Blades in the Dark: A bunch of hacks

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Blades in the Dark: A bunch of hacks

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

At no point should you be asking players to make random rolls, least of all random rolls to determine if a character randomly dies or not. Shreya not tolerating any corruption exists as a potential consequence for failed rolls and a way to shape the feel of your Shreya campaign to match her beliefs.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2020 23:12

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 06:00

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

How do alchemist's deal with Shreya given their work is inherently corruptive?

I don't know, how do alchemists deal with Shreya given that their work is inherently corruptive?

# ¿ Mar 20, 2020 18:28

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

In general, the Chosen is not a playable character - it's a force of nature far outside of the PCs' comprehension that just happens to walk around in a human skin. You should treat it as such, because otherwise you're taking away from the game's focus on the fragile humanity of the PCs in the face of this divine war they happen to be stuck in. In general, the Chosen won't be fighting anything unless there's truly, absolutely no alternative, because if it goes down, the Legion and the entire world are poo poo out of luck.

The book explicitly lists Chosen getting into a fight with an uncertain outcome as an example for fortune rolls using their threat level as the dice pool, on pp.44-45. I would roll it yourself for the reason mentioned above, but if you really don't want to, you could always have the Marshal do it.

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Mar 22, 2020

# ¿ Mar 22, 2020 18:36

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Like all PbtA/FitD games, Band of Blades is fiction-first. Attacks that "spread the unwholesome essence of undeath" cause corruption. Attacks that don't "spread the unwholesome essence of undeath" don't cause corruption. The Blighter upgrade should be read as "if an enemy attack would cause corruption, it causes +1 corruption."

Can all enemies cause corruption? That's up to you and the table to decide.

Do Gut-Sack attacks cause corruption? Almost certainly, unless the PCs can avoid their poison/acids.

Do Crow attacks cause corruption? Maybe their blades are coated in poison, or they have flasks of spooky evil acid to use as grenades.

Do Render's Knights or Heartless have attacks that cause corruption? :shrug:

e; in practical terms, corruption exists as another stress track that's a lot harder to heal and plays into the horror element more directly, to use when making characters suffer complications, just so you're not reduced to always causing harm (or so you can do both to show a threat is serious, etc.).

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Mar 26, 2020

# ¿ Mar 26, 2020 10:18

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Fenarisk posted:

Just realized it's been 6 months since an update, and almost 5 YEARS since the kickstarter ended. I'm assuming we aren't ever going to get Null Vector or a host of other stretch goals.

Looks like someone asked the same thing 2 hours ago:

DarkAvenger211 posted:

So a player in my upcoming game asked if npc squad mates can use their abilities. For example, the ability "Just a kid" grants experience to anyone who "protects" that character.

I can't quite find the answer in the book. I'm pretty sure you don't define rookie abilities until they're actually played by a player in the first place. But this scenario could still happen if the rookie was played in a previous session.

Any character with a sheet not being currently "piloted" by a player should still keep that sheet, IMO, otherwise you lose the sense that you're playing a bunch of distinct characters. I would argue that means their abilities still work as NPCs, though keep in mind NPCs don't get to roll.

DarkAvenger211 posted:

This also brings up another question about soldier promotions. If a rookie is promoted to soldier during a secondary mission, but we haven't defined that character's abilities yet, does that mean that character loses out on the extra rookie ability they would have gotten if they were played by a player first?

Yes, IMO. The rookie ability is a reward that character gets for being played as a rookie. If they're never played as a rookie, they shouldn't get one, same as the initial specialists.

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Mar 30, 2020

# ¿ Mar 30, 2020 16:12

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

DarkAvenger211 posted:

Is it normal to pick someone in the middle of a conflict and say "And the Heartless takes a massive swing in your direction, what do you do? As opposed to saying to the whole group: "The heartless is about to be upon you, what do you all do?"

Yes. This is how you rotate the spotlight in PbtA/FitD games.

Make sure you switch to a different player each time someone has had a chance to do something and make a roll (or before they resolve the results of their action if it would take some time in the fiction and the camera would logically be cutting away to show someone else doing something else while they pick a lock or set a bomb or line up the perfect shot or whatever).

DarkAvenger211 posted:

I didn't quite pick out anyone specifically to "foreshadow" or "telegraph" impending danger aside from stating that the rotters are on them so the Heavy player said he'd disengage from the lieutenant use anchor to try and clear the rotters away from the squad (in order to avoid using the squad itself and potentially taking casualties as a result).

