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Blades in the Dark is the latest effort from industry veteran John Harper, possibly best-known for Lady Blackbird. Well, he was; it's probably going to be Blades now, because that poo poo caught fire and destroyed on Kickstarter, achieving $180,000 of its $7,500 goal, eating through nearly two dozen stretch goals. Don't worry, most of it is up to other people to write. It probably won't suck the life out of the core game's author and cause another embarrassing RPG industry implosion! Quick pitch: You're a crew of Garretts and Corvos looking to grow a criminal empire in a smog-choked Victorian-style city beset by ghosts and other supernatural weirdos. There might also be lightning guns and monorails. The Gates of Death have been destroyed, which isn't as "eternal life" as it might sound because it just means ghosts loving everywhere. Also demons, I guess? Now, the Empire rules scattered city-states hunkered behind electroplasmic fences, because ghosts are basically transparent cows, and the wilderness is a haunted hellscape. These cities are likewise connected by electricity-powered trains, which may sound familiar if you've played Harper's previous game Ghost Lines (they're the same setting). Despite these and other technological marvels, the setting is very Victorian London stereotype, full of gas lamps and coal fires getting grime all over the teeming dirty peasants crammed into Blades is a game about playing a gang of filthy criminals moving up in the underworld. Typically, projects like Thief: The RPG are ill-starred, since vicious backstabbing loners tend not to work together very well. Luckily, we have the terrible scourge of ~story games~ to thank for a functional game about criminal empire-building. On top of each character having their own traits, their Crew has its own character sheet, reflecting their pooled resources, prestige, allies and enemies. Plus, the basic premise is that you all want to form a gang and are not actually anti-social goons. So maybe not all that much like Garrett and Corvo. Characters choose from a selection of playbooks that guide you in what kinds of actions you favor and what gear you have. Thanks to stretch goals, there are seven core playbooks, ranging from the Cutter (bruiser, back-alley brawler) to the Lurk (cat burglar), from the Spider (mastermind with back up plans) to the Whisper (scholar and occultist). There's a touch of cross-classing available. The Crew has a playbook, too, covering groups like Thieves and Cultists. Crews have a lair and other resources, including minions, special group training, and libraries. To resolve actions in Blades, players roll a pool of d6's and take your highest result (multiple 6's count as a Crit). This is a "fail forward" kind of game, so even if you don't get what you want, something happens. When you're setting up an action, your group hashes out whether what you're doing is Controlled, Risky or Desperate—your "position"—which helps determine how easy it is to succeed and determines the quality of your success. Even if you roll poo poo, you can re-try from a worse position. The GM doesn't roll anything, but they do determine how hard things are, not just by helping do adjudicate an action's position, but also by setting up "clocks" for long-term tasks. Clocks are segmented circles that demonstrate progress towards an objective, from "break into the mansion" to "kill all the guards." Actions fill in the segments of the clock, and once it's filled up the objective is completed or the obstacle is overcome. Typically, your Crew will pursue a Score in order to acquire Coin and Hold to bolster their position in the underworld hierarchy. Scores generate Heat, though, which means you're getting more attention from the bluecoats, but you're also getting famous enough that bigger crews are taking notice. When you're on the job, characters trade off being leader ("on point"), using their particular expertise to advance the crew's agenda, even if that's just setting up things for the next person who's going on point. The Lurk leads the party through the sewers into the mansion basement, the Hound knocks out the guards in the library, the Whisper deals with the occult seals on an ancient book, and the Cutter leads the charge against the demon that pops out. Characters who aren't on point are instead "backup" and provide assistance, say by facing an Effect in place of the person on point, or providing a bonus die to an action. In addition to any other problems that arise, failed group actions add Stress to everyone providing backup because they so totally could've done better you guys. Stress is your damage track. Once it fills up, you suffer some Trauma, whether it's a bad wound or a new personal enemy. Your Stress resets to 0 and you start the journey to Trauma all over again. Once your character has acquired four Traumas, the mean streets have proved too mean for him, and he retires. Depending on the Coin in his Stash, he retires in ignominy or he settles into a slightly more honest small business empire. Between Scores, characters spend Coin and Hold to buy toys and influence, to advance Downtime plans like setting up front businesses or bribing officials to be friendly, and to try to reduce the Heat drawing attention to your Crew. Characters also engage in their favored Vice to reduce their Stress, staving off that next bit of Trauma. Character and Crew advancement comes in "ticks" in certain categories, and once you have enough you get a new Skill rank or buy a new move. These ticks are awarded for things like the group agreeing on which Skills you used best, fulfilling your playbook's themes, or doing what your Crew does best. For instance, at the end of the session everyone might say your Hound used Prowl to great effect, so you get