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I've been reading a bunch of noir novels and watching the Bosch series and now I really want to run something like that in this system. Going to be tough deciding what to run first: Robbery-Homicide detectives in either Duskwall, Sharn or 50s LA, the cyberpunk hack, a Thief hack, or just straight up vanilla BitD. 
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Apr 17, 2015 17:22
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Liquid Communism posted:Throw in some Laundry Files. Computational demonology is always fun! I would've murdered someone for a Max Gladstone playset instead of Steven Brust. 
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Apr 19, 2015 13:05
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Foglet posted:I was getting a serious Fallen London/Sunless Sea vibe from Blades in the Dark which turned out to be no coincidence at all. Still incredibly mad this never happened. 
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Apr 22, 2015 12:25
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Time to keep waiting. I'm okay with this. Hopefully he decides he's getting rid of the separate Effect roll too, he wasn't 100% sure last I'd heard.
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Apr 23, 2015 22:56
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And if you only roll one die, your Effect is considered to be 1. I much prefer it this way (I hate having two separate rolls) and it opens up interesting design space in letting certain things (i.e. items or having max pips in a skill or whatever) let the player pick which die to use instead of it being automatic.
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Apr 24, 2015 00:48
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Jimbozig posted:I'm regretting backing this now. Changing your core mechanic after the Kickstarter... He hasn't changed the mechanic, stop being a gigantic baby. The single Action/Effect roll was something he put forward for consideration.
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Apr 24, 2015 15:10
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There are a bunch of Kickstarters where you're just pledging money for the author to be able to afford art and a professional editor on what is otherwise a completed game. 
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Apr 24, 2015 20:05
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QuantumNinja posted:This is a good point, and it reveals the crux of the problem: basically, you've told the players that they must completely resolve the guard situation before they can move forward. They may do it by subterfuge or attack or evasion, but they must deal with it. And that means the entire problem, not "knock out five of the six guards and let the other wander around because who cares". That's problematic, and the only recourse the system offers is "you can deal with the sixth guard any way you can sell your GM, though!" That could easily lead to situations that feel unsatisfying if the narrative does not correctly handle it. The issue here isn't with the clock, though, it's with you quantifying "one segment of the clock = one guard" rather than having no correlation between the two. The actual worth of "one clock segment" is deliberately nebulous and should never be defined, because then you eat in to the narrative. Killing ten guards with a bomb can be worth one segment, just like stealthily sneaking past one guard can be worth five; that's entirely left up to the players to decide in play. I do agree it would be nice to have mechanics for what happens when the clock is half full/75% full, even if it's just in the form of getting a slight bonus to your next roll. The problem isn't narrative at all, it's purely mechanical (having to try again because you aced the Action roll but had a poo poo Effect, whether it's a roll or a second die). Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 11:56 on May 5, 2015 |
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May 5, 2015 11:48
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Jimbozig posted:Ugh. 8 for locks? That sounds like classic bad d&d. "Oh, good job, you unlocked the door! Now roll again for the next door! Oh, too bad. Try again! Hey, great lockpicking! Only a couple more doors left! Keep on rolling..." Yes. Why are you representing an abstract representation of "in this heists, locks are a serious problem" as "the heroes unlock a bunch of locked doors one after another?"
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May 7, 2015 19:37
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Jimbozig posted:It's either "okay, this is the final vault door... Oh, you succeeded but had poo poo for effect. Well, I guess there is another door behind this one lol." If you've got a multi-segment clock for the final vault door, why does one roll equal one go at picking the door's lock or safety mechanism? If you roll poo poo for effect, you describe how the player disables the first step of the vault door's multi-step lock. If you roll well on effect and ace it, you still describe the door as having multiple security measures but you describe how you circumvent more than one of them. It's the opposite of how AW does it; you don't know the stakes of one player's specific roll until after the effect has been determined, where you describe whatever narrative details you need to describe to make the narrative fit the scope of the effect roll. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 22:49 on May 7, 2015 |
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May 7, 2015 22:46
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Looks like that QS update will be a while longer:quote:Speaking of updates to the Quick Start, I'm planning to release them less frequently than I originally planned. I don't want to bombard you with a series of tiny updates with small changes. It can be annoying to keep track of things when they're dribbled out like that. Instead, I plan to wait to release an update when I have a significant new version of the PDF ready (with a changelog showing what's new), with enough time between updates so you can take the changes on board and understand them as I go. So expect maybe 2 or 3 updates between now and November.
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May 11, 2015 18:45
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Dishonored is Dunwall. Duskwall is Blades in the Dark. 
