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DarkAvenger211 posted:This sounds pretty funny, but I kid you not that's basically what was being argued at the (virtual) table. I mean everyone seemed to be all for it so it mostly comes down on me to say no, which kind of feels unfair to them if this is the kind of game they want to play. It's not like we talked in detail about this before the game started since we're all kind of learning as we go. a cool idea in this circumstance is for the player to act solely through flashbacks and actions he can do from a bed. But you probably need to be the Spider for that. When daydreaming I thought it'd be pretty cool to be a Spider in an Assassins crew, go to jail to drop down the heat, then frame your target for a crime (using flashback actions and assists while the rest of the crew does the needful) and kill him when he's in Ironhook.
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May 7, 2020 11:21
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So I ran most of a "session 0" with my group today, going over crew creation and playbook selection with working out the details of the characters to be done over email before the first session proper. They're savvy smugglers, specializing in "Arcane/Weird" cargo, operating out of (and with hunting grounds in) Nightmarket. Now if I'm understanding this right, I straight up tell them which faction they got their hunting grounds from and then give them a choice between two factions (piss off / befriend) for both the upgrades and the favorite contact, yeah? I guess my question is: what kind of factions do people like to use for this? Like, there's no canonical "this faction's in control of Nightmarket" in the game - the three factions involved in the War in Crow's Foot are the exception that proves the rule, yeah? Should I aim for factions of roughly that tier (2) or could I just pick whatever strikes my fancy? Should I just use those factions, since I'll probably start them off with the War in Crow's Foot? Or idk, transpose those factions so their based out of Nightmarket instead? Should I overlap choices, so they can really gently caress over or really befriend a faction - or should I try and make it so they can't start at more than +/- 2 with any one faction before the game starts? What do you guys consider best practices for this?
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May 8, 2020 02:12
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dex_sda posted:a cool idea in this circumstance is for the player to act solely through flashbacks and actions he can do from a bed. But you probably need to be the Spider for that. When daydreaming I thought it'd be pretty cool to be a Spider in an Assassins crew, go to jail to drop down the heat, then frame your target for a crime (using flashback actions and assists while the rest of the crew does the needful) and kill him when he's in Ironhook. That's a goddamn brilliant idea!
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May 8, 2020 16:04
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Hey y'all, so my Copperhead County crew have finally been fingered as the crew that've been burning down neo-confed establishments and generally being a bunch of upstanding criminals. Basically at this point there's no reason the neo-confeds _wouldn't_ be out for murder. But I've not GM'd this far yet, so I'm interested to hear how others have handled their crews being at war.
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May 12, 2020 13:50
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Digital Osmosis posted:So I ran most of a "session 0" with my group today, going over crew creation and playbook selection with working out the details of the characters to be done over email before the first session proper. They're savvy smugglers, specializing in "Arcane/Weird" cargo, operating out of (and with hunting grounds in) Nightmarket. Now if I'm understanding this right, I straight up tell them which faction they got their hunting grounds from and then give them a choice between two factions (piss off / befriend) for both the upgrades and the favorite contact, yeah? You can do any of these, but War in Crow's Foot is designed to be good for newbie GMs. I would actually transpose the factions. Don't worry about putting them into war the first session (which +/-3 would do). Just let them pick a side and be adversarial with the negative faction(s) and helpful with the positive ones. Once they know how downtime works (and so do you!), they'll quickly go to gently caress up one of those factions, possibly all.
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May 19, 2020 17:26
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Cassa posted:Hey y'all, so my Copperhead County crew have finally been fingered as the crew that've been burning down neo-confed establishments and generally being a bunch of upstanding criminals. Basically at this point there's no reason the neo-confeds _wouldn't_ be out for murder. But I've not GM'd this far yet, so I'm interested to hear how others have handled their crews being at war. Start strong. Don't be afraid to, say, bomb one of their holdings or maim one of their allies. The enemies being brazen assholes in some ways is also good. Use the leader description blurbs. The players will do the rest For instance, if the leader is calculating, I might (to give an appearance of a master planner) give the leader one flashback. Shouldn't be something that fucks over the players too much during the score, but enough that he gets away and maybe messes up their plans a bit. Now they're annoyed, and they know the stakes. Or if the leader is brutal, he completely wrecks a cohort, sending back just one with grave injuries who he forced to watch the torture of others. Something so that they aren't just a clock to fill up when it gets down to it. dex_sda fucked around with this message at 17:31 on May 19, 2020 |
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May 19, 2020 17:28
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War is hilariously bad for crews. Losing the downtime action will drive your more strategic players bonkers (unless they have the Copperhead Count equivalent to the Cutter perk that ignores that.) From a MC'ing perspective, war is spectacular. You've got carte blanche to make any complication being "a van full of dudes with guns rolls up outside" and like dex says, you've got permission (due to the war being a meta-consequence of their own making) to start loving with their crew-NPCs, their turf, and their resources. The goal isn't to make your players suffer, but instead to make the characters suffer so they look even cooler if they survive. If your players are anything like mine, they'll take little more personally then enemies blowing up their home base, ruining their rep, etc... and revenge is sweet indeed. Plan for ways to end the war that don't involve "just" a score. A big ole' clock, Faustian bargains with more powerful factions, etc. Show them that there's a way out and make them pay through the nose. Also, if there's any tier difference between the skinhead goons and the player crew, lean on that HARD.
