Unknown Armies is a game about characters trying to fix the world. Objectives are a useful mechanism to focus the cabal on doing just that.
Formalised in the third edition, objectives create some necessary structure in a sandbox game, and an important progression device for campaigns.
As part of the collaborative world-building process, the group of players frame their objective by what they want their characters to collectively achieve (the closure) and at what scale of impact. They make a plan for how they might get there and define the milestones they expect to hit that shows they are on the right path.
Objectives are measured on a percentile scale, and each milestone hit advances the cabal towards its completion.
Objective Objection
Here’s the thing. Do formal cabal objectives become redundant when you’re running a one-shot with the 3rd edition rules?
Or when your one-shot scenario has a group of strangers as PCs, rather than a cabal of characters that know each other?
In a typical convention one-shot there’s usually an implicit, but ultimately obvious, scenario objective. It’s usually set by the GM rather than determined by the player characters.
Hmmm … this was bugging me a little. So I asked around
, and Cam Banks pointed out a couple of things. First:
It’s a good thing to include in any one-shot … Your scenario may even start out with the objective set at a fairly established level, such as 35% or more, encouraging the players to consider rolling it at some point.
When you successfully complete an objective in a campaign, you don’t start the next related cabal objective at zero. You get to carry forward half the progress from the objective you just completed.
One-Shot Progress
Applying the same idea to a one-shot is a neat twist. Here’s why I really like the idea for one-shots.
- The one-shot group has some narrative plausibility that binds their characters, rather than just meeting in a bar on a dark and stormy night. They have a shared backstory hinged around the objective – if not with each other, and whether they know it or not.
- The characters are already working towards the objective. At the inception point of the scenario, it doesn’t matter whether they are doing so collectively or individually, nor if they are doing so deliberately, incidentally or accidentally. They can hit the ground running because they are invested in the goal of the scenario.
- The path and milestone structure can certainly help with group’s focus, which in turn can help with pacing in a fixed-length one-shot session.
- In a session with fixed playing time, characters may not complete all the milestones needed to get to 100% for their objective. But because their progress is mechanically linked to closure, if they are running out of time, the players can be encouraged to take the plunge to find out what happens.
- Objectives are written so they can be fulfilled off-screen. When the resolution has been determined – either by reaching 100% or taking the plunge – it’s narrated as an epilogue. These are common enough in convention games, and can wrap up a satisfying and effective conclusion for a one-shot session.
I’m sold. The objective mechanic does appear to be highly compatible with one-shots – entirely so even, if you consider milestones, the path and off-screen resolution together. With a bit of thought, even pre-generated one-shot characters can be written to be bound together, around a generally known and sought-after objective goal.
Whose Objective Is It Anyway?
But there’s still something that niggles. This setup just isn’t the case with some of the classic UA one-shots I’d like to run. Take the example of Bill in Three Persons, the classic intro scenario that shipped with the first two editions.
The issue is not that there isn’t a prior cabal with a pre-defined collective objective. Nor even that the characters don’t know what’s going on at the outset. Events unfold, sometimes starkly and other times more subtly, as the scenario progresses. The fun bit is having characters with enough agency to respond to what happens and to try to make sense of what is revealed. In Unknown Armies, that’s largely what playing ‘street-level’ is all about, with mundane characters, or at least ones who don’t know much about the Occult Underground to begin with.
But when objectives ought to be deliberate and player-driven, it’s hard to reconcile how the group can meaningfully determine them when they don’t yet know what’s going on.
In the example of Bill in Three Persons, just before the end of the first scene there’s a critical moment that the scenario lunges forward from. Just at that moment a non-player character might let it slip that “we’ve got to stop him.” At this point the GM has set the scenario objective for the players, which in turn provides some direction and motivation for what follows, but it’s still not a player-driven objective.
Until the player characters know what “we’ve got to stop him” means, they’re still just reacting to a world going strange and beyond comprehension around them.
Paradoxically, in this scenario, while the players haven’t set their own group objective, the characters do still have plenty of agency. They can choose to stop him, or they can choose to resist that imperative. Either way, the world around them doesn’t stop getting strange and giving them something to contend with, whichever path they choose.
Closure
So there you go. I’m talking myself back out, and it’s not something that I will settle on soon. I certainly see how the objectives mechanic can work well for new one-shot scenarios. I can also see plenty of one-shot situations where the group doesn’t decide what that objective is. That’s not a problem for most games, but it does grate against a core aspect of Unknown Armies 3.
I might just have to accept:
- that the classic one-shot scenarios are best played with earlier versions;
- that UA3 is designed for a different type of game, and
- I should stop trying to put a round peg in a square hole 🙂
Which leads me to the second thing Cam pointed out: that I’ve “hit the nail on the head with that last paragraph”. Closure.