|
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.
|
#
¿
May 1, 2021 22:39
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:09 |
|
|
Trip report! My usual RPG group's GM couldn't make it this week, so instead of playing BITD we played Broken Spire. It's a very, very short hack (13 pages) on account of being still set in BITD and using all the same playbooks, moves, and action ratings (totally different crews). However instead of being a hardscrabble from the bottom gang of criminals, you're an extremely well established conspiracy to assassinate the emperor. The level of how established goes from "Lifetime" (least dedicated) to "Cataclysm era" (most dedicated). The idea is that you're coming in at the last second - there's three premade scenarios for the assassination itself, and we were doing a one shot so we just started there, though the rules cover situations if you want the crew to be somewhat further out from "we are going right at him today." It was real good. The people I play with kind of don't mesh the best with BITD, we've had a great time but as players we pretty much always want to zoom past the bookkeeping/powerbuilding/inconveniences stuff and get to "ok is this a thing we WANT to do" moments. In base BITD this has meant that we've frequently done a complications roll and gone "that sounds boring, let's not" and treating the building up from the bottom stuff in BITD as basically a chore that we really didn't engage with very much. BS had us start out with +8 action dots and four trauma and half a dozen moves, with the whole thing having an unambiguous end of "this all comes down to one dice roll," which gelled a lot better with our style of going for high consequence, high drama decisions. If nothing else, I highly recommend it as a one shot if you're already into base BITD because it's a very fun, very different way of using the setting.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2021 15:06
|
|
|
CitizenKeen posted:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mythopoeia/cbr-pnk?ref=thanks-copy oh this looks really cool, and i'm very interested in a playbook-less FITD (not to be clear that I think "playbooks were a mistake" - I think they're very good! - just curious to see how that affects the texture & design)
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2022 19:53
|
|
|
Good stuff all around. To reiterate that most recent post, Blades teams tend to roll their best pools a lot, either through group actions or just making sure the person sneaking ahead has a lot of prowl or the person fast talking has a lot of sway. Six is going to increase the opportunities for that a lot and also they'll have like 60 loving stress to spend per heist and 12 downtime actions to reduce heat. I went from a 3 person to a 4 person crew and it was a pretty dramatic shift in capability. Though TBH I'm partially wary just because I find that my ability as a GM starts to falter pretty badly at 5 players, just in terms of giving good attention and keeping track of things. Also I agree that the newer players are if anything going to be better than the more experienced ones. More experienced players tend to revolt against one of my favorite core elements of BITD: different action ratings can be used for the same action. If you're in a sword fight, it can be skirmish or finesse or wreck, and depending on the environment one or the other could change position or effect (a simple example that I like - you're fighting on narrow catwalks above a stage. Wreck will reduce your position as you increase the chance that you fall or damage the catwalks, Finesse may improve your position or effect depending on the GM's whims). If you really do want to improve people's odds of getting into it, I'd recommend above all else "watch a few episodes of Leverage." It's a fun show anyway.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2022 20:44
|
|
|
Hell yeah! BitD good nd it's great when you can make it sing.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2022 17:07
|
|
|
Rick posted:Like "by the book" sometimes had scores feel insubstantial and it was often too easy to just roll over the score in a few rolls and it often felt like our squad was either spinning our wheels or drifting apart because there wasn't a firm storyline reason for us to stick together; also coming up with ideas for scores got a bit old. But it was also really cool actually that you could sometimes roll over a score in a few rolls, and being able to use nearly any skill with very little pushback was fun and I did some cool poo poo. I've had 3 different GMs and they've all approached it differently, and I do agree that the closer the group is to playing this part of the book the easier it was to just march from victory to victory. TBH the thing I view as kind of a problem is that there's too many skills and I don't think they're the best defined, and it ends up being too simple to just never roll skills your bad at even in bad situation and I think its fun and funny to push a player to have to try and lie when they've got no Sway or whatever. I think even just Wicked Ones removing 3 skills is a huge improvement. Oddly none of my GMs have done what I think is an interesting/good move to do, which is "OK it's risky-standard if you use X but if you use Y it's desperate-standard." The book uses the example that a swordfight can be Skirmish or Finesse or Wreck, and which one of those gives you the best position/effect is going to depend on the peculiarities of the situation e.g. swashbuckling on a narrow bridge is going to make Finesse more favorable and Wreck less favorable, fighting with a hammer or against somebody who just throws a molotov cocktail at you will make Finesse less favorable, etc.
|
|
#
¿
May 17, 2022 20:09
|
|
|
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
|
|
#
¿
May 30, 2022 19:15
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
May 30, 2022 22:18
|
|
|
https://nitter.net/_sulcata/status/1526795214051893249#m
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2022 19:09
|
|
|
At base, BITD reinforces a lot of bad habits of risk averse players. I say this as a very risk averse player in pretty much all games (I tend to prioritize defenses and reliability in pretty much all games I play). BITD sets up a kind of basic core motivation for all characters: gain 40 stash before you gain 4 trauma. You can get away with avoiding most consequences by spending stress, but this means that spending stress can be trading a short-term gain against your long-term goals, and if you're risk averse you don't know 1) what the rest of the heist might need in terms of stress and 2) how you'll roll when you get to downtime. Yes I do understand that if you're not a risk-averse player this is all moon-logic because the whole fun of it is in getting those whacky consequences, but at least for me its a game-design sword of damocles that takes the appeal off of taking on risky goals. On the other hand one of the guys I play with pretty much always tries to game a game's XP system which in BITD has been pretty hilarious as he will very overtly try to trauma out on the first session in order to gain an XP trigger. I like the system but it does have some flaws for the psychology of the table I play at. Part of why I like Wicked Ones so much is that it sands off a lot of the stuff that I don't like, mostly by making it so the 'trauma' is less of like a long-term planning thing and more of a short-term issue.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 14, 2022 05:05
|
|
|
dex_sda posted:One thing you should do which I saw in the RITS hack but came up with independently is just like trauma and vice and background, you should make roleplaying Harm an xp trigger. This way players actually remind you when they have -1D on a roll. oh this is clever
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2022 21:29
|
|
|
That always seems like a hard mechanical problem to me. If you don't have any comeback mechanics, then you end up not really engaging with anything that starts a negative spiral because its better to just scrap the whole thing and start fresh - or just turn off the system - than deal with it, which means you basically have a binary between flawless runs and "we just quit." On the other hand, anybody who's seen speedrunning or thought about strategy games knows that if comeback mechanics are too strong then the optimal strategy becomes counterintuitive e.g. feed a redshirt into a woodchipper at the start or end of every mission.