Part of the interaction didn't feel right to me in this case, It really does feel like the players in the squad should have dealt with it especially considering the Heavy was already engaged with the lieutenant, but since there's no real "turn order" or anything anyone is allowed to speak up and decide what to do. In this case we treated it as a single skirmish roll to take on the rotters and disengage, possibly taking consequences from the lieutenant. But would it have been more appropriate to have to disengage first with a maneuver roll maybe? And then deal with the rotters afterwards?

The correct call would have been to just tell the Heavy player "no, you're busy with the Lieutenant, you can't take your eyes off it for even a split second or it'll almost definitely kill you. Soldier and Sniper, you're on your own here - the Heavy is barely holding his ground against the Lieutenant and the whole squad is about to get overrun if you don't do something fast. What do you do?"

As the GM, it's your job to make sure everyone gets a "turn" to act if your players aren't jumping in to interrupt each other with their next actions (and if they are, it's your job to make them act in whatever order you choose so they each get a turn).

e; "the rotters are on you" is completely fine for announcing future badness as long as the players are then able to avoid harm if they successfully react, incidentally.

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Apr 25, 2020

# ¿ Apr 22, 2020 19:29

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

DarkAvenger211 posted:

I hadn't considered holding onto results until after other players make their play simultaneously, might take a bit of book-keeping to remember the position/effects but it would help to illustrate multiple things happening at once.

You don't make them roll simultaneously, you resolve the narrative consequences of their rolls simultaneously.

As mentioned, think of it as being the writer and director of something like an HBO miniseries or an action film. If the Scout is trying to pick a lock so the squad can get to safety from a bunch of Gaunts currently bearing down on them and they roll a 4, maybe the consequence of that 4 is that the lock takes longer to pick, putting the defending squad in a worse position for the Skirmish roll that is going to happen while the camera cuts away from the Scout picking a lock and shows 10-15 seconds of people exchanging sword blows. Depending on the results of the Skirmish roll, an NPC Rookie might get cut down because the fight is dragging on, or maybe the Soldier rolled a critical and their increased effect lets them rescue the Rookie from an otherwise serious wound.

(Note that you generally want to avoid inflicting harm or consequences on one player for the result of another player's roll - though it's completely fine for it to affect the narrative circumstances and thus modify the position/effect of another player's roll.)

e; I also highly encourage you to use this spotlight switching to make characters act in "real time" - if the spotlight cuts to a character that has very little time to react to something, make the player react fast instead of sitting there and pondering the optimal next action. Similarly, if someone gives you a long series of things they want their character to do, you know that's going to take time in the narrative, so you can interrupt them, make them roll for part of what they want to do, then cut away to another character.

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Apr 23, 2020

# ¿ Apr 22, 2020 23:59

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

I'm 90% sure there's a Crypt Quarter in the Lost District entirely so you have an excuse to play The Haunted Cathedral in tabletop form.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2020 17:26

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

It's part of the setting assumptions that Duskwall is old and crowded and all of it has already been carved out into faction territories (where faction might mean a bunch of criminals or the police or a trading company). There's no space inside the walls for the crew to start a completely new claim - even if they have a brand new idea no one else has had, you still need territory and manpower to turn that idea into a claim.

On a mechanical level, the score requirement is there so that there's an actual action that players need to do in order to get a claim. The rulebook is also clear that the claim map on the crew sheet is just typical of what sort of claims that crew type would naturally go for - you can feel free to replace any of the claims on the map with something else that's more appropriate.

Keep in mind that if they have a cool idea, they could also start a long-term project to monetise that cool idea. Technically this would only be a one-off, but I'd definitely say that a good idea and a hard long-term project should be able to convert an existing claim into an appropriate, different claim type.

Remember that fiction always comes first, so do whatever makes sense for the narrative, as long as the PCs have to pay a cost of some kind to get that claim (whether it's a score and reputation loss, a lot of coin and downtime actions, or something else).

# ¿ Apr 27, 2020 11:05

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Here's the secret pro tip: there are 3-4 other people sat around the table with brains full of ideas you can use.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2020 00:02

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Digital Osmosis posted:

If these are as clear as they're going to be (until they come up in the game, of course) fine

They are. The only thing set in stone is the fact that everything outside of the lightning barriers is intrinsically hostile to life, and that's why everyone has to crowd into Duskwall. The exact specifics of that are up to you to define (or not, if they never come up).

