one-shot play, by perhaps linking them to the scenario (although maybe not this particular scenario).

What would I do differently?

Rather than let the players decide the shape of their team (they picked a secret society), I will suggest that they are members of some sort of official agency. The exact form of that agency I would leave up to them, but having some sort of official authority would have made a few things simpler.

I will remove some of the playbooks. For example, we had The Wronged in play, but the nature of the situation I’d crafted meant that their Prey wasn’t going to feature. Similarly, I failed to weave into the game the various characters created in The Crooked’s background.

I will read each playbook more carefully, and cross out anything that doesn’t suit the scenario. For example, I may delete some of the improvements that are better suited to campaign play (such as picking moves from other playbooks).

I would give each player only two luck, and consider how “doomed” could be made more meaningful in a one-shot.

But that’s about it.

Overall?

Overall, I enjoyed running Monster of the Week. I don’t think it will replace Fate Accelerated as my go-to game tabletop RPG, but it’s easy to run and I’ll run it again.