Unknown Armies: In Defense of Milestones

 

In Unknown Armies 3e, the players and GM create the characters and setting together at the beginning of the game, all pointed at a shared objective chosen by the group. The player created objective is supposed to have GM created "milestones" that grant percentage point increases to the score when accomplished during the course of play. 

 

The corkboarding rules in Book 2 say the GM and players should start thinking about milestones from the moment they choose their objective. Every group I have played with waited until the end to develop milestones There's a big advantage to waiting until the board is finished to choose milestones. It transforms the corkboard from a collection of random elements into gameplay. The players and GM are supposed to "relate" elements to each other during worldgen, explaining how everything is connected. Inevitably, you're going to have elements that nobody could think of a tie-in for. Asking the players to generate milestones is the best way to tie all the elements together. Most elements on the board are introduced by the players and that means you can ask them how the things they individually care about and want to be relevant in the story fit into the shared objective

WHAT IF...

...we don't have time?

Corkboarding with new players can take a long time. I've seen it run two sessions and if you've already sunk six or eight hours into "session zero" you might be losing your players. The big problem with milestones-at-the-end is that they happen at the end, and anything that happens at the end of an RPG session is the most likely to be truncated or forgotten outright.

 

We've done milestones through a backchannel between games when corkboarding ran over time. You can also ask everyone to throw out four or five ideas and then refine them yourself between games, presenting the finished list at the beginning of the next session.

I will use this segment to advocate for smaller corkboards. As the GM you've got a couple phases where you can choose to introduce stuff or connect things that are already there. When in doubt, connect elements that are already there. It's tempting to introduce a ton of stuff to "bring the world to life" but if you go too far it actually has the reverse effect - you've got so many factions bumping and grinding that it's impossible to incorporate all the NPC reactions to story events. You end up dropping plot elements and offscreening stuff, which is no fun when you're trying to honor the players' contributions to the board by making them central to the game.

...another route to the objective appears during the course of play?

I have seen people say they don't collaboratively generate milestones because they don't want to "predetermine the entire Path to the Objective." It's what prompted me to write this post in the first place, when I decided to address the issue constructively instead of picking a fight with one of the devs over a three year old discord post. 

 

Thankfully it's easy to fix. If the players do something that sidesteps one of the pre-listed milestones and accomplishes the same goal, just award them the points for the thing they did and add it to the list as completed.

...I want to have a secret milestone?

Then do that. Reveal it when the players accomplish it, or keep it hidden if they don't.