As a side note, make sure your players actually learn the BitD setting. The game mechanics are simple and narrative-first, so things will very rapidly fall apart if your players aren't able to describe their actions with some detail that fits the setting.

Digital Osmosis posted:

Also, any suggestions / easy starter packs for running the game online? I've not run a game online before. I know a lot of people use Roll20, and I figure I should probably download that and start to figure it out - is that a good idea or is there another app people prefer? Do any of them have like, Blades in the Dark plugins that will get me easily up to speed?

Roll20 has a nice BitD character sheet with really fancy graphics, programmed macros and click-to-roll buttons, and the virtual tabletop is nice for putting up maps of the city that everyone can look at. It also has voice chat, though I prefer using Discord just because the quality is nicer and you get push to talk.

# ¿ May 2, 2020 18:48

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Lord_Hambrose posted:

Just look at a wiki about Dishonored.

This doesn't really work because as much as Duskwall blatantly borrows from Dunwall for the leviathan oil stuff (and obviously the name), the BitD setting also has weird gothic horror assumptions that aren't in Dishonored.

# ¿ May 3, 2020 23:51

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but just in case you aren't:

# ¿ May 4, 2020 09:07

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

They happen during the campaign actions, not after:

Per the labourers/alchemists rules on page 139:

With labourers, starting an LTP uses an action as normal, but the clock will auto-progress by 1 every campaign phase per labourer unit assigned to the project, as long as it's for a LTP they can help on (I would rule this includes the phase in which the LTP is started, but the rulebook doesn't say either way).

With alchemists, performing an alchemist action (which can be either starting/progressing an LTP or performing an Acquire Asset action, GM's choice) is in addition to your campaign actions, since alchemists have to roll for Corruption.

It's entirely possible for labourers to be assigned to and therefore progress an alchemical LTP if it makes sense in the fiction (i.e. the alchemists are researching a cure, but they need to build a workshop first; you'd have to justify this every new campaign phase to keep doing it).

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 22:42 on May 4, 2020

# ¿ May 4, 2020 22:39

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

It's a narrative "help" but because this is fiction first, that will nearly always translate into an Assist roll if the player with level 3 harm is trying to act (unless they push themselves). This is of course assuming they can act in the first place; if your PC has "catatonic curse" as level 3 harm, they're unlikely to be attempting any actions.

Why was a character with level 3 harm going on a mission?

# ¿ May 5, 2020 16:48

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

At level 3 harm, they're effectively a casualty that shouldn't be available to be sent out on mission.

Think of it from a narrative perspective: you wouldn't send a person so injured they can't do anything without being propped up by someone else on a cross-country trek where they're almost certainly going to be attacked by undead. There might be a tiny handful of exceptions for cinematic license purposes, but in 99.99% of cases that soldier would just not be fit for duty in any way.

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 19:26 on May 5, 2020

# ¿ May 5, 2020 19:22

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

There's now a page listing the KS stretch goals and supplements that have gotten a public release: https://bladesinthedark.com/blades-supplements

# ¿ May 20, 2020 23:24

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

DalaranJ posted:

Was Band part of the kickstarter rewards? I seem to remember getting it for free.

Band of Blades was a stretch goal, yes. The planned two sequel campaigns were not.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2020 00:34

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

You better believe that if you're trying to dimensionally transfer into the ghost of a building that burned down, rolling anything less than a 6 is going to dump you into the fire that burned it down.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2020 21:26

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

The ghost apocalypse stuff is completely incidental to anything in Blades, except that it provides a handy excuse why "just run away to another city" isn't an option for escaping the consequences of your fuckups. Sparkcraft is completely divorced from ghost stuff, and you could pretty easily reflavour Whispers to being about spirits or whatever instead.

If you can find an alternate excuse for why outside the city is incredibly hard to access and survive in, go hog wild.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2020 21:36

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

The whole point of the Deathlands is that you can't get out or run if you hosed up, and every single inch of Duskwall is already claimed by someone else because it's been there for centuries and it's literally impossible to expand it, which means you're going to have to fight other factions and steal their poo poo if you want to expand your territory.

Again, you can strip everything about ghosts out as long as you can justify the above.

Also most plasm is made from leviathan blood, not ghosts.

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jul 7, 2020

# ¿ Jul 7, 2020 22:34

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

neonchameleon posted:

I'll raise one exception to this. The ghost apocalypse provides a reason that killing is an inherently noisy action so playing throatcutters is instantly bad.

