So, Blades is quite a bit faction-sandboxy, which means you get to have fun thinking about what all the non-PC factions are doing offscreen. So far, so good. But, well, the web possible of interactions is fat and robust. Even if you’re doing the sane thing and limiting your offscreen musings to gangs either the players or you have an active interest in, there’s still loads of potentially relevant stuff that happens offscreen but has onscreen implications. And you want the players to be informed about these goings on, so they could intervene and change stuff up, right? But at the same time, a session is usually mostly about a score, and a score is usually about the immediate concerns of why demon and when fire. There is only so much bandwith for offscreen information to leak into, especially when you also want to just want to just focus on the characters when they’re not criming.
For the first few sessions of the game, I prepared possible job offers from all the gangs the crew was friendly-ish with. This was good because it forced me to have a very clear idea of what all these people were trying to accomplish, and I could have them move on with their plans if the PCs weren’t forthcoming, creating either new opportunities or mayhem.
After I a while, I noticed that the players would basically pick whichever job I mentioned first, so (and this really should have been obvious to me from the start, I agree!) all the effort put in on the other score offers basically went unused. Also, having a “job offers” system at all meant that the players weren’t planning their own scores, and weren’t engaging with the claims system much.
So we moved on to the players planning out their own scores, and me keeping track of long-term complications(/opportunities) through notes and just a whole bunch of clocks. This has worked pretty well so far, but I’ve been running the game a while, and it turns out just having a bunch of mostly-GM-facing clocks just isn’t that feasible. There are now so many that I keep forgetting about one or the other all time (either because I mentally discount them in a “well, that won’t immediately be relevant for the next session no matter how the roll goes, so I’ll just do it later” manner for several sessions in a row; or just because my notes are more like doodles with questions rather than any sort reliable record), and it just feels cumbersome.
At the same time, the players have created a power vacuum a whole bunch of previously unknown groups will flow in to fill, so being able to introduce new factions and their plans and weaknesses while also allowing profitable scores to happen is definitely something that I need right now.
How do you deal with putting the offscreen on screen in your game?
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One thing I’ve done is occasionally write up things like newspapers and bluecoat bulletins highlighting some things that the crew would know happened but weren’t around for.
When I’m preparing factions, I write them up with the following info:
Faction name:
Description:
What they can offer:
What they want:
Mouthpiece:
Link to PC:
Very brief, just a word or two for each answer. What they can offer and what they want might be a few things.
Mouthpiece is the NPC that’s available if the PCs want to talk to the gang, or if the GM wants to deliver information, or something.
Link to PC is a reason for why at least one PC would care about this group. “Killed Bob’s father”, or “Karen used to work for them” or whatever.
The important part is what they want and what they can offer. From that it’s much easier to build up ideas about the offscreen stuff, decide on plots, on what they’re doing and why. It also makes it easier to give the PCs a reason to interact with the group, there’s something the PC can get from the group, and there’s something the PC can offer to the group.
Outside of Blades, in my games a “faction” might be anything really. It might be “the upper middle class” or “a nest of vampires” or “the thieves guild” depending on the sort of game I’m playing, and the sort of conflicts I want. In a political game, what the factions want or offer will be more political. In a dungeon crawl, it’ll be more resource based.
When you’ve got a few factions, there are some obvious alliances. One group wants security, the other offers soldiers? Easy match. But I don’t always put them together, that way the players can match them up and it gives them more involvement in the story.
Or maybe they want security so they match with a group that offers thugs? That could create complications for the players directly, or create a new conflict with some other group (say, with the police) and so on.
And since the PCs have a link to all three groups, there’s going to be some tensions and conflicts that impact them, at least a little bit.
So when things are hectic, I’ve got those four lines that give me enough that I can improvise a game on the spot. When things are slow, I can use this information to build links and plots and figure out what’s happening offscreen in a way that still links back to the PCs.
Mark Moller – I ran a superhero game where each week I’d write up a fake newspaper front page story related to the session.
It was a fun way of both recapping the session, but also showing what “the public” knows.