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May 19, 2020 18:30
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There's now a page listing the KS stretch goals and supplements that have gotten a public release: https://bladesinthedark.com/blades-supplements
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May 20, 2020 23:24
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Had my first session today! Went pretty well, although they hadn't picked faction rep from crew creation so my prep work was kinda limited, since I wasn't sure which of the various factions in my war they'd be inclined to side with. We're running it as a conflicted between the Reconciled and the Dimmer Sisters, and I was pleased af that they immediately sided with the Reconciled and opted to double down, making them +2/-2 with the two of them. The third party are the Railjacks, who've begun dropping some spirit essences off the backs of the trains / under-reporting the spirits they capture in hopes of building some revenue and pushing to unionize. Anyway, I sort of have a positioning question: does positioning tend to "stick?" They went into the score with a fairly run of the mill engagement plan and rolled a one on their single engagement die. The first action they took was thus desperate, and they botched that too - but my player soaked the harm I was going to cause him as a consequence with a resistance roll. After that it seemed like most of their actions should have been risky based on the fiction -- but should I have kept the desperate status going until they succeeded on something? Alternately, should I have just kept piling on fictional complications to keep the situation desperate? I did decently well on other fronts, asking a lot of questions and getting good material from the players. My favorite was when I was describing the Reconciled I was describing how possession usually works, because they're better at it. A player asked me if a ghost that had been possessing someone doesn't kill them, would there still be permanent side effects from the possession? I asked it back to him, we all kind of agreed that there probably would be something, at the very least some serious psychological trauma. We immediately decided to call it "ghost traumatic stress disorder." I'm proud of how dumb that was. I'm also amused that the score ended up being "smuggle ghosts for some ghosts."
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May 22, 2020 03:41
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Digital Osmosis posted:Had my first session today! Went pretty well, although they hadn't picked faction rep from crew creation so my prep work was kinda limited, since I wasn't sure which of the various factions in my war they'd be inclined to side with. We're running it as a conflicted between the Reconciled and the Dimmer Sisters, and I was pleased af that they immediately sided with the Reconciled and opted to double down, making them +2/-2 with the two of them. The third party are the Railjacks, who've begun dropping some spirit essences off the backs of the trains / under-reporting the spirits they capture in hopes of building some revenue and pushing to unionize. Yeah tend to stick with a position and pile on consequences until they manage to convincingly change the situation. Remind them too, that they can trade position for effect and vice versa. There's a bunch of ways to mitigate and resist consequences so don't feel too bad wrecking them if they roll a 1 on engagement. Your pacing decisions should be more long term. Only letting up if they get stuck in a rut across a number of scores and they can't dig themselves out. Then you can do fun stuff like have someone offer them a way out of the rut that comes with very ominous but unspecified strings attached. Point them to one of the smuggler crew special abilities 'Ghost Passage' if they're interested in continuing the smuggling of ghosts without GTSD. WhiskeyWhiskers fucked around with this message at 04:53 on May 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 04:50
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Hmm, yeah, makes sense. I thought it felt a little cheap / easy that they could resist their way out of the desperate situation, and I usually err on the side of being too kind to my PCs. If I'm in that situation again I'll up the threat in the fiction -- there's no reason the Dimmer Sister's couldn't have brought a ton of backup or whatever. I kind of forgot that if the players can control some of the narrative / use flashbacks that I can too. More desperate rolls would naturally follow then. On the other hand we spent a while getting used to Roll20, introducing the characters, deciding on faction statuses and the like so maybe a shorter and easier introductory mission worked well, we would have been running out of gas. Well, there's always next time (until, as is inevitable, the game suddenly falls apart.) I used the "Ghost Passage" ability to justify that possession probably DOES have some kind of long-term effect, since there wouldn't be an ability mitigating that if there wasn't. Still I left it to my players -- I guess I'd refocus Ghost Passage should that have come up and they decided there wasn't GTSD. Kind of similarly, one of my players jokingly asked if ghosts were magnetic... except we know they're kind of electric, so... yeah, maybe? Can't wait for my leech to invent a ghost magnet.
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May 22, 2020 05:45
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Well, ghosts are electric, so obviously they become magnetic when they move. So a ghost magnet would apply a force to moving ghosts, but not stationary ones. (Although, counterpoint: "don't expect scientific realism here" is literally in the rules.)
