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Finally got a game going again and a few things came up I'm not sure how to handle. How do you handle investigation rolls when trying to find the detail for planning a score. Last time I had a few players immediately fail their rolls, since I felt things were stalling, I said gently caress it, made a clock ticked it once for every failure and kept going. Once the clock was full I let the players decide on what a good detail was. Sadly I didn't see any examples of what a failed investigation roll should look like. The other thing is playbooks specific consumable items. Does a lurks silence potion get refreshed automatically after every score or does it need to be replaced or recreated like a player made item would be? Does anyone have any tips on how to play a spider other then always be flash backing? They seem like a very tricky character to play. I've been failing hard at introducing ways to use the ghost contract ability. The look on my players face when they snuck into a merchant's shop ready to trash some inventory and found a weird cult ritual going on instead was priceless.
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Sep 22, 2018 18:31
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Demon_Corsair posted:Finally got a game going again and a few things came up I'm not sure how to handle. Investigation should be Gather Information rolls, which can't fail. They just get less complete information on a lower roll. quote:The other thing is playbooks specific consumable items. Does a lurks silence potion get refreshed automatically after every score or does it need to be replaced or recreated like a player made item would be? Refreshed automatically unless there's a specific thing that it would be interesting to force them to repair/rebuy/hunt down, like a signature weapon. In general downtime is going to feel cramped enough without having to replace every little thing you use. quote:Does anyone have any tips on how to play a spider other then always be flash backing? They seem like a very tricky character to play. I've been failing hard at introducing ways to use the ghost contract ability. What's wrong with always flashbacking? :P
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Sep 22, 2018 18:42
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admanb posted:Investigation should be Gather Information rolls, which can't fail. They just get less complete information on a lower roll. Since I'm still struggling, what would you do if your players were trying to find a way to sneak into a building, and rolled a 1 looking for ways in? Nothing at all. ABF is the advice I've given so far.
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Sep 22, 2018 19:19
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Demon_Corsair posted:Since I'm still struggling, what would you do if your players were trying to find a way to sneak into a building, and rolled a 1 looking for ways in? "Place looks tight as a drum, nobody in, nobody out. Which makes no loving sense, people have to eat somehow. Maybe you'll have better luck leaning on their suppliers?" In other words, go make a roll somewhere else, possibly involving some element of risk other than just gathering information.
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Sep 22, 2018 19:31
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Demon_Corsair posted:Since I'm still struggling, what would you do if your players were trying to find a way to sneak into a building, and rolled a 1 looking for ways in? I'd give them the obvious entry points and maybe one that's a little sneakier but still not very good. Mechanically if they rolled that and still decided sneaking was going to be their approach, they would get the -1D engagement penalty for "Is the target strongest against this approach, or do they have particular defenses or special preparations." edit: Glazius' response is a lot better for handling the fiction, but still the same basic idea. quote:Nothing at all. ABF is the advice I've given so far. Good, good. The Spider is a little weird because unlike the other playbooks their XP triggers don't map to Actions (conspiracy can map to Consort, but it's less obvious) but the trade-off is that they can map to just about any action as long as it starts with, "ah hah, I planned for this exact eventuality."
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Sep 22, 2018 19:32
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Demon_Corsair posted:Since I'm still struggling, what would you do if your players were trying to find a way to sneak into a building, and rolled a 1 looking for ways in? I'd follow the guidance and move the situation up a danger level from casual to intense (or whatever they are called) as they find a way in but get spotted doing so.
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Sep 22, 2018 19:32
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Demon_Corsair posted:Since I'm still struggling, what would you do if your players were trying to find a way to sneak into a building, and rolled a 1 looking for ways in? If they rolled survey, looking for ways in, I'd probably say "it's clear to anyone paying attention in the area that you've been casing the joint looking for ways inside, and worse, you still haven't got a great idea about how to get in without being seen", and knock the heat from the score up by one. If you want them to fail forward, you can try giving them a consequence that leads to a way in ... If the party was bravos or had a player with a high skirmish who was feeling restless, maybe I'd have a little fight between someone who was guarding the place and saw them looking shady, off of whose body they can take a key to be used later. Or if there was a slide who was bored, maybe force them into a conversation with the guards who come over confrontationally, who they can charm or bribe into letting them in when the party comes back. That sorta thing.
