I have 2 questions from my most recent session.
Question 1 – On page 18 of the QS, it seems pretty clear that you get to mark XP each time “you address a tough challenge” in the way your playbook prefers to do so. What is considered tough is obviously up to the individual group. However, in the most recent playthrough of the Blood Letters, Jon mentioned that the max you could get for tough challenges was 2. So was John Harper mistaken (shit happens), or is this a new rule coming in a future version?
Question 2 – When gathering info to provide the detail for the chosen plan, is that always a downtime action, or should it be considered part of the score and not cost rep or coin?
Question 2: I would think it could be either. If you do it as part of a downtime action, there’s no chance of complication or consequences. If you don’t, there is.
The way I’ve been running jobs, there is a gathering info phase (if the in-game circumstances allow it), where each character has one action to gather info on the job. Then they do some minimal planning, and it’s on to the Engagement roll.
Ben Morgan That’s generous, but I feel like it also partly explains why your jobs have been so cool.
It’s certainly being a fan of the players.
It made sense to us. Why go into a job without doing your homework? Sure, you could skip the phase and relegate the Gather Info rolls to flashbacks, but I’ve found it helps give everything a bit of context and keeps everyone on the same page going into the job.
You should absolutely do your homework, but the question is what (if anything) does it cost you? The rule is the during downtime you have time for exactly 2 free actions, and to get more you either have to spend coin to work faster or spend rep to take more time. You’re essentially giving your crew 3 free downtime actions, but one of them must be gathering info for the next score. That’s totally fine, because that’s what the question is about.
It doesn’t cost anything, but I have occasionally presented them with situations where they have to do a job (or something comes up that they have to deal with), and they don’t have time to plan for it ahead of time, so they don’t get the benefits of those rolls.
As for Question #1: My take on this has always been that if one of your playbook XP triggers hits during the session, you get 1 XP. If it hits a lot (2 or more times) during the session, you get 2 XP. The exception is that Desperate rolls always give you 1 XP toward the relevant Attribute every time they come up. So if you made five Desperate rolls in a session, that’s 5 Attribute XP. John can correct me if I’m wrong. 🙂
Ben Morgan That is also how I’ve played, and it appears to be how John played, at least in his last session. However if you actually read page 18, which I just did recently, that’s not what the rules say to do. For reference, here is the rule.
“During the game session, you mark xp each time your character performs an action that matches your playbook xp trigger. For example,
the Cutter’s xp trigger is ‘When you address a tough challenge with violence or threats.’ “
Ben Morgan I run Gather Information during scores exactly the same way. The advantage to Gathering Information during downtime, as I see it, is that the rolls are less risky, you can use contacts for bonus dice, and you can spend coin to improve the result level.
Yes, I do that as well, or more specifically, I don’t allow them to do that in the Gather Info rolls made during the job. I also push the consequences with those rolls, whereas I don’t when they do it during downtime.
Ben, I’m going to try out your Gather Info phase idea. In our last game, we jumped into a score with very little prep for it and it felt sparse and hollow. I think this may be a good answer.
A little planning isn’t a bad thing. The engagement roll is the safety valve for the GM to say “right, let’s do this” when they think there’s been enough and any more will just be the players rehashing things.
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Ben Morgan I’m going to disagree and say I like the game best when the players plan nothing but the detail and fly by the seat of their pants with flashbacks.