|
Hey do people talk about Band of Blades here or is there a separate thread for "Forged in the Dark" games? I have not actually played Blades in the Dark but am looking to possibly run Band of Blades. If there's another thread for it then I'll just ask some questions there.
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2020 15:41
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 4, 2024 21:45 |
|
|
tokenbrownguy posted:Do it. I ran a three-shot of Band of Blades. Was fun, but requires a little more prep than your average Blades scenario. I'm not too far into the book right now, I personally haven't played blades in the dark yet so I'm still trying to wrap my head around the actual mechanics. Are there any common pitfalls that could easily be avoided, I'm thinking specifically around the position/effect spectrum, and how clocks work maybe? I'll probably have more pointed questions once I actually get closer to finishing this book, it's quite large.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2020 03:54
|
|
|
Alright I've spent the last week finishing reading through the book and now I'm kind of going back through it a bit to make sure I understand some things I missed. 1. I'm looking at the playbooks right now, I love that each role and character sheet comes with mostly all the upfront rules you'd need to know. There's some stuff on there that's confusing to me though. I noticed all of the actions have 4 slots available to them to presumably level up to +4, however I'm unsure why 3 of the 4 seem to be partially shaded in already? Does this imply something that I've missed? 2. There also seems to be 2 +1 resist boxes next to them. I assume there are ways to improve individual resists and these are there to account for that? Those are the 2 questions about hard mechanics on my mind. But I also have another which is probably more open ended. 3. There's a note to earn XP when you play up your trauma which is a nice touch, it gives some nice roleplaying fuel while encouraging people to do it, but no so much that you're forced to. But how exactly is blight supposed to be played with? It's never mentioned that you would earn XP to play up your corruption, is it implied that you should? Are there any other mechanics to blights that I might have missed (other than effectively losing the character at level 4)? 4. Since I haven't really run the game yet I'm a little lost on how to work effect level into some results. I totally get applying effect towards a clock, it's pretty obvious when it's +1/+2/+3 ticks towards a goal. But what about when an action is taken that has a binary outcome (You did it / you didn't do it), like jumping over a ledge, or sneaking across the road? What if we determined that your roll will have limited effect (through in game modifiers of some sort) and you succeed? I totally get that if there's a consequence on a 4/5 roll you could do something like "You slip and are hanging off the edge" or "someone might have saw you cross and are suspicious". But assuming there's no consequence then how does the limited (or great) effect here come into play? 5. I'm about to do a search for this myself but if anyone has any good Long Term Project ideas I'd love to hear them (and what you ruled the cost and effect ended up being). There were a few examples in the book, but I figure it might be easier to rule out the cost of a project a bit better if I had some more examples to go off of. I'm really liking the thought of running this, I've just never really run something with pretty loose and fast mechanics like this before. Thanks in advance!
|
|
#
¿
Mar 13, 2020 00:52
|
|
|
Thanks for the response! It helps out to think about these scenarios in advance. I was reading this post which also had a link to a downloadable position/effect cheat sheet, https://www.indiegamereadingclub.com/indie-game-reading-club/band-of-blades-position-effect-cheat-sheet/. Which really does help to define quite a bit of the variation. One thing I'm not entirely sure if it got right though is for position factors, it mentions threat and scale difference. Which I'm not sure is entirely correct. I feel like while threat and scale difference could mean something in the fiction, I don't think it would necessarily also shift the position. As I understand it, threat and scale difference apply directly in calculating harm from consequences. That would mean it has twice the effect on harm if it were to also affect your position. Am I wrong here? I thought scale and threat only applied directly to effect and harm, not position as well.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 13, 2020 17:54
|
|
|
How about downtime and healing? It says each soldier gets to check off 1 box when doing to healing campaign action, and then to erase the row once it's filled. But what if they have multiple injuries on different rows? Will it just take longer? I'm only asking because the Marshal's sheet only has 3 boxes for wounds, when 3 boxes is just the worst injury you could have. I assumed the Marshal would just use his sheet to keep track of wounds but it won't work if they have multiple injuries on different rows right? Another question I have relates to Shreya, just as an example of what could happen. It says that she won't tolerate any amount of corruption and that legionnaires would have to hide it from her. Is it expected that this should happen during a mission? Would it happen at a back to camp scene (should die rolls even happen there or is it just a scene to rollplay?). Would I need to make each character who has corruption make a roll to make sure they don't get caught and killed by Shreya? I realize that this could play out in tons of ways, but was there a way this is intended to play out? It kind of seems like the penalty of death for even a small amount of corruption seems very unfair, but maybe some groups are ok with that?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2020 21:40
|
|
|
I figured as much, I was just trying to figure out how I would be expected to incorporate Shreya's agenda. The other 2 don't have anything nearly as consequential .