I’d have to fill the page, so I’d throw in other fun articles (“Museum dinosaur egg found to still be alive” etc.) to fill the rest of the page. Both the main article and the filler gave me a good way of sneaking in information that the players or PCs might not otherwise have.
I stopped after that game, though, because it was a LOT of work.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_Gza2g0cdfSVTNINGl4NDlvcjg/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_Gza2g0cdfSWXdELXFtSjBjelk/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_Gza2g0cdfSMm1LYTM5aG5oQ2s/view?usp=sharing
Tony Demetriou DAYUM. How much time did you have between sessions? Was the art your own?
We had weekly games. Writing the frontpage took about half an hour to two hours, maybe?
The art (unfortunately) isn’t my own. I just google image searched.
What I actually did was google for news articles about something similar (power plant fire, vigilante gangs, etc.) and then copy/paste a real article. I’d cut content to trim it down, modify it to add any specifics from the game, and then change names & places.
For the backup articles, I’d browse through the Weekly World News website.
Even with those cheats, it still was a lot of work.
I found that, while writing this, it’d spark other ideas. So the time – sort of – counts as preparation for the next game.
Consolidation is key. If they PCs piss off multiple groups, then start having them work together to thwart the PCs. Only make clocks for a couple of groups (or groups of groups) at a time.
That newspaper idea is cool, but too much work generally speaking. Trying rolling for random rumors, or create your own custom rumors, that your players hear while engaging their vice during downtime.
I do something similar for a Vampire/Werewolf/Mage LARP a friend of mine runs, but that’s only every 2 months.
For my Blades game, I use Evernote to keep track of things. Specifically, I have two notebooks, one public and one private. The public one has the session writeups I’ve been posting to this community, as well as pages for the various places the PCs have visited or are aware of, and NPCs the PCs have run into. The private notebook has pages for all my ongoing clocks, and every time the PCs do a downtime cycle, I go down the list and check off a segment for any of the clocks that seem interesting. There’s also a page I’ve called Lingering Questions. That’s where I jot down stuff that’s likely to come back on the PCs at a later date. AT the beginning of a session, I go down that list and remind myself of stuff that needs to bubble back up in some fashion.
“A score is usually about the immediate concerns of why demon and when fire”
Can this sentence go to the book? It’s rediculously accurate.
Good point. I’m still trying to figure it out by myself with trying very(!) hard not to offer job in a classic old-school style (go to tavern, watch for employer, going to save the damsel in distress). I’m trying to let the players plan their own scores but being the old-school player they are, they seem to be a bit nervous and volatile about their path (improve the business/lair/turf? gaining rep? getting vengeance? exploring the city? Running for their lives?).
Additionally: I’m really into long running campaigns with a BIG climax at the end (like the Ghostdance/Harlequin campain from Shadowrun) and I will try the following to get this into Blades: Instead of having one big storyline and pressing the story/PCs into this direction (yes, I already know what you guys are thinking of this style, so don’t comment on this, please) I will prepare 3-4 major player/major storylines with some factions and see when the PCs will get into contact with one of those. Maybe they investigate further, maybe not, they will surely suprise me which is cool with me.
This brings down the offscreen action to manageble degree and gives me something to do between sessions (only one all 3 weeks, pity).
Plan to do a “enemy within” style storyline and I like the dimmer sisters for some unknown reason. Maybe I pick the Scurlock vs. Emperor arc but am not sure yet. What I will offer for sure is the house of Traps/Locks story which may be obvious for a group of thieves.
The personal stories of the PCs (dead/missing parents/relatives everywhere) can be neatly interweaved into that.
Mind, that these are only considerations and not practice-proved. I will let you know if it was any good in 2-3 years…
I do the unfeasible: i start and progress my clocks for the background events behind the scenes. It’s like a story minigame between the important factions, and the ones who’ve been scored upon recently: one where I am rolling Tier dice between factions to decide the outcome.
These results are collected between sessions and during downtimes, then manifest as news reports, extra entanglements, ideas for scores, etc