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May 30, 2020 22:40
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Yeah hahahaha that's true. This isn't one of those games where you can turn an immovable rod into a superweapon if you know enough physics. Overall I'm really pleased with how the game's balance of setting works - last session on of my players asked me what the ghost field was, specifically, and I basically was like "well you already know the gist... and the rest we haven't found out yet" and that completely satisfied him. He knows enough to know that his Ghost Oil is rare and powerful, if more comes up we'll figure it out in play and move on from there. Any advice for running more traditional fight scenes in this system? We ended play with an engagement roll that resulted in a risky position, my players basically made it inside a warehouse they're trying to seize, loaded down for a battle. They asked me about the enemy forces and I gave them a rough idea - basically what I had prepared, no more or no less because risky positioning is kinda the standard. I wrote up the warehouse's overseer as a usual NPC, added "two acolytes" and a few hulls and bound spirits (they're hitting the Dimmer Sisters.) I'm not entirely confident in my ability to pace fights in this system. I've run D&D and most recently Dungeon World, where fights are a long drawn out thing with HP, and I've run other Powered by the Apocalypse games where fights are usually like a single die roll, but feel like in Blades there's a middle ground I'm not sure about. I assume it's something like "make a couple of clocks for each group of enemies?" And similarly, do I give the enemies clocks of their own or do I just do harm as established by fiction / my player's rolls? Or maybe both? Any suggestions would be appreciated -- I'm getting more and more into the Blades GMing headspace but I'm not sure I know how to make a straight up fight fun, challenging, and well paced yet.
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May 31, 2020 18:58
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I have been interested in Blades in the Dark for a while so decided to pick it up during the outrageously cheap bundle. I plan on reading through the book over the weekend but I was wondering if there were any particularly good play through videos or podcasts I could check out to provide some context to things. Also, are there any effective ways to play through Discord or whatever? I've only ever played a couple of one shot sessions of pretty basic TTRPGs and I've never tried to GM but whilst I have some time I figure this as good as an opportunity as I'm going to get.
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Jun 10, 2020 23:10
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Redundant posted:I have been interested in Blades in the Dark for a while so decided to pick it up during the outrageously cheap bundle. I plan on reading through the book over the weekend but I was wondering if there were any particularly good play through videos or podcasts I could check out to provide some context to things. Also, are there any effective ways to play through Discord or whatever? I can't recommend any videos to you, I haven't seen any but in my brief stint running BitD for some folks, Roll20 actually has pretty drat good support for the game with some solid character sheets for individual characters, the crew, and the city. The game, from my experience, is a bit difficult to run, especially if your players don't have significant buy-in because it's a really narrative-based game. I struggled running it, but I'm extremely bad at improv, so you might do a lot better. Outside of the basic action resolution rules a lot of the rest of it is the kind of poo poo you can just wing and learn how to do it better as you go, so that might work really well for you.
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Jun 10, 2020 23:28
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Redundant posted:I have been interested in Blades in the Dark for a while so decided to pick it up during the outrageously cheap bundle. I plan on reading through the book over the weekend but I was wondering if there were any particularly good play through videos or podcasts I could check out to provide some context to things. Also, are there any effective ways to play through Discord or whatever? Roll20's basic Blades plugins are outrageously useful: https://bladesinthedark.com/playing-roll20 It's not perfect but I enjoy the Friends at the Table actual plays that use Blades and Blades hacks. The one they ran using actual Blades in the Dark is probably the worst to listen to for gameplay stuff and while the setting isn't far off from Blades' setting it's their own thing. Their season "Twilight Mirage" is split in half and the second half uses "Scum and Villainy" which is Blades in the Star Wars. Their new season, Partizan, uses Beam Saber which is Blades in the Gundam. All are close enough to Blades that whole classes/playbooks should be recognizable and all should get you a decent sense of how to play. The storyteller isn't 100% bought into the ideology of Blades though, IMO - small thing but for example he way to often says "give me a prowl roll" instead of "what action do you want to use for that?" and then maybe adding "sounds like prowl?" if the player has nothing to add, but it still shows a good amount of the gameplay and the players are extremely committed to telling good and challenging stories with their PCs. Blades in the Dark has a GM paradigm very much in an Apocalypse World vein. Some people find that easier than your usual D&D style, some people find it harder. What it means, more or less, is that as a GM you're responsible for coming up with interesting conflicts and then thinking on your feet, trying to make the insane poo poo your players come up with cool, fun, and challenging. Compare this to your typical D&D GMing where you are either trying to challenge your players at the combat game or running them through a story you've written up. GMing Blades means more thinking on your feet, more rolling with the punches -- but it also means a fair bit less preparation, less being annoyed when players don't do things "the way they're supposed to," and more fun when you, along with the players, also get to "play to find out what happens." I love this style of GMing to death and wouldn't go back to the old-school style for the world but some people have a lot more fun or feel a lot more secure with sixty pages of typed notes covering every possible scenario in front of them. Blades itself gives very good advice for getting into this mindset (although I'd love if there were a bit more) but the thing that really got me to click with this style of running a game was Apocalypse World 2nd edition's GMing advice. Basically if you can get behind the idea of GMing as directing chaos and improvising a cool story with your friends, and you're okay-ish with improvising or committing to dope poo poo as it comes up in play, I honestly think Blades is a pretty good place to start. One small thing I like is that Blades is explicit that as a GM it's okay to change your mind or re-do something. Tonight I had a combat challenge for my crew. Towards the end of the session there were still a few rolls technically needed for my players to mop up some angry ghosts -- but it felt like the drama was gone and rolling through that final clock (like, a marker of how long it takes to complete a task) would be a little boring, so I just hand-waved them away. Had I a lot more experience with the system maybe I wouldn't have put that clock there in the first place... but no one minded, or thought less of my abilities. It made sense in the fiction that they would inevitably have dealt with those ghosts, so I just cut to them having dealt with those ghosts. And to be completely honest - most people don't feel comfortable GMing. Mediocre GMing that's not creepy/off-putting is sadly rare and totally worth celebrating. Your players will want to buy into your games because why would you spend three hours a week rolling dice otherwise? Starting with the basics of Blades and adding more and more systems, starting with simple ideas and slowly building the world and characters, starting with vague descriptors and later adding cool flavor - it's all not only okay, it's probably way better for everyone involved than not having a time to chat with friends and gently caress around and tell cool steampunk heist stories. Digital Osmosis fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Jun 11, 2020 |