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2020 02:58
|
|
|
Another small question, for the first 5 specialists that get created, they won't have any assigned soldier abilities (or GRIT) with they? Meaning the starting specialists wouldn't be as strong as a specialist that gets promoted all the way from Rookie through Soldier right?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2020 19:15
|
|
|
Just reading through some of the quartermaster stuff. From the book:quote:Alchemists can cure arcane diseases and make alchemicals for the Legion. The GM says if this is an Acquire Asset or an alchemical Long-Term Project, but this action is in addition to your regular campaign actions. Does this mean it doesn't cost a campaign action to use alchemists each campaign phase?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2020 14:35
|
|
|
So it's constantly mentioned in the book that high threat enemies should work as clocks, but it's never recommended what to set the clock to. I get that the answer might involve how many players are at the table, but since I haven't run the game yet I don't really have a good number to base it on. Do you guys have any recommendations on how high to set clocks for higher threat enemies?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2020 18:39
|
|
|
That's perfect information for setting clock sizes, thank you! Does anyone have any suggestions on how to run Chosen during a mission? Presumably if they're coming along on a mission then the opposition will need to be just as strong for it to be interesting. The book recommends that the squad is there usually to complete the mission while the Chosen may just be there as a distraction. Do I roll for Chosen actions using their threat level as a dice pool? It seems odd only because as the GM in this system it's usually only the players making rolls.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2020 18:00
|
|
|
Ah right. I only ask because some special missions mention that the chosen will come with the squad. I guess the idea would be to roll a fortune roll for each side, and whoever gets the better outcome will work towards each other's clock then.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2020 20:55
|
|
|
Something else I'm wondering about : Soldiers aren't specialists right? So they don't get 2xp for secondary missions? Just making sure, so that would mean soldiers would need to be played in main missions in order to become specialists
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2020 01:07
|
|
|
Now that I'm looking through some of the enemy descriptions, which enemies can apply corruption? Can they all? None of them explicitly say that they can cause corruption, but plenty of examples mention gut sacks and spitters that can. I've noticed that there's an upgrade for Blighter that just applies a +1 corruption to everything, so it suggests that they can already cause it.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2020 04:11
|
|
|
Awesome, that explanation makes total sense. Going to be starting up our game this Tuesday over Roll20 so all these examples really help to figure out how to run this game. Our group is more used to games with a more mechanical focus in nature, but I think I should be able to get them thinking more creatively and with the story in mind over what mechanics they want to use first.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2020 14:23
|
|
|
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. 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?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2020 16:27
|
|
|
So having played a few sessions of Band of Blades now I'm getting a better feel for the game A big thing that I seem to have trouble doing is making sure to pick out players and ask them specifically what they want to do. So much of the action can come down to the entire group being involved but a lot of times that might just end up being the same player making rolls. I'd like to give everyone an opportunity to do something. 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?" It's a lot harder to manage in this case because there's no "initiative" or "turns" to track. Like for instance last session we had our heavy take on one of Blighter's Lieutenants directly, using his class abilities and setups/pushes they had a real solid risky/extreme roll ready to try and do some damage. Unfortunately he didn't get above a 3 on any of the 4 dice he rolled so he wasn't able to land any solid hits taking a bit of corruption and using his armor to essentially shrug off the rest of the damage. However while this whole thing is going on the squad along with a player Soldier and Sniper were being hounded by rotters. 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? Managing the flow of who has focus and who should act next is quite difficult for me running the game. I realize the answer is most likely subjective and based on your group specifically but it would be nice to know how other people handle it as well!
