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Iceclaw posted:Well, thanks for answers everyone! On another subject, is there some interest for a pbp game here on SA? I'm itching for testing the game, but it'd be hard to do so IRL for various reasons. I'd be in. I haven't looked at the rules since the first quick start, so it would be a good refresher.
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Apr 11, 2016 22:25
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Does anyone have any idea what the quality of the POD copies will be like? I'm trying to decide I should wait for that, or grab the hard cover from backerkit. $20 shipping to Canada loving sucks for a $10 book though.
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Feb 4, 2017 20:44
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Working my way through the pdf and I can't wait to give this a shot. Still need to wrap my head around stress, consequences, and the healing clock. Is anyone planning to start up a PBP? I would love to play, but don't have a good enough grip on the rules to actually run something.
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Feb 6, 2017 21:56
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Reading through the damage and healing rules and it makes me wonder if this game is meant to be played with each PC have a couple different characters to pick from. Getting a level 2 or 3 wound seems like it would knock a character out of action for a few heists. -1d is a pretty heavy penalty. One thing I have wondered, is that -1d for all skills? If I have a deep cut in my arm would that affect a sway or study roll?
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Feb 9, 2017 04:53
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admanb posted:Level 1 and 2 Harm only apply to fictionally appropriate skills. Source is 2nd paragraph on pg. 31. Knew I was missing something. Fenarisk posted:It does say depending on tone, feel free to totally mitigate any harm with resist rolls and just let the remainder be stress if you want them less beat up. The way I would play it, all harm 1 boxes go away at the beginning on downtime automatically, and only harm 2 and 3 need clocks so it isn't too terrible for players. Yea, I would play the level one harms like FATE minor consequences, they go away at the end of the score, or even scene depending on what they are.
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Feb 9, 2017 19:08
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Next dumb question. For the showdown on the docks example of play, is that just a free play set of rolls, or should that be considered a score? Making a show of force probably wouldn't net you any coin, but it would probably be a way to earn rep...
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Feb 9, 2017 22:22
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I don't even care that the book is finalized, I'm just happy they are finally putting loving bookmarks in.
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Feb 18, 2017 23:42
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One thing I learned after a night of character creation. Picking which factions your crew has relationships is a pretty big burden for new players. No one has any idea who is who and there are too many to really explain. So we just kind of picked at random. And one thing I found annoying when picking a hunting ground is there isn't a great list of which factions operate where. Especially when your assassin crew picks white crown....
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Feb 23, 2017 06:31
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It's possible that I missed it in the book, but are there any guidelines as to what jobs should pay?
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Feb 24, 2017 16:09
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SilverMike posted:Page 146, Payoff has those guidelines. Sweet, thank you. Does that seem like strange placement to anyone else? To me that is something that the players are going to want to know going into the job, so I kept looking for that info in all the score creation rules.
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Feb 24, 2017 17:51
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Not sure what I was doing wrong but I felt with the planning phase I was basically just telling the players how the heist was going to kick off. When they ask a question like where are they vulnerable should I give multiple answers? In this case I told them about a skylight, but should I also mention a sewer entrance? That seems like a lot of information for a 4-5 roll. We actually played out the planning phase for our first heist because I forgot about the planning rolls, and it went hilariously sideways. Playing it out doesn't fit nicely with the whole plan - > score - > downtime cycle though. How do you guys handle trying to hire someone after planning a heist? Unless I missed a rule for that somewhere, it's part of the downtime options. Demon_Corsair fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Apr 21, 2017 |
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Apr 21, 2017 02:35
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poo poo that is awesome. I plan to steal that setup. I need to spend a weekend watching heist movies and writing up a list of score ideas. My last session was way more Fargo then heat. The job was to sneak into a red sashes drug processing house and steal the finished product and it ended with a couple guards dead and the building catching fire and due to the chemicals stored in the house, exploding.
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Apr 28, 2017 16:57
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What sort of limits do you put around gathering information. Our last couple heists seem to bog down gathering info and waaay to much planning. The players seem to keep making more and more rolls to get to get as much detail as they can. I'm also not sure about how much should be info rolls and how much should actually be played out. The last heist actually "started" when a few rolls at a meet with a potential target started spiraling out of control. E: My players are either new to role playing or come from D&D. They were asking me what it looked liked when a ghost possessed a person, how it could be detected, and the looks on their faces when I said "I dunno, you tell me" was priceless. Their first suggestion was the eyes glow but a heavy hood could hide it, and I reminded them that whatever they decided I would inevitabley use against them 
Demon_Corsair fucked around with this message at 04:47 on May 20, 2017 |
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May 20, 2017 04:15
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I think the tough part of people making good hacks will be playing with the heist - > down time - > find next heist cycle, and the territory mechanics. That being said, I'm super interested in how the standard fantasy hack will turn out. Really dig the dice pool and stress/consequence mechanic. Blades just hits a sweet spot combining some of my favorite bits of PBTA and fate.