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Jun 11, 2020 05:13
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How easy you and your group pick up Blades is somewhat influenced by your gaming background. If you and your players have been immersed in the D&D style clear delineation between GM and player where the GM has storytelling power and the players have limited reactive agency, then yes it can be a bit of a shakey transition at first. But I have had plenty of success with introducing the system to roleplaying neophytes who bring no baggage at all, and also to players with a D&D background who were willing to engage in sharing narrative power (and found it refreshing and exciting compared to D&D). So I think it's a generalisation to say Blades is a more difficult system to understand or learn/teach. In many ways, the structure of Blades is more intuitive than 'traditional' roleplaying - the Apocalypse World 'conversation' approach that heavily inspired Blades is not that different from playing with dolls or army men with your friends as a kid really. One thing Blades absolutely demands is for the players to engage in the story. You can't really get away with playing it in a 'roll my dice when told to and ask the GM what happens' way you can in some games. It is brilliant for players who enjoy taking more agency in the game but can be draining for people who enjoy handing that responsibility off to someone else and not have to think too hard when gaming. If the mechanics do seem a bit intimating then Blades is really well designed in a modular way. The only essential mechanic is matching up the move name with what you are trying to achieve in the fiction, the dots each character has showing them how many dice they roll for each action and the 1-3 failure, 4-5 partial and 6 full success results. Everything else (position and effect, push for extra die, assisting a teammate, devil's bargains, flashbacks, resistance, special abilities, group actions, tier quality, potency, trading position for effect....) can be brought in at a pace everyone feels comfortable with. In my experience groups will pick up on pushing for extra die, assisting another player and using their special abilities very quickly during the first session. Resisting effects, asking for devil's bargains and flashbacks need a bit of reminding for the first two to three sessions before they internalise. More abstract influences on position and effect such as scale, potency, quality, tier and the like I find even experienced Blades players rarely consider unless explicitly pointed out by the GM. All that boils down to: For the first session if people are feeling a bit intimidated after looking over the playbooks and having the rules explained then just make every roll risky/standard, let the players know they can assist each other and/or take stress for an extra die and then just run with that. If you're having fun you can introduce everything else later. tanglewood1420 fucked around with this message at 12:46 on Jun 11, 2020 |
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Jun 11, 2020 12:42
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Digital Osmosis posted:Any advice for running more traditional fight scenes in this system? We ended play with an engagement roll that resulted in a risky position, my players basically made it inside a warehouse they're trying to seize, loaded down for a battle. They asked me about the enemy forces and I gave them a rough idea - basically what I had prepared, no more or no less because risky positioning is kinda the standard. I wrote up the warehouse's overseer as a usual NPC, added "two acolytes" and a few hulls and bound spirits (they're hitting the Dimmer Sisters.) I'm not entirely confident in my ability to pace fights in this system. I've run D&D and most recently Dungeon World, where fights are a long drawn out thing with HP, and I've run other Powered by the Apocalypse games where fights are usually like a single die roll, but feel like in Blades there's a middle ground I'm not sure about. I assume it's something like "make a couple of clocks for each group of enemies?" And similarly, do I give the enemies clocks of their own or do I just do harm as established by fiction / my player's rolls? Or maybe both? Any suggestions would be appreciated -- I'm getting more and more into the Blades GMing headspace but I'm not sure I know how to make a straight up fight fun, challenging, and well paced yet. I know this is a little while back, but I'm getting near the end of my Band of Blades campaign now and we've had lots of instances to run some fight scenes with the undead. Typically I plan for certain types of enemies and how they might interact in a given scene or situation. Though I stopped coming up with hard numbers on how many of them there are. It's taken a bit of time to come up with enemy scales that seem possible to beat, but aren't complete pushovers either. So the situation really depends on the number of players who are going to be fighting, and whether or not fighting is their only option for me. With the undead being a limitless enemy, I'll have too many to handle in areas where I want to see the players come up with ways around it other than fighting. But if I want fighting to be an option I might scale it back and imply that there may be more nearby, but you have a chance to break through now kind of thing. It is a squad of soldiers, some fighting is to be expected. As for mechanically how the fight works for us normally, If they're up against large numbers of threat 1 enemies, I have each level of effect reduce the scale of the enemies by the same amount. So if there are 6 - 10 (scale 3) threat 1 rotters, they'd need greater effect to wipe them all out in one roll, if they only make it standard effect, then they reduce their numbers down to scale 1. For threat 2 or above enemies I usually end up making a clock as they should be treated as a more significant threat and should take more effort to deal with. This is just how I've been running things after we've done about 10 sessions by now. I'm fairly new to this system but I've taken the advice of this thread and it's helped quite a bit. Now that we're near the end of the campaign most of the player characters have a ton of abilities and skill points so there's always so many dice being rolled. I'm noticing that 6's are a much more common result so they've been able to push through very tough encounters just by constantly rolling 6's. It's interesting because as the campaign nears the end, I'm constantly adding more and more undead to increase the danger and possible consequences. But while there is much more danger involved, they're much less likely to suffer any consequences due to being able to throw down much more dice. It makes those dramatic moments much more tense, and feel that much greater when a 6 gets rolled
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Jun 11, 2020 16:31
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Redundant posted:I have been interested in Blades in the Dark for a while so decided to pick it up during the outrageously cheap bundle. I plan on reading through the book over the weekend but I was wondering if there were any particularly good play through videos or podcasts I could check out to provide some context to things. Also, are there any effective ways to play through Discord or whatever? The creator of the game ran a decent little youtube game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsmw4wC7iOE Unfortunately features the recently outed sex-pest Adam Koebel, but otherwise is a good look.