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2020 17:06
|
|
|
Good to know! 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.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2020 21:29
|
|
|
Thanks for all the tips guys. The last Band of Blades session went a lot smoother I think. With a lot more people able to act. At some point I did mess up and make the squad roll again for the same thing (essentially to escape the bad guys). I realized afterwards that escape should have just been a small 4 point clock so that it was more obvious their first roll wasn't going to take them out without extreme effect. Either way it's all coming together a bit better. What's been holding the Legion back at this point has been secondary mission failures. The last 2 secondary missions they've stacked as many engagement dice as they can and ended up getting 3 for each. Both resulted in complete failures with major harm and 3 casualties each. Along with mission failure penalties it's been a pretty bad setback for them. With time and pressure mounting they've essentially been forced to advance every single campaign turn in order to keep up. I don't think they're in a loss state yet, but the advancement rolls need to be good. It kind of sucks that at the end of the day your campaign could essentially be lost due to poor luck, but that's just how the game works I suppose. I don't think it's expected that you'll fail so many secondaries when you're spending so many resources to ensure that they succeed, but worst of all I can tell it's demoralizing to the players.
|
|
#
¿
May 1, 2020 14:14
|
|
|
I've got a question for those who've ran Band of Blades. Does the quartermaster need to explicitly spend a campaign action to "start" a long term project, or can he start them for free as long as he has idle laborers or alchemists handy? It's not super clear in the book since it mentions that laborers and alchemists are checked to make progress on a project for free, but only after the campaign actions step I think
DarkAvenger211 fucked around with this message at 22:26 on May 4, 2020 |
|
#
¿
May 4, 2020 21:26
|
|
|
Lemon-Lime posted:They happen during the campaign actions, not after: Ah ok, that makes more sense. Alchemists can start and continue projects without an action, labourers can be used towards filling clocks that make sense for them.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2020 01:34
|
|
|
How about level 3 harm? It mentions in the book that level 3 harm effectively means you can't do anything without help, does this mean someone else needs to be carrying this person? Or they aren't able to perform any actions without another character helping them? And in that case, does that mean helping them narratively? Or mechanically with the assist action? The last mission we ran we had someone start with level 3 harm from a previous mission. I wasn't exactly sure how to treat it exactly, could a rookie npc in the squad be used to "help" the entire mission? The other harm levels are explicit in saying you have less effect or less dice, I'm just not sure what exactly the intention behind level 3 harm is supposed to be mechanically.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2020 14:02
|
|
|
Lemon-Lime posted: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. Mostly because he was the only other required specialist for the primary, since the others were also very injured or required for the secondary. It didn't help them with the engagement roll anyway since they rolled a desperate situation so at that point that character would really be a liability. They were an officer so a lot of the rolls were to marshal the squad itself (which again, seems a little strange that you could do that with physical help), but ultimately they weren't put in much danger themselves. This next session will be a little interesting then. There's a couple specialists with level 3 harm from last secondary mission failure, and they might be needed depending on which missions they pick. If a medic comes along, they can technically use their Doctor ability to allow them to ignore their injury right? But if no medic comes along maybe it would seem right to just not allow it. In my head a level 3 injury kind of means being carried out on a stretcher which really doesn't mesh well with them joining a squad for a mission.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2020 18:10
|
|
|
Ichabod Sexbeast posted:A soldier immobilised in a full-body cast that is just carried up to whatever their speciality is, then carried away This sounds pretty funny, but I kid you not that's basically what was being argued at the (virtual) table. I mean everyone seemed to be all for it so it mostly comes down on me to say no, which kind of feels unfair to them if this is the kind of game they want to play. It's not like we talked in detail about this before the game started since we're all kind of learning as we go. So I made a compromise and decided it's only possible because they brought along a medic who could Doctor away the injury for a scene when they needed the injured character to do something, and that the injured character could still assist other people if it made sense since he would be spending stress to do so anyway Our group is very much used to D&D with more hard/defined rules, this game is very narrative focused so a lot of it is up to interpretation. Rules as written it doesn't technically say you can't take level 3 harmed characters out on missions, so it's kind of up to me as the GM to arbitrate that. Using the examples you all give me is real helpful, I really appreciate it. DarkAvenger211 fucked around with this message at 21:18 on May 6, 2020 |
