After a session of actual play, here are the main complaints my group shared. Their conclusion was that they would only play this again if we house-ruled the hell out of the “Action, Effect, & Resistance Rolls” page. Even then, some elements left them cold. Here is what they had to say, summarized. First, a link to the play report:
https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2015/04/18/blades-in-the-dark-adventure-summary/
TO BE CLEAR, I don’t want this to come across as me saying the game is terrible. Instead, my goal here is to share the feedback of my group. They do not want to play the game again, and these are their reasons why. Every game is not for every player, and I’m not suggesting this game is “broken.” I do feel it may be helpful to share their perspectives. I understand and accept that these problems may stem from me misunderstanding the rules, or “doing it wrong.” Still, I want to share what my players shared with me during and after the session (sometimes with heated enthusiasm.) I’m really not sure which category is best for a discussion like this, so we’ll go with “Rules (Official.)” On to the feedback!
SIX IS TOO MUCH TO ASK. They felt that being punished for anything but a six, which could fail to materialize with any number of rolled dice, made their characters feel incompetent and vulnerable. In a sneaksy game, once you are detected, once things escalate, de-escalating them is really difficult if it is even possible. Having dangers manifest on anything but a six means if you’re around people and alarms and traps, escalation is pretty damn likely. They disliked this. In play, this worked predictably; a danger manifests, now the DM thinks up more dangers, and they manifest, and the situation gets more and more difficult with very limited tools to de-escalate. After all, on anything but a 6, more dangers will manifest.
YOU NEED SIX TWICE IN A ROW. Even if you get a 6 on the action roll, if you don’t get ANOTHER 6 on the Effect roll, you are still much less effective. Even a critical success can be reduced to a partial success for effectiveness. They found this demoralizing.
DICE POOLS WILL NOT BE BIG ENOUGH. Tied into the issue of needing a six, your maximum dice pool for an experienced character is 4 for an action, +1 for background, +1 for a tool, maybe +1 for having them overmatched; that’s still 7 dice, and incomplete success if none of them turn up a 6. They compared that to, for example, Arkham Horror. There a 5 or 6 is a success, and dice pools can get higher than 10. And you STILL get screwed by the dice sometime. With the combination of the tiny (often 1 or 2) dice pools and the need for a 6, they were pretty demoralized.
TRIPLE JEOPARDY. For a flashback, you can take triple jeopardy. FIRST, you take stress for a bad situation, avoiding consequences. SECOND, you take stress to have a flashback, no matter whether it turns out to be helpful or not. THIRD, you can be asked to make rolls and accept consequences DURING the flashback. The fact that the characters could actually be in a worse situation because they triggered a flashback made the players leery of using them often.
For example, one character used a flashback to trail an important NPC, then she got challenged to a duel, and she used her armor up to defend against an injury in the flashback. In the present mission, the armor is still used up. And, of course, lots of other bad things could happen.
In another example, one character used a flashback to bribe a bluecoat, who did not take well to the offer; he didn’t push, but he did snap back to the present down 2 stress from making the attempt. His already desperate situation was that much worse.
BIGGER GROUPS ARE DISPROPORTIONATELY PUNISHED. I had two players. However, when I explained how the group actions worked, they were appalled by the levels of stress that would flow to the leader, or to the party, if EVERYONE was rolling and needed to not roll 1-3, or if the leader didn’t roll a 6 and all those people would absorb stress.
The main objection there was that you could have a group getting stressed out by not doing much. Ideally you want stress to be connected to awesome flashbacks or derring-do; but after two not-perfect lock picking sessions and a not-perfect climbing session the group could have racked up a lot of stress for not-particularly-stressful activity. Is that wrong? They didn’t care so much about that, but as PLAYERS, they didn’t like the idea at all for how they play.
ROLE PLAYING NOT INTUITIVE. This may be my fault; when they wanted to do things, I called for rolls. However, this led for a session where the players did not portray the characters talking to each other or NPCs. Things were handled in an abstract way. It was definitely a roll-play focus; which action to use? What effect? The dice then determined how it worked.
There was definitely game fiction going on; I relayed to them the situation, but in terms of whether it was controlled, risky, or desperate, and what actions might be most appropriate to use. They never got into the skins of the characters. Their decisions were driven by what was on the sheets, not what was in the character’s minds. I’m not sure how I would pull them from that mindset, considering the abstraction requests a GM keep the game moving by setting the scene and resolving it and keeping things from bogging down.
The characters were still distinct, and had goals and such, but they were much more marionettes dandled by the players and less masks the players wore. Your mileage may vary, that was just an observation from the experience.
