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Court of Blades is officially out and seems like it's a FitD aimed straight at me. Fantasy renaissance, you're a bunch of nobodies (a 'coterie') within your noble house, aiming both to rise within your House, and to put your House at the top of the ladder. sebmojo posted:Is the expectation in BITD that heists/scores are completely freestyled? Like you roll the various options and bam you're doing it? Or would a more typical approach be to think of a few in broad terms, based on the party's position and history, and present a selection? The way my most recent GM has been doing it is that they've got a couple of score ideas preset based on what's going on in the city and people that might come to the PCs with a job for them, but there's also nothing stopping us from going "That rival gang has been up our butt for too long. Time to take them down a peg and seize their territory" and that's the score instead. If that's the case you play out the leadup and the Gather Information rolls and whatnot, then you pick the score type and the detail, you roll engagement, and then you take a 5-10 minute break as the GM thinks about what happens from there and occasionally laughs to themselves. Having GMed myself I think the most important 'knowledge' to be able to quickly improvise or have on hand is just what a building's rough layout might be like, and who might be living or working in said building.
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May 26, 2022 05:24
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sebmojo posted:Is the expectation in BITD that heists/scores are completely freestyled? Like you roll the various options and bam you're doing it? Or would a more typical approach be to think of a few in broad terms, based on the party's position and history, and present a selection? It really depends on the GM. You absolutely can freestyle the entire scores and it's often a pretty fun way to do it, but you can also firmly plan all the elements, which can be pretty fun too.
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May 26, 2022 05:51
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bewilderment posted:Court of Blades is officially out and seems like it's a FitD aimed straight at me. yeah, i can do that no prob just gaming out how i'd be doing it. a good trick is to pick a building you know well and use the layout from that.
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May 26, 2022 05:54
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The way I'm planning on doing it is not having it set up like a house but set up as a series of challenges. Like if the group choose to approach stealthily then there might be alarms to avoid and patrols. If they approach loud its going to be mooks and the target trying to flee.
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May 26, 2022 07:21
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I mostly lurk this thread because I haven't been able to talk my gaming group into BITD just yet, but for whoever was looking for a actual play series, this one is pretty fun - leans a little more on the humour side, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Lwxp-5QxR0
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May 26, 2022 17:59
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sebmojo posted:Is the expectation in BITD that heists/scores are completely freestyled? Like you roll the various options and bam you're doing it? Or would a more typical approach be to think of a few in broad terms, based on the party's position and history, and present a selection? Setting up a score can be pretty open. There are random tables you can use to generate some hooks if everyone is stumped, or as a starting pitch. After that, it's pretty simple to pick up a few dangling plot threads from each score and feed those into some new scores, or look at what players are saying they want and pitch some options to them. Do they want to do a heist to expand something on the claim map? Did a troublesome clock fill up and lead to issues during the last heist? Did an entanglement from downtime lead to a problem that needs an immediate response? Is there a Devil's Bargain that needs to be called due? Eventually they're going to piss off some other factions enough that those factions start pushing on them and they're going to need to push back. The crew is also running a small business, so they'll need to do jobs fitting their crew type, some financiers and friendly NPCs are paying them to smuggle, kill, rob, smash, sell, etc. and they're going to want to run some of those jobs on the regular. Their contacts are going to ask for help, need to be put back in line, or sometimes they have a falling out and they need to go and recruit new contacts. On the score itself, it helps to have some ideas of problems they'll run into along the way, or ways things can get worse on a bad roll. The first focus is going to be getting the crew to settle on a Plan for the score and the single detail they need to set up to get a score going. From there, the Engagement roll should give you a good setup. Things pop up organically afterward, and the GM can pull from player suggestions if they're not sure where to take something, too. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 06:48 on May 29, 2022 |
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May 29, 2022 06:42
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Love my Blades game. We started off as a small group of "luxury experience providers" and ended up as a union forming, revolutionary cell that invented rock and roll and is currently holding a concert to distract from The Real Heist which is the culmination of the current plot. I've been playing the incognito son of the Emperor who's totally not a demon, guys, and also a trans doctor inventor cowboy who smokes hella weed and is the lost child of the current Big Bad. They're DATING
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May 29, 2022 17:38
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So what are like, the more boundary pushing FitD? I've read BitD, Broken Spire, Wicked Ones, Runners in the Shadows, Scum & Villainy, and Beam Saber, and those last 3 in particular kind of disappoint me with how closely they adhere to base blades, including replicating things I consider problems with BitD. I guess I'm just thinking about how Firebrands and Half A Fool really push what PbtA can do, and I kind of want to see that kind of thing for FitD if only for my intellectual curiosity. Poland Spring posted:Love my Blades game. We started off as a small group of "luxury experience providers" and ended up as a union forming, revolutionary cell that invented rock and roll and is currently holding a concert to distract from The Real Heist which is the culmination of the current plot. lol this is good bitd
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May 30, 2022 19:15
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Tulip posted:So what are like, the more boundary pushing FitD? I've read BitD, Broken Spire, Wicked Ones, Runners in the Shadows, Scum & Villainy, and Beam Saber, and those last 3 in particular kind of disappoint me with how closely they adhere to base blades, including replicating things I consider problems with BitD. I think the equivalents of that for FitD are games like Band of Blades and Blades Against Darkness, which lean into the structural mechanics of the system. I don't think you'll see the same kind of mechanically-bare FitD systems because the defining marks of FitD are significantly more mechanical than PbtA.
