I think we need a special ability that specifically protects against the paralysis and fleeing that is a natural consequence (that must actually be resisted or endured!) when facing ghosts.
Something like “Inured to Undeath” as a Whisper talent that other playbooks can take as appropriate.
Once the system hard-coded that first round you freeze (unless you resist and take stress) and second round you run (unless you resist and take stress) ghosts got a LOT more dangerous.
As I understand it, even Whispers face this potentially catastrophic consequence.
Or…players should fear ghosts, and that is the point?
Joseph Le May That remains the default, of course. But lots of plotlines and stories are taking place in Duskwall, which is painted with a hunted brush, and there’s a whole character playbook built around the idea of interacting with ghosts.
The hardwired fear negates the chance that supernatural horrors ever become just ‘background noise’, I think. Its always horrific and frightening when they appear, so the souls as fuel concept or ghosts in general never become mundane and accepted. No Casper the Friendly Ghost ever. No ‘oh its just a ghost we can handle it’ attitude. I like that.
But Whispers should definitely be able to pick up immunity/resistence. If you want to limit it, perhaps Whispers only get a bonus dice to resist, or are only immune to ghosts they have Commanded (or gained dominance over some other way). That seems to thematically fit and isn’t a blanket shrugging off of all apparitions?
Dan Voyce Eh, I guess for me that’s the territory of GM presentation, you know? Anyway, if I were to make a cutter, and take the special ability that let me punch ghosts, I would be aggravated that I had to take potentially loads of stress every time I faced one.
I also think there is room for a gap between “comfortable” and “takes stress.” In a city like Duskwall, there are places and ways where ghosts are part of the culture. I also have no problem with crews becoming complacent in their ability to handle “just a ghost” because they come in all flavors and potencies and flipping that overconfidence with a proper spectre could be delightful.
If ghosts were really rare, then I could see never getting used to them. But they are not rare in this setting. So I feel that people willing to spend a special ability slot on it should be able to school their visceral reactions and harden their psychic nerve to face the dead without flinching.
You can’t control an autonomic response, only what you do about it. So what about a move that doesn’t change the initial interaction, but instead gives them a Hold that they can then spend to either reduce their Stress or perform some adrenaline-charged feat of strength or speed, something like that?
So that way, they can either channel that stress into their reflexes, or they can calm their heartbeats and Zen it away.
We have different ideas of what humans can get used to and how they can train themselves to react over time.
You could certainly make a special ability that does what you’re describing.
Another way to go would be to tweak the armor that Whispers can get against the supernatural, to protect them against sight and interaction and only be burned off by an actual attack.
And maybe adjust the Hound armor so they can resist the fear as well, until attacked.
Then others could take those special abilities to get the coolness, so you are adjusting existing special abilities instead of making a new one.
So since it sounds like you already know what you’re looking to implement, then the question becomes, “Why ask the community?”
Responses give me ideas I didn’t have, and my ideas can give other people ideas they didn’t have.
For example, I thought it was pretty good to make it a stand-alone thing. You talked about adapting it, and that tipped me to the idea of adjusting armor that’s already a special ability on a couple playbooks.
Even ideas I don’t agree with provoke further thought and may point me in a direction I would not have otherwise gone.
I think that one Hound ability (Cold maybe? I don’t have my character sheet handy) should count!
Fictionally Whispers start un-freaked out by Ghosts. And most thieves can (of course) roll resistance by default. In general I’ve left this up to the story (does the whisper research a ritual? do you have to inject an essence? Are you smugglers with Ghost Passage – then you’re already freaky enough it’s cool).
In general it’s better to stick to the fiction, otherwise veteran becomes less flexible, and many of the ghost powers people have stop making sense (ghost hound, ghost whispers etc).
Stras Acimovic Yeah, I was cool with the way the supernatural was presented in previous drafts. When I noticed that first people freeze (or resist) then run (or resist) I realized there was a mechanized element added to this that was really significant.
Previously I’d use a supernatural chill as a consequence added to anything but a 6 as a possible condition to resist, or for especially scary ghosts scare them upon sighting. Keep it fictional, you know? (“Oh, so you try to sneak past the ghost, and you do, but as you are passing you breathe some of it in and you see the image of the ghost cycling between bone, rot, and tender flesh as it absently stares at the wall. Want to take an ‘Unsettled’ tier 1 or resist?”)
But it seemed that the additional mechanizing of supernatural presence in a more rigid way calls for some better ways for players to protect their characters.
The description says it may not be as bad for people who are better prepared to deal with it, but reduced effect is still something that has to be coped with, and man… if you’re a whisper, I’d think you’d be chill about facing ghosts, you know? And others could become so. Not just to roll with reduced danger, but to get over it unless being actively assaulted.
Whispers tend to be folks born with some wierdness. Or touched deep by the supernatural. I suppose a power they start with could reflect that. Seems overkill though.
