I was wondering if there was a particular rationale for the attributes used in resistance rolls.
If I’m trying to avoid being stabbed in a duel, why is Finesse 1, Prowl 1, Skirmish 1 better than Skirmish 3? Sure, all that parkour and pickpocketing has trained my reflexes, but surely extensive swordsmanship would have too.
Is there mechanical or narrative reason for the way it works?
I saw this as an interesting way to force advancement choices. By specializing, there are a few skills you regularly succeed at, but when you get caught out of your element things will go bad and you probably won’t be able to defend yourself. If your a Jack of all trades, then you might not be spectacular at any one thing, but you’ll be able to get out of most situations not to much worse for wear.
Well, one mechanical rationale is that if you were able to use your highest ability instead of your lowest, it would give people an incentive to min/max for better resists, which is not really in the spirit of the game
It would make the characters a lot more ‘powerful’ and reduce the riskiness and tension of the game, which are fairly crucial.
I suppose you could always houserule it differently and see how it works out, but I think you’d find the characters would have it a bit too easy.
If you want a good fictional reason you can’t go past: cross training, which is known to enhance performance. Elite athletes do it for good reason.
You’re not avoiding being stabbed. At this point, you’ve already been stabbed. General physical fitness reduces the damage.
Will Scott is right. You’re trying to avoid being stabbed when you roll to Skirmish in that duel. If the consequence of being stabbed happened as a result, then you already are stabbed, and your Prowess helps you not be stabbed as severely.
Being stabbed is actually the example for resisting with Prowess on page 6: “If you get stabbed, for example, you resist physical harm with your Prowess rating. The better your roll, the less stress it costs to reduce or avoid the danger.”
Mitigating damage might be a bad example; you can resist other kinds of consequences in other situations and do so fully, unless I’m mistaken. Like resisting being spotted while sneaking around.
I can see the argument for shaping advancement choices or avoiding min/maxing, but if it doesn’t have some fictional underpinning, it’s going to keep bugging me. Cross training might work for Prowess, but does it make sense for Resolve and Insight as well?
My off-the-top house rule would be to allow skills to be used to resist things specifically in their arena, but also have the attribute as a catch-all. The expert skirmisher could use Skirmish to resist during a fight, but not when sneaking around, but the jack-of-all-trades would be rewarded with a good across the board resist roll. I kind of hate to start house-ruling this early, though.
Mr Kalyptein The thing is, as they’ve said, your expert Skirmisher’s Skirmishing skills have already failed him in that example, so it fictionally doesn’t make sense for him to mess up his Skirmish roll then Skirmish to resist. Same goes for Prowling. I totally understand what you mean. It is one of those “mechanics over fiction” things that tend to be integral to RPGs.
Turn it around. YOU tell ME how you resist being spotted while sneaking around: if you can’t think of a reason for the attribute to apply, then you can’t roll the resistance.
For example, I could see someone resist being spotted by rolling Insight and saying, “I see the guard’s shadow and duck into the next room.” Another person might roll Prowess and say, “I leap up to the ceiling and hold myself between two rafters.” In either case, the consequence is reduced, but not eliminated: the guard heard SOMETHING and now he’s lurking nearby trying to figure out what it was.
Your house rule is not a bad one. I might modify it by saying you can’t use the same action rating to resist that you used to make the action roll that lead to the consequence. Like if you fail a Skirmish roll and get stabbed, you can’t roll Skirmish to resist, but maybe one of your other action ratings applies. I do worry that this would overpower certain action ratings. Prowl, in particular, is general athletic ability and is already quite useful, so I could envision it being used to resist an awful lot of things.
Your Resolve attribute is a fictional trait of your character just as much as your Attune skill rating is. This game says, “Studying attune techniques your whole life doesn’t give you stronger willpower. You need to broaden your experiences to achieve that.”
In other words, in the world of Blades, if someone wants to be really tough, they practice all the physical actions. If someone wants to be really shrewd, they invest time in all the ways of knowledge. Etc. It’s part of the fictional quality of the setting.
Also, remember that when it comes to resistances, you’re not rolling to see if you resist, you’re rolling to see how much stress it costs when you do resist. (“Failing to resist” isn’t even an option.) More broadly experienced people are better at managing stress — at least within this fictional world, anyway.