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May 17, 2015 17:35
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New quickstart rules (v5), and Harper has decided these are the final rules:quote:The rules are finished! That's right, version 5 is the final iteration of the core mechanics. Nothing significant will change going forward (maybe just a number here or there if we find an error). If you've been waiting for the rules to stabilize before you start playing with the Early Access PDF, your wait is over. 
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Jan 11, 2016 00:19
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The system has changed enough since the KS that there isn't anything accurate to how the game is right now, but you can still watch the AP provided in the actual KS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsmw4wC7iOE The game treats "combat" the exact same way it treats all task resolution.
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Jan 14, 2016 19:45
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The game is cooler with the serial numbers filed off, rather than being tied to an existing setting. e; vv exactly. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 16, 2016 12:59
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Yeah, the game has definitely benefited from all the time spent iterating on and playtesting the rules. I'm glad he made all the big changes he made early on.
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Feb 16, 2017 16:29
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Harrow posted:Have they put out a PDF with bookmarks yet? Yes, ten days ago.
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Feb 27, 2017 19:24
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Siivola posted:What sort of mecha anime would you represent with Blades' plan-execute-regroup gameplay loop? Dougram or VOTOMS or something like a more realistic 08th MS.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:07
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There's no reason why you'd remove the equipment load stuff, because the goal shouldn't be to recreate the mechanics of Persona 5.
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Apr 20, 2017 16:48
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Watch a Coen brothers movie then play Fiasco together, a week before you play BitD.
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Apr 20, 2017 17:48
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I resent the book claiming planning isn't fun, because it's often the most fun part of any session in games I've played, but the way the rules makes the heists planning-free is great.
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Apr 20, 2017 19:40
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I'm running Blades on the 13th and not going to lie, I'm probably going to have them break Basso out of prison and rob Bafford's manor. 
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Apr 28, 2017 18:56
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I still haven't seen my BitD book, or my AW2e for that matter, but I'm in Europe.
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 14:47 on May 8, 2017 |
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May 8, 2017 14:44
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It would be nice if they started shipping in the EU, too.
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Jun 6, 2017 07:28
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Finally got my book! It's smaller than I thought but yeah, the special edition is incredibly pretty.
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Jun 19, 2017 20:48
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KirbyJ posted:The engagement roll seems to want to cut directly to that last part with everybody already at their stations and, more aggravating, potentially sticks you in a bad position that you can't possibly forsee or avoid because if you could, that would make the engagement roll pointless but it's still just "well, you're already on the backfoot because we hit the fast forward button". How many heist films do you know where the big heist goes off with absolutely zero deviations from the plan and no complications whatsoever? There are very few, because that's boring. The engagement roll skips past the opening few minutes of the heist where everything is going fine and makes you start playing at the point at which things have gone wrong - the cops drop by for a random inspection, the New Guy kills a hostage while trying to get the rest of them to obey, the teller managed to hit the silent alarm, etc. The entire point of flashbacks and this game's attitude to planning is to eliminate the bit where you meticulously plan every detail of a heist ahead of time, and instead assume your PCs have already done that, and present them with the twist immediately. Once play actually begins, they use flashbacks to retroactively have planned for twist and deal with them - and whether the plan worked or not will depend on the dice. They could roll well and the heist goes off perfectly despite the initial hitch, or they could roll poorly and it could all snowball horribly. You can still do the scene-setting, just do it immediately before the engagement roll - it limits you slightly in deciding what the narrative effects of a poor engagement roll are, but not a whole lot. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 09:58 on Oct 8, 2017 |
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Oct 8, 2017 09:56
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Fenarisk posted:Been watching Altered Carbon, it's basically Shadowrun meets Eclipse Phase. About 80% of the technology in Eclipse Phase was ripped straight out of the Takeshi Kovacs novels, so this is pretty funny.
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Feb 10, 2018 19:01
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Kai Tave posted:I don't know if he's the first writer to employ the concept, but Eclipse Phase directly borrows the terminology that Morgan uses in Altered Carbon for the tech (cortical stacks). Subjunctive posted:I think Altered Carbon is also the source of EP’s “sleeve” jargon. Yeah, this. Sleeves and stacks are literally reused concepts/words from Altered Carbon.
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Feb 11, 2018 00:42
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You use downtime actions to do the research, or else the vulnerability is information obtained from a previous heist (usually as a reward).
