Has anyone ever played Urban Shadows? I'm looking for an alternative to WoD but I've never done a PbtA game before

The authors are left enough to accuse Evil Hat of bad inclusivity.

Are you going by the Google Plus page?
Because that says January 2015, friend.

nvm, looks like there was a backer preview PDF released in December, though, which is... something. I guess.

I've read through the book and honestly, my major gripe is that it harps on multiculturalism and then provides you with only The Most European urban fantasy magic things.
Gimme some yokai and djinn and shit, man. I wanna play the shinto deity of whatever town we're in.

The game seems to assume American cities, probably due to American authors.

I think they're remedying some of that in Dark Streets, and The Fae works pretty damn well as a yokai. Ditto for The Tainted and a djinn.

Was this before or after that 'disabled people in Fate' book was talked about?

From the Kickstarter page, it looks like NYC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Tokyo, Miami, London, and Bangalore.

>no Hong Kong
>no Istanbul

shit list

>more American cities than non-American cities

Still, when was the last time you saw India in an RPG book?

I'm not knocking Bangalore, but four American cities seems excessive. You could at least knock Chicago out and replace it with, fuck, I don't know, Rio or Tangiers or Baghdad or Moscow or fucking Winnipeg or something.

To be fair, Chicago is being written by the only author on the list whose name I recognize, and he's a man who lives and breathes both history and the city he lives in. I'm almost certain it'll be the only good one the best of the bunch.

Eh, fair. Drop NYC or LA, then. It's not like resources on those cities are rare.
Miami I at least kind of get.

If you're looking for an alternative to WoD have you already tried Unknown Armies?

I love UA, but it doesn't really have anything in common with WoD/CofD outside of maybe Mage. Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible game, but it's not exactly full of vampires and monster hunters.

we did. it was just... not good.
the whole political power shifting mechanic was annoying.
we're back at wod and have to narrate the political climate by ourselfs again but it works way better for us than urban shadows.

Dresden Files maybe?

I haven't played Urban Shadows but I have a lot of experience with PbtA games so I'll give you the boilerplate info based on the core rules they all share.

PbtA is moderate complexity for the players and low complexity for the GM. All dice rolls break down into 2d6 + STAT, where stat ranges from -1 to +3. Players roll everything except (in some games) the damage that enemies inflict. On a result of 10+ the PC succeeds totally at their task, on a 7-9 they get a partial success, and on a 6- they fail but are usually rewarded with experience points to compensate. This keeps the game moving along because there's no such thing as a pointless dice roll; it either helps the character, makes thing harder or more complicated for them, or a little bit of both.

PbtA gives all characters access to some basic Moves, which represent the standard actions they can do in the world - attacking enemies, evading danger, protecting themselves or allies from harm, getting information about the world or the environment, and getting NPCs to do what they want if they have leverage over them. Individual classes/playbooks give characters additional bonuses or options, making them better at certain basic Moves or letting them do stuff nobody else can, such as hacking, spellcasting, and the like.

PbtA is good for low to medium powered campaigns, and with groups who like narrativist rules and don't mind a bit of hand-waving to keep the story moving. Character creation is fairly simple but your players will definitely stumble for the first two sessions as they get a hang of the rules and flow of task resolution. It's not a good system if you want 'crunchy' mechanics or a lot of granularity, and it sorely lacks is any kind of built-in Difficulty Rating slider for actions. Swinging a sword and injuring a goblin is just as difficult as swinging a sword and injuring a dragon, the only difference is the dragon has more hit points. The game is generally poor at taking the 'scale' of opponents into account, only focusing on the stat of the character in question.

So, I recommend that if you use PbtA you add an additional modifier to actions based on their difficulty, like so: Easy (+1, Average (+0), Hard (-1), Daunting (-2). That way hacking the Starbucks wifi isn't as easy as hacking into a Megacorp's secure servers protected by ICE programs.

In summary, it's a decent system with a few flaws, keep getting feedback from your group as you play and see if they enjoy it.

>Swinging a sword and injuring a goblin is just as difficult as swinging a sword and injuring a dragon, the only difference is the dragon has more hit points. The game is generally poor at taking the 'scale' of opponents into account, only focusing on the stat of the character in question.
Wrong. Unless you have sword that pierces dragon's hide that's like inch thick metal you are doing jack shit damage against dragon.
Also goblin attacks you by getting close and stabbing you with something that armor can deal with, while dragon just makes the general area around you and your friends a fiery hellscape.

>Wrong. Unless you have sword that pierces dragon's hide that's like inch thick metal you are doing jack shit damage against dragon.
According to Dungeon World, yes and no. Page 20 of Dungeon World, under The Effects of Moves, states
>A 10+ on hack and slash doesn’t just mean the mechanical effects, it means you successfully attacked something and did some type of harm to it.

Now page 58 does corroborate your statement, with:
>Note that an “attack” is some action that a player undertakes that has a chance of causing physical harm to someone else. Attacking a dragon with inch-thick metal scales full of magical energy using a typical sword is like swinging a meat cleaver at a tank: it just isn’t going to cause any harm, so hack and slash doesn’t apply. Note that circumstances can change that: if you’re in a position to stab the dragon on its so underbelly (good luck with getting there) it could hurt, so it’s an attack.

