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Dolash posted:After-action report: hoo boy, my theory that one or two dice is plenty so long as you max resists for better stress management sure does hinge on you not rolling below-average all night and failing almost all your rolls! Trauma'd out, though thankfully right at the end when we'd already succeeded at blowing the bridge. As someone who's only played base BitD, the early game really teaches you that each die is basically one coin flip to see if you do what you want to do and coin flips are brutal and uncaring. So, your strategy works mathematically, but in play everyone wants to throw themselves into desperate situations and bad deals so they aren't whittled down by bad coinflips until they can actually be good at something. I'm not disagreeing with you or anything, it's just a dynamic I really like.
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Apr 2, 2020 17:44
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 00:54 |
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Other people probably have more specific BitD experience than I do, but I can still throw out some general advice. -One of the good things about discussing the risk/effectiveness of every skill roll is that it gives you a lot of opportunities to explain the system. Blades has a lot of mechanics, but as long as your new players understand the skill system and earnestly want to do cool thief things, they can have a good time in the system. -I consider bouncing the spotlight around a key part of running this kind of system anyway, but it's especially important to move the spotlight to new players and throw them a few softballs so they can feel cool and get used to how this kind of game operates. -If you're asking someone a question, try to have a few suggestions for answers. Both so they can get a feel for what kind of answers you're expecting when you ask that kind of question, and so your players don't blank entirely and flounder for a while. This is especially important for open-ended questions like "so, how are you breaking into the Red Sashes' hideout?".
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Mar 19, 2022 16:30
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Yeah. I would generally consider Blades' skill list one of its big strengths. There's always going to be some wiggle room about what skill best fits a given situation, and the fact that the book just says where each skill is likely to overlap and tells you to figure out which feels best for your group in a given situation means Blades has thought it through more thoroughly than basically any other game I could name. The problem is that it sounds like Tulip's group (or at least Tulip's GM) never really reached a consensus on how effective skills like Finesse are in most situations, and that just sounds miserable. On the plus side, I don't think that's a very common result in most groups? But it still sounds a bad time.
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May 31, 2022 02:14
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Anime Store Adventure posted:Specifically devil’s bargains are something I’ve been having a ton of trouble engaging as a mechanic. I am still kind of running a bit “on my toes” and it makes it hard to get creative beyond the main plot beats and fun flavor things here or there. Devils bargains feel like they require being at least a half-step ahead to anticipate how I would make the outcome meaningful. I feel like I already have more “hooks” than I’ll ever use but even harder is just coming up with bargains. Off-hand, my one piece of advice is to set up a lot of clocks ahead of time that matter on a longer timescale than a single heist. If you already have clocks like "The Special Investigators Are Tracking You" or "Count Orloz Acts Directly" or "The Cutter's Romantic Problems" established, or at least in your notes ready to be deployed, this causes two things. One, it immediately establishes how big of a deal you're offering, because everyone understands clocks. Two, it means that all you have to offer as the Devil's Bargain in the moment is ominous foreshadowing. Your Lurk is breaking out of a police ball and takes a Devil's Bargain where another notch is filled in the Special Investigators clock. In the moment, all you have to do is have the metaphorical camera linger on the potion cork they just spat out and make a note somewhere and you can continue the heist normally. But when the Special Investigators show up in three sessions with that cork in an evidence bag, that quick and dirty Devil's Bargain you offered has now become a fun callback. Heck, if you suggest that kind of foreshadowing as a Devil's Bargain, your players will probably come up with a cool idea themselves. The point is, if you just mark a notch in a long-term clock, it feels important but you don't actually have to think about the consequences immediately.
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May 31, 2022 03:17
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Captain Walker posted:Do you remember what action covered supernatural bullshit? There's all sorts of other weird skills and disciplines available to FL characters who study Things Man Was Not Meant To Know: Glasswork for understanding dreams and mirrors and why they're so weird in the setting; Mithridacy for sowing confusion and deceit through words that are technically true; Kataleptic Toxicology for making use use of poisons and weird Neath substances, etc. etc. All of these could be available to crew members willing to risk their hair catching fire or worse, but Attune doesn't fit, and Esoterica doesn't have a good verb form. I'm not exactly an expert on Fallen London's endgame skills, but things like toxicology feel less like individual skills and more like the Leech moves that let you use craft specific things better. Maybe make some custom moves similar to the Ghost __ cycle to represent the weird practical uses of Glasswork. The point is, there's a lot of ways to represent supernatural weirdness in Blades beyond what is and isn't a skill. (And really, a lot of supernatural stuff probably shouldn't be a skill. Attune's a basic skill because everyone can try to contact the other side and do a seance and etc, or can try to work with horrible burning words in the Correspondence version used here. Not everyone can make advanced poisons, or attempt the more complicated uses of dreams and mirrors, or lie in a way that's unique enough to justify its own stat in the game, so they should take a different approach.) (Okay, in writing that I realized the basic dream/mirror/etc stuff is also universal enough to work as a basic skill, but it doesn't feel broad enough that you couldn't fit that and Correspondence into Attune as it currently stands.) Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Jun 23, 2022 |
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Jun 23, 2022 14:36
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It's also worth remembering that flashbacks are probably going to have a different level of risk/effect than they would if you were doing them mid-heist, just because you're doing it at an earlier point when you're more prepared to be doing things. So, that flashback has much better odds of being controlled than anything you'd do normally, so you can probably just give them a slightly tricky choice and it will fit. You flashback to bribing a guard to let you onto the roof and roll a failure, but since you're bribing them on your terms it was controlled so the results can just be "your man on the inside held up his end of the bargain and left the roof access unlocked; however, now that you're up here, you see that the shutters on the window you were going to rappel to are closed. Are you going to rappel down anyways and try to open the shutters with your rear end hanging out in the wind, or are you going to improvise?". You can just give them a minor complication to work around on their flashback and call it a day. This won't help with riskier flashbacks, but those are also meaty enough that you'd hopefully have an easier time thinking of something bad to happen.