one tick over your Cloak Skills, and you also "hunted or killed a challenging target" which gets you a tick towards a new special move. Maybe you also pulled a couple of Desperate tricks, so you get two ticks you can place anywhere. Finally, your Thieves Crew might get an advancement tick towards a new special ability after executing a successful robbery. You start out as a very low-level Crew, but as you progress you should move up, controlling multiple neighborhoods, bribing more important officials, and potentially turning the whole city of Dunwall into your giant gang's turf. Maybe somewhere along the way you steal cool jars full of souls from creepy witches, uncover deathgod cults' plots to subvert city councilors, or even organize construction efforts to seal up the crumbling wall before ghosts overrun the city. There is a pretty extensive Faction Ladder used to track your influence over other groups and parts of the city, and to track your Crew's relationships with other potential allies and rivals. There are a number of suggested tools to give the game a quick start up time. The base advice on how to run all the set up and planning that goes into executing a Score is mostly "don't." Your PCs are experienced criminals. They already bought floor plans, they already timed guard patrols—take a few minutes to outline what their "plan" is, then get into the actual caper. There is a Flashback mechanic for pulling contingencies out of your rear end, something that the stretch goal playbook the Spider is probably expert at. The GM section also has some tables for randomly generating Scores, or they can just act as lists of possibilities to choose from! They include Client/Target, Work, Location, Troubles and Twists. The world of Blades in the Dark is full of ghosts, demons and other monsters, which means it's ripe for adventures other than the purely criminal enterprise. Among the Kickstarter's stretch goals are a grip of playsets that completely change up the game, providing new player and crew playbooks tailored to them. quote:• Broken Crown: A playset for the game that adds new character and crew types so you can play a group of revolutionaries intent upon doing the impossible — assassinating the Immortal Emperor himself. By James Stuart. Also in Addition On Top of That On top of the core game and its directly related stretch goals, the Kickstarter's runaway success resulted in a bumper crop of setting hacks. quote:• Band of Blades: A complete dark fantasy hack, Band of Blades allows you to play a small band of soldiers desperately trying to shift the tide in a war against powerful sorcerer-kings and their undead minions. By Stras Acimovic. Other There's a G+ community, where John Harper has been pretty active. There's a growing FAQ pinned at the top of the community. On a personal note, it's nice to see the author being really engaged with feedback and publicly musing on pretty significant changes to his game in pursuit of making it fun and accessible. Here is the first part of a session run by John Harper on Google Hangouts. Here is a write-up of that session. Welcome to a thread guaranteed to die a pathetic death waiting for Kickstarter fulfillment. Prove me wrong, motherfuckers! That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Apr 14, 2015 |
# ? Apr 14, 2015 11:37 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 19:03 |
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I'm currently running a PbP game of this. The system feels quite flexible and fast-playing, and the "one detail for planning then drop the players in medias res" is a general principle that you could apply to other games. I could definitely see it being used in a SWAT/HRT/Rainbow Six-type setting. The clock mechanic also strikes me as eminently poachable because it dovetails well with a GM never saying no. Even the most outrageous ask can be reduced to a "long-term project" with a clock that the party can work on over multiple sessions. I feel like I already got a lot of value out of the quickstart rules. I do think though the game could use with some options for cutting down on the number of Actions - 16 feels a little too many for a quick oneshot/fast Chargen. EDIT: My thread title was totally going to be Blades in the Dark: Dirty D6s Done Dirt Cheap
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# ? Apr 14, 2015 12:30 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm currently running a PbP game of this. Woops, I forgot to talk about the score generation stuff in my post! Yeah, the Quickstart definitely had a lot of value for a teaser on an unfinished game. It helped me up my pledge. He already said he's cutting down on Effects, I think, and he made a pretty big G+ post about eliminating half of the "roll to-hit, then roll damage" aspect of the system. Maybe Skills will get a paring, too.
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# ? Apr 14, 2015 12:56 |
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It looks like he's also expanding the clocks to handle more situations that come up, which I think is pretty great. Both for random obstacles, long term goals, consequences that you eat if you don't want stress, everything. Also, John's said that all the Dunwall playbooks can play with one another, which I think would be awesome. Crew of thieves plus one leviathan hunter or inspector or something could be awesome. (Kind of makes me think of City of Stairs a little, and then maybe I'll reskin it for running a group of conspirators for or against a government). I sort of hope the skills don't get pared down too much, but I can be sold on that. A bunch of friends of mine are way into this; we all want to play rather than run it, but I should just get us all to rotate GMing and get this ball rolling with the quickstart rules. I'm super excited for it!