|
#
¿
May 6, 2020 20:52
|
|
|
Digital Osmosis posted:Any advice for running more traditional fight scenes in this system? We ended play with an engagement roll that resulted in a risky position, my players basically made it inside a warehouse they're trying to seize, loaded down for a battle. They asked me about the enemy forces and I gave them a rough idea - basically what I had prepared, no more or no less because risky positioning is kinda the standard. I wrote up the warehouse's overseer as a usual NPC, added "two acolytes" and a few hulls and bound spirits (they're hitting the Dimmer Sisters.) I'm not entirely confident in my ability to pace fights in this system. I've run D&D and most recently Dungeon World, where fights are a long drawn out thing with HP, and I've run other Powered by the Apocalypse games where fights are usually like a single die roll, but feel like in Blades there's a middle ground I'm not sure about. I assume it's something like "make a couple of clocks for each group of enemies?" And similarly, do I give the enemies clocks of their own or do I just do harm as established by fiction / my player's rolls? Or maybe both? Any suggestions would be appreciated -- I'm getting more and more into the Blades GMing headspace but I'm not sure I know how to make a straight up fight fun, challenging, and well paced yet. I know this is a little while back, but I'm getting near the end of my Band of Blades campaign now and we've had lots of instances to run some fight scenes with the undead. Typically I plan for certain types of enemies and how they might interact in a given scene or situation. Though I stopped coming up with hard numbers on how many of them there are. It's taken a bit of time to come up with enemy scales that seem possible to beat, but aren't complete pushovers either. So the situation really depends on the number of players who are going to be fighting, and whether or not fighting is their only option for me. With the undead being a limitless enemy, I'll have too many to handle in areas where I want to see the players come up with ways around it other than fighting. But if I want fighting to be an option I might scale it back and imply that there may be more nearby, but you have a chance to break through now kind of thing. It is a squad of soldiers, some fighting is to be expected. As for mechanically how the fight works for us normally, If they're up against large numbers of threat 1 enemies, I have each level of effect reduce the scale of the enemies by the same amount. So if there are 6 - 10 (scale 3) threat 1 rotters, they'd need greater effect to wipe them all out in one roll, if they only make it standard effect, then they reduce their numbers down to scale 1. For threat 2 or above enemies I usually end up making a clock as they should be treated as a more significant threat and should take more effort to deal with. This is just how I've been running things after we've done about 10 sessions by now. I'm fairly new to this system but I've taken the advice of this thread and it's helped quite a bit. Now that we're near the end of the campaign most of the player characters have a ton of abilities and skill points so there's always so many dice being rolled. I'm noticing that 6's are a much more common result so they've been able to push through very tough encounters just by constantly rolling 6's. It's interesting because as the campaign nears the end, I'm constantly adding more and more undead to increase the danger and possible consequences. But while there is much more danger involved, they're much less likely to suffer any consequences due to being able to throw down much more dice. It makes those dramatic moments much more tense, and feel that much greater when a 6 gets rolled
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2020 16:31
|
|
|
So we finished our Band of Blades campaign last night. The finale was quite a ride, they were lacking in full squads for some of the final missions so a few of those missions were quite a bit tougher. They came through The Maw and landed the special mission to bury a Broken and their forces by demolishing the cave exit. They succeeded in trapping Render and had plans to use a Blight tank relic they acquired to see if they could "de-blight" Render. Shreya was upgraded with Battle-saint making her equal to Render in strength so they were able to keep him restrained where they attempted their experiment as one of the final missions in Skydagger. Unfortunately they didn't have enough time to finish a long term project on studying the blight tank and it's use in cleansing Render. So the mission itself was almost always desperate all the way through. They had to convince Shreya to go along with it since she abhors everything about corruption. The promise that it might be used to save the other Broken convinced her. The Officer in charge of the mission was quite obsessed with everything blight and corruption related so he volunteered to take on a lot of blight himself, but the mission went quite sideways when Render managed to escape after he had been somewhat drained by the machine. The ensuing flight even with Shreya there to incapacitate him left many in the squad dead or mortally injured. But eventually they were able to subdue him once more, And in the end the obsessed Officer took on the rest of the blight himself to the point where Shreya had to put him down. But in the end Render was dead, and no longer corrupted. After that we got to watch the heavy hitters defend the walls from the second wave and despite the desperate situations they were in managed to score quite a few 6's and many crits. They easily held off the assault and defeated the Lieutenant commanding the forces. The whole campaign was a blast to run, and everyone involved had a great time as well. I really liked how the finale turned out. It leaves me quite excited for a part 2 of the campaign whenever that comes out.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2020 18:35
