One of the things I like about Blades is as a GM I’m totally comfortable giving Downtime Actions to characters who miss sessions. It takes the sting out of missing and provides more avenues to drive the fiction. I’m looking for opinions on how many Actions players get.
Caveat: I have a tendency to be a stingy bastard when it comes to rewards.
My thinking is that although characters normally gets 2 Downtime Actions after a score, most of the time they will be using one or both for Vice or Recovery to heal up from the Score. So in practical terms characters will end up with <1 "Free" Action after a Score.
Based on that, I think 1 Downtime Action is fair. It still hurts to miss a session, but still gives to player a resource to spend and interesting decisions to make.
The alternative opinion: characters earn several xp per Score, so 2-3 Downtime Actions gives the character the ability to Train to make up some lost XP, and still have actions to do “interesting” things like Gather Info or work on a project.
Is 2 the middle group? What say you, Blades GMs?
I think 1 down time action per heist and 1 down time action per down time is plenty generous. Your mileage may vary, but I tend to get at least 1 heist and 1 downtime per session, sometimes 2 of each. Upon returning, the player would then get 2-4 down time actions to plow through in short order; a nice packet of plot propellant that may help the whole crew, if used on things like reducing heat.
Andrew Shields Maybe with a caveat that some of those actions be used on LTPs? For one it explains why the PC was off doing their own thing, and secondly I don’t think my PCs use them enough. When they do start an LTP they usually end up burning rep or coin to finish it in one go, they suck at delayed gratification.
I would not require players to do long term projects. I think it’s a very cool tool in the toolbox, but not something they have to do if they don’t want to.
As for delayed gratification, one way around that in my group has been multiple characters each working on one project clock. If each of them contributes an average of 1 segment per action, they can fill out a clock pretty fast.
I overestimated the down times that we’d have available in my current arc, and there are some down time actions that the characters can’t fill. In retrospect, I would have collapsed some of them together and reduced the clock on them. My players use them a lot. =)