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Jun 9, 2017 00:57
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Evil Mastermind posted:Well, that and coming up with a new idea that someone else hasn't come up with already. Although maybe that's just me not being able to think of a good idea for a hack. Nobles scheming plots of courtly love and throwing jousting tournaments. Or to take even more "inspiration" from fate, Atomic Robo. Actually, some modern fantasy that's kitchen sink similar to dresden files/monster of the week could be interesting. Heists are taking down different monsters? Demon_Corsair fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Jun 9, 2017 |
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Jun 9, 2017 05:19
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Harrow posted:I wonder if a sort of high-adventure dungeon crawling hack could work. There's already a dungeon crawling hack, but it's much more in the vein of Darkest Dungeon or Torchbearer. Maybe a sort of optimistic treasure-hunters sort of hack could work with this system, because I love the system a whole lot. I hope so, I backed swordfish islands, and being able to use blades for a exploration hex crawl would be super rad. I was planning to use dungeon world, but blades would be a way better fit. Think I may have just killed my game though. Told my players about scum and villainy and they all seem way more excited about it then the base setting. Which is probably on me as a gm not doing a great job selling or making the world come alive.
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Jun 9, 2017 15:53
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Harrow posted:How is Scum and Villainy shaping up, anyway? It occurs to me if my current group doesn't end up really enjoying Strike!, we could easily continue our current fantasy magic space bounty hunters game with a system like that, and I already know at least a few of the players loved Blades in the Dark when we played it. One thing that appeals to me is that your ship (the crew replacement) is limited to three choices. It never sat right with me that the crews in blades were so specialized, so have more generalized ship types seems like a good change. Haven't really looked at any of the playbooks yet.
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Jun 9, 2017 16:55
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DemonMage posted:
With my group I found we got bogged down in free play. They would take endless rolls trying to case a place or follow someone and I would finally just say, ok that sounds like an approach, its go time on a job. How do you balance the line between looking for a new job during free play, and actually kickstarting a heist. I think I big part of that wasn't I wasn't really impressing how much you could do with a flashback.
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Sep 23, 2017 20:36
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Mighty Dicktron posted:This game is really really neat, but I always feel like I'm doing something wrong when I run it. There's some missing piece that I think is entirely on my end. I'm traditionally an extremely heavy prep-first DM and while I'm not bad at coming up with things and bullshitting on the spot, it's definitely my weaker area. Is there something I can do to mitigate this, or any advice on session structure so I can work to my strengths slightly better? I've been doing Engagement-Score-Downtime-EXP-Hook for Next Session made by PCs to accommodate this but I feel like I'm being too restrictive on the players by doing it. They're very short, no-more-than-two-hour sessions, so we don't usually have the time to do more than one Score. I spent some time random rolling up a few jobs that made sense for the crew, and cribbed a bunch of job ideas from some heist movies, just to have a few skeleton outlines to fall back on. Actually, just watching a pile of heist movies would be a good idea. Just keep an eye out for all the complications that come up and think about how they could be used in your crews heists.
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Nov 20, 2017 02:46
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I'm re-reading the rules in order to kick off a game of scum and villainy this week and ran into something that has me a little confused. Gambit doesn't ever really get explained anywhere. Does anyone understand how gambit works? For the most part I get how to get and spend it, but there is mention of a refresh based on your ship at one point that doesn't seem to be explained. Since the starting pool seems tied to the ship I guess its a pooled resource and not a player one?
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Feb 22, 2018 16:14
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I have another question about engagement rolls. It stresses that you should jump straight into the engagement roll without doing all sorts of pre planning, but then it mentions getting an extra dice for a targets vulnerability. How do people usually handle gathering that info? Allowing a couple of rolls to plan a bit before the engagement roll, or using flashbacks before the job proper starts?
Demon_Corsair fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Feb 25, 2018 |
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Feb 25, 2018 06:32
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I liked that idea, but it always seemed a little weird when you dropped a 2 harm consequence to a 1. Did it also just vanish? Another rule in scum and villainy I like the idea of is when you resist a consequence you drop it by two tiers instead of one. So what could have been two harm is just stress. E: started rewatching firefly, and it has not aged well. It's really just all the standard western tropes with a spaceship as one set and a smattering of Chinese for future color. What are some good Sci fish movies or books with a fighting against the man plot? I did not expect my players to chose that ship at all. Demon_Corsair fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Feb 28, 2018 |
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Feb 28, 2018 05:04
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Ran my first session in a while, and christ I am rusty as a GM. One thing I like about blades is failures make it super easy to keep things rolling and escalating. What I really struggle with is what comes next when they start rolling well and handle the current situation. The gambit system in Scum and Villainy makes good out comes way more likely as there are a lot of available dice floating around.