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Jun 11, 2020 18:17
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Thank you all for the great tips, links and general encouragement. I have my group of 4 scoundrels willing to join up which I honestly thought would be the toughest part so I'm rolling 6's already.
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Jun 14, 2020 23:12
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Sorry for the double post but I have some more potentially silly questions. 1) How much prep do people do before/between sessions? I'm going to start with the book's suggestion of the war in Crows Feet so my plan is to prep a few NPCs, places and maybe a set piece or two. Given the focus on player agency/improvisation and that I don't know which kind of crew my players will choose I don't want to go into too much detail that won't be used or that leads me to try and railroad things but I figure some broad strokes will be useful. 2) Speaking of not knowing what my players will decide to do, how much player prep is needed before the first session? Can they just show up mostly empty handed on the first night and see how it goes or should I try to sort out which playbook and crew type they'd like? I'm hoping we can have our first session in a couple of weeks so I'm sure I will have more questions before then. I'm really looking forward to being a sneaky thief and seeing how it all plays out.
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Jun 17, 2020 12:48
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Redundant posted:Sorry for the double post but I have some more potentially silly questions. I'm about 4-5 sessions into my first game and don't have any real GM experience. I'm going to answer your second question first, though. You can absolutely show up for session 0 empty handed for the first part. Obviously you, as the GM, should have a passing familiarity with the rules and playbooks and crew types, but an intimate familiarity isn't really necessary. I knew my players weren't going to read the book, so I took an little extra time to make sure I was fully familiar with the flow of the game and how to explain the rules and what I was going to do to slowly introduce concepts about flashbacks and resistances and all the fun stuff that is in the system. I think there's a danger to preemptively having people do character generation, especially because it's such a collaboratively focused game. I did it and ended up with two characters who share a lot of archetypes and inspirations (they both happen to be weird old men who deal in curiosities and baubles). For every character we did, I basically just walked my players through the book, step-by-step, which I think is the easiest way to do it, hopefully it gets your players' creative juices flowing. The one thing I really wish I had made clearer to my players was how XP works -- make them read the little box on the sheets about how using your background or heritage will earn you XP. There's a playerkit on the here that the most essential stuff (dice rolling rules, character creation & sheets, standard items, vice purveyors, maps, factions, crew sheets & creation). Give this to your players. My prep is pretty in-depth, but I think I might be an outlier here. I really like thinking about how factions interact and how a city will react to things happening off-screen and this is where I find a lot of fun. I've sort of devised my own single player city-level stories that just will make the world feel lived in for my players. Here's what my prep and game management stuff generally looks like (or...what I wish I did and didn't forget to do most of the time) -- during game I will take notes on what characters are doing, what new lore we have generated about Doskvol, and what my players are suggesting as things they want to do for example - I happen to know that 3 of them really want to get into some horror/weird stuff based on various player-level discussions they have at the table while things are ongoing. When I sit down to do prep, the first thing I do is read all of those notes and put that information into a notebook organized with various tabs -- I have players, city, factions and scores as my big headings. This is all just mostly information for me to have to make decisions about what consequences that player actions have on the world. From there I like to work out from what the players have done and who they've managed to piss off in the last week -- I deal with all of their consequences (that are a little more removed from the first steps of downtime, which I do with them and talk about with them) and how that ripples through society, so I will adjust clocks and faction relations and put little writeups in my faction pages about why so-and-so is mad at the gang or why they want to work with the gang again. I like to, at the very least, think about what their new friend, Zara Templeton, does in her days off because they really seem attached to her and even just knowing that about her is going to make her feel that much more real and alive. Then I kind of work my way outwards from the crew -- friends of friends of factions and out from there. From there I tick clocks in the same way -- outward from the central story that my players are telling. I think about the permanent consequences and changes to the city that are happening and so on and so forth. I don't do a lot of job-specific prep. I think mostly about who they're going to be interacting with and what the area their job is going to be in. I kind of visualize it as a Deus Ex level or something. There's always more than one way (in my mind when I'm doing prep) to get the job done and hell, what I come up with probably isn't going to be what my players a) want to do and b) end up doing because they rolled a 1 on Engagement and somehow need to start off in a desperate position. Your players are ostensibly your friends. It's fine to tell them you're going to try not doing a lot of prep and to just trust you. I think to actually answer your specific question -- broad strokes are the way to go here. Know what Bazso Baz wants them to go after (the book gives you suggestions for each crew type getting a job, so that's a bit of prep you don't have to do). Also you should prep more names than you need because it sucks to be like "oh poo poo I'm out of names and everyone should have a name and hang on I'm pulling up the name generator uhhhhhhhhhhhh do you guys like 'Slorp Tinglefoot? No? Let me find another good one" for 5 minutes. Then you also don't end up in a situation where you're trying to save the name Leftenant Crouton Gimmick because it was the last name you had on your list but the big, bald definitely-not-Irish barkeep is not gonna be named Crouton loving Gimmick.