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# ? Apr 14, 2015 14:04 |
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It should be pointed out that John Harper's mini-RPG Ghost Lines takes place in the same world.quote:On the Ghost Lines
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# ? Apr 14, 2015 14:29 |
Womb of Night is almost word for word from Warp Riders. http://youtu.be/PjKI_U9ENwU
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# ? Apr 14, 2015 16:39 |
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I'm so bummed I missed this kickstarter. Is there any way for me to buy in for a copy of the rules quick start rules?
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# ? Apr 14, 2015 17:25 |
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Impermanent posted:I'm so bummed I missed this kickstarter. Is there any way for me to buy in for a copy of the rules quick start rules? He's going to do one of those "late backers" things, so that might be it whenever that's ready.
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# ? Apr 14, 2015 21:02 |
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So: a hack based around the idea of low- or no-powered wannabe superheroes fighting crime. Think Arrow/Daredevil/that upcoming "We Are Robins" comic. Talk to me. e: I'm thinking of playbooks like The Striker (DD), The Weapons Master, The Sleuth, or Control (the Oracle-type). Not sure what to do for crews, though Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Apr 14, 2015 |
# ? Apr 14, 2015 21:07 |
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Evil Mastermind posted:So: a hack based around the idea of low- or no-powered wannabe superheroes fighting crime. Think Arrow/Daredevil/that upcoming "We Are Robins" comic. They're definitely "Teams" instead of "Crews." Ideas off the top of my head are: the Nine-to-Fivers (government agents), Outcasts (certain versions of X-Men), Fightin' Family (Fantastic Four) and Bickering Soap Operatives (Avengers, or really every team ever).
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# ? Apr 14, 2015 23:34 |
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I seriously can't wait for this to come out. I look forward to running my group through it. It all looks goddamn fantastic; I haven't been this excited about a kickstarter since Feng Shui 2. (And before that, Fate Core.)
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# ? Apr 15, 2015 00:08 |
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Plague of Hats posted:They're definitely "Teams" instead of "Crews." Ideas off the top of my head are: the Nine-to-Fivers (government agents), Outcasts (certain versions of X-Men), Fightin' Family (Fantastic Four) and Bickering Soap Operatives (Avengers, or really every team ever). I was thinking more street-level than that. NIMBYs: We don't give a poo poo about what's happening in the rest of the city. This is our goddamn street, and we don't want you superassholes doing whatever the hell it is you're doing or peddling your poo poo here. We don't care where you go or what you do, you just ain't doing it here. Get out of our neighborhood. Thrillers: You know what the best thing about fighting gangsters and D-list supervillains is? The rush. Parkour-chasing thugs, dodging blasts from a laser pistol, beating up nameless goons, you loving love it. This isn't about justice; you're in it for the kicks. Wannabes: Listen, you can't just go to one of the major super-teams and ask to join up. You need to build a rep first. Take down a few metadrug dealers, get some exposure on the news, that kind of thing. Stick with us; we're on the road to the Big Time! Wronged: It's not about stopping crime, or taking down every two-bit thug or mob boss. It's about taking out that particular mob boss. And yeah, it doesn't matter who you have to ally with to do it. Ends justify the means.
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# ? Apr 15, 2015 15:53 |
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A game about heists where you can apparently get through 1 or 2 heists in a single session with explicit mechanics on how your group works socially with the larger world makes this the first RPG I've been really excited about in a while. I wish I had known about this 5 days ago since I would easily pay the money for the quickstart, but now I have to wait. Sucks.
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# ? Apr 15, 2015 17:12 |
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I admit I'm slightly disappointed that the near future STALKER South Pacific hack seems to have fallen behind the couch cushions (I mean, good for John Harper, he seems like a cool dude, but a novel? Eh), but if even half of the stuff unlocked for this game comes out it's still going to be a really solid game.
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# ? Apr 15, 2015 18:30 |
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I was sold from the minute I learned that the "dispatch other people in combat" skill was openly called Murder instead of Combat, Melee, Attack, or whatever. For a quickstart with something like a paragraph of setting material, the mechanics themselves do a surprisingly good job of setting an appropriate tone for what you should be doing, where you should be doing it, who you should be killing, and how bad you should feel about it afterward. (This amount of bad is "none bad" as far as I can tell) I am praying that with Null Vector, I will finally be able to run a Shadowrun game in a system worth half a drat.