You can still have the Spirit Wardens and crows without having the Deathlands etc., honestly.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2020 08:39

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Angrymog posted:

I've got a query about the rewards from the Capture a Wardstone special mission; hwo long does the 'Pressure doesn't increase' benefit last for?

Just that mission, is how I would run it.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2020 08:45

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

If you backed the Kickstarter, the special edition PDF contains a city guide to U'duasha, which is located in the not-Middle-East but is much smaller than Duskwall. I don't know of any other city guides like that that have been produced, since the setting is really more Harper's personal setting rather than anything else.

If you want to keep the basic Blades mechanics and just transpose the whole thing to a city you wrote up yourself, you need to remember a few facts about Duskwall which are actually critical parts of the way the game works on a mechanical level:
- the world outside the city walls is a blasted hellscape, which means you can't just run out of town after something bad happens; you have to lay low in the city itself, where you're always within reach of your enemies. It's impossible not to poo poo where you eat, in general.
- Duskwall is old and crowded; every inch of available space has already been claimed by someone. Combined with the above it means that you can't get things without taking them from someone else and making enemies in the process. This drives conflict between factions.
- concurrent with the above, resources are limited and the infrastructure of the city and its people is easy to disrupt. There are also barriers to introducing new people and new things into the city.
- spirit bells, deathseeker crows and ghosts mean that killing people is very suboptimal and you can't just shank someone to silence them. It's harder to remove human obstacles and foes will either stick around for a long time or make your lives hard even when they're dead.
- the ghost field exists and can be interacted with; there are a lot of mechanical elements that do this.

If you want to transpose the game to a different city but not change anything about how the mechanics work, you'll need to make sure your setting also forces players to compete for very limited resources with other factions, with very limited ability to dodge the consequences of their actions (and that you have a ghost field equivalent that works similarly so you don't need to rewrite the Whisper and other supernatural moves).

For example, you could copy-paste Blades to a sci-fi setting by setting it on a space station - this would cover the isolation and limited resources and space aspects. You would then need to find a reason why killing people isn't just the most expedient solution to every problem (because the station is scoured daily by maintenance bots, and the body will always turn up in fairly short order) and a substitute for the ghost field (there's an omnipresent cyberspace layer and people are regularly digitally backed up, but it's impossible to re-instantiate those backups in physical bodies; dead people are supposed to get sent to a digital afterlife so they're not running on the same mainframe that runs the actual station).

# ¿ Feb 3, 2021 11:58

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

There's this, which is cool: https://mabelharper.itch.io/steelweavers-rebellion

# ¿ Aug 12, 2021 09:53

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Tekopo posted:

In terms of differences, I think I largely prefer the system within BoB: once you ratchet up the lethality of a mission, it really captures the essence of the game quite well, and the PCs will ratchet up a lot of stress to deal with the mission.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2021 09:13

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

JMBosch posted:

I had looked at Band of Blades briefly. I like the asymmetric player roles, but I also saw a big review complaining that it was too resource-management-heavy for the party to engage with much else and that keeping all of its plates spinning in the air was really draining on the players. If anyone's had experience playing or running it, I'd be interested to know if you felt similarly or not.

This sounds like it was written by someone who never played BitD because BoB's campaign phase resource management is roughly as complex as BitD's, and is entirely confined to the campaign phase (also like BitD). The in-mission "resource management" (spending stress) is exactly identical.

If you have specific questions I can answer them as I just finished running the campaign, but I would suggest just reading the game in full.

e; though one piece of completely fair criticism you can levy against BoB is that like a lot of PbtA/FitD hacks it assumes complete mastery of the game it's a hack of. The BoB rulebook places too much apparent focus on the campaign mechanics, because those are the most different from BitD, and fails to stress that the vast majority of the campaign phase needs to be spent roleplaying the Legion's life (with the actual campaign mechanics being something you sort out in a few minutes).

If you don't already have experience playing/running BitD it's easy to make the mistake of thinking the campaign phase is a pure mechanical phase and all roleplaying happens in the missions, and end up with a really unsatisfying experience.

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Nov 20, 2022

# ¿ Nov 20, 2022 16:47

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

JMBosch posted:

How many sessions did it take for your campaign to get to the end in BoB? And how long were your sessions? Would you be able to give a rough ratio of how much of that time was spent doing what?

The campaign ran for ~14 months with one session every other week, for a total of 29 sessions, which were generally around 3 hours long (sometimes a little shorter or a little longer if we hit a natural break point).