I’m curious why you’re dead set on power here. You can easily pay someone to ritual you. Make a deal with a demon. Or have a whisper-tinker make you a charm or set of wards you can wear. Or you can just create a project clock: “Learn to not paralyze with fear around ghosts” and get a pie slice when you expose yourself to them and roll resistance.
The game has all these tools. I’m curious why you think it should be a power? Which is 8xp and a used Veteran slot (for most) to just not get the heebie-jeebie’s around ghosts. It seems overkill to make a hard-set expensive path to a solution when there’s already tools to deal with it that can be customized to each group/table.
Stras Acimovic I guess it depends on who you’re playing with. I mean, if you have a project clock to not paralyze with fear, and fill it, then that’s creating a kind of special ability that is not a special ability, to track separately.
I don’t know that all GMs would allow that, as it changes your character in a way that requires a new recording method for the sheet. “This stuff I wrote down off to the side on my sheet is stuff I learned to do with project clocks not experience, but it’s basically special abilities I have even if they aren’t special abilities.”
With the ritual example, sure, I suppose that’s possible. I still am not really familiar with the boundaries of how rituals are going to work. With the demon example, again you’re getting a special ability that’s just not called a special ability, or tracked with the special abilities, so it’s a character trait that doesn’t fit into the general method for tracking characters.
In a system that considers your inventory something that’s part of your character enough to track and spend experience on (!!!) I feel it’s a bit dismissive to figure the system doesn’t care if you pick up special abilities as a project or supernatural boon without tracking it among your special abilities.
The whole point of special abilities, from my point of view, is that they are things that your character can do that are handled differently than other people must handle them. They are your abilities, and they are special. That’s why I’m interested in coding the ability to resist supernatural fear into them.
I am also not sure how focusing on special abilities is focusing on “power.” I mean, if you get to the same place from several different methods, then it’s less about the destination and more about the route, right?
Anyway, I don’t see it as overkill. The game has a powerful fictional base, and being able to describe how you can resist supernatural fear seems to require some explanation for why you don’t experience the terror like another scoundrel would.
Here is what started this whole train of thought for me. It’s from page 9 of version 3f.
“By default, the standard effect is to first freeze a
person in place with fear, then panic them into fleeing from
its presence. A PC can choose to roll and take stress as normal to resist these effects. Exceptional NPCs, such as Rail Jacks and occult weirdos, are more resistant to the supernatural terror of spirits but it still takes its toll eventually.”
So, where before I was using the fiction to excuse whispers from having to cope with fear from anything less than assault, I interpreted that passage to mean whispers would be vulnerable to stress-or-condition confrontation too. Actually adepts might be LESS vulnerable as NPCs than PC whispers.
It appears to me that this clearly states PCs can take stress or accept the consequence, and NPCs may be resistant to the effects fictionally somehow.
With that new understanding, I began to consider how best to provide PCs with ways to protect themselves. When the “freeze and flight” conditions were fictional and open to interpretation, I was pretty casual about it. If they are more codified, then PCs need better defense.
I don’t know how the system allows you to take less stress from a resist roll because the fiction is in your favor. So, maybe something else is needed.
This might just be being unfamiliar with clocks, projects and narratively squishy powers. With ritual (as with projects, and tinker) the limitations are really between you and your table.
If you watch our Six Towers game on youtube you’ll see that I’m learning how to not die from spirit death from a ghost, and getting demon powers from Satarra.
I don’t think I’m going to have any trouble tracking or remembering that in the future. It’s part of our story and it’ll be on my sheet. We all know it because it happened at our table. It’s no different sitting in my notes section than it is filling in a little circle next to a power.
If you have someone with Tinker who wants to make a new item that isn’t a generic item for a group member, then they just do. They spent the resources (downtime, skill procurement, rolls, coin, etc) for it and now it’s a thing in the game. You don’t need to buy it with XP.
Oh you think the hunter needs a sweet compound bow and arrows with brakeable tips that can hold alchemical compounds? Sounds like a couple tinker projects to me.
Then you can hand it to your Hound or Cutter and they get it (oh is it two handed? Costs two checks of gear. What, it can fold? Well one check then. Good job clockworking that up.)
That’s what the giant blank area on the sheet is for, notes like that.
The powers are a statement about general facts about the game. You gain XP by acting like your archetype (I act like a whisper, I get whisper XP, I spend that to learn whisper things). So the powers reflect those archetypes. There’s some flex (veteran) but a cutter has a specific fictional space for the most part.
From a balance perspective codifying something as a power is limiting. Because you make a specific statement (this is how you get X, and X is held only by Y type people, this is how the world works). You’re putting very specific restrictions on the shape of the world.
Maybe for your game this is the right answer, but for Duskwall at every table it seems limiting. That – is what I meant by overkill.
I see what you are saying. To me, it kind of clashes with what strikes me as surprisingly restrictive detail that’s built into the rules.
I like the idea of how you say the game plays. I just don’t know that I agree that your vision maps cleanly to how the game is written at this point.
Much like questioning people whose favorite version of D&D was 2nd edition, then finding out how heavily adapted and selectively applied the rules were in actual play.
