So I had a discussion with one of my players last session that’s been bugging me a bit. Since 2 of the results are that you succeed but the danger manifests (and a 3rd offers a trade of danger manifesting for additional effect) it would seem that a multitude of obvious dangers couldn’t be present.
For instance, you’re trying to climb up a tower (4 segment clock) and you’ve gotten about half way up (2 segments ticked off). The most obvious danger I can think of would be to fall down to the bottom of the tower (and possibly break their leg). Now say you get a 6 on a risky action to make progress on the clock, and you want to better assure knocking it out. You then get a 1 on your resistance roll and you have 7 stress already. So you chose to take the danger.
Do you fall to the ground? Does that knock out the segments you’ve already ticked? What about your effect roll? Do you jump up and grab the top of the tower only to slip and fall to the ground?
The danger can’t be non-completion of whatever you’re doing per se. Because then you run into the problem you’ve found, where failing the Effect roll nullifies the Action roll, which should never happen.
Animals notice you. Guards spot you. You tear off a finger nail. You drop a dagger. You pull down some stonework. These are all dangers.
Someone pokes their head out a window to see what all the noise is about.
So should set backs (in the purest sense of the term) actually exist in this system? Namely, should there ever be a situation where failing is a 1 step forward 2 steps back ordeal?
I definitely agree that it’s boring for things to ever stay as they were when an action roll is made (and making an effect roll should always tick segments on the clock) but to me it seems like the natural consequence of some actions to be loss of the progress you’ve made.
I really like the examples! But I’m still wary of saying it’s not possible for someone to slip and fall in this type of situation.
Another example: You’re trying to escape some bluecoats. So you’re rolling on an “Escape!” clock. Since getting caught would nullify their actions, it seems like you cannot be caught (definitely there are other dangers that could manifest first; injury, increased heat, losing an item, etc).
It takes a bit to start thinking about the multiple aspects to any action.
What are they really after in climbing the tower? It’s seldom about just succeeding for it’s own sake, but rather the action is instrumental to some other goal. They’re climbing to gain access probably, but other aspects of that action are speed, stealth, timing, what they carry with, what clues they leave behind, what others think or feel about your action happening. Once you know the specific aspect the roll success seeks to determine, then you know that the danger can be something going wrong with any of the other aspects.
As others have suggested, they ultimately gain access, but get hurt, maybe fall once and break something, then make it in somehow after all; maybe they make noise; maybe the are slow and miss their target’s nightly star-gazing ritual; maybe they offend a contact for even trying or for going without them; maybe they anger a spirit for stepping on the guardian gargoyle it inhabits; maybe they leave footprints, or maybe they drop their weapon when trying to hold it in their teeth.
I think you can threaten the characters with death and worse. That’s what stress is for.
Either accept the consequence, OR take stress. And the effect roll lays out how expensive (in terms of stress) avoiding the consequence is.
Roll to see if you accomplish the task. If you do not, roll effect to see how expensive it is to use stress to avoid the consequence–or take it.
If they are doing something like climbing high enough that a fall might be lethal, then it is worth the stress not to fall. If they don’t have enough stress left to mitigate the consequence, then they fall. Maybe a family member will join the crew (a new character.)
You have to state the specific danger before Effect is rolled, or at least before the decision to take stress is made. If the roll is a 4-5 falling doesn’t make sense; the action succeeded in addition to the danger happening, and falling is the opposite of the danger.
On a 1-3, though, it’s perfectly fine to have the PC fall. That’s a legitimate danger. It nullifies past successes—but the reason to fill the clock quickly is so you don’t keep facing danger. I think that’s fair. It’s just not fair on a 4-5.
In general, though, I’m wary of “you fail and get injured/captured/bad stuff” as a danger when there’s a clock and success might take a while. It works well for high pressure, high threat situations when things are going wrong. If the Bluecoats have been called and they’re on your tail, it might be an 8 segment clock to shake them off, but making the danger be “getting caught” makes this a necessary stress sink. Remember, even with 4 dice the chances of rolling 4-5 and facing danger are still just under 50%. Instead, for something like that. I wouldn’t make the danger a danger the the PC at all. Instead, fill up segments of the “Bluecoats catch up” clock. If that fills before the “Escape” clock, you’re caught.
It’s also very important to keep the danger in keeping with the fictional tone, not just what might happen. Yes, one could fall while climbing a very high and very slippery wall; one could fall many stories and die! But that’s the real world, and that’s not what BitD is trying to imitate. Instead, consider what’s going on. Is this the beginning of the score? Then falling is probably not a good danger. It blocks the action, it causes injury, and it seems too severe for when nothing much is going on. In fact, my biggest objection is that it makes the PC look bad and incompetent. He tried to climb and failed totally miserably! Don’t do that, especially starting out.
Climbing a wall to escape from the guards with the loot you stole as they fire bows at you is different. The score’s progressed. Things are dangerous and tension has ratcheted up. Now it’s okay to have the PC fall; it’s also easy to make it less a sign of basic inability. “You’re hampered by hauling that box you’re stealing. You were hit by one of the arrows and lose your grip. Knowing they’re right behind you, you push just a little too hard and a handhold gives way.”
Make the danger fit the tone of what’s going on and the pacing of the game, don’t make PCs look bad even when danger happens (danger isn’t failure!), and don’t use clocks as a “roll until you fail” setup. When there’s a clock, progress should be incremental but steady.
I think I overstated pacing there, actually. Situation and tone matter more. You can open up with deadly traps and lethal guards if you want, and it sets a certain tone. Stress can take care of some of the pacing for you.