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Sep 22, 2018 19:37
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Spider rules. I love having bribed just the right Guard ahead of time.
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Sep 23, 2018 01:36
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I guess I was looking at it the wrong way. I was trying to figure out how to speed up the part where the players got the plan detail to get into the score. Sounds like everyone else plays that out a bit longer.
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Sep 23, 2018 04:23
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Demon_Corsair posted:I guess I was looking at it the wrong way. I was trying to figure out how to speed up the part where the players got the plan detail to get into the score. Sounds like everyone else plays that out a bit longer. It's a stylistic choice. My players don't go wild with planning (if they did I would cut them off) but they do enjoy some legwork, so we use Gather Information to figure out how much and what they learn and they use that to choose their approach. If you want to skip all that you can kind of just do that -- make your very first rolls be action rolls with consequences that push them right into the poo poo and use flashbacks to figure out anything you missed.
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Sep 23, 2018 07:31
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Ran my session 0 today. It went well, the players really liked the world and character creation process and so did I. I’m still trying to figure out the rules and ran into a few situations I didn’t know how to handle, along with a more of a generic issue I’m still trying to work through regarding sandbox play. 1. How do burglars tools work? Do they just automatically succeed? A PC lock picked a door with a finesse roll. Not sure if that was the correct rule. 2. How does dust/poison/etc work? Like for example, the PCs had Drowning Powder and were talking about using it against some guards as a surprise attack. They didn’t end up doing it but I couldn’t find specific rules on how it worked or how PCs can use it. Now, for the sandbox question. This is more of a fundamental issue I’ve been struggling with with sandbox style sessions/campaigns. Do you pre-plan generic heists/NPCs/encounters and just pull them out of your grab-bag as the session goes on, or do you come up with all of that on the fly? If the players end up getting a score inside of a guard’s barracks, do you have guard’s barracks already mapped out with the number of guards in each room, alarms, etc, and then reveal that information through the outcomes of dice rolls? Or do you plan/create it as you go, room by room, as the players move along and make dice rolls? I tend to do the latter, but I don’t really know how else to do it. For example, this happened today. One of my PCs rolled a 6 on an Attune check to see if they could communicate with ghosts in a sewer that they were exploring. They also have Ghost Echoes because they are a Shadows crew. I had not planned or thought of including ghosts in the sewers before they tried this. Because they rolled a 6, I “created” a ghost door that would lead them to a back way through the sewers into the hiding place of the bandits they were looking for. If I hadn’t “created” this as a result of the dice roll, they would’ve found nothing, in which case it feels like the roll failed for them. I run into this issue with dice roll failures, as well. Like if they severely fail a Prowl check, I’ll sometimes “spawn” guards that surprise them that I hadn’t planned on. Or if they fail a Consort check in a desperate situation while running from the Bluecoats, they suddenly realize that everyone in the bar they are in is wearing symbols of their enemy faction and everyone starts reaching for their swords, even though when they walked into that bar I had no intention of it being an enemy faction hangout. Etc. Another example from Dungeon World: Our group was in the forest and kept repeatedly failing rolls. One player was strung up by a vine monster while Hill Giants were throwing boulders into the camp. One of the players tried to extinguish his burning robe (a bad attack fireball roll) in a nearby lake, but when he got into the water he failed another roll. I decided to “Reveal an Unwelcome Truth” move, and “spawned” a large predatory sea creature that was now surfacing and slowly moving towards them. My players laughed, because at this point it was obvious that they were just getting tons of stuff spawned on top of them as a result of their bad rolls. At the start of this session, I had only planned for the vine monster. Of course, I could’ve chosen to do other things than “spawn” more enemies, but the moves felt pretty appropriate for the fiction at the time, and I was weaving in other moves as well. I’m sure to the PCs it may feel like this is all pre-planned, but when I’m running it it feels very duct-taped together and incoherent. It also feels like there is no way to balance it. It is just snowballing. Is it just something I need to get comfortable with? Or am I doing it wrong? Should I be preplanning generic encounters/buildings/etc and just filling in the blanks as a result of the rolls?
