So in last night’s game, one of the hound’s solo downtime projects involved stalking and assassinating some of Lord Skurlock’s zombies.
It wasn’t really a big deal, and we weren’t that interested in playing out the fiction blow by blow.
I suggested the player use their Prowess attribute as the trait for the daring action roll (at standard effect )and used the core mechanic to narrate the montage of the ‘hunt’ in the fiction. The player rolled a critical success for great effect and had a little moment of authorial bliss as they described their slippery, shadowy murder in the dark.
Later, I thought I might have bypassed the action roll granularity and used the attribute as an action trait rather than just for resisting consequence.
The group was happy and I thought was a neat way of condensing the fiction during downtime.
Thoughts?
Sounds like you handled it well. That kind of resolution is an example in the original QS, actually (the murder example).
“I suggested the player use their Prowess attribute as the trait for the daring action roll (at standard effect )and used the core mechanic to narrate the montage of the ‘hunt’ in the fiction.”
Mmm… I had players doing the downtime projects, but I thought that there is no space for “system improvisation” about that part. They always rolled as the rules dictate, with no chances to “bad things” happen, because you simply gain 1 clock segment with failure, 2 segments with 4-5 etc.
Nathan Roberts what if the player had rolled a failure, in that scene you described?
As I understand, the “work on a project” roll does not comtemplate failure, but any action narratively necessary to get to the point where you actually have worked on the project should be treated as a normal action roll (i.e, with the possibility of failure).
Yeah, what MisterTia86 said.
If you want to gloss over that a bit in downtime, and just roll the downtime actions alone, that’s fine too. Blades is a “follow the fiction” game, but it’s also a “follow your interests” game, so you can skip or elide things as you like.
Good Question Andrea! as MrT and John Suggests, we often give a bit of narrative exposition to success and failure within downtime actions, but I was more concerned with the blending of a few action rolls into one attribute as the trait for the roll’s dice pool.
As for failure? It was a 6 segment clock (that they had already ticked some segments for information gathering type rolls) so I had a few options for parsing limited effect. I think I would have gone for either a few Zombies taken out, the chance for being marked and attracting the ire of Skurlock, or mayhap bringing the taint of corruption back to the lad’s lair. All of which could have been avoided through Stress Resistance of course.
We treat projects like ‘min-scores’, so they have all the trappings of the core-mechanic, inclusive of failure, teamwork (if warranted), stress and resistance.
Well, Nathan, I’m just a master/player, so I give you only my humble point of view, however, I suggest you to avoid to turn that downtime action in a “mini score”, with the normal rules for action. As I’m testing right now, the game is REALLY “punitive” with the characters: they need to burn stress for almost everything during missions, and in the downtime they can recover very few stress pints, then they often need the second action to recover harm – often needing another roll! – and to replace armor. So, throwing another action roll before the next mission could be harsh.
Maybe, those kind of Mini Scores could be something useful when the characters are very battered, so, after the standard mission, and the standard downtime, you could propose a Mini Score to everyone (they could help a friend, if they don’t want to go around alone), using the One Roll rule, then you make another entanglements and downtime.
This could be a nice way to show the crew the passage of the time, or the need for minor jobs between the main ones.
Sidenote: my group is absolutely annoyed by “standard jobs” to gain just a few coins. They want adventures, they want hit the big names, they want scores with heavy personal attachment, so the things escalate very quickly to our table.
Thanks for the feedback everyone 🙂