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The wording in Blades itself is vague (and has been pretty much the same throughout development), but "out of the scene" is the way that I've seen John Harper, Sean Nittner, and Stras Acimovic run FitD games. Band of Blades is slightly more specific (which is shocking to me, considering that book is extremely hand-wavy when it comes to GM guidance), though there's still flexibility: "When you take trauma, you’re out for at least a scene while you recover." Putting you out of the score/mission entirely is a very common reading, though, and found in many fan APs.
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Apr 19, 2021 03:48
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Most of my games have played it until the end of the score but we also play fairly short scores -- usually just one session. So it's very rare for someone to be traumatized before the climax. The rare instances where a score has gone for multiple sessions and someone suffered trauma in the first one we've had them come back in the second.
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Apr 19, 2021 04:16
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Yeah our scores have been almost universally been single session, with a few cliff hangers that bled into 2. The GM also is a big fan of APs so I think that's also part of his model. Heck our usual games are a downtime phase and a score per session, so that might be part of why it doesn't seem as out there on my end. I also came up in RPGs like oWoD which even had split groups in their sample play sections, so made it seem normal that some players hang out while their character literally isn't there.
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Apr 19, 2021 08:19
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Yeah, the author himself has clarified that Trauma is only supposed to take you out of the current conflict. That doesn't have to mean that you instantly spring back up, but you can absolutely return before the score is over. E: This also makes complete sense. Forcing a player to not interact with the game goes very much against the BitD approach
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Apr 19, 2021 14:30
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Anybody know anything about Sig: City of Blades? I'm kind of burned out on the constant slew of Blades hacks, but I loved Sig: Manual of the Primes.
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Apr 19, 2021 15:25
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Yeah, I wouldn’t kick a party member out of an entire score, that sucks. Maybe a scene.
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Apr 19, 2021 15:34
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Wicked Ones (the Dungeon Keeper hack, basically) is available for free now! Author's Reddit post with explanation: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/mtytad/wicked_ones_is_now_free_come_grab_a_copy_and/gv2k8lv/ DTRPG page: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/354307/Wicked-Ones-Free-Edition
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Apr 19, 2021 16:09
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Megazver posted:Wicked Ones (the Dungeon Keeper hack, basically) is available for free now! See also: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3956210
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Apr 20, 2021 00:20
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Pollyanna posted:Yeah, I wouldn’t kick a party member out of an entire score, that sucks. Maybe a scene. We never kick anyone out of a score unless they push their luck so far that they die, and even then ideally they show up as an ally or friend and keep playing. We do get a bunch of fun roleplay at the end of a scene where someone's trauma'd out, as they play out what caused them to freeze or panic or run away or whatever, and everyone reacts to that.
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Apr 20, 2021 05:52
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For Band of Blades specifically, if your character dies you can immediately pick up and make a new rookie from the squad you always take with you
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Apr 20, 2021 17:11
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Just finished reading Wicked Ones. Trauma-ing out has never been too much of a problem in my Blades games, but it's a line that has to be danced around. I do like that Wicked Ones does this thing where death being on the line is a very specific kind of roll, and "stressing out" doesn't remove you from the heist/raid, it just makes you do something that's really, really bad for the raid/heist's success. Edit: I'm a fool and decided to make a Wicked Ones CYOA. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3965536 CitizenKeen fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Apr 20, 2021 |
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Apr 20, 2021 17:55
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Down With People posted:I've been playing this game and enjoying it a ton. We just cleared our fourth job. As a pillar of crows descended onto the bloody docks, it was unanimously decided that 'subtle' was maybe not the best reputation for our smuggling operation. We cleared today's job clean and tight. We ripped off the Dimmer Sisters to pay off the quicksilver demon we met, but they don't know about that. I took the gang to Kellen's to celebrate our rise in tier when the two 6s that the GM rolled for Entanglement kicked in and a pile of Bluecoats burst in to arrest us. In the madcap escape scene that followed I got my second trauma in two sessions and we got our first wanted level. I'm fine with that. I picked up the Jailbird advance and I'm ready to recreate the prison dinner from Goodfellas.