IN CONCLUSION. I think this is a really interesting game! I am not saying it is bad, or broken. I AM saying that I will not be able to run it with my group again unless I roll up my sleeves and tinker with some of its internal mechanics.
Why bother sharing this at all? My intent is not to be abusive, but to share specific “ouch” points from my group, and their insights in playing it. Maybe the community will chime in a chorus of how I was doing it wrong and these things should not apply, or maybe there is a flash of insight that knocks half these things out of consideration. In any case, I hope this report serves as food for thought for the game designers, and others who are preparing their own games.
https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2015/04/18/blades-in-the-dark-adventure-summary
I haven’t played yet, so I can’t speak to your system issues, but the way you wrote it up sounds like an exciting session!
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Adam Schwaninger It was an exciting session. I did my best to make it really exciting and reliant on player choices. But, the players got more and more frustrated as the game went on, and were pretty annoyed by the end. I couldn’t head that off, as hard as I tried.
Interesting observations Andrew. I have a very picky gaming group, so hopefully everything will be sorted out before final release, otherwise I’m sure they will feel the same as your players 🙂
Claus Christensen Your group may not have these issues, they might be fine with things as they stand now. Still, I thought it would be helpful to share one group’s perspective.
Regardless of how one feels about the game, this is how thoughtful criticism should be delivered; I like it.
(Haven’t had the opportunity to play myself yet, sadly.)
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I had similar feelings about not being competent. We’ve played twice and the second time was much better but even then I got a little discouraged but I had a good time once I decided to go with the flow
One of the things that my GM did in the second session that helped was to reframe the danger. You are sneaking across a room. There’s a clock for you to bypass the guards. the danger isn’t you get noticed (with a 4-5 the success contradicts the danger) so the danger is that the guard becomes suspicious. Now instead of on a roll of 5 or lower you fail, you have a race of two clocks.
You can use stress to mitigate failures as the clocks count down.
I think we are going to need to play some more to get the rules locked down but I think this is a better mechanic. Rolls are not binary, success or failure but are building toward success. They are a way to draw out the action of I sneak past the guard from one roll.
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sub – very interesting post. I just read the quickstart. Never played it, so far, while I have lot of AW / DW playing and mastering under my hood. However while reading, I had some of your feeling, I hope the play will go better than my guts suggest (quite “mechanic”, maybe difficult to build the fiction around that, 3 rolls in a row building 3 different pools for the actions etc.)
Also, I could be wrong, however from what I read, should be easier to tick the experience gained from actions etc. DURING the game, not at the end. Like other systems, you roll, and you tick. But please take my phrase with lot of salt, it was simply a thought of mine, during the first reading.
Thanks, Andrew! This is great feedback.
Note that I haven’t played yet.
Personally I feel the most interesting outcome of a roll in a game is ‘yes, but…’. Of course it’s nice for players to sometimes just be awesome, but I think a lot of that should be in the fiction where no check is being called for. Are you calling for too many checks, maybe?
The flashback issue is interesting, I’d love to hear others about it. I think I already read other people saying the default 1 stress for a flashback might be a bit much?
The punishment on bigger groups might be a pacing mechanic. By having that, you don’t need to fiddle around with having bigger/more clocks for larger groups. I’m just guessing, though, so maybe John Harper can comment on that?
I get the strong impression that GM’s are using too many clocks with too many segments. I think a heist could probably stand being just 2-3 clocks of 4 segments each and maybe some additional binary checks.
As to roleplaying not being intuitive, I think one common issue with AW style games is focusing on the mechanics too much. Instead, the fiction should flow and dice should be rolled only when people disagree about the fiction. For example the GM says ‘you open the safe and trigger a trap, poisoning you’ will have the player challenge that by rolling.
The player might say ‘I puff up my chest and intimidate my way into the high-rollers club’ with the GM calling for a check.
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Hmm, i am worry abit about DM This soon to my group. Points I am having a hard time to understand fluidly are flashbacks and the planing jumps into action part.
I haven’t played it yet, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. The first two flashbacks seem unnecessary for something that is essentially gathering information. They appear in the writeup before any other action has taken place. The lack of an exit strategy I would also consider prep and therefore think that’s just the result of inexperience on the players’ part with heists.
Wrt the chances im a bit surprised. In BitD the chance for a beginning character to get away scotfree in its apex action is roughly 1/3. Success in general has a chance of 3/4. Since it is success not failure, the danger shouldn’t equate negating the success.