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May 30, 2022 20:53
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Tulip posted:So what are like, the more boundary pushing FitD? I've read BitD, Broken Spire, Wicked Ones, Runners in the Shadows, Scum & Villainy, and Beam Saber, and those last 3 in particular kind of disappoint me with how closely they adhere to base blades, including replicating things I consider problems with BitD. I'm sort of curious what you and others think of as the big problems with FitD games. My experience is limited to S&V, but I had three main "frustrations" with the system (I'm using S&V terms but all this applies to BitD except for Home Cooking, for which I don't remember a parallel). 1. If you expend resources, it's difficult to fail in any meaningful way when playing to your strengths. E.g., I had a player who was Muscle and took Wrecking Crew (+1d in melee) and 3 dots in Scrap. If someone assisted him and he spent a gambit (which the crew was never short on because there was a scoundrel in the group), then he had something like a 60% to roll a 6 and hack away without damage. (And of course he dipped Mystic for Psyblade and blaster reflect for better offense and to get into melee safely, respectively; ironically, this player isn't usually a power gamer but he wanted to be a real asskicker in this game.) The answer is to put players in situations where their dots don't help (occasionally; you don't want players frustrated as they roll Doctor for the 13th time that night, and they should get use out of their dots and abilities), but even then group checks take the sting out of failure. 2. Resistance, especially physical resistance (which is probably rolled more often than the other two together), becomes fairly trivial once the crew gets more experienced; most PCs will tend to have at least one dot each in Scrap, Scramble, and Skulk by mid-career. (Plus, Freighter crews have an advancement that gives them a free dot on IIRC Scramble, Helm, or Rig.) It gets challenging to threaten PCs with stress damage, especially considering... 3. The availability of the Pilot ability giving +/-2 to any "accompanied" indulge vice rolls mixed with Home Cooking means that for high-stress runs, the PC is likely to lose a majority of their stress, while for lower-stress runs, this gives a way to clear that stress relatively risk-free and avoid it building up over time. I know the Pilot ability is a clone of the Spider ability, but in retrospect I would have said that you can't use it with Home Cooking. [But these limits made me a better GM and got me to think about how to really challenge PCs within the context of the game. For a heist-type run, maybe failure state wasn't someone traumaing out, but it was alerting the local Nightspeakers cell that a powerful Way user was on the loose and needed to be converted or neutralized -- and who has more experience fighting roided-out plasma blade wielders than the Nightspeakers? Or the time that the consequence clock from their narrow escape led to one of their contacts getting killed (and replaced by a less reliable one). Etc...]