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Mar 2, 2018 21:42
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How do you handle failures in flashbacks? Are the PC's out the stress and possibly out of luck on the flashback? Can they take injuries in the flashback that retroactively apply to the job?
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Mar 3, 2018 05:39
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Flipping through this as I ponder doing a write up for Fatal and Friends and I came across the prison sheet and rules for incarceration. And it struck me as not a really interesting or a useful addition. Another sheet to manage but the player has to sit out or roll a new character for the time they are locked up. Does anyone use it they way it was written or have people come up with better ways to reduce wanted levels?
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Mar 19, 2018 03:44
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I don't know how I feel about the focus on a rotating group of semi disposable characters over the standard one per player. This is basically the perfect framework for setting up an xcom game. Failure spiral and all.
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Jun 1, 2018 22:20
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Finally got a game going again and a few things came up I'm not sure how to handle. How do you handle investigation rolls when trying to find the detail for planning a score. Last time I had a few players immediately fail their rolls, since I felt things were stalling, I said gently caress it, made a clock ticked it once for every failure and kept going. Once the clock was full I let the players decide on what a good detail was. Sadly I didn't see any examples of what a failed investigation roll should look like. The other thing is playbooks specific consumable items. Does a lurks silence potion get refreshed automatically after every score or does it need to be replaced or recreated like a player made item would be? Does anyone have any tips on how to play a spider other then always be flash backing? They seem like a very tricky character to play. I've been failing hard at introducing ways to use the ghost contract ability. The look on my players face when they snuck into a merchant's shop ready to trash some inventory and found a weird cult ritual going on instead was priceless.
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Sep 22, 2018 18:31
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admanb posted:Investigation should be Gather Information rolls, which can't fail. They just get less complete information on a lower roll. Since I'm still struggling, what would you do if your players were trying to find a way to sneak into a building, and rolled a 1 looking for ways in? Nothing at all. ABF is the advice I've given so far.
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Sep 22, 2018 19:19
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I guess I was looking at it the wrong way. I was trying to figure out how to speed up the part where the players got the plan detail to get into the score. Sounds like everyone else plays that out a bit longer.
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Sep 23, 2018 04:23
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Bazanga posted:Ran my session 0 today. It went well, the players really liked the world and character creation process and so did I. I’m still trying to figure out the rules and ran into a few situations I didn’t know how to handle, along with a more of a generic issue I’m still trying to work through regarding sandbox play. Most of the skills intentionally have some overlap and grey areas. If you are picking a lock with finesse, to me that means you are trying to crack a tumbler lock by feel. Where if you are using some lock picks or your burglar's tools, that's probably tinker, since its more gear oriented. For almost all of the gear, I just ask the players how it works. It is their gear after all. Once we have figured it out initially then its canon and away we go. Always ask your players. There is nothing more satisfying then seeing a failure on a desperate roll, saying "the worst possible outcome" and asking the table what they think happens. They will usually come up with sick and twisted stuff way worse then you were thinking, and since the table came up with it, the players are more likely to accept it. Bazanga posted:Now, for the sandbox question. This is more of a fundamental issue I’ve been struggling with with sandbox style sessions/campaigns. Do you pre-plan generic heists/NPCs/encounters and just pull them out of your grab-bag as the session goes on, or do you come up with all of that on the fly? If the players end up getting a score inside of a guard’s barracks, do you have guard’s barracks already mapped out with the number of guards in each room, alarms, etc, and then reveal that information through the outcomes of dice rolls? Or do you plan/create it as you go, room by room, as the players move along and make dice rolls? I tend to do the latter, but I don’t really know how else to do it. For NPC's and encounters I don't. I will just slap a random name on an NPC and let them develop from there. I'm lucky and my players take notes, so I can just ask them, who was that merchant by the docks who you burnt down a rivals shop for? And get all the details. It never hurts to ask your players how they know this person and for some details around them. So far for heists I will either come up with something, or if inspiration is lacking, I will use the random tables in the back and roll something that fits. The twists on that table add a lot more to a heist then I come up with myself a lot of the time. I'm real bad at maps and generally just sketch something out on the fly, but I have just backed this guy's patreon, so we will see how using nice pre-generated maps go. https://www.patreon.com/ryandunleavy/posts For things like guards and alarms at most I will throw down a clock or two before we start. Bluecoats is a always a good option. What I really struggle with is moving things along when the players role well. What I have been thinking about doing is just sitting down with those tables, watching some heist movies and generating a pile of index card sized heists. Just Client, Target, Work, Twist, and maybe faction and connection. Then throw down a couple clocks. There is also a twitter I cannot find right now which just generates scores every few hours based on those tables. There is also a FATE supplement called Crime World that I plan to steal some ideas from. It has the idea that the core of your score is contained in The Box. This box has FATE style aspects and skills, that I think would