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Jun 17, 2020 14:42
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I do a bit too little prep but if you're confident in your ability to improvise, or your player's tolerance for hearing you say "uh hold on a sec" or "hmm actually, wait, that's not right" you can go in with almost no prep at all. Having said that, prep helps, especially for the kind of "thinking off-camera" about factions and NPCs the players have taken an interest in. That kind of thing makes the city feel living and surprising and real, and it kind of works like verisimilitude does in writing: keeping every faction and NPC's wants and needs and moves in your head and having them all "take turns" is insane and useless, but if you throw your crew a couple of rumors or headlines, or a couple of situations the PCs might want to intervene in, every session it will build an intense feeling of reality and reactivity. One of the core ideas of Blades is that every act pisses someone off, that nothing is free, that Duskwall is old and every loving inch of it is claimed by someone. This is a really fun idea to convey to the PCs, because it's super motivating for action and works kind of as guidelines for how the underworld works and therefore how their crew works in it. My players seem to be trending towards dope, flashy scores - kinda an action comedy vibe, like a lot of RPGs have, so this provides cool antagonists and raises the stakes. The same idea in a crew interested in serious character work and moody noir stories could make a mood of (fun) despair and hopelessness. Either way it's a surprisingly useful tool. So yeah, always be thinking of a couple of people who might be pissed off, or making moves, on your crew's allies. For the jobs themselves I usually have like, half a page of notes in bullet point format, and I've had two of these set up for each job previously so the players could have a choice (and it's not like I can't re-use them later.) I usually think of what someone wants, why they want it, where it is, who doesn't want them to get it, how those people would stop the crew from getting it. My crew are smugglers and I want to include travel in most heists so I always start with a district of the city, then imagine a general place/building/vibe where the macguffin is or where they have to go to do the thing, then look at opposing forces. For enemies/rivals/NPCs who stand in their way I honestly make only two or three of them. I generally use the charts at the back of the book (which are INCREDIBLY useful, on my first mission I somehow forgot to prep almost entirely for what would happen after the initial action scene and was able to roll an NPC together, in front of my players, who they really took to) to make these guys. A physical descriptor or two, three personality adjectives, maybe a quirk/hobby. These are for major players only, the captain-of-the-guard types, although I usually have some names for NPCs who hew closer to mook status. For the physical location I sometimes roll on the location detail list, sometimes imagine a vague status from the rival faction or location ("haunted af" when they're going after the Dimmer Sisters, "orderly patrols" in a noble's manor house, etc.) and don't do much beyond that. My players are going to come and blow it all up with their insane ideas anyway, so I don't personally try and build routes of attack in my head first. This might be in part because my player's smuggler vehicle is a train car - basically whenever they ask if there can be tracks to a place, and it ever sort of makes sense, I go "sure, why not?" It also might be because I don't have the strongest visual imagination too... but it usually works. Once the crew gets on ground I take down things that we've all decided and stick with it but I don't rigorously plan out the physical area the score's going to be in beforehand. Digital Osmosis fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 06:11
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Has anybody written up a guide to hacking Blades? Other than just reskinning playbooks, what happens when you pull on threads.