|
|
|
CitizenKeen posted:Say what? Supposedly Band of Blades is just part 1 of a 3 part planned campaign
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2020 19:28
|
|
|
Has anyone had any experience running a Blades based game with miniatures and maps? I get that there's no point in having a "tactical" grid with the way the game works, but I was thinking about using larger scale maps with players having their own miniatures to represent where they might be at the time, and possibly to represent the number and kind of NPCs/Monsters in their way. Having already run an online game without miniatures I know that they're not needed, but I also just really like minis and would like to include them anyway, I recently got a resin printer and have been printing and painting up a bunch of models for my next Band of Blades campaign. My hope is that it will help everyone at the table understand where they/their enemies are since theatre of the mind stuff can sometimes get a little mucky if someone missed an important explanation or just plain forgets. But my worry about using them is that it may stifle players' imaginations when it comes to thinking up creative solutions to a problem since they might look at a map and just passively assume that because something isn't on the map that means it must not exist. I can of course remind everyone about this, it's just that it still might mess with people anyway. I want it to work as a play aid and not as something that might detract from the experience. Any thoughts?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 13, 2020 19:35
|
|
|
Got a question for you guys more familiar with FiTD games other than Band of Blades. Is the harm calculation different? In Band of Blades the starting point for harm comes from position, and then is further modified by difference in threat and scale (sort of having a double effect on harm since those mechanics usually also factor in the position as well). In other games is it similar? Or is harm generally decided on just position? I know this can just come down to player and GM preference, but I also want to know how other games in this system are normally run. From what I can tell Band of Blades is purposefully supposed to be gritty and brutal so the way harm mechanics work in this way support the setting, where other games in this system may not run with this same assumption
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2020 00:34
|
|
|
I think it's set up that way to really increase the difference between threat levels. Things only really go up to T4 in this game and players can only really attain T2 at the most. I personally think it works well with the setting. It also allows for high levels of harm to be applied if there is a large difference in position / threat. I assume in other games the most amount of harm you could take in an action would be 3 (for desperate)? With more only being applied if it narratively makes sense (and hopefully expected by the players)
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2020 18:53
|
|
|
So I've started up another Band of Blades campaign with some new people. Trying out Breaker instead of Render and the themes in her army focus around deception and the supernatural. One thing I realized I'm not really sure how to play out mechanically is an NPC lying to the players. Say a group of Hexed villagers come across the squad and they just totally lie about whats going on (because they're all being dominated by a hidden shadow witch somewhere). I can make things seem suspicious and a player might say I want to try and tell if they're lying. Research would be the best ability to use here but maybe they try and argue a different one. That part doesn't matter much but what I have a hard time coming up with is position/effect here, and what exactly could happen if the players would receive a consequence. One of the main principles in the book is to not directly deceive your players. To tell them how it is and to telegraph danger before a roll. It seems like having the villagers immediately turn on the players and apply harm as a consequence would be way off base and not expected at all. Not to mention it's not useful to have figured out they're lying by immediately taking damage from them. What could be a good consequence of a roll here (especially if successful on a 4 - 5 and not just an outright failure)? It's hard to telegraph danger when I'm also trying to play up enemies intentionally deceiving the players. Should this just be handled as a fortune roll instead? No potential of consequences even though they are in a risky spot. Trying to directly tie in themes of deception and not being able to believe what you see is very difficult for me to think of how to apply the game mechanics towards it. Could really use some help from people who've run FitD games before.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2021 15:33