When I compare that to an average beginning char in other systems success in say combat is generally around 50% just to hit not for effect. So maybe it’s more a question of perception.
Christopher Rinderspacher Here’s the thing. We knew we were going to do a job that involved stealing a treasury, and I decided it was in a drug den where the Red Sashes hung out. However, I had no prep ahead of time. No idea what they were walking into exactly.
I made up the bit about the pulley and the laundry. Then I handled “gather information” as flashbacks instead of sample questions that may or may not have a roll. I did not charge them stress for those flashbacks, however.
That gave me some information to work with, what they found out. And it gave them a sense of how flashbacks work. So I counted it doubly useful in that way.
As for not having an exit strategy–part of the purpose of the game is that you don’t have to have planning ahead of time, you handle it through flashbacks. I took that seriously, so when we needed an exit strategy we flashed back to when we set it up. That also cost no stress and involved no roll, because duh they’d need a way out, and the Gondola faction was +3 with them.
As for dice and odds, I think there’s some inconsistent comparison with that. The systems work differently, the baseline expectations of what starting characters should be able to do may be different across a number of systems, and if we’re saying “success with a complication” is “success” then I’ve covered my thoughts on that one.
I hope that’s helpful.
Great Feedback Andrew!
One thing I’d like to ask is your wording of ‘GM calling for rolls’.
How did that actually play out at the table? Sure, its the GM’s responsibility, but its shared: the players can be on the lookout and have the power to call for their own action rolls and choose their approach for the obstacle. This can lead them to focus on what they are good at and get more dice – which is fine, its what they have flagged as interesting after all.
Did you talk as a group about the positions prior to the roll? We’ve found that this conversation can bring up all sorts of tidbits that help frame the fiction, especially if you address the characters to ‘get into their head’.
What about the ‘push their luck’ mechanic? I love the advice in no wiffing. It’s more dangerous, but if the player cares enough to keep trying (and facing dangers) they can overcome a string of unlucky rolls and achieve success at a cost.
Speaking of cost, how much stress / trauma did the characters get? We never got to the eighth stress (for a trauma tick) and shared the stress ablaltion around the group, so having 4 players meant 28 stress before potential trauma, which was enough for flashbacks and effect soaks. (Though my players seemed to love accepting the narrative potential of non-lethal effects!)
In fact you could play with the positional escalation mechanic and action / resist rolls and leave off effect rolls altogether to ‘ease in’ to the system?
‘_Fly casual. If you’re not sure what to do, keep it simple. Go
with what’s obvious to you. Add mechanics when you’re
comfortable. Forgive each other’s mistakes. Have fun_.’
Andrew Shields , now I’m a bit confused as to why your players were appalled by the stress incurred by flashbacks, if 3 of the flashbacks had no (automatic) negative consequences.
Because sometimes it mattered. One guy was hanging on the side of a fast-moving coach, and had a flashback where maybe he bribed the guy driving the coach to pull off to the side for him. The roll didn’t pan out, and he didn’t want to escalate the situation, so he let that go; he just reflected on the earlier failed attempt to bribe the guy.
But there he is, hanging on the coach, 2 stress down.
I’m not saying it’s bad to have that flashback cost, I’m just saying my players were reluctant to use flashbacks, especially if they were in a situation that could cause them to take stress to prevent worse consequences.
Like you thoughtfully surmised Andrew, it sounds like your group likes to play scoundrels that succeed with little (fictional)consequence. That’s Ok! Maybe an easy solution is to increase their base stress to 10?
My group is more in the ‘Indiana Jones’ camp, where all the action rolls are success with complication. So long as the danger isn’t lethal, my players seem happy to take the effect rather than the stress, especially if the effect is not a physical one. This creates all sorts of hooks for us to latch onto and spins the ‘simple plan’ into a fiasco-like rollercoaster every time.
Nathan Roberts Couple things. For one, I spent a lot of time poring over the rules, trying to get it straight. One other player spent some time looking them over. The other guy never saw it before that night. So, I had a higher level of familiarity with how things worked, and how to apply rules so they could try what they wanted to do. Several times I told them explicitly that I wasn’t telling them what they had to roll, only interpreting, and I was open to other interpretations. I made copies of the character generation sheet because it had descriptions of the actions and effects, so the players could refer to them.
What do you mean by “the positions”?
As for pushing their luck, they quickly decided the dice were going to screw them. They preferred the comfy bed of controlled circumstances, or maybe the sofa of risky situations, but did not want to be in the Applebee’s restroom of desperate situations when the dice eventually betrayed them.