Ultimately there IS a strong distinction between “rules as written” and how a table uses those rules.
Limiting is usually not bad. Limiting is providing a color palette, providing a level of balance, and focusing in to provide help in interpreting the intent of the power.
I hear that you don’t agree with codifying traits as special abilities because it is a “power” focus, and also that codifying traits as special abilities is limiting. I suspect at some level we agree, we just don’t agree on whether that’s good or not.
I feel it is really helpful for the GM and player to have help finding a shared assumption of how a power works, and it is good to limit how it can be applied in play so it doesn’t run away with the game or get so boxed in by interpretation it’s useless.
I think I do come at it much more from a game design perspective, and you come at it more from a perspective of the experience of play at your table.
One is not better than the other, but I can see how they don’t line up with the same recommendation on how to handle an issue like a player trying to protect a character so the character need not choose between running away or taking stress.
I want something built into the rules from the start (or for the rules to be less insistent on the default condition/stress cost.) You recommend something organic grown at the table that characters must develop through play that is only tangentially related to traditional character building methods.
Does that sound like a reasonable summary?
And from my style, I’d repurpose spiritbane charms to provide two advantages; a level of armor if attacked, and combining the “freeze n flee” response into a single resist roll instead of two.
I’d also upgrade the Whisper and Hound armor to resist “fear n flee” until spent.
I guess in part it is a question of whether it is better to have tools built into the culture the characters live in already, or to expect the players to build the tools and retrofit them into the culture. That’s reflected by what kind of choices the players have to make about their characters at the beginning of play.
Part of what gets more complex is when you’ve been playing a game for a while, fleshed out the world significantly, then new players come or old players make new characters. The longer your world is developed through play and the more detailed their worldbuilding is, the less serviceable the original rules and structure will be in representing what you’ve made.
So, either you’ve got built in game design to go in with your evolving world, OR you accept that the way special abilities and playbooks work Rules As Written out of the box is just not going to quite match up with the environment the characters enter.
That’s an advantage to building some of this stuff in at the beginning, and coding it into the rules that the group accepts from the top and expects to still use down the line.
I talk about that a little bit here.
https://plus.google.com/113881370051836623777/posts/AhqqoQR9TgE
Yeah actually that’s a pretty fair summary.
The reason I play RPGs and not say video games is the fact that inherently there is the flexibility of limitations. The GMs brain and the fiction allow us to do things that aren’t necessarily pre-programmed in so to speak.
But that said, I’ve been playing this a long time, and a lot of my assumptions and expectations (as you put them) are both from experience, and having a number of questions answered by John during the playtests – neither of which are in the text which does however set up limitations and specifics on spirit interactions up to a point.
So I think I see where you’re coming at. I still think a power may not be the right answer, but I think if we abstract this there probably should be something else in the actual ‘spirits and how to deal with them’ section. Whether it’s a clarification or a discussion on options like this (or as you say, a more explicit Spiritbane mechanic).
Stras Acimovic I could even see a section with a slider: if you want spirit-heavy madly occult game, then here’s a variety of ghosts and here’s roughly how you handle running across them. Then a mid-level setting. Then if you have ghosts, and they’re real, but still rare and horrible and most people never see one.
The only time I think you need some bones in the rules is when the cost you must pay is also rigid. If there’s a fixed threat to your character, I’m in favor of your character having some fixed defenses. =)
Part of what shapes my thinking on this matter is the number of tables I’ve managed. I have had five open table games, where people can make it to more than one but that’s not an expectation. They are open for who signs up first. (My hope was and is that others continue to pick up the idea so there can be a pool of characters that have played with different open tables of Duskwall.)
Then I’ve had one long-term game like you’d expect, with seven sessions.
I’ve started a couple others, and been present for the start of one.
So in looking at those, I have an assumption of coding things so they’ll be portable. If someone wants to bring in a character, it’s much easier to express the character through the starting assumptions in the rules (such as special abilities) rather than to explain in a previous game you did some things and now you’re capable of this.
It is difficult to successfully move the assumptions and collective activity of one table to another table, I think. If the assumptions line up, then that’s cool, but if the GM (and players) have different ideas of how demons work, or what electroplasm is capable of, or what the relationship between lightning oil and leviathan blood is, then your character may have to change from one table to another.
I think the default setting of Blades in the Dark is one table working things out for itself over the course of arcs or campaigns, and I don’t know that I’d change that. I just had a further reflection on how the very variety of people I’d used the game with affected how I feel about codification. More a further reflection on the roots of my bias than a recommendation.
This is a good discussion. I’ve revised the passage on page 9, to this:
“A close encounter with a spirit or demon is a harrowing experience. By default, the standard effect is to either freeze a person in place with fear or panic them into fleeing from its presence. A PC can choose to roll to resist the effect. Characters with lots of exposure to spirits, such as Whispers, Rail Jacks, and occult weirdos become less susceptible and only face fear or panic from exceptionally powerful entities.”
I think that’s a great way to say it.