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Apr 24, 2021 10:38
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Oh poo poo are you playing a Spider?
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Apr 24, 2021 10:41
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Josef bugman posted:Oh poo poo are you playing a Spider? I had just watched the Godfather when we started playing so I couldn't resist the Spider.
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Apr 24, 2021 10:45
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Down With People posted:I had just watched the Godfather when we started playing so I couldn't resist the Spider. I always liked the fact that it is a support role for a game that is very weird when it comes to support. How are you finding it btw?
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Apr 24, 2021 10:47
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Josef bugman posted:I always liked the fact that it is a support role for a game that is very weird when it comes to support. Oh it's great, I dig it. I feel like it's a bit like the AW Hardholder in that it's not a flashy playbook with a lot of crazy moves but I don't think that matters as long as you have skin in the game. I've got lots of irons in the fire: I'm the Skovlander Don of Crow's Foot, the lapsed high priest of the cult of the Dream Beyond Death and I've got my sights on either killing Ulf Ironborn or making him my goon. I'm also our crew's getaway driver!
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Apr 24, 2021 10:58
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Spider is very fun, especially if you go heavy on abilities it winds up feeling very much loke your character isn't the most directly useful in a score but does so much to tweak the math and action economy. Also is the common wisdom still "a little something on the side" is a bad advance? Because I love being guaranteed another free downtime action I can horde for later sessions. Plus your dude gets rich in the meantime, it's a very spider-y thing to grab along with rook's gambit from the slide playbook
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Apr 24, 2021 11:45
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I'm running my first game of Scum & Villainy soon, and just wanted to get quick feedback/thoughts -- do the recommended introductory adventures by ship types work to get things going well or would I be better served by offering up a more traditional score for a first adventure? Never played BitD or sav so it'll be a learning experience for everyone!
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Apr 24, 2021 19:39
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I've found that the ship starter adventures tend to be pretty good for getting a group rolling.
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Apr 24, 2021 21:04
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Thanks! Follow up: recommendation for a couple of good Youtube play sessions of SaV? I'm pretty sure I've got a handle on everything but can't hurt to do a little more prep going in as a newbie GM. e: nvm, found the links to play sessions on the SaV website Admiralty Flag fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Apr 27, 2021 |
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Apr 25, 2021 23:48
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I got a wild hair today and started working on a rough hack for BitD that would be a typical fantasy adventuring party in a region rather than a group of scoundrels in a city. Changing up the playbooks and abilities seems pretty easy, and I'm thinking that factions could be really fun to hack as well. Have factions like Goblins, Highwaymen, Undead Cults, etc along with various "districts" being sub-regions like swamps, mountains, etc complete with some minor settlements and maybe 1-2 actual towns. I'm thinking the tier 5 factions could be the town rulers and maybe a dominant religion, with various other factions like the citizens of given regions, other adventuring parties, cults, etc. Instead of scores the Party would go on adventures / missions to clear out dungeons, explore ruins, rescue prisoners, deliver goods, etc. Are there any other hacks out there that have tried this? If not, what are some problems you may foresee cropping up during play?
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Apr 29, 2021 01:42
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I'd definitely take a look at the Wicked One rules for a more action-adventure focused version of the BitD rules. How Wicked Ones handles resistance, equipment, and loot seem better matches for high fantasy, and the magic and weird tech rules have plenty to mine for alternatives to the ghost focused magic in the core book. There's also Blades Against Darkness, though it hasn't been updated in a while. Stepping back for a moment, the BitD Action Roll is a solid core mechanic, but the system really shines with complications, and making characters live with the consequences of their complications. The open questions for an adventuring party focused hack are "what kinds of things can you do in Free Play that narratively lead to a Score?" and "what are players doing (or failing to do) in downtime that leads to further complications?" BitD also works when you can't run away from trouble. BitD makes you defend your gang and your turf. Scum & Villainy can always threaten the ship. Wicked Ones has the dungeon as a base and source of trouble. I think an adventuring party would build up a network of allies and followers, but defining home and how it can be threatened will sharpen the game.