In the first heist, one had 5 stress and the other had 6. Due to coin and luck, they cleared all that. In the second heist, one had none, the other had about 4 (of which he only cleared like 1.)
Yeah, I could have played with less mechanics. But I wanted to play Blades in the Dark. I wanted to wrap my head around it and understand it, and I could only really do that by seeing how it played out.
+Nathan Roberts ‘Indiana Jones tended to leave places fast, with guns blazing, to exciting chases. That’s okay for a globe-trotting pulp hero whose adventures don’t follow him home. And, as I said elsewhere, if my players were playing barbarians or orcs or something noisy, then whatever. Bring the complications.
If the focus is on being thieves, and there are consequences of the law finding where you live not far away, then all that noise is just frustrating. Yeah, sometimes you do flee guns blazing. But that shouldn’t be the norm, and it’s hard to avoid when there are lots of complications.
Considering the entanglements roll, and the list of friends and allies and enemies, and the inevitable complications that will occur regardless (even if they are not as constant), I don’t feel there is danger of running out of plot hooks. Especially when players start side projects.
As I said elsewhere, I think you might be hitting too hard with the danger. Tone done what it means for danger to manifest. Don’t make it stuff that requires stress as much. Make it reasons to switch methods or routes, or other changes in the fiction. In a heist film, an unexpected guard coming by is dangerous, but that guard will most likely be hidden from or taken out. He’s a threat, not a disaster. Don’t get disaster dominoes started.
Every roll will probably manifest danger, even for experienced crews doing what they’re best at. Much of the danger should be ominously looming but not crashing down. Otherwise every roll will trigger danger that will require more rolls that will trigger danger that will… Well, stress runs out and everyone feels browbeaten.
I think that solves the dice pool problem, too. With 2 dice you have a 75% chance of 4+. As long as you don’t require a 6 every time it should feel fine.
For flashbacks, again I think the issue is that your game made rolling too punitive in general. But also, if you spend stress to avoid a bad situation, you’ve avoided it. A flashback shouldn’t be immediately needed.
Question, aren’t flashbacks supposed to have an automatic good outcome in exchange of the stress point? You just bribed the guard, period. Or not?
Um. No? It just lets you set something up in the past for benefit right now. It may or may not require an action roll dependent on the fiction.
All right, I probably remember wrong, don’t have the quick start handy now. But I can see how there might not be an incentive in using them. You’re always paying for them and you can actually WORSEN your situation. Sounds like something to do only in very desperate cases.
Tommaso De Benetti There are degrees of flashbacks, costing from 0-3 stress. If it is something simple (“I knew we’d be going in the dark, so I brought a lantern. We all did.”) That doesn’t cost anything. If it was predictable you’d need this, it might cost 1 for significant effect, like going back and bribing a guard.
Some flashbacks are just a statement, others might be a role, others might require role playing out a scene.
The main point to flashbacks is to suggest the characters planned the score, but you get to drop in the middle. If you need something that they would have planned out in advance, or there is a need they could have anticipated, you can do a flashback instead of just being stuck OR having to actually sit through the planning.
You need the flashbacks to do heists with minimal or no prep.
Got it!
Flashbacks have the great advantage IMHO that you only role play the prep that is necessary for the current scenario. No “cover every bloody angle possible” waste of time.
LOL “Applebee’s restroom of desperate situations” dont ever wind up there… ever…
So its been three or four months now since the game, did these issues ever get addressed? Were you able to make a work around or were things changed to make the play experience better?
Lots of these have been addressed by mechanical changes. For example, the effect level is rolled into the action roll, so you don’t need six twice. A team member can take +1 stress to give you +1d, or you can take 2 stress to give yourself +1d, and that helps with the dice pool issue.
Trying to figure out how to make the role playing happen around the board-game-y mechanics has a lot to do with getting enough familiarity to apply the rules when you need them instead of focusing on the rules, and I think most campaigns will start out rules-and-heist focused and relax into the comfortable ebb and flow.
Tightening down the consequences of partial successes has really helped with the frustration of needing a 6, because there are a few KINDS of consequences that draw the focus and that is useful for clarifying everyone’s expectation and making a 4-6 feel like a success instead of only a 6.
Another big difference is, through this community I”ve found a pool of players who have brought their own style and attitude to the game and I’ve been able to have some really great open table play, plus a couple of my plusser friends who have some ongoing play. Sometimes you just face some growing pains.
I hope this is helpful. I think the game has come a long way since the first quickstart, in a good direction.