You also might want a game where the PCs aren’t highly competent, and where they blunder and mess up all the time. You can do that too, but make sure that’s what you all want to be playing. Making incompetence the result of bad rolls and the fictional cause of the disaster that follows is a common GM method, but it’s not always a good instinct. When you do it, do it with intent and to suit the game, not just because bad dice mean PCs are bad at things.
Another interesting element of actions and dangers is how traps work. Rogues searching for traps are as old as D&D, but in Blades “I search for traps” is a strange beast. How do traps happen? Do you Discern them or Secure safe passage past them? Do they just go off and trigger Effect rolls to survive them?
I’d argue none of the above. The PCs are probably always checking for traps; they’re competent. So don’t spring sudden unexpected bad stuff on them. Tell them, “You realize there are pressure plates across the floor,” or, “There’s a tripwire here,” or, “Just in time you notice the needle set into the door’s handle.” Then leave it to the players to come up with a way to bypass the traps (and Secure is only one option!). The other way traps can come up is as a danger: “The danger when picking this lock is that the trap goes off,” or, “Someone must have known that clever blackguards might try to climb this wall, and you stab yourself on one of the tiny, razor-sharp spikes. From the dark coating it’s probably poisoned, and your hand starts to go numb…” Traps shouldn’t just go off because no one is actively looking.
I’ve wandered far afield from the original question, haven’t I?
Clocks reflect the fiction, not the other way around. If you fill part of a clock to infiltrate a place (by climbing a tower, or sneaking past patrols, or whatever) and then something happens to eject you from the process, you lose your progress on that clock.
Let’s say you’re fleeing from the Bluecoats. You want to escape by running away (Prowl). The Bluecoats are the obstacle, 6-segment clock.
You leap up and grab a window ledge and climb up to a rooftop. The Bluecoats are right behind you, blowing their whistles. What’s the danger? It could be many things (you get hurt, you leave evidence, etc.) but let’s go with the troublesome one: They catch you. How does this work?
You roll Prowl and get a 4. You do it and the danger manifests. How can that be? You can’t both escape and not escape, right?
Let’s look at a few possibilities:
1) You get 2 segments on the clock. 4 left. The danger manifests.
You make it to the roof and start to run for a sky-bridge, when a group of Bluecoats climb up just ahead of you and cut you off. You whirl around and the group behind you closes in, drawing their truncheons from their belts. There’s no where left to run! What do you do?
The obstacle of the Bluecoats is still present. You haven’t overcome it yet. The danger happens: they’ve caught you. Now you can decide: go quietly, or fight back. You haven’t overcome the Bluecoats obstacle (just 2/6) and you can’t simply keep running, since they caught you. So now what?
When do you actually get captured and put in jail? In this scenario, you have one more chance. Maybe you fight them (facing their higher-scale factor) and if you get 4-ticks on the clock, you escape. If not, they beat you (you can avoid harm with Stress) and cuff you and drag you off to jail.
2) You get a critical on effect, and fill 6 segments. You overcome the obstacle! But the danger manifests. Both things are true. You escape from the Bluecoats but they catch you. Huh? How is that possible?
You escape, stash the loot, and go home. The next morning, banging on your door. “Open up, you blighter! Inspector Krop wants a word with ya!” You can go with them, to face questioning from the Inspector about last night’s robbery, or do something else. What do you do?
They caught you, but since you also escaped, it’s after the fact — not red-handed, holding the loot.
So that’s one way of looking at it. You can do opposed goals and dangers, with a little practice. Is that helpful?
The climbing and falling example is a bit different, I think, so I’ll talk about that in another post.
Now let’s look at climbing the tower.
Let’s say that the danger is: you fall. This is a very serious tower! It’s so dangerous to climb, that every move you make has to be flawless. You need to roll 6s, in other words, all the way up, or you’ll lose your grip and fall. Is it perfectly sheer stone? Probably something like that.
Still want to try it? Okay. Good luck! If it’s a 4-segment clock, it’s daunting, but you just need a couple lucky rolls. If it’s 6 or more, man, that is not a tower you want to climb. Seriously dangerous business. Only take that route if there’s no other way.
1) It’s a 4-segment clock. You go for it. You roll Prowl and get a 4. Then you roll Effect do 4 ticks. You overcome the obstacle and the danger manifests. So… you get to the top and you fall?
Yep. Those were the stakes. But what was your goal? There’s a thing you need to do at the top, before you fall, and you now have the opportunity, since you overcame the obstacle.
Maybe you were using the tower to scout over the walls of the manor to the south, to see if they had gotten their shipment of Quicksilver. So you do that, then your grip slips and you fall.
Or maybe you wanted to gain entry to the tower, using the rooftop hatch. So you realize your grip is faltering, but you manage jam a piton into the cornice before you slip and fall. So it’s simple to hook it with a grapnel line and climb back up and gain entry (assuming you’re in a condition to do that after the fall).
When you choose a danger opposed to the goal like this, you can usually make sense of the outcomes if you keep the goal in mind.
If you really can’t reconcile them, then just change the danger to something else. “Eh, I guess I shouldn’t have said ‘you fall’ … that’s a bit weird here. How about ‘you get hurt’ instead? Since you beat the obstacle, let’s say you haul yourself over the top with the last of your strength and you feel your shoulder pop out of its socket as you do it.”
Also, opposed clocks, as someone else suggested, are a “soft” way to have opposed goal / danger.
You can have “the tower” obstacle (6-clock) and “your grip slips” danger (4-clock). When the danger manifests, fill in one segment of the grip slipping. If that fills first, they fall (and lose their progress on the tower).
This is also good for chases, like the Bluecoat example. Make the two clocks different sizes to show who has the advantage.
Some people find opposed clocks more tricky than resolving an opposed outcome like my examples. I think they’re a bit simpler. But you can do it either way.
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Great examples John.