be perfect for clocks. The categories are Access which is anything that impedes your movement getting in or out. Eyes which is anything that could detect your presence. Last, there is Bolts which are anything that physically restrain you from leaving with that you came with like a vault. Now, these are all heavily geared towards breaking in and stealing something, but you could probably come up with one clock per category for almost any heist. Bazanga posted:For example, this happened today. One of my PCs rolled a 6 on an Attune check to see if they could communicate with ghosts in a sewer that they were exploring. They also have Ghost Echoes because they are a Shadows crew. I had not planned or thought of including ghosts in the sewers before they tried this. Because they rolled a 6, I “created” a ghost door that would lead them to a back way through the sewers into the hiding place of the bandits they were looking for. If I hadn’t “created” this as a result of the dice roll, they would’ve found nothing, in which case it feels like the roll failed for them. I run into this issue with dice roll failures, as well. Like if they severely fail a Prowl check, I’ll sometimes “spawn” guards that surprise them that I hadn’t planned on. Or if they fail a Consort check in a desperate situation while running from the Bluecoats, they suddenly realize that everyone in the bar they are in is wearing symbols of their enemy faction and everyone starts reaching for their swords, even though when they walked into that bar I had no intention of it being an enemy faction hangout. Etc. Remember, your players sheets are full of them telling you things they want to come up in the game. So if they picked Ghost echos, its a pretty safe bet that there probably should be some sort of supernatural aspect to any heist you come up with. I think those are great responses, especially the first and third one. Then you get to ask fun questions like, what is a ghost door, and what are the consequences of going through it. For "spawning guards" I like to use a clock and make it obvious as it fills up that there are people hearing things and preparing to respond. But if you want to hit them with a hard move, there is nothing wrong with going straight to them showing up. The balance is in how you use your moves. Soft moves for a prowl move are like announce future badness by ticking a clock and saying the players hear a guard in the other room say "did you hear something?" vs a hard move of guards busting in. I think part of it is that you just need to get more comfortable with rolling with it and improvising. And don't worry about it feeling incoherent, the human brain is great at tying unconnected events together so things like ghosts appearing or a rival faction suddenly showing up will be explained away in no time.
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Oct 15, 2018 05:38
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An even shittier Victorian London. Oh and there is no sun and death is a bit hosed up.
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Aug 22, 2019 22:46
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Was there ever a good fantasy fitd game? I’m always looking for something that I can pitch to D&D players as an easy alternative thats already a little familiar.
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Jan 10, 2024 01:44
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And when doing the character and gang creation don’t even show them the faction list. Pick a couple to start. Any time I’ve brought rival gangs up, it gets overwhelming and things grind to a halt.
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Jan 24, 2024 06:05
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I need some advice on something basic. Picking the detail for the plan. Is that something I should have come up with in advance when I'm prepping the heist? At least for the approaches the gang is most likely to take. Any time I try to play through it we always get bogged down in investigation rolls to come up with multiple options and I scramble to come up with something.
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Feb 2, 2024 00:49
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Coolness Averted posted:If they don't have a good answer for the detail, then they should use a downtime action to gather intel -and you can provide those potential weak spots to exploit. This is where we generally end up. The crew is thieves so the default is they are doing to sneak in and then they do a few survey rolls to "find" a good access point. Should I just tell them to pick a likely way in and go? Should they just say there is a door on the roof we can try to access, or a second story window, vs them do a study for me to tell them those are options? I'm just not sure who should be making up the detail, or where that info comes out. If it's a study or a survey to figure that out, then I should probably prep a few options because it turns out I suck coming up with those on the fly. If that's something the players can just make up because the characters would know, then I can just tell them that the detail is on them and roll with it. I really try to stress the idea of flashbacks to avoid overplaning, and oceans eleven is practically required watching to try to drill in the idea. If I ever get to play this game I want to play a spider that only exists in flashbacks and doesn't actually come on the heist.
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Feb 2, 2024 02:37
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Ok, the key part I was missing is that the players have the narrative power to declare what the detail is. The book implies that if the players don't know they should gather information to figure something out. I've been working on a semi-structured skeleton for fleshing out heists. So if I do a decent job describing who is the mark, or what the location is like, then a detail should flow from that pretty easily.
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Feb 2, 2024 18:30
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Pirate Radar posted:Rules as written I believe this would be Luxury. The Weird vice is supposed to be supernatural in nature. If the house and it’s furniture is perfect, then a ritual will bind the ghosts of x to happily play house in the doll house forever. As long as they get a regular amount of renovations done. Ghost heloc? We ended up switching from blades to scum and villainy because the dark and serious tone clashed with the vibe of our group as well as the comic downward spiralling that happened every score.
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Mar 8, 2024 20:59
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