We made the mistake of not spending nearly enough time in campaign phase free play scenes at the start, so for maybe the first third of that we were jumping from mission to mission as quickly as possible, which really hurt the experience. After course-correcting, we started splitting the time roughly 50/50 between mission and campaign phases.

Most of the time this was literally a full session in a mission followed by a full session for one campaign phase (including the time spent generating new missions, doing the mechanical bits, and roleplaying what the Legion was up to). Rarely, this would be a shorter mission and a shorter campaign phase in the same 3 hour session, just because not every mission has enough meat to it to justify spending 2-3 hours.

Generating missions usually took me about 30 minutes, which I would try to do between sessions when possible, but sometimes it made more sense to do it with the players present. Doing campaign actions would usually take 20-30 minutes as the players discussed what the Legion needed most. The rest of the campaign phase was spent in free play scenes deciding what was happening to the various legionnaires and command staff during or between missions.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2022 18:11

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

We did a post-mortem on the campaign after it ended and I had a bunch of notes which I'd been meaning to write up for this thread, as well, so I took the time to do so just now.

Here are the things myself and my group took away from my running BoB for them, split into three categories (the stuff you absolutely need to know, small mechanical things I would consider houseruling, and some more minor points about the fictional framing of the whole campaign):

Important game things:

Do not ever skip out on roleplaying what's going on with the Legion between missions. The book puts too much emphasis on the actual campaign mechanics when in reality those should be taking very little of your campaign phase, proportionally-speaking. Playing through what the various legionnaires do between missions (especially anyone who did something memorable in previous missions) is the absolute meat of the campaign phase and where you should be spending 80% of your campaign phase time; it's how you make the Legion and the legionnaires into actual characters your players will remember and care about.
Corollary to the above, the game tells you the Lorekeeper role is optional. It is lying. The Lorekeeper is probably the single most important campaign role to make sure someone is running, after the Commander. If you don't have enough players for a LK and no one wants to double up on roles after assigning the Commander/Marshal/QM, give it to the GM, because some form of Back at Camp scenes have to be set after every mission (obviously, if the LK playbook list of scenes ever runs up against the fiction as established in play, disregard it and make up your own) otherwise the Legion doesn't exist as a character.
Make the players actually roleplay as their command staff characters in the campaign phase/Back at Camp/free play scenes so they exist as characters instead of purely as a gameplay function. In addition to occasionally catching up with them and how they do their duties, any time something important happens or is revealed in a mission, or some legionnaires do something dumb/bad/obviously in breach of discipline or regulations, it's time for a scene where the command staff discuss what to do among themselves after someone made their report (and as GM, it's your job to point out where the command staff's personality traits are going to cause them to butt up against each other until players start naturally roleplaying them).
Don't make the mistake of leaving the Chosen out of these scenes, either. The Chosen is effectively the GM's campaign phase character and should be played accordingly. Actively involve them and their mystical bullshit in the campaign phase scenes. Their being with the Legion is the main reason why the retreat to Skydagger Keep is the campaign's entire objective, and they can't participate in most missions, so this is needed to make their presence felt.
If you want the Broken to be a significant presence, make them show up and do stuff relatively early, and consider framing some free play scenes from their perspective. There isn't really a natural escalation point for them to suddenly appear in person, and we ended up just not seeing them at all (though several lieutenants and elites made appearances and a few missions dealt with foiling some of their plans).
Don't pull your punches when it comes to NPC death. The book doesn't do a good job of explaining this, but legionnaires not being actively played by a player are best treated as just ablative HP for the squad - whenever the squad as a whole is taking harm, you should be killing or at least seriously wounding one NPC legionnaire for every level of harm the squad takes. This is a consequence players can resist like any other.

Mechanical quibbles:

The way resistance stress costs work has been iterated-on since Band of Blades came out, generally to smooth the cost out. For example, Brinkwood has resistance rolls cost 0 stress on a crit, 1 stress on a 6, 2 stress on a 4-5 and 3 stress on a 3-, instead of just making them cost 6-roll stress. I like this more because it's a lot less swingy, and we ended up swapping to these costs halfway through the campaign.
Non-specialists getting zero XP out of secondary missions didn't make sense and felt bad, so we ended up awarding them 1XP per secondary mission (vs. 2 for specialists). You could probably just give 2XP to everyone and not break anything.
The way morale loss from casualties works and the way it ties in to the number of campaign actions you get can be really wonky if your players don't grasp its importance ahead of time. You may end up having to treat NPCs with kid gloves (in a way that damages the war-horror part of the fiction) because otherwise the morale cost would significantly hamper the players' ability to take actions during the campaign phase. On the flipside, if no one is really dying, morale is absolutely trivial to replenish because Liberty gives so much free morale (and players will want to take Liberties to restore stress anyway).