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May 30, 2022 21:12
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I never thought of trauma-ing out as a meaningful failure state TBH, because it's not much of a narrative consequence and most of the players I've been around have started to play MUCH much more cautiously when its even on the table. Taking trauma tends to feel like something the player choose to do because they want a trauma for narrative reasons (or for the XP trigger). But I also just...don't play a table where "failure state" is a significant consideration in any of the games we play. The two things that I tend to consider the big flaws of BitD are, in order of how seriously I take them 1) ambiguity and therefore conflict over the meaning of action rolls 2) fiddly bookkeeping 3) resource system & XP system both encourage conservative, often stale feeling play. Virtually all of these are resolved by changes in Wicked Ones, so I'll talk about that to illustrate. 1. Sway, Consort, & Command overlap in frustrating ways, as do Tinker & Finesse, as do Finesse & Prowl, plus the "using Wreck or Finesse to swordfight," not to mention Study vs Survey. Our table has some sort of dispute the majority of sessions over whether or not you can use x to do y, with Finesse being the biggest problem (our longest GM I think would never have allowed me to roll Finesse once if I didn't push back, which is not a great feeling). Wicked Ones reduces the number of stats from 12 to 9, considerable improvement mostly from just eliminating Skirimish while folding together Survey & Study as well as Sway & Consort. 2. I don't think there is specifically a problem with keeping track of wounds or load or trauma or stash or long-term project clocks or XP tracks per item or cohorts, but in practice keeping track of all of those just gets mind numbing. Wicked Ones considerably simplifies load, resistance, wounds, XP, and stash each, to basically pure upside as far as I'm concerned (I know there are people who like the resource management side of BITD - I don't, I find it actively disengaging). 3. The thread that felt loose to me here was the bonus coin and XP for doing heists that fit your groups "type," e.g. Shadows getting bonus XP and coin for burglaries. Yes we could just ignore those I get that but it's a meaningful bonus and I experience it as somebody nagging me to do more of the same heist over and over again. Plus the way the consequences trend toward long term stress management encourages you to try and only roll your best action pool. Dungeon Themes don't link themselves nearly as overtly to Raid Plans, and the consequence for going over on stress isn't trauma it's Going Feral which is a lot more fun tbh. I mostly consider Wicked Ones' changes kind of tinkering with it, but I do think they're pretty straight improvements which makes me feel more confident in saying the base versions are problems, at least for how I want to play. Broken Spire is a FAR more radical change to BitD because it basically plays 90% in flashback and the entire campaign turns on a single roll which is pretty crazy, but it also doesn't fix a fair number of those issues. admanb posted:I think the equivalents of that for FitD are games like Band of Blades and Blades Against Darkness, which lean into the structural mechanics of the system. Mm, fair enough. Just was feeling kind of disappointed by Beam Saber and wanted to see if I just wasn't looking far enough afield.
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May 30, 2022 22:18
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Tulip posted:I never thought of trauma-ing out as a meaningful failure state TBH, because it's not much of a narrative consequence and most of the players I've been around have started to play MUCH much more cautiously when its even on the table. Taking trauma tends to feel like something the player choose to do because they want a trauma for narrative reasons (or for the XP trigger). But I also just...don't play a table where "failure state" is a significant consideration in any of the games we play. I agree with you on your points to varying degrees, though the Actions are better defined in S&V (except for the Sway/Consort/Command triangle -- that I had to handle from day 1 by using position/effect for suboptimal approaches and making sure there was a clear gut-feel difference between each Action). The message I'm getting from the rest of your post is that I need to check out Wicked Ones sooner rather than later. I've downloaded the free version to read but haven't gotten around to it.
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May 30, 2022 22:59
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Tulip posted:
I've definitely felt the pinch on all the other problems you list, but I don't think this one here isn't the games fault. The rules are pretty clear on how this goes by RAW.
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May 31, 2022 00:51
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Yeah, ultimately the player decides the action rating, GM sets the effect level. There can be some negotiation but it shouldn't be a recurring "dispute".
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May 31, 2022 01:06
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It also definitely can come into issue if you have a power tripping DM, but I always stand by “DM decisions are final” with a quick subtext added to the rule that says “hey, you get a point of argument, and I’ll listen, but ultimately we need to keep moving so more than like 30s-1min on an issue is bad, and generally I’ll take your side with any convincing argument.” Players shouldn’t leave upset, but definitely arguing about rules should generally be a spot decision of what to do if you aren’t 100% sure of the actual rule (and if you want to respect it.) I treat it like running a work meeting: you can derail for a long time on a technicality, nothing gets done, and no matter the outcome most people don’t come out happy. A quick decision is often better than the correct one, within reason.