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# ? Apr 15, 2015 20:36 |
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Something I hope the full game goes into a bit more detail on is a clearer explanation of what separates Murder from Mayhem and when to call for the latter over the former. Is Mayhem strictly meant to be nonlethal brawling? If your intent is to kill in a fight do you ALWAYS use Murder?
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# ? Apr 15, 2015 21:10 |
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The way I interpreted it is that Murder is what you use on unsuspecting targets, then Mayhem for dudes that can fight back.
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# ? Apr 15, 2015 21:20 |
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Kai Tave posted:Something I hope the full game goes into a bit more detail on is a clearer explanation of what separates Murder from Mayhem and when to call for the latter over the former. Is Mayhem strictly meant to be nonlethal brawling? If your intent is to kill in a fight do you ALWAYS use Murder? Kai, to put it in Transeldritch game terms, Murder is Zhang, Mayhem is Storms.
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# ? Apr 15, 2015 21:27 |
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Kai Tave posted:Something I hope the full game goes into a bit more detail on is a clearer explanation of what separates Murder from Mayhem and when to call for the latter over the former. Is Mayhem strictly meant to be nonlethal brawling? If your intent is to kill in a fight do you ALWAYS use Murder? I read it as using Mayhem for brawling, throwing down, and busting heads - fatal or not. Murder is knives from shadows, dedicated killing, finesse dueling, that kind of thing. I agree that a little more clarity would be helpful.
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# ? Apr 16, 2015 02:53 |
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John answered that on G+:quote:Think of it this way.
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# ? Apr 16, 2015 08:21 |
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So Murder is "quick and quiet" and Mayhem is "loud and messy." I can live with that given that Mayhem has other applications as well (wrecking things, causing a ruckus) while Murder is strictly, well, Murder. It seems a little fuzzy around the edges but I suppose that's by intent.
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# ? Apr 16, 2015 08:55 |
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According to John, we're getting a new quickstart rule packet on (hopefully) Monday. It was supposed to be today, but turns out that he's doing a bigger system overhaul and more examples. Sweet!
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 14:07 |
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I wound up bumping up to the hacker tier because the one setting that seemed good for this that didn't show up as a stretch goal is modern urban fantasy. So I will probably work on it myself. Little bit Daniel Faust, little bit Skin Game, little bit Leverage with wizards, demon mob bosses, etc, etc.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 14:19 |
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A thing I'm not clear on is how spending Stress interacts with fail forward. Let's say a player fails a roll to sneak down a corridor and the fail forward effect is that a guard comes unexpectedly through a door and spots the player. The player doesn't want this to happen and spends some Stress to avoid the effect. If the effect is "a guard comes out of a door and spots you" preventing that effect defies fail forward in that the player failed and nothing interesting happened. If the effect is "the guard spots you" then even if they player spends the stress, there's still a guard in the corridor and their life is now harder, which seems like something Stress is supposed to prevent.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 14:36 |
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Doodmons posted:A thing I'm not clear on is how spending Stress interacts with fail forward. Let's say a player fails a roll to sneak down a corridor and the fail forward effect is that a guard comes unexpectedly through a door and spots the player. The player doesn't want this to happen and spends some Stress to avoid the effect. If the effect is "a guard comes out of a door and spots you" preventing that effect defies fail forward in that the player failed and nothing interesting happened. If the effect is "the guard spots you" then even if they player spends the stress, there's still a guard in the corridor and their life is now harder, which seems like something Stress is supposed to prevent. I think what's supposed to happen is that the player sees the guard coming, but the game freezes at just the moment before the player gets spotted. "The danger manifests" - the player sees the guard riiight about to come out, so you offer them a choice: he either gets spotted, or he scoots across the corridor anyway and avoids getting spotted, but he takes stress from exerting all that extra effort.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 16:45 |
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I've been reading a bunch of noir novels and watching the Bosch series and now I really want to run something like that in this system. Going to be tough deciding what to run first: Robbery-Homicide detectives in either Duskwall, Sharn or 50s LA, the cyberpunk hack, a Thief hack, or just straight up vanilla BitD.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 17:22 |
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50's LA with 50's sci fi tech. The players are hunted by Joe Friday and his partner Robbie the Robot.