|
|
#
¿
May 30, 2023 12:42
|
|
|
SimonChris posted:I just kind of like the idea of running a fractal heist where individual actions expand into earlier heists. I realize that's not the normal way of doing things, and the sub-heists would need to be very short, but it could be cool setup for a particularly epic score. This is basically how Broken Spire is structured. Its very cool! I recommend everyone check it out since its set in the same universe as BITD just with a different emphasis.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2023 11:07
|
|
|
Definitely a weird end to that one, especially since I really liked WO in a lot of ways, I think it really fixed a lot of the issues I had with base blades*, and in particular in a genre (RPG books) where authors seem utterly unable to not include super racist things in their books, I can't think of anything in WO that felt nearly as off as, well, every single WOD or D&D book. Wish I could say I saw it coming or something but no, pretty surprised that this is how it ends. And I guess, anybody got the CC links? I only ever got the free stuff and I'm not even sure that's the most up to date. *For the record, these would be too much overlap in a couple of the skills, crews that encourage repetitive gameplay, and a trauma system that encourages excessive caution. I think #2 and #3 and even moreso #3 are more matters of taste than universally considered flaws. WO condensed from 12 skills to 9 skills and that removes a lot of the trouble my table had with not being 100% sure when something was Finesse vs Prowl for example, which feels prettly clearly good, and I like the crew equivalent being more about goals than methods, and I like that the trauma system is still a penalty but more of a kind of fun and repeatable one than in base blades.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2024 18:59
|
|
|
Lemon-Lime posted:The overlap in actions is completely by design so that there are multiple verbs that make sense for any given thing the players want to do. I am sure there are tables where it was never an issue but I'd say functionally all of the negative, out-of-fiction conflict I've had in FITD games was over when something was Finesse vs Prowl, Survey vs Study, and which combat ability to use. WO played much, much smoother with the people I've played narrative games with and 99% of it is because we didn't have people nitpicking over which of those to use. I also think its much easier from a character conception level to roll Survey & Study together into just having a generally observant character as opposed to splitting that concept across two points of investments, and same with Prowl & Finesse for characters that use physicality to avoid conflicts.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2024 21:52
|
|
|
Bottom Liner posted:Your example doesn't follow though. You wouldn't penalize them for choosing the book given Action for a specific goal over an alternative because of the guard on the other side of the door. That would affect the Position no matter the skill (though Wreck would obviously be more risky). Finessing would be like, slipping your arm through an opened window to pop the lock on the other side, or quietly opening an already unlocked door. Tinker would be getting through the lock without smashing it. Yeah so imagine the last 20 posts every time somebody has to roll, and WO removes 15-20 of those posts.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2024 05:52
|
|
|
NachtSieger posted:Hi I am finally biting the bullet to actually run a game but I'm perfectly nervous about essentially running my first game. Any advice y'all can give for a newbie GM? Are you new to GMing in total or new to blades in specific? GMing in general advice: it is in fact ok to kick something to your players or admit you don't have an idea, that's fine. Planning is a lot less important reading the room, and make sure your Out Of Character problems have Out Of Character solutions: like 99% of horrible GM stories are that the GM decided that things a player did can only be corrected by punishing their character. If a character does something tactically stupid or betrays a friend or something, the character suffers, but if the player is hogging table time or being mean to another player or being overly metagamey, you talk to the player. For Blades in specific: the system genuinely gives you a lot of support, I'd say trust it. The biggest mind-bender for people from outside of blades coming in is the flashback system, which is an incredibly simple fix for the problem of "spending 8 hours pre-planning a heist." It isn't hard to implement, but it is a MASSIVE shift in how you play a game. You really want to spend a few minutes (mostly just a matter of what the tone at your table is like) and then zoom straight to "you're in trouble." Try to keep things moving. There's a bit of a seeming paradox where a default blades character is actually pretty competent (they can scrounge up +2 to anything, so even a 0 in a skill is pretty surmountable), but the consequences of failure can be quite nasty, so always try to think before you ask somebody to roll: "What can actually go wrong here." Its very explicit in the rules when it talks about establishing position & effect, but I think its just worth really keeping that as probably the main rule of GMing blades. My experience with blades is that most people try to do an entire heist, from initiation through downtime, in one sitting. This isn't necessary but from a GMing perspective its rather uncomplicated, and pushes you into a pretty brisk (and, IMO, good) pace.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2024 09:50
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:09 |
|
|
NachtSieger posted:Honestly, both. I have some small amount of games under my belt but they're so far apart and done so shoddily that I have absolutely no faith in myself. Negative, probably. So, assuming you are GMing for friends you can talk to: talk to them. You can very much say, as a GM, "I want this to be a good experience and I would appreciate feedback about what works and doesn't." You can very much say "what kind of tone do you want for the character and the campaign." And this is just me and my personal style but I prefer as a GM to think of it more like facilitating than "running." Less leading and more mediating.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2024 10:12
|
|