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May 31, 2022 01:38
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Anime Store Adventure posted:It also definitely can come into issue if you have a power tripping DM, but I always stand by “DM decisions are final” with a quick subtext added to the rule that says “hey, you get a point of argument, and I’ll listen, but ultimately we need to keep moving so more than like 30s-1min on an issue is bad, and generally I’ll take your side with any convincing argument.” Players shouldn’t leave upset, but definitely arguing about rules should generally be a spot decision of what to do if you aren’t 100% sure of the actual rule (and if you want to respect it.) Sure, but the rulebook is pretty explicit that this isn't a time when it's the DM's choice. You can roll that way at the table, but if that leads to bad feels then at that point it's the table's fault, not the system's. And this is THE core dice mechanic in the system.
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May 31, 2022 01:43
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the JJ posted:Sure, but the rulebook is pretty explicit that this isn't a time when it's the DM's choice. You can roll that way at the table, but if that leads to bad feels then at that point it's the table's fault, not the system's. And this is THE core dice mechanic in the system. I want to make the argument that “not the dm’s choice” and “the dm can say it’s zero effect” is almost always functionally identical. It’s the DM’s choice, even if I know what you mean and I know that’s what the rules say. I functionally I don’t see any real difference in the outcomes no matter what’s precisely at fault. A player can still insist on rolling a zero effect and maybe that’s cool or funny or fits their character. If not and there’s some out of character tension or argument about it, the rules lawyering doesn’t help that. I guess my ultimate point is the “have a conversation about it” guideline supersedes any other written rules for me, and I’d rather make a quick decision (that almost always benefits what the player is trying to do) than get bogged down in back and forth for ten minutes, if that makes sense.
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May 31, 2022 01:59
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I guess I should maybe qualify that a little. Unless my players are barking down some “well my character would do this anyway, even if useless” track, if I give them zero effect, they’d rather talk about it and figure out why and what better to do. This has always worked out. I don’t insist my players roll a specific skill, but I often suggest one if they just describe an action without saying the skill. Sometimes it isn’t what they thought, and they have to convince me. These are actually some pretty good moments, because it makes them really describe their actions in fun detail. “Im not asking him, I’m telling him. My chest is puffed out and my shoulders are up and tense.” Okay, you meant command, not sway, and now we all get a much more vivid visual of the scene. Win win!
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May 31, 2022 02:02
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Yeah. I would generally consider Blades' skill list one of its big strengths. There's always going to be some wiggle room about what skill best fits a given situation, and the fact that the book just says where each skill is likely to overlap and tells you to figure out which feels best for your group in a given situation means Blades has thought it through more thoroughly than basically any other game I could name. The problem is that it sounds like Tulip's group (or at least Tulip's GM) never really reached a consensus on how effective skills like Finesse are in most situations, and that just sounds miserable. On the plus side, I don't think that's a very common result in most groups? But it still sounds a bad time.
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May 31, 2022 02:14
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"zero effect" isn't the same thing as "can't roll it" or "can only roll it as a joke." You can use setup actions and push yourself all the way from no to standard effect, not to mention special abilities. The point of saying "no effect" is not a passive-aggressive way of saying "no," it's saying "this will require additional justification in the fiction."
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May 31, 2022 02:15
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By far my biggest problem with FitD was entanglements. I get the intent for sure but it was hard for it to not feel capricious. Tulip posted:So what are like, the more boundary pushing FitD? I've read BitD, Broken Spire, Wicked Ones, Runners in the Shadows, Scum & Villainy, and Beam Saber, and those last 3 in particular kind of disappoint me with how closely they adhere to base blades, including replicating things I consider problems with BitD. We played a cyberpunk FitD but it was practically a copy and paste. Beam Saber seems like the biggest change but just barely. Rick fucked around with this message at 02:29 on May 31, 2022 |
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May 31, 2022 02:24
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Exactly. Blades has plenty of ways for a character to pump up a zero effect, if that's what they want to try / gamble on.