|
|
|
WhiskeyWhiskers posted:I mean it really depends on what the lie is. I'd usually have a consequence like that advance a clock. For instance a mission might be that a member of one of your squads went missing while on patrol last night near this village, they're currently being held in a barn while being corrupted by shadow witches so they can return to camp as an infiltrator. Failing to see through the villagers lies about this would put ticks on a clock for that squad member to turn up unharmed and happy to return to camp with no one the wiser. Succeeding with consequences is just basically seeing through the lies taking time and without any conclusive smoking gun, so the plot still progresses, but your characters now have a lead about the barn. Controlled/Standard would be my starting pos/effect for that sort of roll. That's a pretty good example. I suppose just thinking about the situation in a vacuum doesn't really work since there's usually a lot more going on that I can draw consequences from. So in your case here, would the players know that the clock is for the soldier to return (having now been turned)? Or would the players not even see this clock? DarkAvenger211 fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Mar 29, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2021 18:05
|
|
|
All this is super helpful, thank you! The group I'm playing with is more used to D&D games than this. Though we've played some PbtA games in the past. For me as a GM though I've enjoyed Band of Blades more than any other campaign or game system I've run before. I think trying to get everyone on board with the co-op story writing aspect of it and getting the notion of "winning" or "losing" out of their heads is probably the most important step
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2021 13:57
|
|
|
So I've finally finished printing and painting the models we're gonna use for this next in person game (whenever that is). Since I got my resin printer last year I've been subscribed to some model patreons and I've found a bunch that I think fit the themes here pretty well. Decided that this Zora's gonna have a flaming hammer instead of a sword. You can probably tell which models I started first and gradually got better as I learned some better painting techniques. Until now I haven't painted models since high school. Thought I'd post these here to show em off   
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2021 21:55
|
|
|
Anyone have any tips for running a Blades game with 5 people? I kind of feel like 4 is the max upper limit I can manage in order to keep everyone engaged and give everyone some time in the spotlight. This is something I kind of need to practice on but I kind of rush through consequences without giving it enough thought in order to keep the game moving. But as a result I just kind of end up with boring consequences or just defaulting to harm most of the time (which can be kind of unfair too). I try to jot down possible consequences for rolls beforehand to offload the amount of thinking I need to do on the spot but I can't rely on them most of the times since it's really the players that determine the direction of where the narrative is going and I can't pre-think of everything.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2021 18:32
|
|
|
Coolness Averted posted:My game is about 5-6 players and 1 GM, though we average 5 per session. Ask especially if during downtime anyone goes with each other and have some plot hooks happen there, since downtime otherwise tends to be everyone doing their own thing. Thanks for these. I didn't really think about the differences between Blades games factoring in as much but we're playing Band of Blades at the moment. So downtime is mostly relegated to campaign actions though I try to throw in some hooks during back at camp scenes. Our group doesn't split up as much but I think that's more the setting than anything. A squad of soldiers is much stronger together than split up but I really do want to push them to split in most cases since we end up devolving into group action rolls for everything. It's effective but also gets a little stale. Needing to get them to split into at least 2 groups to focus on different objectives is key, but the hard part is making that the most plausible choice. That brings be to another question though. When do you guys call for group action rolls vs just one person leading? For a big group skirmish it seems like a no brainer to have them all roll so they can get scale on the enemy as well as just a straight up better chance to roll a 6. But say the group is trying to maneuver to a new position fast, do we group action roll this or have someone take the lead and do it themselves? I lean more into making it a group action but as I said earlier we kind of end up doing a lot of those by default and it doesn't let individuals shine in their areas of expertise as much.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2021 04:25
|
|
|