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Apr 29, 2021 02:13
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Really great advice in that post, thank you for taking the time to reply. I am thinking that a sort of homage to old school D&D where the characters are expected to basically create a fiefdom / faction with holdings and such could be very cool. The party can start out with a basic hideout and over time, they can decide if they want to make it something more grand like a manor, keep, fortress, wizard's tower, or secret lair. FLIPADELPHIA fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Apr 29, 2021 |
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Apr 29, 2021 02:30
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:Really great advice in that post, thank you for taking the time to post. How familiar are you with pbta and fantasy variants of it? Dungeon World for example was an early attempt at what you're suggesting and might be good to check out -especially for critiques of its failings, so you can try and avoid them. For more modern stuff of similar lineage Heart is an interesting adaption of Spire, though set in Spire's same world, it does the same trick of "How do I adapt a game focused on 'everything takes place in one city the players don't leave' into dungeon delve and exploration game?" Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Apr 29, 2021 |
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Apr 29, 2021 02:38
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Coolness Averted posted:How familiar are you with pbta and fantasy variants of it? There's also a Kickstarter PBTA about the home base idea called steadings or stronghold or something I can't remember the name of. That one seemed more King of Dragon Pass than Fairy Tail thematically.
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Apr 29, 2021 02:55
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:Really great advice in that post, thank you for taking the time to reply. Maybe replace the turf map with something like a wilderness/borderlands map? They can free up territory, maybe build watchtowers and outposts and towns as upgrades, and work towards setting up a castle and becoming lords of the area?
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Apr 29, 2021 03:05
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:Really great advice in that post, thank you for taking the time to reply. That's a really cool pull, actually. All that stuff is just impossible to book-keep even if you're dedicated to the OSR ~aesthetic~, but marrying it to Blades makes a ton of sense. If you don't want to go whole hog and do a full hack, I would recommend just making crewbooks/playbooks for each of the different stronghold types with generalized OSR mechanics. Or even just one master book with different abilities. That way you can just drop them into an ongoing OSR campaign and have fun with it instead of suddenly becoming a master book keeper.
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Apr 29, 2021 07:32
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:Really great advice in that post, thank you for taking the time to reply. You could run it as an "Adventurer's Guild" or "School" - think Final Fantasy Tactics or Fire Emblem, and have the "territory" from Blades be the Guild's HQ or Adventurer's Hogwarts adding wings, training fields, dungeons...etc. Or maybe, make it a Suikoden hack with the players recruiting up to 108 characters and decide which to bring to the "heist" of the day; each character they recruit expands their HQ/castle in some way.
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Apr 29, 2021 10:37
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Yeah, I think the type of holding maps perfectly the crewbooks. If you're a "fighter playbook" in an arcane tower crewbook you're a gish. If you're in a thieves' guild crewbook you're a thuggish brute. If you're in a temple playbook you're a paladin. Et cetera.
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Apr 29, 2021 14:18
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Stonetop is what I was thinking of, not exactly what you're doing but maybe some of the moves will inspire you.
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Apr 29, 2021 14:31
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Having read Wicked Ones I now really want to be in a Wicked Ones campaign, since it deals pretty deftly with the two things I haven't liked in BITD. 1) My playgroup does not have a clean consensus on Study/Survey, Sway/Consort, or Finesse/literally any other skill. Opinions have calcified (I think my interpretation is best, the GM has a different one, another player has their own interpretation) and so those rolls are a constant building headache. WO's cutting down on the pool is a very positive sign to me for actually playing in practice. 2) Since many of the crew bonuses reward the crew for its approach rather than its ends, a huge percentage of our heists have been very similar. "We're assassins/bravos/etc, we do x" kind of mentality. Don't get me wrong BITD's been on the high end of systems I've played and the highest that isn't by Meguey Baker or Vincent Baker, but these two things did feel like improvements when reading WO. Coolness Averted posted:Also is the common wisdom still "a little something on the side" is a bad advance? Because I love being guaranteed another free downtime action I can horde for later sessions. Plus your dude gets rich in the meantime, it's a very spider-y thing to grab along with rook's gambit from the slide playbook This is the first I'm hearing of it. Admittedly I'm not tuned in to any sort of broader BITD community, but at a base level it's "better version of Calculating" and at a secondary level it's possibly the best tool for trying to build up stash before you retire. The best skill for both a character's longest term project and for managing down time actions is hard to beat. I quickly checked the subreddit and it was listed among the most powerful skills next to Functioning Vice and Rook's Gambit.
