Finally got to run a session of Blades the other day. I’ve had great feedback from my players and I had a lot of fun putting on a plethora of questionable Cockney/Scottish accents. I’ll probably do a play report soon, but wanted to get some advice on managing obstacles.
We reached a point where the crew had infiltrated a distillery and needed to secure their way into an office, which was guarded by patrols of thugs. For this I opted for a 6 segment clock – reasonable difficulty but not super hard.
The crew ended up taking 4 action rolls to overcome the obstacle, avoiding any danger each time (6 – 5/4 on controlled).
– 1 Stalk roll to find the pattern of their movements = 2 effect
– 3 Murder rolls to eliminate the guards – 2 effect, then 1, then 4.
They justified every roll as controlled, as they were going slowly and methodically and they had narratively scouted the guards out beforehand with the Stalk roll. However this feels like it may have been a little too straightforward/nice to the players.
As a GM should I feel I probably should have introduced Soft Moves (to use the *World term) to change the scenario at some point and perhaps tried to enforce that going more slowly might lead to more Risky moves the longer they continued the same course there.
How to you handle situations like that? Players avoiding danger but acting with diminished effect for multiple rolls. Are multiple rolls an inherently bad thing?
I’ve actually found it undesirable to require lots of rolls for the same obstacle. (unless it’s supposed to be a big deal in the bigger story rather than just the score, like getting intel on the Unseen). Therefore, in last night’s session, I tried to emphasize four things that helped avoid superfluous rolling for rolling’s sake. Overall, I’m pleased by the tone produced from my shifted focus and will stick with it in future sessions.
1) Don’t require effect rolls. (this doesn’t always work, like with pre-established score obstacle clocks, but if there’s not yet a clock, I think long and hard about if something merits one at all).
2) Default to 4-segment clocks
3) Use countdown clocks for careful/slow activity. Put a 4- or 6-segment clock down and say, “this ticks down when time passes, basically when you take actions and don’t get a crit. When it’s full, you’ve lost some window, or someone gets home, or something makes continuing the score significantly more bothersome or impossible.”
4) Definitely play with the narrative (soft moves) to adjust position. My players’ 0-tier cult pursued a score in Whitecrown, way outside of their relatively safe little Crow’s Foot hood, to get intel on the secrets of the Circle of Flame, who I am casting as wielding powers like classic fantasy mages or sith lords: conjured fireballs, lightning, scrying so they know when people are asking about them, etc. I also introduced a 20-man gang of leviathan hunters as legbreakers hired by the Flame when they found out the PCs were trying to hustle some info out of their members. Basically, the way I described these magi and badass whalers justified a lot more Desperate positions for many things the PCs aimed to do. This prompted the players to take great pains to arrange things so they could at least move up to just Risky. I thoroughly enjoyed the creativity and fictional drama they gladly put into giving themselves better opportunity, such as leveraging and threatening connections, revealing background info about their characters, etc. All in all though, position went a looong way to helping players respect the power dynamics of certain appropriate setting elements as truly powerful and maybe above their heads at the moment, which was great because they’d had some awesome/easy successes early on and were thinking the system would kinda let them do whatever they want in Duskwall. So I guess all that is a long way to say, definitely go with the soft moves to change the situation between rolls, especially if you can do so while still making them feel like their achievements made a good difference. 🙂
Wot Adam said.
Don’t forget too, that the players may justify away that they are being controlled, but you can always say that something here in this situation makes it risky (or desperate)…
You may not even know what it is yet! Play to find out and all that, but sometimes I’ve just said to myself that this scene needs a little added tension.
Great advice there. Definitely have some good ideas on variable difficulty going into session 2.
It may also be worth saying that sometimes a score can be as simple as a fictional contribution per PC, maybe a roll or three, and it’s all over in 20-30 minutes. That’s great too, especially if it’s not in your crew’s main metaplot interests, since it lets you get 2-3 scores in a session, thus allowing Duskwall to develop, relationships and consequences to grow or fester, which is my favorite part. 🙂
My cult group does some monetary or faction-pleasing side job scores, but that’s not their main gig so they don’t want to spend all session seeing if they get in and crack a safe. That Circle of Flame score was a whole session, but it was also the 5-man crew splitting up to do essentially 3 plans concurrently (social to find out what they Circle is after/up to, infiltration to find places they lair/gather, deception to find out who’s involved)
I try to avoid having the same Action used multiple times in a row, especially for the same obstacle.
Don’t let them Murder Murder Murder. Don’t put them in a position to do so. They’ve killed a guard? Neat. Make the next problem or two something else that they can’t Murder their way out of.
You handled it just fine, Max. But, also, Adam’s advice is great.
His item #3 is going into the rules, in fact. Controlled now says “You do it slowly and carefully.” And the concept of a “mission clock” that ticks down when you take extra time is in the text.