WhiskeyWhiskers posted:If you're having trouble with spotlight I would hack a bit. I'd definitely err towards group actions more, withhold the consequences for the group action, and follow it up immediately by singling out whoever contributed most to the success, or most to the failure and require another action roll with success or failure bumping up or down the position or effect of the group roll retroactively. I like this idea, following through with whoever rolled best or worst seems like a good way to get some individual focus. WhiskeyWhiskers posted:Band of Blades' stress economy is definitely a bit tighter though. Especially with your additional players playing rookies who only get a single stress track before death. I had been originally trying to go for multiple consequences per roll just for this reason. But it felt a bit unnatural and arbitrary to have to think up extra consequences on the spot, and I noticed it was really punishing for the PCs in the campaign phase as they don't get to recover stress unless the Quartermaster has time and actions to do it. One player had mentioned when he was maxed out on stress it felt like he shouldn't speak up or do anything anymore which is definitely not what I'm trying to encourage. They're a bit new to the system so it kind of takes a bit to pull away from D&D mentality and instead focus on cool moments and story vs worrying too much about whether your character could die. In Band of Blades specifically you're kind of expected to lose some along the way but the point is to try and make that death as cool as possible instead of hanging back forever.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2021 14:16
|
|
|
For Band of Blades specifically, if your character dies you can immediately pick up and make a new rookie from the squad you always take with you
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2021 17:11
|
|
|
So I've been reading through the Wicked Ones book and I've gotta say, as a GM I think some of it's mechanical changes seem like pretty good ideas. Stuff like mixed and success results giving 1 or 2 ticks on clocks respectively, with weak and strong effect giving -1 / +1 and having effect limited specifically from None to Strong as opposed to potentially going infinite really makes me think that Strong effects really are strong, instead of trying to push effect level to Extreme +2 for example. Limiting clocks to be a max of 8 means you shouldn't need those high effect levels. It also lets me create 2 opposing clocks of the same size and it feel right mechanically. As it stands now if the players have goal clock and there's an opposing clock I always have to set the opposing clock to be like half the size in order for there to be any tension at all I also really like how Harm, Resistance and Stress work in this game. Taking Shock to a group of actions vs taking harm that I as a GM have to remember to bring up if I think it applies is now just handled as a single status effect that's goes away after it affects you once. Death only being on the table once you've been bloodied once and the GM sets the position of your action as deadly means that death as a consequence will always be known immediately before a roll. Resistances being just another action roll with it's own set of results seems fun too. Needing to pick a different action than the one that caused the consequence makes for some interesting ideas on how to resist certain consequences. And determining whether or not it's a partial or full resist based on the result of that roll is nice too. It makes rolling 6's during a resist feel real good while also making the worst possible roll only cost you 3 stress max (as opposed to possibly 5). Stressing out in this game isn't nearly as lethal, it's seems to just be throwing more wrenches into the situation instead. I'm curious how hard it would be to move some of these systems over to Band of Blades or Scum and Villainy. I know some of the game's downtime and class mechanics sort of revolve around the existing harm structure. And for Band of Blades specifically a lot of the games campaign actions focus around resting and recuperating soldiers so it might kind of break the balance of the campaign a bit. I haven't played a game of Wicked Ones yet either so I can't really say for sure if all these changes are good, they just seem good on paper to me.
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2021 16:43
|
|
|
I ended up creating (and printing) a version of the Wicked Ones toolkit deck but for Scum & Villainy instead. I was so inspired by the concept of Adventurers I wrote up an S&V equivalent called "Experts". I had quite a bit of back and forth between Ben, one of the Wicked One's creators. He was very helpful in setting this up with me. I also made sure to poke Stras and make sure he was ok with a Scum & Villainy supplement. The card print came in a few days ago and they look so nice, I wanted to make sure it was formatted correctly before posting but here's my posting on DTRPG in case anyone is interested. I hope it helps inspire your games  https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/366589/Scum--Villainy-Experts-and-Random-Inspiration-Cards
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2021 00:42
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 4, 2024 21:45 |
|
|
The Bandcamp guys who made Wicked Ones have a kickstarter for their new game Relic: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/banditcamp/relic Apparently they're diverging enough from the blades formula here to leave FiTD behind I suppose, but in any case I'm pretty interested
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2021 18:44
|
|