The end result here is that if you're having legionnaires die at a reasonable clip as dictated by the fiction and the genre, players are basically forced to spend one of their campaign actions on Liberty every campaign turn in order to keep up with morale loss from mission casualties, and if they dip to medium morale they are now unable to do anything except Liberty as their single campaign action or else they'll drop to low morale and no longer be able to recover morale. I'll also add that fiction-wise, having the Legion party after every single mission is a bit silly.
A solution to the above would be for morale loss to be per mission where there were casualties instead of per casualty; i.e. if any number of legionnaires (or NPC allies) died in a mission, Legion morale goes down by 1 (I would also suggest -1 morale if the Legion outright fails a mission they chose to go on). Liberty would then not restore any morale on a basic action, and only restore a small amount on a boosted action. This smooths out the morale loss/gain so losses are less frequent and less swingy, but also harder to overcome.
Minor gamefeel thing: high rolls on Advance ticking in more Time segments feel pretty bad, and the next time I run BoB I'll just flip the numbers entirely (i.e. 1 = 3 segments, 2-3 = 2 segments, 4+ = 1 segment). Yes, it breaks the universal resolution system but it feels significantly better as a player.
Less minor issue with Advance: I also don't think crits should exist here - my players actually technically lost the campaign by rolling a crit and filling in the last Time clock as they were advancing to Skydagger, which felt like absolute poo poo to everyone involved after 14 months of playing the game (we ignored this and pushed on to Skydagger and they just took fictional penalties for having the undead a day behind them instead of a week). If you want to put more Time pressure on them as a GM, just throw +1 Time or Pressure into mission penalties and force them to make hard choices on which missions they're taking.
We never rolled a single long-term project action, and the only acquire asset was when the players were forced to roll one to get boats to cross from Westlake to Eastlake. Part of this is because of the morale issue I listed above, and part of it is just because LTP/AA have less obvious results than Liberty/R&R/Recruit. I would be tempted to change the campaign action structure so that you get one campaign action no matter what, but having high morale also gives you a free LTP/AA action, and low morale gives you -1d to engagement rolls instead of losing you your last action. This encourages players to to LTP/AA and also stops the weird morale death spiral.
Side note: it's weird that there isn't even a single-page epilogue for what happens when you lose the campaign due to running out of Time. We only realised this when I went to look up how the campaign should end from the aforementioned crit Advance roll.

Verisimilitude stuff:

The book doesn't offer any reasons why you can't just deploy the Chosen as a nuke every time there's a mission with serious stakes. Come up with an excuse - mine was that the Chosen had to suppress their power most of the time so that they didn't act as a gigantic beacon above the Legion's head telling the Broken exactly where they were at all times. You could also decide that Ettenmark taxed them pretty heavily in some way or another (they got wounded, or expended most of their power fighting the Broken and now need several weeks of rest) - whatever works for your group.
YMMV as I played with a bunch of wargamers/history nuts, but a lot of stuff about the Legion's size and capabilities doesn't add up. Going from any sizeable number of soldiers (even just 500-1000) to just 40 people would have a much larger impact on morale and unit cohesion than the game suggests, and it really feels like they should have some baggage and camp followers (beyond Labourers as a game resource).
For the same reason, the entire Legion top brass all magically surviving and going on to command the last 40 soldiers felt a little too convenient. Since one of the later missions has you meet the Banner Guard, who are a unit inside the Legion, we ended up deciding the Legion had multiple companies all with their own command staff (the Commander isn't the commander of the whole Legion, but a person with the rank of commander, in charge of a single company), and that the part of the Legion you play is one such company that's been reduced to roughly half strength. The Banner Guard ended up being another company (the elite one), and this led to a cool moment where we got to roleplay through the player-Legion realising they weren't the last surviving legionnaires.
The above change in the fiction made us all wish there was a choice in setup of what type of company you are, so you'd pick between e.g. engineering/logistics/assault/etc. and get some small campaign phase bonuses and different starting Rookie stats - mostly because the idea of playing the rearguard paper-pushing logistics guys triumphing over the Cinder King's forces through loophole-abusing supply contract negotiations despite rookies who don't know how to shoot their guns would be really funny.
Finally, having missions always involve a single squad no matter what can feel very artificial and limiting. I recommend occasionally ignoring the limitation entirely when it makes sense, i.e. if you want to come up with missions that require 2-3 squads to hit different objectives at the same time and running those as mini-missions that the players play through one by one. The game is already troupe play, so bouncing between squads like this isn't particularly taxing on anyone, and it can really help the game feel more like you're involved in an actual war.

