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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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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 12:16 |
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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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Dramatika posted:Six is a REALLY large group for Blades - have a go at it, but I’ve found even 4 is a it harder to keep people engaged while they aren’t participating. Or to look at the flipside, when I run Scum & Villainy (Star Wars smugglers using BitD's mechanics), if I'm not having a problem giving everyone enough time, then I'm not giving people enough time in the spotlight to do character moments, I'm not fleshing out the world adequately, I'm letting people roll "too soon" (e.g., before it's dramatically necessary), and so on. I too have a hard time giving four people enough spotlight time each. Six will be a real challenge, I think. Perhaps the best way to handle this, if you are dead-set against reducing group size, is making a habit of grouping up the PCs. You'd have ad hoc groups during a heist, and it's easy enough to make sure the overwatch & exfiltration team/the face team/the burgle team all get roughly the same amount of focus. But then you'd have semi-formalized pairs during downtime/free play (e.g., the cutter and the leech hang out a lot together because they are the ones who manage the gang on a day-to-day basis) and split time that way, so that even if this week the cutter gets most of the focus with the gang because he's leading them in a street brawl, next week the leech gets more focus as she renders first aid, replaces explosives they've used, etc. Also, these pairs can align along vices to give natural groups wandering off into the dark to indulge vice, at least until the Spider buys the upgrade that makes the whole group indulge together.
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Mar 19, 2022 21:37
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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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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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JMBosch posted:What ideas, concerns, hopes, etc. might you have about a system that tries to wrap up any unfinished missions or unresolved fallout by the end of each session, because the next session might have a completely different roster of players and/or Agents? Would it be frustrating for the real-world time of the game session to be a timer on pulling off a mission? Would resolving unfinished missions with a simple roll if you ran out of time feel hollow? Would you be annoyed if you had to start a session by specifying and dealing with the fallout of an unfinished mission you might not have been a part of in the previous session? To answer your questions: 1. I think trying to wrap it by session instead of by in-game mission should be a GMing goal, not a rule. Some days things will just run long (and you'll have to cut it); other days, things will run short (and what do you do? Start another mission and risk having to cut it off?) The ways to address a long mission or a mini-mission brought on by a short mission (overly simplistic mission, rushing through the mission, eliding important but not central parts of the mission, etc.) don't sound satisfactory. 2. Yes; see above. You can make it a GMIng goal, but I would hesitate to make it a game rule. 3. Ugh, I already hate engagement rolls and those are just to set initial position. Instead of settling it by roll(s), I'd rather have the mission success adjudicated by GM fiat as a failure, partially successful, completely successful, or critically successful based on performance to date in the mission, if I had to choose, but I really would rather not have it done this way (see #2) 4. Maybe a little, but a GM should be able to find something for me to do, even if it's just being the clock-monkey. I think that this is the preferable way to handle things, rather than try to wrap everything neatly.
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Nov 18, 2022 16:58
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:My group just finished up a year long OSR game and we decided our next campaign will be scum and villainy set in Star wars world, right before the events of ANH. I've only run straight FitD (including S&V), no Star Wars, but the first thing that jumped to mind is factions are really core to the gameplay. I think things will be a lot richer if you have more than five or six factions. A lot of the gameplay comes from factions' expectations/belligerence rubbing against each other right where the PCs are standing. Sure, the Empire is a faction all it's own, but so too are there separate factions run by Moff Sinestrous, Adjudicator Brix, ISB Chief Snoopaz, Chief Accountant Tallyman, etc., and they'll have their own separate interests in the PCs, whether for good or bad. I would also think about modifying Heat to be something more like BitD, where you have a single heat score, rather than per-system, since there's so many in the Star Wars. If they want to jet off to Dantooine and try to pick up some smuggling jobs from the nobodies there, that's effectively a Lay Low downtime action. (Or maybe a new crew move: get a crappier job at the benefit of dumping heat points.) Will they be smugglers, rebels, or something else? Or will they start as one and move toward another? Or do you not have a sense of that yet? (More for my own curiosity.)
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Sep 26, 2023 21:35
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Agreed. If someone wants to spend a downtime action prepping for the next score, that sounds like Acquire Asset, and the examples the book gives of temporary assets that can be acquired are one special item or set of common items (enough for a gang of your Tier scale), a cohort (an expert or gang), a vehicle, or a service. But to let the crew use these in the next job either means you have to make the job easier, or throw additional roadblocks at the crew to keep the difficulty up. The latter is plainly unfair, but the former smells a bit suspicious to me. If it's getting a wagon or gondola for a fast escape, that's OK to me, but saying that a service is "the paid-off doorman giving us free entry into the target building" doesn't really sit right with me -- that really feels like it should be an action roll (perhaps as part of a flashback) based on the engagement dice. What if the bribery fails? If it's Acquire Asset-based, there's no downside besides wasting a downtime action. Likewise, saying that the asset is "finding a secret entrance in the sewers" has the same feeling of urgency/risk that demands an action roll rather than a downtime action. The flip side is I would hate for my players to feel like they have to waste downtime actions scouting every score. But I think it's all play it by ear and make sure that the fiction comes first; there's no hard and fast rule.
