I feel a little bit like a dummy, but I’m having trouble sussing out what HOLD connects to mechanically.

5 thoughts on “I feel a little bit like a dummy, but I’m having trouble sussing out what HOLD connects to mechanically.”

1. More the latter, I think. It’s part resilience, part progress bar?

2. Standard caveat: Blades is Fiction First, so all of the mechanics should serve as indicators of or reinforcements to the fiction.

   That being said, I think the mechanics you’re looking for are described in the “Hold”, “Advancement”, and “Reducing a Faction’s Hold” sections on pages 13 and 14 of V4 of the quickstart rules.

   My reading of these is that Hold is a mechanical measure of how secure a Crew (or Faction) is in their Tier. When a Crew advances they can choose to increase their Tier, or improve their Hold on their current Tier. Before a Crew can lose Tier, they need to be knocked down to weak Hold.

   Fictionally, the higher a groups Hold, the more work it is for someone to knock them down a peg. (i.e., to reduce their Tier) By contrast, Tier represents a groups influence or power. Together these two mechanics allow you to represent an influential group with only a tenuous hold on their influence, or a small group with a tight grip on their power base, or any combination of strength and security.

3. Fictionally, I play it as Dan said, mechanically, I play it as Crew/Faction Health, so to speak. Your crew/faction can have 1, 2 or 3HP; weak, firm or strong hold. When an enemy faction makes an attack against you and succeeds, you take a certain amount of damage. When you are reduced to 0HP you go down a Tier and are restored back to 1HP.

4. Yep! Good answers. 🙂

5. if hold is a type of crew-HP, can it regenerate? if not, why would you prefer it on tier advancment if you have the money?

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