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May 31, 2022 02:33
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admanb posted:"zero effect" isn't the same thing as "can't roll it" or "can only roll it as a joke." You can use setup actions and push yourself all the way from no to standard effect, not to mention special abilities. The point of saying "no effect" is not a passive-aggressive way of saying "no," it's saying "this will require additional justification in the fiction." Fair - I guess maybe my group isn’t treating it like that. I’ll definitely try to encourage them that “maybe you can work around it through justification” instead of just switching behavior/action altogether. Investigate why it’s zero effect and maybe find ways to mitigate that without taking a brand new course of action.
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May 31, 2022 02:36
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The zero effect rolls I pushed myself and then took a devil's bargain to make are memorable, I like that feature.
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May 31, 2022 02:39
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Specifically devil’s bargains are something I’ve been having a ton of trouble engaging as a mechanic. I am still kind of running a bit “on my toes” and it makes it hard to get creative beyond the main plot beats and fun flavor things here or there. Devils bargains feel like they require being at least a half-step ahead to anticipate how I would make the outcome meaningful. I feel like I already have more “hooks” than I’ll ever use but even harder is just coming up with bargains. Thoughts/experiences?
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May 31, 2022 02:44
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Specifically devil’s bargains are something I’ve been having a ton of trouble engaging as a mechanic. I am still kind of running a bit “on my toes” and it makes it hard to get creative beyond the main plot beats and fun flavor things here or there. Devils bargains feel like they require being at least a half-step ahead to anticipate how I would make the outcome meaningful. I feel like I already have more “hooks” than I’ll ever use but even harder is just coming up with bargains. Off-hand, my one piece of advice is to set up a lot of clocks ahead of time that matter on a longer timescale than a single heist. If you already have clocks like "The Special Investigators Are Tracking You" or "Count Orloz Acts Directly" or "The Cutter's Romantic Problems" established, or at least in your notes ready to be deployed, this causes two things. One, it immediately establishes how big of a deal you're offering, because everyone understands clocks. Two, it means that all you have to offer as the Devil's Bargain in the moment is ominous foreshadowing. Your Lurk is breaking out of a police ball and takes a Devil's Bargain where another notch is filled in the Special Investigators clock. In the moment, all you have to do is have the metaphorical camera linger on the potion cork they just spat out and make a note somewhere and you can continue the heist normally. But when the Special Investigators show up in three sessions with that cork in an evidence bag, that quick and dirty Devil's Bargain you offered has now become a fun callback. Heck, if you suggest that kind of foreshadowing as a Devil's Bargain, your players will probably come up with a cool idea themselves. The point is, if you just mark a notch in a long-term clock, it feels important but you don't actually have to think about the consequences immediately.
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May 31, 2022 03:17
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Admiralty Flag posted:I'm sort of curious what you and others think of as the big problems with FitD games. My experience is limited to S&V, but I had three main "frustrations" with the system (I'm using S&V terms but all this applies to BitD except for Home Cooking, for which I don't remember a parallel). Scum & Villainy has some unique issues, I feel, and some of that might be from it being the first hack, which was being made as Blades was still in a playtest state. Gambits are a unique extra pool of +1d6 the other Blades games don't have. I guess since S&V is going for a slightly "pulpier" and less "gritty" feel they're there to be a bit of extra buffer before things go bad, but it does mean they'll be able to stack dice odds in their favor a bit more. Once players have enough dice through a large pool to really push the odds in their favor, I suppose the two counters would be to be pushing them against significantly higher tier threats more (S&V seems to expect this since eventually you're going to enter what amounts to a Final Showdown phase against some forces.) Injecting in 2 or even 3 complications to burn through stress and harm boxes and hit them with some damage is probably necessary. The Resistance stats in Blades were designed around the expectation that most characters that get high up in them would have at least one Trauma or getting a ton of Stress in "endgame" missions, which needs to be fed with a Vice each downtime, and that would also normally put you at higher risk of overindulging if you've got a lot of dots. The Hedonist (Functioning Vice in Blades) ability is honestly too good in both games, and yeah stacking it with the Home Cooking crew ability really defangs that system. The Cult in Blades has a similar group vice thing (Conviction), but it demands a "pleasing sacrifice" which reads like something that's going to put the team at risk or come at some cost. S&V has some other specific things that bug me. The whole debt system doesn't work well. Maybe money is supposed to be a thing that's harder to manage as you upgrade your ship and move up in tier, but as it was it never came up at all. The revisions to the actions unbalances them. Why are there specific Doctor, Hack, and Helm actions? Why did they make it so there's only one attack stat (Scrap)? The Blades actions are specific but also broad enough that you could easily see how each stat could be used for another thing. Yeah Finesse might be used for some acrobatics, could also be needed for dueling with a flashy rapier, or maybe driving a carriage deftly. It's not awful or anything, but it could really use a couple more passes and reworking of some essential stuff.