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Jun 18, 2020 16:07
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My players Kobayashi Maru-ed me tonight. The set up was that they were a smuggler crew whose bread and butter was smuggling spirit essence from the Rail Jacks, who were trying to unionize, to the Reconciled. This pissed off the Dimmer Sisters, who had previously been inches away from cornering Duskwall's spirit essence trade. My player's crew and the Dimmer Sisters were at open war while the Reconciled and Dimmer Sisters were sorta having a cold war -- my PC's crew were basically the Reconciled's proxy force. Anyway I set up a tough choice for the session tonight. Their contact with the Reconciled drops by and offers them a job - they can seize a sick claim off the Dimmer Sisters, a cover operation, which would deny the Sister's an operating base in my PC's neighborhood (Nightmarket.) Thing is, the Reconciled's spy just got burned, so the Dimmer Sister's know and will be moving the artifacts the PCs would need to get a hold of by the end of the night. The artifacts are in two places, one kept in a safe on the premise of the cover operation (a tea shop) and the other on a Dimmer Sister who works out of Tangletown off the shore of Crow's foot. Then, as my players were gathering information, I had the Rail Jack's (proto) union leader come in furious. Turns out one of my player's rivals had been grabbed by the Bluecoats during entanglement last downtime and feed them enough info on my PC's crew to generate some heat. But he was so pissed off afterwards that he'd been stalking the crew and while he didn't have their HQ found out he did suss out the Rail Jack's role in things and then promptly told it to the Bluecoats. So the Bluecoats, always happy to bust a union, are gearing up for a raid on the Rail Jack's headquarters... also tonight. Setting it up, I thought quite reasonably the players would have to choose between claiming a powerful advantage or protecting their allies and business partners. Except the PCs decided their plan was to convince the Bluecoats that the Dimmer Sister's operating out of the tea shop are the real threat and that they need to raid them instead. Which... like, gets 80% of both jobs done. The PCs don't get the claim but the Dimmer Sisters do get kicked out of Nightmarket, the Bluecoats still know about the Rail Jacks but the Jacks have time to move their HQ or figure another way out. Planning the operation they mentioned that there were a ton of moving parts to keep track of. I yelled "THAT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE RUNNING TWO ADVENTURES AT THE SAME TIME!!"
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Jun 19, 2020 06:47
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So we finished our Band of Blades campaign last night. The finale was quite a ride, they were lacking in full squads for some of the final missions so a few of those missions were quite a bit tougher. They came through The Maw and landed the special mission to bury a Broken and their forces by demolishing the cave exit. They succeeded in trapping Render and had plans to use a Blight tank relic they acquired to see if they could "de-blight" Render. Shreya was upgraded with Battle-saint making her equal to Render in strength so they were able to keep him restrained where they attempted their experiment as one of the final missions in Skydagger. Unfortunately they didn't have enough time to finish a long term project on studying the blight tank and it's use in cleansing Render. So the mission itself was almost always desperate all the way through. They had to convince Shreya to go along with it since she abhors everything about corruption. The promise that it might be used to save the other Broken convinced her. The Officer in charge of the mission was quite obsessed with everything blight and corruption related so he volunteered to take on a lot of blight himself, but the mission went quite sideways when Render managed to escape after he had been somewhat drained by the machine. The ensuing flight even with Shreya there to incapacitate him left many in the squad dead or mortally injured. But eventually they were able to subdue him once more, And in the end the obsessed Officer took on the rest of the blight himself to the point where Shreya had to put him down. But in the end Render was dead, and no longer corrupted. After that we got to watch the heavy hitters defend the walls from the second wave and despite the desperate situations they were in managed to score quite a few 6's and many crits. They easily held off the assault and defeated the Lieutenant commanding the forces. The whole campaign was a blast to run, and everyone involved had a great time as well. I really liked how the finale turned out. It leaves me quite excited for a part 2 of the campaign whenever that comes out.
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Jun 19, 2020 18:35
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DarkAvenger211 posted:It leaves me quite excited for a part 2 of the campaign whenever that comes out. Say what?
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Jun 19, 2020 19:12
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CitizenKeen posted:Say what? Supposedly Band of Blades is just part 1 of a 3 part planned campaign
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Jun 19, 2020 19:28
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CitizenKeen posted:Say what? Campaign two will cover (possibly among other things) holding and defending Skydagger Keep during an extended siege. As of last fall, it was tentatively called "Legacy of the Old Empire," and Stras guessed we might see a beta version in 2020. I have no idea if anything more specific has been said. Campaign three would be a broader-scale campaign to defend the eastern kingdoms on multiple fronts. They've talked about having multiple Chosen at your disposal, deploying them around the continent with various specialists and squads.
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Jun 20, 2020 04:43
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The help from this thread has been really useful. So far I have a pretty good outline in place for the 3 key factions in the war (Crows, Sashes and Lamps) as well as a little something about the Bluecoats because they're probably going to get involved in anything that happens eventually. I also have an outline for a possible score for all of the crew types with an idea for possible complications for the next session if needed (if they're assassins maybe the inspectors get involved, if they're a cult maybe Lord Scurlock or the Dimmer Sisters are unhappy that they're messing with things they don't understand etc). Since I can play around with that later and it's all subject to change I aren't really going too far down that rabbit hole right now. I'm still kind of struggling to work out how tier level, gear quality and potency interact but I am happy to basically ignore that for now and bring it up later assuming we get more sessions under our belt. I also aren't entirely sure how to open the game. After doing all the character/crew creation I am quite happy to just get to a score fairly quickly and the book recommends just being in a meeting straight away with Bazso Baz but it feels a bit against the idea of the game for me to take the agency of that decision away from the players. I guess they can shoot down his offer and go and speak to Mylera if they so choose though so it's probably not too big of a deal. My score ideas are broad strokes enough that I could shuffle it from one faction to another. Finally, when it comes to adjusting status with factions during crew creation how do people tend to approach that? I figure I will just ask what kind of faction they want to have the +/- with and then offer a few factions that fit the bill. Thanks again, my first sessions is set up for Saturday so I am just trying to smooth as many edges as I can before then.