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Oct 15, 2018 04:20
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Bazanga posted:Ran my session 0 today. It went well, the players really liked the world and character creation process and so did I. I’m still trying to figure out the rules and ran into a few situations I didn’t know how to handle, along with a more of a generic issue I’m still trying to work through regarding sandbox play. Most of the skills intentionally have some overlap and grey areas. If you are picking a lock with finesse, to me that means you are trying to crack a tumbler lock by feel. Where if you are using some lock picks or your burglar's tools, that's probably tinker, since its more gear oriented. For almost all of the gear, I just ask the players how it works. It is their gear after all. Once we have figured it out initially then its canon and away we go. Always ask your players. There is nothing more satisfying then seeing a failure on a desperate roll, saying "the worst possible outcome" and asking the table what they think happens. They will usually come up with sick and twisted stuff way worse then you were thinking, and since the table came up with it, the players are more likely to accept it. Bazanga posted:Now, for the sandbox question. This is more of a fundamental issue I’ve been struggling with with sandbox style sessions/campaigns. Do you pre-plan generic heists/NPCs/encounters and just pull them out of your grab-bag as the session goes on, or do you come up with all of that on the fly? If the players end up getting a score inside of a guard’s barracks, do you have guard’s barracks already mapped out with the number of guards in each room, alarms, etc, and then reveal that information through the outcomes of dice rolls? Or do you plan/create it as you go, room by room, as the players move along and make dice rolls? I tend to do the latter, but I don’t really know how else to do it. For NPC's and encounters I don't. I will just slap a random name on an NPC and let them develop from there. I'm lucky and my players take notes, so I can just ask them, who was that merchant by the docks who you burnt down a rivals shop for? And get all the details. It never hurts to ask your players how they know this person and for some details around them. So far for heists I will either come up with something, or if inspiration is lacking, I will use the random tables in the back and roll something that fits. The twists on that table add a lot more to a heist then I come up with myself a lot of the time. I'm real bad at maps and generally just sketch something out on the fly, but I have just backed this guy's patreon, so we will see how using nice pre-generated maps go. https://www.patreon.com/ryandunleavy/posts For things like guards and alarms at most I will throw down a clock or two before we start. Bluecoats is a always a good option. What I really struggle with is moving things along when the players role well. What I have been thinking about doing is just sitting down with those tables, watching some heist movies and generating a pile of index card sized heists. Just Client, Target, Work, Twist, and maybe faction and connection. Then throw down a couple clocks. There is also a twitter I cannot find right now which just generates scores every few hours based on those tables. There is also a FATE supplement called Crime World that I plan to steal some ideas from. It has the idea that the core of your score is contained in The Box. This box has FATE style aspects and skills, that I think would be perfect for clocks. The categories are Access which is anything that impedes your movement getting in or out. Eyes which is anything that could detect your presence. Last, there is Bolts which are anything that physically restrain you from leaving with that you came with like a vault. Now, these are all heavily geared towards breaking in and stealing something, but you could probably come up with one clock per category for almost any heist. Bazanga posted:For example, this happened today. One of my PCs rolled a 6 on an Attune check to see if they could communicate with ghosts in a sewer that they were exploring. They also have Ghost Echoes because they are a Shadows crew. I had not planned or thought of including ghosts in the sewers before they tried this. Because they rolled a 6, I “created” a ghost door that would lead them to a back way through the sewers into the hiding place of the bandits they were looking for. If I hadn’t “created” this as a result of the dice roll, they would’ve found nothing, in which case it feels like the roll failed for them. I run into this issue with dice roll failures, as well. Like if they severely fail a Prowl check, I’ll sometimes “spawn” guards that surprise them that I hadn’t planned on. Or if they fail a Consort check in a desperate situation while running from the Bluecoats, they suddenly realize that everyone in the bar they are in is wearing symbols of their enemy faction and everyone starts reaching for their swords, even though when they walked into that bar I had no intention of it being an enemy faction hangout. Etc. Remember, your players sheets are full of them telling you things they want to come up in the game. So if they picked Ghost echos, its a pretty safe bet that there probably should be some sort of supernatural aspect to any heist you come up with. I think those are great responses, especially the first and third one. Then you get to ask fun questions like, what is a ghost door, and what are the consequences of going through it. For "spawning guards" I like to use a clock and make it obvious as it fills up that there are people hearing things and preparing to respond. But if you want to hit them with a hard move, there is nothing wrong with going straight to them showing up. The balance is in how you use your moves. Soft moves for a prowl move are like announce future badness by ticking a clock and saying the players hear a guard in the other room say "did you hear something?" vs a hard move of guards busting in. I think part of it is that you just need to get more comfortable with rolling with it and improvising. And don't worry about it feeling incoherent, the human brain is great at tying unconnected events together so things like ghosts appearing or a rival faction suddenly showing up will be explained away in no time.
