Month: April 2016

Our group is has a mildly fluctuating number of players, and because of that, an odd and interesting thing has come up.

The game difficulty varies highly with the number of players at the table. Specifically, going from three to two noticeably taxed my group’s downtime resources. They went from taking care of most of the resource problems (stress, heat, wounds) and having 1-2 coin left over, to spending every single coin and still having a significant heat problem.

Has this been the experience of anyone else?

I guess this shouldn’t be surprising – every player is basically worth 2 coin at downtime. Some of that is gone to deal with personal stress or wounds, but the amount of resource tax is generally determined by your setting’s action-to-grit scale, and doesn’t really rise with added players – if anything, it decreases, because they can specialize more and thus don’t need to take it on the chin as often.

My players are troopers and I rather enjoy making things be painful for them, so we are more than fine with things the way they are, but this might be a thing to keep in mind when setting up your own game!

A big fight is coming up for my campaign – the Red Sashes have been weakened to the point where Ulf Ironborn is seeing them as prey. While the PCs don’t have a gang of their own (except for the Cutter on his lonesome) yet, they will be participating in the fight – to secure loot from the Sashes, to get on good terms with Ulf, and to secure a certain number of bodies for this death-essence addicted androgynous demon butcher. The Red Sashes will also be pulling as many of their allies into this fight as possible, as their own numbers are low. Many variables in play, meaning a lot of ease in determining complications. Exciting!

However, I have not done extended battle scenes much before, Blades or otherwise. So, a couple questions for the people who have – how’s it different from regular play? What should I watch out for? What tricks have you employed to make the experience be memorable, as the first major fight in a campaign should be?

(P.S. – also really looking forward to more gang details in the book. The fact that the gangs have allies and enemies of their own contributes a lot to making these groups feel like relevant and dangerous even when the PCs are just cutting their members up into ribbons.)