Blades in the Dark has been made to be a pretty much a job based game where the game flows doing daring gigs with a pretty short time invested in doing some R&R and other personal stuff between jobs.
Based on reading this works well. However, has anyone used the game for more open ended, sandboxy game? How much I should hack the game to do that?
I ask because the rules seem pretty intriguing and the setting is something that really feels great for a very open type of game.
It’s sandboxy, in the sense that it just cuts away the non-daring parts and makes you pay resources to accomplish cool things.
Examples of long-term countdown clocks at least discussed around the table from my games:
Finding mom & dad (two of the characters had grown up at The Heartbreak Orphanage), the first clock would have been to know their names…
A romantic subplot with a contact – two worlds colliding (a poor violent cutter and a wealthy schooled woman). Clock one: “make her open up to the possibility for a romance”.
… I think the term “sandbox” is unequal to “slow”. The premise about establishing the crew is difficult to avoid though.
What Michael Esperum said: downtiime doesn’t have to be short or “dry”, it can be axplored in detail in the same way as jobs.
If you meant avoiding crews altogether and play a cast of loosely connected characters, then you’re drifting away from the premise of the game: that would require some serious hacking I suppose…at least to make the mechanics “sing” in the same way.
Not at all, I like the idea of crews as it is a good way to keep the party together. I think the structured base of Downtime is what restricts me and players more than it should (or in fact is even meant to do).
To my mind, two of the fundamental tensions of Blades are: you have to work to eat (coin), and you have to work to maintain position (rep).
The crew can do as much as they want to between scores, so long as they can afford to feed themselves (by paying coin) and so long as their position doesn’t start to deteriorate (by paying rep). A ‘score’ is just anything they do that generates coin or rep to keep them going to pursue thier personal goals. If something they do to pursue a personal goal could generate coin or rep, think about turning it into a score.
Approach the downtime actions with the same fiction first stance you use during scores, and I think you can support a lot of RP during downtime.
Joni Virolainen it’s easy to feel restricted by the structured base of downtime (it happened to me as well) when it’s simply just a tool to enforce tension (as Dan Pierkowski said) and avoid losing focus. It’s also a clever way to quickly manage the sandbox when you don’t want to invest too much time in details.
Agreed. One thing I did recently is rule that if a job is over near the end of a session, I’ll break then and there rather than try to squeeze in downtimes. This will help avoid us rushing through it. When we pick it up again, we’ll take our time with the downtimes, zooming in on particular actions if necessary.
Blades’ faction system is already super sandbox, wouldn’t you say?
I use the system to run my Runners in the Shadows game (SR hack). I applied the same mentality as Blades towards my reflavored factions list; offering up lower tier factions with just a blurb of description to align or contend with, and this has led to a very sandboxy experience. I also deliberately leave one Tier 2 entry open in each category for player ideas. The faction list tracker in general has been a great help for avoiding that too-sandboxy-feeling where you can’t find something to do without grasping at straws.
I would also point out that listing factions for the sprawl has reminded me to give each of them weight in the narrative only as needed, letting me introduce new faces and highlight evolving relationships clearly – and the threat of war has led to some interesting exchanges with the various NPC groups.
Mark Cleveland Massengale any more info on this hack? I’d love to take a look
Cory Altheide https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwzNN7yL3u8NdjBhX1Zzdlhfd3M
EDIT: the Magician, Shaman, Face, and Rigger are the most tested of the playbooks, many are not. Considered ditching the archetypes altogether, and letting players form those themselves. definitely a work in progress needing testing; if you are interested let me know I have a game currently running alternating Saturdays/Sundays
I can see there would be good hacks, or possibly addons for having other kinds of PCs in the same setting. It would be fun to see how the faction politics affects those only touched marginally by the factions.
I suppose my feeling of restriction comes from being used to more traditional RPGs without as much structure. Jobs are actually what my players want to do but there is also a lot of roleplaying possibilities during Downtime. So, maybe I am reading the intent of Downtime wrong and giving it more time (if that is what the party wants at that time) is OK and won’t break anything but can be fast forwarded to next job if nobody has anything interesting in mind.
I think this helped me quite a bit. Thanks a lot quys!
Just had a whole session of nothing but downtime stuff last night.
Joni Virolainen same thing noticed here, my thoughts are that most groups like downtime to take less time than scores during the sessions. However, your group is your best indicator of how much time to spend on downtime. By default, I move quickly, and ask then if they want to turn the detail knob up (and when it feels right, I turn it up for them!).
Yep, Joni, you’ve got it. Spend as much or as little focus on downtime as you like, case by case. In my groups, sometimes it takes only 30 minutes or so, other times we spend a most of a session on downtime (and maybe do a 30 minute score). It’s good to be flexible.
Blades was designed after I ran 200+ sessions of sandboxy games in a row — it’s definitely meant to support sandbox play (partly by giving you a bit of structure to hang things on).