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Oct 15, 2018 05:38
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Good to know I’m not doing it totally wrong. I just picked up https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/duskwall-heist-deck and will definitely check out that Patreon because I’m also terrible at creating decent maps and layouts. My players are really digging into their character fantasy so I’ll study their sheets more to figure out what they want to see in a session and go from there. Thanks for the tips!
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Oct 15, 2018 17:51
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Got to play Band of Blades with Stras at Big Bad Con over the weekend. We finally have an actual Black Company RPG, and it is really good, I can't recommend it highly enough.
Kestral fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Oct 16, 2018 |
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Oct 15, 2018 18:37
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Has anyone already done all the work of hacking Scum & Villainy into Star Wars? I have the opportunity to introduce a couple newcomers to RPGs and one is a huuuuuge Star Wars fan. I know I will get a lot more buy-in if everything I hand her is Star Warsy. I'm thinking especially of the charts for coming up with missions on the fly, ship and sector names, the basic setting stuff baked into the book. I know I could do it myself, but if somebody else has . . . well, that saves me a lot of work.
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Dec 4, 2018 00:12
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All you have to do is change names, out of the box S&V works excellently for star wars
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Dec 4, 2018 03:32
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JesterOfAmerica posted:All you have to do is change names, out of the box S&V works excellently for star wars Yes. I am not enough of a Star Wars nerd to complete the charts and decide on ships and systems and factions without research. I don't want to spend that time if somebody has already done it. Like I said in the post you just replied to, "setting stuff." I know the game will work fine mechanically.
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Dec 4, 2018 03:36
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Serf did a Corporate Sector write-up for his Scum & Villainy game. We ended up just grabbing a random floorplan for our ship, a YT-1930. Your options are basically a tramp freighter, a bounty hunter ship, or a corvette, so it's pretty easy to just google one of the infinite ships on Wookiepedia.
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Dec 4, 2018 06:54
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My group did a Blades to Vibroblades hack while S&V was still in development. We mostly just changed the names on things: Breath mask, stimpack, etc. “Not to be trifled with” became “Wookiee Rage.” We never really worked out a starship combat system, so hopefully S&V has suggestions for that. We stuck with the Crew sheet instead of having the characters tied to a specific ship. We also agreed to ignore canon for the sake of gameplay, and I picked a star system with very little info of Wookieepedia. I’m proud of my Gotal prepper planet (they’re sensitive to EMF and were living with industrial age tech) that was also home to the prehistoric (on Earth) crocodiles that were anatomically closer to dogs and warthogs.
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Dec 4, 2018 15:45
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Could anyone recommend a podcast or other recorded playthrough of the base game? I'd like to get a feel for how it's meant to go before I try running it.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:32
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Dr Snofeld posted:Could anyone recommend a podcast or other recorded playthrough of the base game? I'd like to get a feel for how it's meant to go before I try running it. Friends at the Table played it for their Merielda arc. It got me into the game in a big way.
