Blades in the Dark: A bunch of hacks

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

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Jimbozig posted:

Is that what the image means? Sorry, I thought that the "fine locks" were distributed around the heist, not just on one door.

Having them distributed feels funny because you might pick a lock with a roll or if you do well for effect you might pick all the locks with that same roll. Which is unintuitive, to say the least.

Having it be HP for one very complex locked vault actually makes perfect sense to me. Is that the thing I was missing?

What you're missing is a lot more basic than that.

The clock doesn't represent some finite defined set of locks, but how much the presence of superior locks increases the difficulty of the heist. If one amazing roll clears all the segments of the that clock, it means they've managed to remove them as a meaningful obstacle, not that all the locks are magically opened or disappear. How this works is a narrative question that I can think of many different answers to, depending on what approach the team took.

Even if it's limited to mechanical picking of the locks, I can think of several. Maybe while picking the first lock the lurk has an epiphany and uncovers an inherent weakness in the design used throughout the building, making it a trivial exercise to bypass the others. Perhaps only the locks on the outer doors are genuine, and the interior ones turn out to be inferior copies. Maybe once they're inside, the locks they need to bypass are ones they can work on without fear of discovery - the risk is in moving between them, which is part of the guards clock.

I'm a little shocked to be honest, because this is such a baseline concept of the entire system. You don't figure the details of how many locks or whatever beforehand. You sort it out during the heist. That's why there are Flashbacks and all the other options to backfill detail. Of course there are some salient features figured out ahead of time, but a big conceit of the system is to do it heist film style, like say Ocean's Eleven, with twists and turns and reveals of the real plan along the way.

# ¿ May 8, 2015 06:16

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 16:52

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

There's a lot of Locke Lamora in it, but that's partly because that series has a lot of Taltos and Dishonored in it. And a fair bit of Fritz Leiber. I like the Lamora series but the setting for it is pretty clearly not!Renaissance Europe and hardly totally original, so any game in a similar world is going to look like it. That's not a hit on the series - it adds enough unique elements to be compelling. Let's not pretend it's a totally unprecedented and wholly unique world though.

Besides, there's a lot of games with similarly direct setting cribs (Eclipse Phase is the Takeshi Kovacs setting with extra bits, even original D&D is equal parts Vance and Leiber with a bit of Howard and Moorcock spackled onto it).

# ¿ Aug 16, 2016 15:42

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

admanb posted:

I like the new system a lot, but feel it should move from crew's tier = base # of dice to difference between crew's tier and target's tier = base # of dice. It makes sense that a brand new crew would always be in desperate positions, but that's because everyone else is so much stronger than them!

What you're describing is a more complicated method to achieve functionally nearly identical results.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2016 17:15

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

I love that not only is cool poo poo like that possible, but clearly intended from the ground up.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 06:27

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

DemonMage posted:

Blades of the Jhereg wasn't even mentioned, so that's a bit odd.

I suspect that's because it's the one licensed property in the mix. I know I'd be extra cautious when talking about work that's based on someone else's IP, even if it's probably not necessary.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2017 15:07

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Angrymog posted:

And what about people wanting to swop out characters because their current guy is stressed?

It feels to me as if that really goes counter to the intended feel of the game, but that the player in question is expecting a game where you start each new mission fully refreshed.

My take as I said in my original post is that if you don't go on a score, that character doesn't get downtime, and I also know that he's just going to get peeved when his stable of characters doesn't advance as fast as the people who stick with one.

Honestly, I feel like your core issue here is that you're trying to solve a social/behavior problem with a mechanic, and that's just not going to work.

Imposing a further rule restriction isn't going to make this player any less shirty about the situation. If anything it will just make him gripe more. You have to talk to him about expectations and whether this is a game he actually wants to play, because it is working as intended. Picking between risking a less effective character on a heist to keep advancement pace up versus slowing advancement to make sure you aren't going in with penalties is a feature, not a bug here. That just may not be the game he wants to play right now.

Plus, I think this restriction is, in the long term, going to create problems for the other players. BitD's harm rules can put characters into states that will just be fun to play. Being able to slide them to the side while they're on the mend is really to your and your group's benefit.

In part that's because I don't think swapping characters this way really gets around the consequences. It just shifts them. As mentioned, it will slow advancement. Having to spend downtime healing up does that already, and not going on a heist means missing a lot of XP opportunities. Having someone heal up off screen has a significant cost already.

Having a restriction that characters who didn't go on a heist can only heal with downtime makes sense though. The place giving an entire stable of characters two downtime each can really get abused is that they can do projects and training and "power level" offscreen to a certain extent. That's really the thing that needs to be taken away.

In light of that, for the players who are already on board with BitD's tough choices, giving them the option to swap relatively freely gives you more room to tell the stories you want.

That being said if you really just don't want to deal with character swapping for story or book-keeping reasons, that's perfectly reasonable. But it's much better to state that flat out and then talk to your group about whether that should be coupled with some other changes to avoid someone getting stuck unable to really participate in a session.

For the other suggestions...
I think auto-clearing or more easily clearing level 1 and 2 harm is perfectly reasonable. That's more about the kind of game you want to play. It's more likely to fix the core issue your problem player has, but it still needs to be coupled with a frank discussion about expectations.

Handing out three downtime instead of two is going to have a similar effect, but wouldn't be too unbalancing either IMO. Again, the bigger impact here will be to training and projects. And it still won't solve the problem player's issues on its own.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2018 21:31

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Where is it saying it�s unpaid?

# ¿ May 28, 2018 14:49

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 16:52

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Serf posted:

Apologies for the double post, but the update on Scum and Villainy is live. We got arts, bookmarks, the whole shebang. It looks pretty good too. I'm still not sure we need to have every rule from Blades replicated in full with sci-fi flavor, but its good if you don't want to refer to two books or if you just want S&V by itself.

I've been playing in a Fragged Kingdoms game, and having to cross-reference two core books during play has turned me a complete 180 degrees on this issue. Yeah, it's reprinted content, but it's much better for actual use.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2018 15:23

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