Played out first session using the quick-start last night. Overall it went well and everybody had a good time. I’m hoping they’ll be up for tackling their second score next week.
GOOD THINGS:
* Character and gang creation was good, everything is in place to help people make interesting/colorful characters. I’m dying to get my hands on the other crew playbooks!
* Filling in the details of “our” Duskwall during play was a great pleasure, thanks to the evocative setting prompts laid in everywhere.
* They chose to assassinate Baszo Baz in order to impress the Red Sashes, so that was their first score and the meat of our session.
* Really enjoyed the way variable Position impacts the dice mechanic and puts escalation in the hands of the players. I was worried that this would unnecessarily mechanize the contextual difficulty of *World games, but there is satisfaction to be had in determining a Position.
* Everyone loved the way flashbacks could get folded into the plan, and how it made them constantly assess the current situation, searching for opportunities to exploit. The most memorable came from the acquisition of fireworks (to be used for a distraction during the assassination attempt), and ended with the murder of the fireworks peddler (Devil’s Bargain on a Desperate roll).
* There’s a pleasing mechanical input->output aspect to the gameplay. There are a lot of terms and resources to juggle, which got a little confusing at times, but resource management has some very tasty hooks that tie nicely into the narrative.
* Downtime was short yet satisfying.
NOT-SO-GOOD THINGS
* The “choose a Plan and dive in” approach worked as advertised at first, in the way it allowed us to go right to the score after deciding one detail (for us it was Deception: distract Baz and his bodyguards so we can kill him), but the brakes came on every time we had to count dice for Actions and Effects. It felt like the time we gained from not over-planning was lost to figuring out how many dice to roll in each instance, then again each time Position was escalated.
* One contributor to the above was always feeling like we needed to come up with a Devil’s Bargain. In re-reading the rules I see that a DB’s are optional, but I think it would help to have their optional nature emphasized and/or mechanized. Because the dice mechanics are so crucial, it seems like PCs bent on success are going to want a Devil’s Bargain every single time in order to know all of their options. I love it as an interesting choice, but I would like to see some pointers or explicit rules about when a Devil’s Bargain is or is not available, because it a) slows down the action, and b) can be exhausting to keep coming up with them. The old 7-9 problem.
* Similarly, we rolled Effect too many times, not realizing it was optional until I went back to re-read the rules. Again, it might be worth emphasizing the fact that it’s optional, with maybe examples of when and when not to roll Effect. Add in the fact the Effect rolls also have a DB, and you can see why we felt bogged down in places.
* I can tell that for us, PC and Crew Advancement will work better at the end of a session rather than the beginning, because it gives the players concrete rewards for whatever dramatic and Stress-full Score they just pulled off, while it’s still fresh in their memories. I think I might house-rule a thing where whoever recaps “last week’s episode” at the start of a session gets a playbook tick, or something like that. And rotate that from session to session.
* Super-minor: I would like to see category headings for each of the faction sets on the Crew sheet so new players don’t have to figure it out by deduction: Criminal, Municipal, Industrial, Religious/Occult, or the like.
I know some of our problems had to do with learning a new system and not getting into a groove with it yet. The good thing is that we were gripped enough by what DID work for us that I want to keep at it until things click.
In any case, as a backer I’m grateful to have been handed such a substantial quick-start, and I really appreciate the obvious hard work and care John has put into this dark, bladed baby.
Lovely AP Jason 🙂
In regards to DBs, did you ever admit to being stumped and ask the players for ideas? I had the old ‘hard choice stutter’ too and found that throwing it out there to the group garnered some great narrative hooks and ideas.
Rather than stymie the old ‘gather dice and roll ritual’, it seemed to develop this interjection or circuitous flow. Like the audience not knowing whats going to happen next in a heist film. Almost the opposite of ‘railroading’ the fictional trajectory.
I’ll write about it soon.
I’m excited to crack out this game with my group on Monday.
Did you notice that the Cult crew sheet is available on the front page of the kickstarter? With all the excitement with the QuickStart it’s easy to forget.
Nathan Roberts, yeah, I opened it up to the players every time, but we didn’t manage to get a flow going. I think it’s mainly a matter of us all getting used to how it works. Were you guys coming up with a DB in every instance?
/sub
No, not every instance. But when it counted, the digging into the DB was quite revealing to the story. I can see how petitioning for the extra die every roll could get tiring!
Great ap! When and when-not to apply effects to rolls has been one of my biggest queries also, as I felt rolling them all the time would slow things down, much the way you have described.
Examples for different uses of effect rolls would be very helpful. I suspect the distinction for using effects will hinge on whether there is a clock present or not.
I guess as we play more it’ll change, but at present, the rolls tend to be less granular. The narration gets quite detailed, but the rolls themselves are not as ‘fast and furious’ as more skill-based rpgs.
It’s reminding me very much of a blend between AW and BW. Not so much about task and intent, but dovetailing introduced fiction into all the bits and pieces that make up a single action / effect roll.
The possibilities of mechanically supported retro-active setup are just touching the surface of our play and frankly blowing my mind. Its 3-16 taken to the next level.
Great AP feedback, Jason. It looks to me like most of the issues you saw will be mitigated by the full rules and/or system mastery. It definitely feels to me like there’s more to master than previous Harper games.
I have run a fair amount of Danger Patrol and I and some other players have experienced some of what I call “Danger Die fatigue” at times. For me it helped to boil dangers down to a couple quick mental categories and if neither of them applied and nothing else really juicy popped immediately to mind, then skip past adding more Danger dice.
For Blades I’m thinking those two categories will be Coin and Heat (both given as examples). There’s usually a reasonable way to extract a cost in one of those two without much mental exercise. Another thing that helps me for cases like these is not to worry about being awesome and to do/offer the obvious thing. There’re many improv and game texts that emphasize this and I think that will be wanted here to help groups avoid getting bogged down.
The other side of that coin is to not worry too much about that extra die. Either because failure can be fun & interesting or because that extra die won’t often make that much difference statistically. The PCs should be bent on success, but maybe the players less so for the fullest enjoyment of Blades? You’re playing some pretty flawed characters & hopefully enjoying and anticipating that aspect too. At least as I approach it.
edit: just noticed on a re-read the quick start suggests: “Offer a devil’s bargain. Think of a fun complication or reckless decision. Offer them the bonus die in exchange. If you don’t
have a good idea, you can offer the devil’s die in exchange for heat or stress.
Great AP, Jason! Thanks for sharing it.
And thanks especially for sharing the rough spots. That’s always very helpful to hear.
Like Matt said, if you’re feeling DB fatigue, offer the die in exchange for heat or stress. 1 or 2, depending on how evil your GM nature is. 🙂
silly thought…. Would it too weird to offer the DB die in exchange for stress, as proposed, but the quantity depending on the result of such dice? Maybe you use a dice of a different colour for the DB so you can identify the cost quickly… Maybe it’s too different in style to the rest of the system…
Why change the color of the dice? The point of a DB is that it will happen, regardless of whether you succeed it fail. You will drop your sword, the child will see you attack his father or the drugs start to kick in right now.
It doesn’t matter what result the dice the DB gave you is, so why make it different from the rest?