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Sep 8, 2023 16:54
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SimonChris posted:Maybe allow the players to flash back to an earlier scene and explain what really happened. The stuff that played out earlier was just the cover story they told everyone to put them off guard! You can't contradict anything that previously happened with a flashback within the rules, but you can give it a Rashomon-esque feel with flavorful narration. Character A flashbacks to them seducing a guard with their limitless charm, later Character B flashbacks to when they were standing in the background of that scene and talks about how they lifted the guard's spare keys while A was being a horny dumbass drooling over a random berk.
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Sep 9, 2023 16:11
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Ultimately, you need both a GM that's willing to go "yes, you can use Tinker instead of Finesse to pick this lock, but it's more dangerous because there's a guard on the other side of this door and they're going to hear you clanking away with your tools if you take that approach" and players that are willing to accept that position and keep the game moving. If the GM won't do that, you're going to lose what makes the skill list interesting. If the players won't do that, the game is going to be a complete slog.
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Jan 9, 2024 23:29
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Bottom Liner posted:(tinker is explicitly the action to pick locks) Yeah, but Finesse and Wreck are both called out as possibilities you could flex to so meh, it works.
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Jan 9, 2024 23:52
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Bottom Liner posted:Your example doesn't follow though. You wouldn't penalize them for choosing the book given Action for a specific goal over an alternative because of the guard on the other side of the door. That would affect the Position no matter the skill (though Wreck would obviously be more risky). Finessing would be like, slipping your arm through an opened window to pop the lock on the other side, or quietly opening an already unlocked door. Tinker would be getting through the lock without smashing it. Fine. The situation that I had in my head when I wrote that example but didn't explain because I was making a quick post was that it was already established that there was a guard on the other side of the door and the GM decided that Finesse or Tinker could fit the way they're picking the lock, but the main threat in this instance is that the guard hears so Finesse's hand-eye coordination fits the check better than Tinker's mechanical knowledge. I have a logic to the decisions I made here. And to the wider point I was making before (because I want a reason for this tangent beyond nitpicking my example), the GM should have a logic they're willing to talk through for these kinds of decisions. And I'm not saying the GM's word is law, players questioning that kind of thing is how you build a group consensus on when which skill should be used in a given situation. But it shouldn't go much further than "This is this skill, because X", "I think it should be that skill, because Y" and then either "you have a good point, we'll go with that" or "I'll go with X for now, but let's talk later" because otherwise the whole game bogs down.
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Jan 10, 2024 00:51
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Panzeh posted:When you prep a Forged game, the key aspect of prep is coming up with details, names, etc. It's not really about carefully defining every aspect of the situation, but making sure you have names of everything, you know the context of what's going on, etc. You can improv a lot, but focus your prep on things that aren't easy to make up on the spot. On a similar note, doing some basic plans for what your party's opponents are going to do is a good idea. There's no need to do anything complicated, especially if you don't have a super-clear idea of where specifically your party is going to rob. But just doing a basic "if left alone the guards are going to do this, if they try to talk their way in they'll do ABC, if things go loud they'll do XYZ" for the two most-likely next targets is going to make running things in the moment a lot easier. If nothing else, if things go completely sideways from what you planned for they'll give you something to repurpose for whatever is happening.
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Jan 14, 2024 16:39
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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. As far as the setting goes, if they just understand that it's basically a Victorian crime drama where spiritualism actually works and ghosts are everywhere and are willing to roll with it when you say things like "the sun broke along with death, it's always night" and "lightning hooks are basically an electrified ghost-grabber, train engineers use them all the time" they'll be fine. There's a lot of detail if they're interested, but getting the basic vibe is the important part.
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Jan 23, 2024 19:04
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Aesthetically and tonally, Troika is great. Really unique stuff, more of the industry needs to be willing to be that weird. Mechanically... well, it's a pretty generic resolution system plus an initiative system that seems like it's more clever than good. I haven't looked at Mothership, but judging by Troika's example Swyvers is probably going to be an inspiring read that mechanically doesn't add much.
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Feb 9, 2024 15:38
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The way I see it, the line between weird and other types of vice is mostly social acceptability. Talking to a priest about the nature of death as a calming hobby is accepted, talking to a medium about death isn't. Going to a bar and getting blackout drunk on beer is socially accepted, blacking out because because you do weird Talk To Me stuff with ghosts isn't. And to this example, building out your dollhouse collection as a Luxury vice is eccentric but socially accepted. Building our your dollhouse collection as a Weird vice is the sign that it has gone from a collection to a collection. (And for that matter, building our your dollhouse collection for weird occult reasons as a hobby is different from building your collection for occult reasons as a specific mechanical ritual you're building, but if your vice is making a weird dollhouse collection I'd probably just give you a chunky head start on the construction process.)
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Mar 8, 2024 23:06
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 00:54 |
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sebmojo posted:Eh in practice it works fine, and makes downtime much more interesting rather than having everyone off in their bubble, if it's a houserule it's a good and fun one imo. It also makes being a starting character that doesn't have points in every category much less harsh. You still should if you can, but it's no longer "roll 2d6 and take the lowest for every attempt at recovering stress" bad.
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Mar 9, 2024 22:41
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