As an example: I ran the mandatory Fort Calisco assault mission as a three-squad affair where one squad had to take out an undead picket camp to make them think an assault was coming from one direction and draw forces away, then two squads lead an assault on the main undead camp - one of them took the Chosen to raise hell, and the other set out to blow up the siege weapons. Everyone loved this and I should have done it more frequently and earlier in the campaign.

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Nov 21, 2022

# ¿ Nov 20, 2022 19:26

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

SimonChris posted:

How complex can flashbacks get? Is it always supposed to be a single roll, or can you do an entire mini-heist to establish how you prepared for the current one?

They're flashbacks, they're happening as a break in the actual action to set something up for immediate resolution as soon as the flashback is over. If they start involving more than a roll or taking more than a couple of real-time minutes to resolve, they should have been a regular score instead.

This is both RAW and also best practice if you want the game to flow at all when flashbacks are used.

That said, anything is fair game as long as it fits within those limits - if you can work your way through your entire mini-heist in that single roll and a few minutes of talking about what happened, that's totally a valid flashback. So would a flashback that involves weeks of building up a contact or whatever.

SimonChris posted:

In connection, is it possible to nest flashbacks? Like, if a flashback goes wrong, can you flashback to an even earlier time to establish how that was you plan all along?

Is it possible? Sure, why not.

Do you want to do this? No, for the reasons outlined above.

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Sep 8, 2023

# ¿ Sep 8, 2023 15:12

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Consequences for partial/failed rolls in flashbacks just happen outside of the flashback, in the current score, not inside the flashback.

In general, I treat rolling as a flashback cost. If a flashback already costs 2 or more stress, I'm less likely to ask for a roll, because the stress already paid for it. Instead, I'm more generous about what a 0-stress flashback can accomplish, but I generally ask for a roll.

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.

Yes, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from doing this, and it would be fun if everyone's on board, especially in a oneshot or a big climactic heist. In normal play, flashbacks don't work that way because otherwise the game would grind to a complete halt every time someone tries to flashback, which goes against the intent.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2023 15:52

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Bottom Liner posted:

That seems opposite of what's intended by the scale quoted above. More complicated flashbacks cost more stress because they can achieve more. The complication naturally leads to more rolls to pull it off.

No, the stress cost has absolutely nothing to do with requiring more rolls; a 6 stress flashback should still take only one roll to resolve.

What the stress cost measures is how much suspension of disbelief is required for everyone to accept that the stuff being depicted in the flashback happened ahead of time while no one was looking.

It's there to prevent players from doing constant asspulls. :v:

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Sep 8, 2023

# ¿ Sep 8, 2023 16:46

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

DarkAvenger211 posted:

Some strange stuff going on around Wicked Ones. It seems to have been taken off of DriveThruRPG. Both the deluxe and the free version.

The writer for Wicked Ones suddenly closed down the game's discord server last year it was very strange. It also kind of looks like the Kickstarter for the deluxe print run including their new Undead Awakening expansion is basically dead now with there having been no updates since April of last year. Same thing with their Kickstarter for the game Relic they had started a while ago. This kinda sucks I was a pretty solid backer on both of those and the weird thing is that I they did at least send out the PDF for the Undead Awakening, just not the physical books, I've got nothing for Relic though.

Not sure DTRPG took down Wicked Ones themselves or if the creator just nuked it but the whole situation sucks all around. I talked with Ben on Discord a while ago and he seemed like a pretty nice guy, I wonder if there were some sudden hardships with the Kickstarter rather than someone just taking the money and running with it. But who knows really.

IIRC he announced a while back that he was getting out of writing RPGs entirely, a few months after shutting down his itch.io page and pivoted to hosting his stuff on DTRPG. The Discord was apparently closed down because he felt like it was just not popular enough to deserve its own community over just getting a channel in the official Blades in the Dark server.

Apparently the Kickstarter for print copies of Undead Awakening/reprinting the base book hasn't fulfilled yet and the last update was from April 2023 announcing a delay until Q4 2023, which has obviously just passed.