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Feb 25, 2018 10:19
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Demon_Corsair posted:I liked that idea, but it always seemed a little weird when you dropped a 2 harm consequence to a 1. Did it also just vanish? Just make it so 1-harm consequences are healed at the start of downtime only, so if you drop a 2-harm down a level it stays until the next downtime.
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Feb 28, 2018 09:48
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I mean, it's intended to keep play in the city (it's a toxic, barren wasteland so you can't actually escape the city for long), but we also know enough about the deathlands that "find a maintenance gate to deathwalk from neighbourhood A to B via the outside" is a totally viable plan. The ghosts and the toxic air that requires pressurised, powered breathing apparatuses are just things that you can make clocks out of.
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Apr 8, 2018 10:13
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spectralent posted:Yeah, for sure, I just wasn't sure from reading if it was a case that it's literally toxic or if it was mad max. I got my answer to that from Ghost Lines, I just couldn't find out much in the book. Honestly? The book doesn't say and even Ghost Lines is vague about it (they might just be wearing them because they work on top of moving trains, which makes it hard to breathe), so it's entirely your call as a GM. Though yeah, the more you make the deathlands like space, the more you have interesting elements that might potentially fail at a crucial moment to make into countdown clocks.
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Apr 8, 2018 10:32
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Foglet posted:John Harper (Creator) 2 days ago gently caress that poo poo, that's completely inexcusable. The dude pulled at least $162000 after Kickstater's cut, he can drat well afford to pay contributing authors a reasonable rate. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 15:38 on May 28, 2018 |
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May 28, 2018 15:31
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Serf posted:I'm pretty confused here. If the stretch goal money wasn't being paid to the authors to produce material, where was it going? What was the point of them being stretch goals? If the person was going to work for free anyways, why add the extra money requirement? Seems like a real backwards rear end thing to do. Harper basically treated the stretch goals as a marketing tool and nothing else, presumably. They were an incentive to get people to give the KS campaign (and thus him, personally, since the other authors were all unpaid) more money. It's real scummy.
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May 29, 2018 13:16
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Serf posted:It seems like Acimovic is in there saying that the original intent was that the hacks would be like the document that long constituted Scum and Villainy: 40ish pages of modified rules, some playbooks and crew types and maybe a novel mechanic or two and not full 300+ page books that are mostly just copied over rules from Blades with their spin on it incorporated with some art. This is what all of them (bar S&V) will be, yeah. That doesn't actually change the fact that it's 40 pages of work being done for free and locked behind giving the KS more money, which should have gone towards paying the people writing the stretch goals. S&V is only the way it is because Acimovic got Evil Hat to publish it as a full game since he owns the rights to what he wrote and the Blades core rules are in a "well if you ask me and I don't dislike you I might let you use them" licensing state. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 13:54 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 13:50
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mllaneza posted:That's very much the Black Company love letter I was expecting. It's Black Company mashed with Malazan Book of the Fallen (which is itself about 40% Black Company homage) mashed with a tiny bit of the zombie stuff from Game of Thrones. The actual flow of the game isn't too clear to me yet because the beta doc isn't organised super well and it needs a few pages of "here's what you're doing, here's what order you do it in, here's how it's different from Blades" explanation text, but I like the setting and tone/flavour a fair bit.
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May 31, 2018 22:37
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BinaryDoubts posted:Does anyone have any advice for spicing up social encounters? My two-player group of Hawkers (Spider, Leech) have zero sneakiness or fightiness so a lot of their scores (obtaining turf, hiring distributors, etc.) have been social. FYI, one of the stretch goals that came out recently is a new crew playbook called Grifters which is all about being conmen and comes with some advice on how to run a con in Blades. Probably worth checking out if you have access to the backer downloads. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Jan 24, 2019 |
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Jan 24, 2019 10:19
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Dunwall, but the whales are demons and instead of the Outsider you just have a bunch of sad gothic ghosts bumming around.
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Aug 22, 2019 19:48
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Band of Blades is so loving good and I'm very sad I'll probably never get to play it.
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Oct 14, 2019 18:10
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FWIW Blades does play differently from most games out there, but it does a pretty okay job of explaining the differences in the rulebook. I do think Band of Blades does a significantly better job of providing examples to illustrate position and effect than BitD itself does, though. You get the usual problem of people fixating on one system and acting like it's universal when it isn't, but reading the rules will generally teach people how the game works differently from what they're used to (whether or not they recognise that it might not work for what it was recommended for is another story). I'd say BitD's biggest failure is not providing a stronger thematic relationship between the core mechanics and its setting, or not stressing how important it is for players to have a shared sense of place as a result.
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Jan 20, 2020 08:36
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