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May 31, 2022 03:19
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Scum maxes at three base dice in an action, so it's not that much of a difference in terms of late-game max power. It mainly smooths out the early game.
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May 31, 2022 03:48
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admanb posted:Scum maxes at three base dice in an action, so it's not that much of a difference in terms of late-game max power. It mainly smooths out the early game. I don't personally find the dice stacking to be much of an issue, but I do think Scum like Blades functions best if you're applying a good amount of Stress and Consequence pressure throughout the game time, and that's a tricky balance to strike if you're not experienced in the system.
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May 31, 2022 04:15
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I think i find myself really preferring the things Blades does in the context of something like Band of Blades where the GM can really hammer people with consequences without knocking people out of the game since you'll be playing different people next time.
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May 31, 2022 09:20
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Panzeh posted:I think i find myself really preferring the things Blades does in the context of something like Band of Blades where the GM can really hammer people with consequences without knocking people out of the game since you'll be playing different people next time. It its an established conceit in Blades itself that you'll most likely need a second character eventually. Either your wanted level will get too high and someone has to take the fall and serve time, a vice roll goes badly and you might decide your character gets lost in their vice for a week or two, or a character might be laid up from some really bad harm for a bit. Blades treats these as more optional than Band of Blades, and says to run it as gritty the PCs and GM want it, but I think there needs to be an honest conversation that with Blades you're playing a crew of desperate weirdo criminals and (to repurpose some old Monsterhearts advice) "treat your
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May 31, 2022 15:29
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Tulip posted:The two things that I tend to consider the big flaws of BitD are, in order of how seriously I take them 1) ambiguity and therefore conflict over the meaning of action rolls 2) fiddly bookkeeping 3) resource system & XP system both encourage conservative, often stale feeling play. Virtually all of these are resolved by changes in Wicked Ones, so I'll talk about that to illustrate. I want to add to the Wicked Ones improvements here as I'm actually running a Scum and Villainy game with some Wicked One's rules ported over. My favorite change is just modifying resistance rolls to be a different skill than the one that was originally rolled, that and the results of the resistance roll determine if it's a full or partial resistance too. I personally found arbitrarily deciding whether or not something can be "fully" resistable was just extra brainpower that I could let the dice decide for us. That and range of stress costs are less swingy (no more costing 5 stress cause you rolled all 1's) but also still costs you at least 1 stress on a 6. I prefer Shock and Bloodied for harm instead of the usual level 1 - 3 harm track. Shocking an attribute just causes you to lose 1 dice on your next roll in that group, and afterwards you clear the shock. Being Bloodied shocks all your attributes and getting bloodied again kills you. It gives your players an obvious threshold to go from being safe to being in a deadly position. In essence this makes your players more durable, and heal much faster which I like more for the pulpy feel of Scum and Villainy anyway. I think this might not work as well for grittier settings. And the final thing I brought over was my own implementation of Wicked Ones Adventurers. I just really like some codified NPCs that give you some quick prompts for offensive and defensive abilities. You can set them up so that they work even in social encounters as well. They're basically just important NPCs that come with 3 free "moves" so to speak to interrupt player actions or act with their own agency (that are also still resistable by the players). I made up a bunch of different NPC class cards that I pull out every game and throw into the mix every now and then. Making player rivals a specific class of NPC can be fun too for when they show up to mess with the crew.
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May 31, 2022 20:07
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bewilderment posted:Court of Blades is officially out and seems like it's a FitD aimed straight at me. Have you had a chance to read/try this yet? If so, thoughts?