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May 1, 2021 22:39
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Down With People posted:We cleared today's job clean and tight. We ripped off the Dimmer Sisters to pay off the quicksilver demon we met, but they don't know about that. I took the gang to Kellen's to celebrate our rise in tier when the two 6s that the GM rolled for Entanglement kicked in and a pile of Bluecoats burst in to arrest us. In the madcap escape scene that followed I got my second trauma in two sessions and we got our first wanted level. GM suggested that we could roll my incarceration time into another job so we're going to bust someone out of Ironhook for the Grinders. Before that though, we had to fulfill an obligation to the Red Sashes and bomb the daylights out of the Gondoliers. To set up a distraction I tampered with a spirit well but in the process unleashed some kind of entity that's like a sparkling murder noodle. I encountered it on the job and had some kind of possession experience? We shared souls for a second? I'm not entirely sure what happened but the GM keeps chortling about a new countdown clock he started but refuses to tell me what it is.
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May 1, 2021 23:23
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So I've been reading through the Wicked Ones book and I've gotta say, as a GM I think some of it's mechanical changes seem like pretty good ideas. Stuff like mixed and success results giving 1 or 2 ticks on clocks respectively, with weak and strong effect giving -1 / +1 and having effect limited specifically from None to Strong as opposed to potentially going infinite really makes me think that Strong effects really are strong, instead of trying to push effect level to Extreme +2 for example. Limiting clocks to be a max of 8 means you shouldn't need those high effect levels. It also lets me create 2 opposing clocks of the same size and it feel right mechanically. As it stands now if the players have goal clock and there's an opposing clock I always have to set the opposing clock to be like half the size in order for there to be any tension at all I also really like how Harm, Resistance and Stress work in this game. Taking Shock to a group of actions vs taking harm that I as a GM have to remember to bring up if I think it applies is now just handled as a single status effect that's goes away after it affects you once. Death only being on the table once you've been bloodied once and the GM sets the position of your action as deadly means that death as a consequence will always be known immediately before a roll. Resistances being just another action roll with it's own set of results seems fun too. Needing to pick a different action than the one that caused the consequence makes for some interesting ideas on how to resist certain consequences. And determining whether or not it's a partial or full resist based on the result of that roll is nice too. It makes rolling 6's during a resist feel real good while also making the worst possible roll only cost you 3 stress max (as opposed to possibly 5). Stressing out in this game isn't nearly as lethal, it's seems to just be throwing more wrenches into the situation instead. I'm curious how hard it would be to move some of these systems over to Band of Blades or Scum and Villainy. I know some of the game's downtime and class mechanics sort of revolve around the existing harm structure. And for Band of Blades specifically a lot of the games campaign actions focus around resting and recuperating soldiers so it might kind of break the balance of the campaign a bit. I haven't played a game of Wicked Ones yet either so I can't really say for sure if all these changes are good, they just seem good on paper to me.
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May 11, 2021 16:43
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Any tips for running a BITD oneshot?
