I ran a one shot for a group of cultist druggies (the PCs, not the players). They turned out to be quite a handful! But more than that I wanted to relate some observations I made.
It felt..odd.. to tell players to narrate the level of success they want, without telling them what levels of success they could ever hope for. When I told the players that they describe the outcome they create, and we will assign difficulty; it came back to bite me later when one player described shooting Baszo Bas to kill him. The player is like “I kill him in his face,” and I realized by all rights, Baszo, being the leader of a Tier 2 gang, would basically turn any 4-tick description (such as killing) into a 2- or 1-tick effect (he is the the leader after all, so him having an additional tier of difference makes sense). This created this awkward moment where he rolled a 6 for a “face killing”, and then the tier difference kicked in to reduce effect by 2, and disappointment/confusion resulted. I explained it was armor, and magic wards, and it seemed okay, until..
An action later, when describing how the situation defaulted to that, since it had to be Desperate to cause any damage at all. I ended up feeling compelled to go easy on him because I felt sorry for him having no chance. I dropped the damage reduction before long (sort of like how the Escalation dice work in some games to let him do things)
Retrospect: I wonder if I shouldn’t have broken down the makeup of these rulings more clearly or not, from a game perspective. The fiction was there, but it felt like it would have bogged things down, and probably killed him. Or perhaps spent longer on mechanics at the start or throughout the game (I have been describing the rules a little at a time so far). Thoughts?
Also: Curious how long others are spending explaining the Blades rules during the first hour?
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Now, I’ve only run a handful of sessions but I think I’m finding my stride a little better WRT moving the game’s sliders to make a declared action more or less difficult.
I think if you can remember to do it, breaking down the rules the first time they come up in a situation is probably helpful instead of infodumping clocks with positioning and resistance rolls and all that.
“I kill Baszo in his stupid Lampblack face.”
“All right! WAIT DON’T ROLL YET. Well, he’s the leader of a gang two tiers higher than you, he’s canny, and he’s probably had this happen to him before. Here’s what I think you’re up against, rules-wise, and you can let me know if you still want to throw down. NO DON’T ROLL YET DUDE.”
And then you could go for the clock option, or call it limited effect (even on Desperate), or call for a resistance roll first, saying Bazso’s got a holdout pistol or goons waiting for this or something. There are a bunch of ways to make a single NPC “tough”, and I managed to forget most of them in my own game, which is why the Spider went over a 2-story balcony with Mylera Klev under him. 🙂
And at the end of the day, the Lampblacks aren’t Bazso. He’s one guy, and he’s got capos or seconds or first mates. This speaks to a little bit of “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”. If PCs want to be able to assassinate schmucks on a 6, that’s a danger that’s on the table for them as well. Maybe the player just wants to ride rough-shod over NPCs, but there’s the chance that the table secretly might want a chance for a Departed-style headshot circus.
When my players are fighting someone they can’t realistically kill with a single shot to the face (Ulf Ironborn, Lord Scurlock, Mylera) I always put a clock or two down before the fight begins. I make it clear that this person won’t die until the clocks are full. Even a shot to the face won’t kill them til the clock is full, though that may fill more segments. If it were my first game I probably wouldn’t discuss effect, but I would be doing it in my head.
In a first session I describe the action roll and teamwork, but not effect. I don’t use crew sheets, entanglements or engagement rolls. I try to not explain anything until it actually comes up in play so we can role play right away.
Adam Schwaninger oh yea, I definitely had to ward off the dice momentarily for clarification with our eager assassin. No problems there.
I am more talking about (and this might just be a personal style issue) a momentary disconnect between fiction and mechanics which occurred when I start the game all Fiction First!, and then things get crazy in that fiction very quickly. More on this below
Mark Griffin yea that is how I did it too. In my case, it just felt like it helped bring about some awkward player-GM exchanges – where I stopped a couple times from the clarification to explain what I was asking, and why.