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Dec 4, 2018 20:14
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Friends at the Table played it for their Merielda arc. It got me into the game in a big way. Marielda is a good arc but it's an unusual example of Blades because they are so bad at it. There are two on YouTube run by John Harper: RollPlay: Blades, which is solid, and Bloodletters, which is great, but starts early in the development of the game so the rules don't coalesce until a few episodes in.
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Dec 4, 2018 20:25
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The Magpies is pretty entertaining thus far.
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Dec 4, 2018 23:42
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admanb posted:Marielda is a good arc but it's an unusual example of Blades because they are so bad at it. Seconding John Harper's games in a big way. Bloodletters is fantastic.
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Dec 5, 2018 05:00
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admanb posted:Marielda is a good arc but it's an unusual example of Blades because they are so bad at it. I'm curious how you mean? Or, do you mean how the players keep forgetting they have flashbacks and failing to come up with good engagement plans? Because, fair.
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Dec 5, 2018 22:20
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spectralent posted:I'm curious how you mean? That, yeah. It results in them very frequently taking actions that they have 0 or 1 in, and (unsurprisingly) failing. Couple that with Austin taking a pretty hardline approach to consequences in Blades (multiple consequences on risky rolls, in particular) them being bad at resisting, and also getting the resisting rule wrong (it's 6-1D6 stress not 1D6) and I've talked to people whose only experience with Blades is Marielda express that they don't like Blades because it's too brutal. It's ridiculous. Marielda was a good arc but if it's your only touchpoint for Blades you're gonna have a real weird view of it.
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Dec 5, 2018 22:39
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Kestral posted:Seconding John Harper's games in a big way. Bloodletters is fantastic. They also show two drastically different ways that Blades can be played. Bloodletters is very loosey-goosey, rarely uses clocks in missions, and the plot is based entirely on what the PCs want to do and how the world reacts to that. RollPlay: Blades is tighter, uses clocks for just about every mission, and has a laid out set of goals from nearly the beginning.
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Dec 5, 2018 22:44
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Marielda is a good podcast arc and a poor blades in the dark game. Storyline wise, it rules, but... Yeah.
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Dec 5, 2018 22:58
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2018 End of Year Updatequote:
So some interesting stuff coming in Q1 it sounds like. Still looking forward to it even if I'm not hype anymore. Oh and the Grifters supplement with crew and con jobs is out in the backer downloads! [edit] quote:City of Red Waters, by Ash McAllan - Draft coming out in our next update (#66). DemonMage fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Jan 1, 2019 |
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Jan 1, 2019 06:04
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RAW things like burglars tools are perfectly fine to use with finesse (if picking locks) or tinker (if messing with the lock mechanism) or with other skills, if say, bashing the door in with a crowbar or hammer. All tools do is increase effect—so using them either nets you great effect, or, if you are injured with a level 1 harm, normal effect
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Jan 1, 2019 22:39
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Has anyone used the BitD Heist Deck found here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/172348/Blades-in-the-Dark-Heist-Deck-Print-and-Play Or the printed version of it? On that note, any handy aides, setting guides or other things to help at the table or prep for improvising scores or stuff to help with running the game would be greatly appreciate. I'm on the google+ site, but trying to sort through the myriad of links and work out which things are actually useful is a pain.
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Jan 17, 2019 14:15
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Oh hey, nice to have an update on Broken Crown. There's a lot of potential in turning around the BitD setting to be about trying to topple a tyrannical Emperor, especially when there's probably some ambiguity about whether that would even improve things at all.