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Jun 21, 2020 13:40
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Take a look at the three starting situations in Scum & Villainy, you can reskin them pretty easily. I think they are each stronger in opening up the first session than the suggested starting scenarios in the Blades rulebook.
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Jun 21, 2020 14:58
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DarkAvenger211 posted:Supposedly Band of Blades is just part 1 of a 3 part planned campaign Was Band part of the kickstarter rewards? I seem to remember getting it for free. Can I ever mark the box that says product delivered on this one?!?
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Jun 21, 2020 23:17
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DalaranJ posted:Was Band part of the kickstarter rewards? I seem to remember getting it for free. Band of Blades was a stretch goal, yes. The planned two sequel campaigns were not.
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Jun 22, 2020 00:34
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We played our first session this evening and it went pretty well. A safe was stolen, people fell off balconies/into canals and a guard got brutally kneecapped so successes all around really. I need to spend some time and think of better devils bargains, do some checking to find a way to bring our whisper into play more (Baszo being a weird occult figure helps with that but I still need to get a firmer handle on what attune is really all about) and I need to find a better balance for giving the PCs a bit of a kicking when things go wrong. They're sturdier than I think so I should lean on them a bit more. The game was well received and people seem excited about a second session so I'm looking forward to seeing where the game takes us. Time for some off screen rolls to see what's going on in the city.
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Jun 28, 2020 00:12
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Thought I'd give running this solo a shot. Really not too difficult. Running a Bravo's crew of a hound a leech and a slide with one tag-in spider character. The Skovland National Liberation Front. Run two scores so far, the first blowing up a ship carrying volatile reagents for Leviathan blood refining headed for Skovland, the second sticking up the local bluecoat garrison's payroll transport. The second did not go very well. But dead cops are their own reward really. XP seems like it will probably be the wonkiest system involved.
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Jun 30, 2020 16:15
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So I play in a Star Wars D6 game with a few of my Blades in the Dark players and tonight in Star Wars we basically spent the entire session planning, tediously, a sabotage. At the end of the game one of my Blades players mentioned how if we were playing Blades we would have already been knee deep in action and how boring planning RPG actions feels after playing Blades, which I think is a really neat endorsement of the system. Now I just need to sell the GM of Star Wars on Scum and Villainy.
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Jul 3, 2020 03:59
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I'm nearly done prepping for my next session. My crew was interested in being a cult before picking Shadows so I am going to have Bazso ask for an artifact to be stolen from the docks to link to his own cult stuff. I will throw in some ghosts that may have been sent by the Dimmer Sisters or are just drawn to the power and if things go too smoothly maybe an ambush by another crew, probably from The Path of Echoes. The artifact will probably have something to do with Setarra because she's a PC's rival but we'll see. I also have some turf ideas, mainly a fence who needs some evidence to disappear. Not really sure of a complication for that but since it's in bluecoat holdings I'm sure they'll cause some issues for themselves without me having to worry. Maybe the evidence they disappear is somehow useful to them or someone else though, but we'll see what I can come up with. I also have some Crow stuff going on in the background with Lyssa trying to work out who in her crew is betraying her and hitting her holdings with weird mystical attacks. It's probably Roric to be honest but maybe something better will show up. After reading through the thread I'm also going to steal the web idea to show connections and links. That's a great concept and if I get on top of it early enough it should be easy to set up and then it's just a matter of keeping it updated.
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Jul 3, 2020 14:03
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Last night my crew moved in to take over a casino controlled by a rival gang that we had just wiped out. After long series of rolling failure after failure on my social checks, the session ended with my character being thrown out the front door badly injured as well as missing a finger. Who could have foreseen that the casino owner was about to propose to the guy we just betrayed and sent to prison during a bank heist we engineered to destroy their gang! And the casino owner is so confident in how badly he embarrassed us that he is now forming his own rival gang too! All I know is I am definitely going to start a long term project to have this guys lover killed in prison, right before we get revenge on the rest of the gang. Blades good.
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Jul 3, 2020 16:20
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Blades is extremely my poo poo. I'm in a game right now, my crews a bunch've art thieves and smugglers. My boys a former journalist turned serial killer loving whisper who uses his writing and research to dig up the ghostly victims of old serial killers and a special ritual to rebuild them into mashedup megaghosts as his own personal cohorts.
Motherfucker fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Jul 4, 2020 |
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Jul 4, 2020 00:38
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| # ? May 16, 2024 15:06 |
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My crew ended up stealing evidence from the bluecoats to get a loyal fence and it all went mostly fine but some of the mystical stuff kind of eludes me with it. In the last session my whisper ended up isolated after succeeding in the heist and was looking for a way out. Since the crew has Ghost Echoes and the whisper has a spirit key I let them unlock a door to the echo of an old tenement building that had been burnt/knocked down in the past and hide out there after a survey roll and a desperate attune roll (the ghost field isn't to be toyed with lightly) but I worry I've made a rod for my own back. In a heist game being able to just disappear into thin air is a powerful thing. I guess other factions will have whispers who won't fall for it and I can always retroactively nerf it if it becomes a crutch.
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Jul 6, 2020 22:06
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