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# ? Apr 17, 2015 18:41 |
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Really hoping the 70's italian mob setting can be easily reskinned to Boardwalk Empire. Also finding a way to run this type of game in Eberron
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# ? Apr 19, 2015 00:56 |
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Why didn't someone tell me we had a thread for this? This game is so cool it managed to get (most) of my old online group back together. We've played 3 sessions so far and while I'm not sure we're doing things quite right, I'm having a good time. 3 sessions in and my Hound has managed to kill 4 people and be indirectly responsible for the death of a fifth person. I'm a bit surprised at myself at how fast I'm starting to see killing someone as an efficient solution to a problem. At least I've only killed people who are murderous scum like myself (assuming Spirit Wardens count as murderous scum). Of course, that might be partially because I used the highwayman from Darkest Dungeon as a "my guy looks like this" reference. I've also caught myself musing every once in a while about how you'd adapt it to modern day criminals (ala GTA or Payday) and Shadowrun. Sure there are eventually going to be kickstarter stretch goal hacks for this stuff, but that is later! Galaga Galaxian fucked around with this message at 08:12 on Apr 19, 2015 |
# ? Apr 19, 2015 08:08 |
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unseenlibrarian posted:I wound up bumping up to the hacker tier because the one setting that seemed good for this that didn't show up as a stretch goal is modern urban fantasy. So I will probably work on it myself. Little bit Daniel Faust, little bit Skin Game, little bit Leverage with wizards, demon mob bosses, etc, etc. Throw in some Laundry Files. Computational demonology is always fun!
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# ? Apr 19, 2015 12:58 |
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Liquid Communism posted:Throw in some Laundry Files. Computational demonology is always fun! I would've murdered someone for a Max Gladstone playset instead of Steven Brust.
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# ? Apr 19, 2015 13:05 |
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Kai Tave posted:So Murder is "quick and quiet" and Mayhem is "loud and messy." I can live with that given that Mayhem has other applications as well (wrecking things, causing a ruckus) while Murder is strictly, well, Murder. It seems a little fuzzy around the edges but I suppose that's by intent. Murder is also the other "quick and quiet" option, which is to say the nonlethal takedown (at least as interpreted in our PBP, shoutouts to Gradenko). To go back to the Dishonored comparison, both the lethal and nonlethal stealth takedowns would use Murder, whereas swordfighting the guards is Mayhem.
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# ? Apr 22, 2015 06:53 |
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I've already got plans to run Shadowrun in this when it drops. Hopefully the setting hacks mesh well with each other.Plague of Hats posted:They're definitely "Teams" instead of "Crews." Ideas off the top of my head are: the Nine-to-Fivers (government agents), Outcasts (certain versions of X-Men), Fightin' Family (Fantastic Four) and Bickering Soap Operatives (Avengers, or really every team ever). Bad Weirdness Magnets (Doom Patrol) Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 11:09 on Apr 22, 2015 |
# ? Apr 22, 2015 11:06 |
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I was getting a serious Fallen London/Sunless Sea vibe from Blades in the Dark which turned out to be no coincidence at all.
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# ? Apr 22, 2015 12:15 |
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Foglet posted:I was getting a serious Fallen London/Sunless Sea vibe from Blades in the Dark which turned out to be no coincidence at all. Still incredibly mad this never happened.
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# ? Apr 22, 2015 12:25 |
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Group played our fourth session today. After gaining a fatigue/Vice level at the end of the third session, I went from 0 to 7 stress in this session one score thanks to us getting rather greedy. We pulled it off pretty well given the rolls we failed at first. I didn't even have to kill anyone this time.Lightning Lord posted:I've already got plans to run Shadowrun in this when it drops. Hopefully the setting hacks mesh well with each other. Shadowrun/Generic Cyberpunk is the hack(s) I'm most anticipating. As well as GTA/Payday/Heist-Movie style modern day stuff. I mean I love the "Industrial Fantasy" setting of Duskwall, but I know I can wrap my brain better around criminal activities in more familiar settings.
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# ? Apr 23, 2015 00:35 |
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It looks like from the G+ group we're gonna get the update QS tonight. I'm gonna start planning my own campaign after that. Any good tips for introducing people to the system from GMs that have already run a bit?
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# ? Apr 23, 2015 00:53 |
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John Harper posted:I've decided to go all in on a bigger batch of tweaks and additions, so the QS update has been delayed. Sorry about that! I'm working to get it ready as soon as I can. Time to keep waiting. Galaga Galaxian fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Apr 23, 2015 |
# ? Apr 23, 2015 21:08 |
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Time to keep waiting. I made the mistake of not backing so no QS rules for me. Those of you with the privilege of waiting for the update exist to me as Golden Gods with the world at your fingertips.
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# ? Apr 23, 2015 22:12 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 19:03 |
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Time to keep waiting. I'm okay with this. Hopefully he decides he's getting rid of the separate Effect roll too, he wasn't 100% sure last I'd heard.
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# ? Apr 23, 2015 22:56 |