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May 20, 2021 13:43
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Push the players really hard. Blades PCs are extremely tough to kill if they go into a job without any harm, stress or trauma. They also have a ton of tools at their disposal to mitigate any situation the GM throws them into. Remember that a PC even with no rating in a skill can still be rolling two dice pretty easily by pushing/taking a devils bargain and getting an assist - and two die gives you a 75% chance of a partial or full success. Blades PCs are very competent even at the start. The danger comes from the slow attritional build up over time chipping away at them and by the crew getting too greedy and biting off more than they can chew by going after higher tier targets. In a one shot those two drivers of difficulty go away, so you have a ton of leeway to really put the players in tight spots. It will also encourage them to delve into all the tools the system gives them (pushes, assists, set up actions, trading position for effect, using gear and so on), which will show off the full capabilities, otherwise if you make it too easy they could very possibly just roll through a job comfortably and not really have a proper Blades experience. Also, of you've never run Blades or any FitD games before, then come up with two short lists of a) generic consequences (other than the obvious like suffer harm or get a worse position) and b) generic devils bargains. These will be lifesavers when you need to think on your feet and can always be easily adapted to any specific situation on the fly. Some examples I use often are You drop your weapon/something valuable Civilians/bystanders get put in danger A foe you thought you dealt with comes back An alarm goes off Set off a trap The lights go out Uh oh, this guard is some kind of badass And two all time classics... Something gets set on fire Snakes! tanglewood1420 fucked around with this message at 14:35 on May 20, 2021 |
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May 20, 2021 14:15
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May 21, 2021 00:21
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PerniciousKnid posted:There's also a Kickstarter PBTA about the home base idea called steadings or stronghold or something I can't remember the name of. That one seemed more King of Dragon Pass than Fairy Tail thematically. Stonetop. The PCs are basically the local notables who respond to dangers to the community. There's a playtest kit up, and it looks like a good, community-based fantasy game. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1735046512/stonetop
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May 21, 2021 01:19
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Dang, when is that out? I missed the kickstarter but that looks right up my alley.
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May 21, 2021 14:04
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A little over a year ago, I decided to run Blades as my first ever GMing experience and I think it generally went okay, but after a really bad session I kind of wrapped it up and switched to a system that would allow me to prep in a more concrete manner to give me some sort of GMing training wheels, but for the last few months Blades has been occupying the creative space in my head, something about the aesthetic of Doskvol really just tickles my brain in the right way. Luckily, the Lancer game I was running wrapped up last week so this week was a change to see if my group was interested in going back to Blades (they were). When we left off, about a year ago, they were just getting into Tier 1 with a weak hold. We sort of decided to do a soft-reset and small time jump before getting back into it and letting the players shuffle around ability pips a little bit. I also told them they were free to make new characters should they please and surprisingly most of them wanted to stick with their old characters they haven't seen in a year, which was nice for me. We did decide that one of the old crew, known only as Old Man, probably had seen some poo poo and wanted to retire so that player made a new character, Jepson "JJ" Jens, a mad-as-hell Skovlander who is friends with a literal demon to join the crew. It's looking like his baptism into the life of crime is going to be the first job next week, stealing a personal electrostatic generator for one of their contacts from a Dimmer Sisters-linked vendor in Nightmarket. To round out the rest of the crew we've got a man known only as Yanny, a big brute of a man with a heart of gold. Yanny also can not read and is in possession of a book called Shackle the Midnight Hour, which is currently narrating Yanny's exploits in the text of the book. This has inspired Yanny to learn to read. There is also James "Callisto" Croake who is primarily a knife pervert and is terrified of boats. He may also be involved with an old trickster god that is slowly driving him out of sanity. Finally we've got Lucian "Specs" Petrakis, a first generation Dagger Islander who is trying to make his way as a merchant in Doskvol. As for the crew? They wanted to call themselves Bad Company but that was a line too far for me, as GM. I can't let them sing Bad Company songs, ever. They are the Seedy Acquisition Group and they love to steal poo poo and also light things on fire, for some reason. I'm excited to see what this crew of miscreants gets up to. I'm really excited to be playing Blades again.
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Jul 27, 2021 14:05
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ShallNoiseUpon posted:a knife pervert Mods? Also that sounds like a solid group and I look forward to hearing of their shenanigans
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Jul 27, 2021 14:56
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