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Feb 8, 2024 23:57
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Tekopo posted:Just be careful because if you just set everything as risky/standard you will struggle a lot as you keep playing. The game only shines when you use position/effect effectively and games in which you make use of both of them will feel much more tactical and engaging when the narrative that the players weave has an actual effect on the resolution of the rolls. FITD does not work very well IMO if you don’t fully use the mechanisms the way they are meant to be used so although it’s not a big deal ignoring it in the first session, you absolutely need to start getting used to making them be the first thing that gets set during an action and once you and your players get used to them momentum will come on its own. Try to get into the habit early so both you and your players don’t learn bad habits. If nothing else, you definitely need to have position/effect laid out already the first the a player says, "I'll use...um...FINESSE...to gracefully slide a stiletto into the Bluecoat's eye," so they don't think you're making the system up to screw them.
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Feb 18, 2024 16:21
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I take weird as anything that'll get looked down on society for one reason or another. If BitD were set in the late 80s, D&D would be a Weird vice. But my favorite concept of a Weird vice is based on the Mutter Museum of Medical History in Philadelphia. It's a collection of all sorts of medical samples, from fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva to conjoined twins to everything in between. If it weren't so clinical, it'd be a horror show. Now, it's not named the Mutter Museum because someone named Mutter paid a lot of money to get their name on the building. No, an old-timey doc named Mutter had this as his teaching collection. Even my wife, an MD, thought the guy must have been a little creepy and might have contested Michael Jackson for the Elephant Man's skeleton were he alive to do so. Now imagine if you weren't a sawbones in Duskvol, but a...let's say, cutter. While your companions are blowing coin from their scores on gin, blackjack, and hookers, you get word that your fixer has a lead on a preserved baby's body with a vestigial tail, preserved in clear liquor in a glass jar. You cram some gold sovereigns into a valise and hail a cab across town to the sales point as fast as you can. That's a Weird vice.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:22
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Vagabong posted:The above situation is currently occuring in my game, although I'm aiming for it to become a source of controversy that they're two timing eldritch gods; I feel like the various types of vice are mainly there as prompts to get people's brains working, and especially to get them to broaden their idea of a vice to more than drugs, drink, and gambling. I agree. The prompts on page 299 (examples of vice purveyors) are potentially helpful. For example, one of the weird ones is, "Ojak, Tycherosi rooftop market vendor, Silkshore." OK, so what's their stock in trade that falls into the family of stuff Lemon-Lime quoted? There are two proprietors at the House of the Weeping Lady, but one is faith and one is weird. What's the difference? These are great conversation starters, I think. About the dollhouse, I definitely would not want to make this a by-the-book downtime project (unless it could somehow be used as a planning tool to give boosts on engagement rolls or the like). I'd say, whenever the player indulges vice, let them have a free downtime action to work on a long-term project, only usable on their No-impact-in-the-game haunted dollhouse, to reflect their work on their hobby. After all, imagine what the dollhouse could mean I know it's not strictly by the rules, and maybe it's because of my player group, but I don't want roleplayers to be penalized for their choices compared to the more munchkin-minded.
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Mar 8, 2024 22:48
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Lemon-Lime posted:I don't know why you would need or want to do this. "Working on the dollhouse" is itself the weird thing the player is indulging in. You don't need to also make it an LTP where they build things for the same reason you don't make the gambling addict wager actual Coin to indulge their vice; it has all the fictional and mechanical weight of any other indulge vice action. I wrote it in response to this post, but you cut to the essence much more clearly. Shanty posted:Right but this is my issue with Weird as Supernatural. What you're describing [building the spooky dollhouse] would be a perfectly sensible (very cool!) long term project that a character could get up to in the world of Blades. Not a weird vice.
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Mar 9, 2024 00:14
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 12:16 |
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Bottom Liner posted:A simple one that can be used in a lot of scenes is tracking the amount of sound being made. This can be used in stealth, combat, etc and can be affected by not only the outcome of rolls, but the actions used in the first place. In my last Scum and Villainy game, I enjoyed tormenting the Mystic (a Jedi with the serial number filed off) by having his nemesis, a Nightspeaker (essentially a Sith with different rituals), show up repeatedly, and he had linked clocks. The first had to be filled by doing damage to him or otherwise stymieing him to stop him from screwing the crew around with his Way powers (which are legally distinct from the Force -- depending on what type of crew you have, S&V is intentionally derivative of multiple sci-fi IPs). Once that was filled, he would close with his plasma sword and engage the Mystic until the second clock was filled, whereupon he would try to make his escape (and always succeed, sometimes at a cost). I had to increase the size of the clocks as the campaign went on to keep it a challenge (justifying it as the Nightspeaker acquired artifacts and delved into forbidden Way powers), and of course in the final conflict the Mystic defeated him after cleaning his clocks (ha!) and chasing him down. Can someone explain to me how else linked clocks are different from just having one bigger clock? Is it just like my example above or, "No one can make any progress on looting the vault (progress clock 2) until it's been cracked (progress clock 1)"? Or is there something else I'm missing to this?
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Mar 10, 2024 22:59
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