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May 31, 2022 20:14
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I've read Court of Blades and it is very close to base BitD for better or worse. Aside from the new setting, the biggest difference is that the meta layer and crew sheets have been simplified a little. Each social season consists of three linked scores/errands, and you pick primary and secondary objectives for that season, along with unexpected events, personal matters, and rival plots. The number of things you do build a dice pool, and at the close of the season you advance a 12 segment clock. There's also a new subsystem for having a paramore, which is neat. The setting seems pretty gamable, but the mechanics don't really innovate, or engage particularly well with the themes. For me, these kinds of stories are about people caught between their obligations and their passions, and the ways become a slave to either is destructive. While there might be some kind of honor among thieves, scoundrels can do whatever they can get away with. Aristocratic privileges come with a staggering set of normative social expectations, and a whole set of awful things your parents did which are now catching up to you. I'd like to point to Neon Black as a cyberpunk RPG, but one which makes some subtle and nice points that along with being some kind of hacker, you also have a lovely day job that you need to work at, or deal with the consequences of being broke and homeless even if you are some kind of hacker warrior-prince in cyberspace. The way that the objective of the game is about building up solidarity in your community against grinding hypercapitalism is well represented by the lists of NPCs with problems to be solved. And the system of non-repeatable downtime scenes, marking the passage of time and the way the world changes is a clever way to include a campaign without forcing a certain order. Court of Blades has nice art, a cool setting, and it builds on a solid foundation, but it also feels a lot like something that came out a year after Blades and not five years after.
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Jun 1, 2022 04:34
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I've been big into Fallen London recently, and I can't help but feel like a Blades in the Neath hack would be a fantastic fit for the setting. Not only is it a city of eternal night where the ruling classes hide away and the Constables are the meanest gang in town, but the literal entrance to Hell is just up the River Thames, and death is a temporary inconvenience rather than a permanent condition. So much cool territory to explore, especially in playing a crew of scoundrels trying to lay low rather than a big-shot with their name on Society's lips.
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Jun 19, 2022 05:21
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Captain Walker posted:I've been big into Fallen London recently, and I can't help but feel like a Blades in the Neath hack would be a fantastic fit for the setting. Not only is it a city of eternal night where the ruling classes hide away and the Constables are the meanest gang in town, but the literal entrance to Hell is just up the River Thames, and death is a temporary inconvenience rather than a permanent condition. So much cool territory to explore, especially in playing a crew of scoundrels trying to lay low rather than a big-shot with their name on Society's lips. I've literally run this, I even made up a little list of "Adjective" + "descriptors" for when I needed a throwaway title. I also avoided using direct dialogue much, preferring instead to steal the style of "The Cheery Zee-Captain tells you that he already sold the goods to a Quivering Academic, at a very fair price. For a fairer one, he suggests, he could give you the address his crew delivered it to." Wound up falling apart due to COVID (mine), but I've always dreamed of trying it again.
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Jun 19, 2022 07:05
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:I've literally run this, I even made up a little list of "Adjective" + "descriptors" for when I needed a throwaway title. I also avoided using direct dialogue much, preferring instead to steal the style of "The Cheery Zee-Captain tells you that he already sold the goods to a Quivering Academic, at a very fair price. For a fairer one, he suggests, he could give you the address his crew delivered it to." Wound up falling apart due to COVID (mine), but I've always dreamed of trying it again. Sounds delicious! Do you have a list of rules changes, etc? 
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Jun 19, 2022 08:44
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Captain Walker posted:Sounds delicious! Do you have a list of rules changes, etc? Not handy, since it was all on my laptop which died the death, but I'll probably reconstruct them at some point since I love the setting. Mostly it was just tweaks to the equipment lists and borrowing the map from Fallen London - the heaviest rewrites were basically reworking the Whisper into the Correspondent (as in, "one who studies/uses the Correspondence, albeit badly") and the factions, which naturally had to be entirely reworked for the setting. Also some ally/rival tweaks, though most of those hold up pretty well since, as you noted, the two settings already have a healthy amount of overlap. When I do reconstruct it, I'll upload it somewhere and post a link here.
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Jun 20, 2022 06:17
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I was amazed by how little I had to do as the GM for Band of Blades downtime. It was nice.
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Jun 20, 2022 17:02
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Would Band of Blades work ok for a campaign about a travelling merchant caravan? I have been obsessed with the Ultraviolet Grasslands setting recently, but also want to try out Forged in the Dark as a system. Is there a fitd game that could be adapted to run UVG with a bunch of overland travel and some dungeon crawling on the side?
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Jun 21, 2022 01:47
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