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Jan 17, 2019 17:11
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Harrow posted:Oh hey, nice to have an update on Broken Crown. There's a lot of potential in turning around the BitD setting to be about trying to topple a tyrannical Emperor, especially when there's probably some ambiguity about whether that would even improve things at all. you should check out The River crew in City of Red Waters
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Jan 17, 2019 17:38
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PST posted:Has anyone used the BitD Heist Deck found here: I think I'm going to pick it up myself. I'll post back and let y'all know how it goes. Loving Blades a lot but I'm not sure how creative I am with my obstacles and what not. The games I'm playing have a free RP to Score Gameplay ratio of 50:50 which is kinda interesting. I've been thinking about making a publicly editable google doc for here and Reddit's Blades forum for people to list obstacles or score ideas. Nothing too specific, just stuff like "Bluecoat & Spiritwarden checkpoint on bridge" or "Friendly talkitive Janitor trying to chat up lookout, distracting and drawing attention";
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Jan 22, 2019 19:03
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Wrr posted:I think I'm going to pick it up myself. I'll post back and let y'all know how it goes. Loving Blades a lot but I'm not sure how creative I am with my obstacles and what not. The games I'm playing have a free RP to Score Gameplay ratio of 50:50 which is kinda interesting. Cheers, shipping it to the UK makes it a bit pricy, though there is the pdf and print option. Have you seen the BitD twitter accounts @DoskvolNews and @doskvolscores Not obstacles but has some things you can use for inspiration https://twitter.com/doskvolscores/status/1087560493299101697 https://twitter.com/DoskvolNews/status/1087896067037908998
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Jan 23, 2019 18:31
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PST posted:Cheers, shipping it to the UK makes it a bit pricy, though there is the pdf and print option. This a pro click I'm saving for the day i have players for this game. 
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Jan 23, 2019 18:59
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Does anyone have any advice for spicing up social encounters? My two-player group of Hawkers (Spider, Leech) have zero sneakiness or fightiness so a lot of their scores (obtaining turf, hiring distributors, etc.) have been social. We've been building to a big score - a soiree at an art gallery thrown by Lord Strangford's bastard son - where they're going to try and lobby him for control of the docks drug trade. I don't want it to boil down to "we find him, we talk to him, we convince him" but aside from having reps from other gangs there trying to muscle in on the job, I'm a bit lost as to how to make it more complicated/layered/etc. Lots of ideas for cool characters and setpieces within the venue, but I'm not sure how to go from that to interesting social obstacles.
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Jan 24, 2019 04:23
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BinaryDoubts posted:Does anyone have any advice for spicing up social encounters? My two-player group of Hawkers (Spider, Leech) have zero sneakiness or fightiness so a lot of their scores (obtaining turf, hiring distributors, etc.) have been social. We've been building to a big score - a soiree at an art gallery thrown by Lord Strangford's bastard son - where they're going to try and lobby him for control of the docks drug trade. I don't want it to boil down to "we find him, we talk to him, we convince him" but aside from having reps from other gangs there trying to muscle in on the job, I'm a bit lost as to how to make it more complicated/layered/etc. Lots of ideas for cool characters and setpieces within the venue, but I'm not sure how to go from that to interesting social obstacles. His real political agenda is hidden behind a smoke-screen, players must discern his real motives before they can have a chance of getting him to bless their control of the docks. Another possibility - someone else is lobbying him that very night, and they have a very compelling case. Or perhaps in the negotiations he tries to set up the PCs as disposable fall-guys for something, and players must cannily navigate around his bullshit to avoid getting pinned. If they're any good at the supernatural they might also discover he's possessed or otherwise influenced by some dark power and essentially hold him hostage for his own body, and the thing running his body has other plans for the docks.
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Jan 24, 2019 04:59
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:His real political agenda is hidden behind a smoke-screen, players must discern his real motives before they can have a chance of getting him to bless their control of the docks. Another possibility - someone else is lobbying him that very night, and they have a very compelling case. Or perhaps in the negotiations he tries to set up the PCs as disposable fall-guys for something, and players must cannily navigate around his bullshit to avoid getting pinned. If they're any good at the supernatural they might also discover he's possessed or otherwise influenced by some dark power and essentially hold him hostage for his own body, and the thing running his body has other plans for the docks. These are all fantastic. Thank you!
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Jan 24, 2019 06:28
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If you really wanna pull out all the stops, blend one into another. There's nothing quite as fun as your characters thinking they know what's going on in a complicated situation and just pulling the rug out from under them.
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Jan 24, 2019 08:43
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