I think they were all perhaps adjusting to the idea of a game where it’s fiction-first, but that has more uncertain game-mechanical weight. Basically: that difficulty and effect are being judged as well (this is a departure from most PbtA where the outcome of narration is either certain, or not). Makes me think I ought to spend a little more time pre-game just talking about Taking Action and the back-and-forth which can occur about the Thing they want to do. Hence the second question about how much people talk about mechanics in that first hour.
The deal with clocks is to show that you’re committed to a journey, not a single action.
When you’re in position to achieve a goal with your action, okay, roll, and you can do it. When you’re not, then we might start a clock, and see how the first step toward that goal turns out.
When you want to shoot some dude in the face, which is it? If it’s just a normal guy, then okay — maybe we can gloss over 99% of that journey and just resolve it. The steps along the way, like open coat, grab pistol, draw it out, cock the hammer, aim accurately at head, fire all get glossed over because so what? This guy can’t do anything about it, so blam! you shoot him.
With Bazso, all those steps really matter a lot, because he can do things all along the way that will utterly spoil your actions. Do you have your gun against his sleeping head? No? Then you are miles away from shooting him. Let’s start that journey and see how the first part goes.
Think of it like this goal: I pick up a rock. Is the rock on the floor across the room? Okay, go for it. Is the rock on the summit of Mt. Everest? You got a long way to go first.
When a clock is involved, your action rolls resolve the fiction of that step in the process that moves you closer to the goal. Focus on that fiction, not the fiction that results at the end of the process.
(Btw, the text doesn’t totally make this clear, so I wouldn’t expect you to know this already. I wrote this reply mainly as a reminder to myself to include this explanation in an example. :))
It seems like this scenario calls for opposing clocks. You only get into position to kill Bazso, if you fill your clock before he fills his. His clock could be as simple as to escape or something more complex like taking the PCs prisoner.
To be clear, John Harper I definitely got that from the text; and the players understood why this and other parts of the prep needed clocks. Not really the issue. It is worth nothing however that while I used them, I ran them in the background as much as I could (“You are halfway to finding his location, which will undoubtedly change soon since their faction is at war with the Red Sashes and all..”). Therein might lie the rub, in fact.
When it came to the shooting.. I of course had to talk a bit more about the clocks, namely the “Kill Baszo” clock. I just failed to talk about the effect of Tier much before this moment, and so when the first weapon attack did almost nil, there was the disconnect I mentioned. I think it might have just been a fluke of the situation, and the way the effect was necessarily reduced to a single tick even for a desperate action.
Ah, okay, I see what you mean, Mark.
Is the Tier of a faction meant to diminish the effect of absolutely every action roll against members of that faction? That could lead to a lot of “double-dipping,” wherein a single fictional factor leads to multiple simultaneous mechanical representations. For example, a higher-Tier faction has larger gangs, so they already get an advantage from scale. In the case of Bazso Baz, the dude’s already badass enough to warrant a clock; should his defenses also benefit from Tier?
Will Scott Ultimately you control the size and number of those clock. You can fine tune the number of ticks along with factors relating to his quality and potency to make him the right amount of badass.
Tier can represent Quality and Scale, mainly. You use it as you like, to fit the fiction. Does their higher Tier mean they have much better gear and also many more dudes? (You fight the Imperial Guard) Then yes it’s both. If it’s not both, then don’t double dip.
As Mark said, there’s not a single rule about how Tier impacts effect. The general rule is “The GM sets effect, by assessing the factors.”
So Tier can affect different factions differently? This sounds very similar to the use of a cohort’s Quality, which applies to “actions for which its types apply” but not to other sorts of actions. That makes a lot of sense to me.
We had another conversation about what parts of a faction are affected by tier, and the result of it was basically “whatever you think should be affected”. Tier is a shorthand for a factions general effectiveness for when the GM want to offload that complexity. However if you feel like thinking about it, and you think that this particular thug belonging to a tier 3 faction isn’t actually that much stronger than the PCs, then he isn’t.
Yep, Will, that’s the idea. This is sort of mentioned on page 24 under “Abstraction vs. Details” with the example of The Hive’s locks.