What this means is that there's only two states your character can be in: (1) You're in a position to inflict harm to your enemy, roll normally, and (2) You're not in a position to inflict harm to your enemy, you can't roll AT ALL. The GM dictates whether you can roll for a Move or not, which is strange because parley explicitly states its prerequisite (leverage) while Hack and Slash does not.

So, this means that a character is equally likely to hit a slow-moving troll with an arrow as they are to hit a flying sparrow a hundred feet away. As long as the GM says that it's possible, it's the exact same dice roll. There's absolutely no accounting for the relative ease or difficulty of the challenge, the only thing that matters is the character's Dexterity. So, when I said that there's no difference between attacking a goblin and a dragon I was incorrect. I will rephrase that as "The Target Number and thus odds of hitting an unskilled and slow opponent is exactly the same as hitting a well-trained and agile opponent."

That kind of thinking only works if you take moves as separate things outside of rest of the fiction and it's context.
In more challenging situation you have to defy danger more, to maybe even get to proper position to stab/shoot your target and the risks involved with failure increase.

Like, if you are saying that there is no difficulty scale for die rolls in DW (and most other PbtA hacks), it's true, obviously, but there are still other tools that GM can use to increase or decrease the challenge of the whole situation.

Frankly, I prefer that one roll to fit all method to the stuff that's in games like FATE and Hero Quest, where GM sets the roll's difficulty based on if they want character to probably fail or probably succeed.

>In more challenging situation you have to defy danger more, to maybe even get to proper position to stab/shoot your target and the risks involved with failure increase.
Why would you overcomplicate things by forcing the player to roll more dice more often just because their opponent has a more canny defence, or because there are circumstantial modifiers that make it harder to hit them? Not everyone is as easy to bribe or bully into submission. Not every fact is as easily knowable by your character. Some things in life are, and should be represented as, being harder than others. The one-size-fits-all dice mechanic of Dungeon World absolutely ignores that.

Kicking through a brittle wooden door should not be as difficult as kicking down a solid door reinforced with steel, but in DW they're the same thing. There's only three states in DW:
>You don't need to roll, you just do it successfully and automatically
>Roll 2d6 + Stat against DC 10, with 7-9 as a partial success and 6- as a failure
>You can't even attempt to do this by rolling dice, you always fail
Therefore a GM who wants to distinguish between the relative difficulties of two similar, but different, actions has to either (a) make one impossible to succeed/fail and the other a 'normal' roll, or (b) create an entirely new move for that action.

Remember that while a GM can indeed amp up the consequences on a 6- for a more 'risky' action, that still doesn't alter the action chances for a complete success, partial success, or failure. If I have a +2 STR and I try to kick those doors down, they're both at 42% success, 42% partial, and 16% failure.

A +/-1 modifier is dead simple and the fact that PbtA doesn't consider it at all is, in my experience as a long-time user of the system, a clear failing on its part. Don't get me wrong, I LIKE this system, I use it a lot! But you need to give criticism where it's due and not pretend that something is flawless because it's what you like the most.

I JUST WANT TO PLAY AS THE IMMORTAL JESUS FUCK

Remember in DW fiction comes first.
For that door kicking scenario you can add one more part.
>Is it reasonable for your character to be able to kick down this door?
For heavy duty barbarian, yes, for sickly wizard, maybe no.

DW is not and doesn't try to be simulationist system, and adding scaling difficulty on checks just gives GM one more piece of power they don't really need with the system.

The thing is, for me, lack of scalability is not a flaw. It's obviously something that the system lacks, but it's obviously and clearly intentional omission and the game works perfectly fine without it.
For me odds of success being solely defined by character's ability is fine, character succeeds more on things that are important to them and fail more on things they are not strong at, reasonable fiction has been created.

I was about to mention that you should check out Blades in the Dark, for PbtA system with variable difficulty on rolls, but checking things out, I realized that it doesn't affect the odds ether, just on what partial success and failure means.

>For heavy duty barbarian, yes, for sickly wizard, maybe no.
But what distinguishes them from each other? Their Strength score, and yet there's not a single rule in the game stating "Characters with a Strength of X or higher can be assumed to accomplish Y and Z without needing to roll. Characters with a Strength of A or lower can't attempt B or C, since it's simply too difficult for them to accomplish realistically."

"It's just something the system lacks" can only take you so far, sir or madam. At some point a system lack too much, or forces the GM to arbitrate too much, and it stops being a good system and starts being a hasty set of guidelines that leave far too much responsibility on the GM and the players trust of them. Omissions because they're obscure cases are acceptable and unavoidable, but the concept of two possible tasks having two wildly different difficulty levels is BASIC. It's so obvious that I, and every player I've ever run Dungeon World for, noted its absence within the first 5 hours of play.

As though it wouldn't be hilarious and awesome to help a black vampire run for City Council.