If you check the BitD Discord, one of the Undead Awakening authors just posted he has no idea why the product pages are gone and reached out to DTRPG for comment.

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 11:35 on Jan 6, 2024

# ¿ Jan 5, 2024 18:41

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

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.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2024 19:27

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Vagabong posted:

As someone also looking to gm for the first time (aside from a failed attempt back in 2021) I was wondering how much of the system/setting I should try and get the players to learn before running a session. Asking them to read the fairly robust rulebook seems like a lot, but at the same time the rules and the world have enough to them that it'd be hard to jump straight into the action and teach on the fly.

The system: not much, because the core mechanics are very easy to pick up, and you can just make sure you remind people about pushing themselves several times at first. It should stick fairly easily.

The setting: as much as possible; if the players are not familiar with the setting, or at least the general aesthetic/vibe/real-world place and time Doskvol is based on, the game will be much drier, much less interesting, and much less fun, because your players will lack the basic fictional touchstones required to breathe any kind of life into their narration and actions.

I started a BitD group a few months ago with one player who had never played RPGs before, one who'd played several but never played anything FitD, and one who had played a large amount of FitD games but not BitD specifically. The instructions I gave to all three players as prep was:
- read the game overview, pages 1-9.
- read the setting touchstones on pp. 280-281 and 308.
- read (and make an effort to internalise) the entire setting stuff on pp. 237-255.

This is 30 pages of material so not exactly a big ask for anyone, and will make the game go much smoother for everyone.

I would also heavily recommend that you do a movie night a few days before your session 0 and sit everyone through some amount of Peaky Blinders, Ripper Street, The Sopranos, From Hell, The Limehouse Golem, your favourite Sherlock Holmes adaptation, etc. to give everyone some shared visual imagery to draw on.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2024 20:55

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Coolness Averted posted:

folks just say "I want to do <a thing>" and then you say "Ok, that sounds like and X roll.."

Note that players choose the action they want to roll, not the GM, so you should probably avoid doing this from the start and just hand your players a print-out of the short action descriptions from the book.

(The roll20 sheets have those descriptions as a popup when you hover over the action names, for anyone playing on that.)

# ¿ Jan 24, 2024 08:48

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Coolness Averted posted:

You're right the player chooses what rolls to make and only after being informed of the stakes and it's important to remember that. For example nitpicking over whether sway or consort is the right stat for a roll is bad, but I don't see the harm in "tell me what you want to do in the narrative, and we'll figure out how the system can get us there." Especially when players are learning the game. Has it lead to issues in forged or PbtA games you've played?

It's just really easy for people who have played other games to fall into the trap of having the GM go "give me a X roll" (or having players go "I want to roll X to do Y") which is definitely not the way FitD or PbtA are meant to be played.

That's why I recommend being rigorous and staying completely away from the GM having any kind of input on what players roll, other than clearly stating what impact the characters' actions (and not the player's Actions) are having on position and effect.

Obviously this isn't a problem if everyone is intimately familiar with how FitD works, but that's not going to be the case with a first-time GM and players who probably have never played BitD.

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 10:59 on Jan 24, 2024

# ¿ Jan 24, 2024 10:51

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Coolness Averted posted:

If they don't have a good answer for the detail, then they should use a downtime action to gather intel

Note that gathering information usually doesn't take a downtime action and is just something the players do freely in the freeplay phase, unless the information is so well hidden that that would need to do a LTP to acquire it.

Gathering info also doesn't necessarily require a roll (see p.36 for info).

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Feb 9, 2024

# ¿ Feb 3, 2024 08:05

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

Captain Walker posted:

I always felt preparing for a score was distinct enough from downtime, and something you did after your downtime actions. ~~Not that I'll ever play a game for real because FitD doesn't use D20s~~

Downtime isn't the same thing as downtime actions! Downtime is the entire phase, which includes payoff, heat, entanglements, downtime actions, and indulging vice.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2024 10:10

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 06:00

Lemon-Lime: Aug 6, 2009

SimonChris posted:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/melsonia/swyvers

Get the gang together; someone's trying to muscle in on our turf.

It's pure groggy OSR tripe, so thankfully no overlap. Theoretically some of the random tables might not be completely useless for BitD, I guess.

Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Feb 9, 2024

# ¿ Feb 9, 2024 13:28

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Blades in the Dark: A bunch of hacks

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