What kind of planning do you personally do as the GM? Do you plan out encounters and NPCs characters will meet, or do you do it on the fly seeing as the approach to a mission and the PCs can be unpredictable?
What kind of planning do you personally do as the GM?
What kind of planning do you personally do as the GM?
The only thing I do much planning around is when players telegraph their interest with long term projects. If somebody is researching the illegal flow of leviathan blood into the city, then yeah, I will figure out some cool stuff for that as they track it down.
Or if there’s a big raid coming, I will likely put some thought into that. If a new crew shows up during play, I’ll backstop their identity some with some ideas for what they might be up to.
My prep is reserved solely for figuring out some mysteries that crop up in play that will eventually need explanations. The players already expressed interest in that, it emerged in play, and I have the chance to give it a deeper treatment than I can manage on the fly at the table.
Anything else I prep tends to be big ideas; the Iruvian embassy is being used by nobles back home to back a spirifer’s work in Crow’s Foot, so that brand new crew, the Wax Masks, is vexing the Crows. I know that on the macro scale, so I try to weave it in to be relevant in complications and as a factor to possibly include in heists or down time as appropriate.
I improvise almost everything on the fly except unresolved or undecided complicationsand entanglements from previous sessions. I plan the current political or phisical situation the crew and their gangs are in, and let them plan their glorious and mad schemes to solve them. If most the entanglements and such were resolved, or if I have no sinister inspiration at the moment, I remind them of the many things they planed to do but didn’t, like a hostile takeover of a drug den, finding allies and getting a written apology from their goddes to give the gem polisher so he will polish their demon-trapping gems.
Also The whisper usually have some plan anyway XD.
I tried to have three opportunities sketched out for the crew to take, if they wanted. Two heists, and the third either a heist our a turf taking opportunity.
I’m with Shields. I never plan before a session, but I sometimes plan after a session in response to things players do or discover.
Follow-on question: how much of the nitty gritty specifics do people plan around heists? I’m thinking, do people have floor plans ready to go, a clear idea of which type of plans the target might be vulnerable and prepared for, what miscellaneous valuables might be there, etc.
I am with you on not being sure about the answers to most of your questions, Antimatter.
Almost none. For a group I recently started I did four scores in the following format:
THE IMP OF BRIGHTSTONE
The crew has to extract and deliver a sealed container from the personal museum of Lord Dunvil in Brightsone to the Priestess Ilacille in Coalridge. The container traps a mischievous fire imp bent on bringing chaos and misfortune to everyone around it.
Client: Ilacille, Priestess of the Forgotten Gods Target: Lord Dunvil, collector of the occult
Work: Extract a rune-sealed container from Lord Dunvil personal museum.
Twist: The imp is actually the cerebellum portion of a great fire demon: the demon implanted the idea of acquiring the imp inside Ilacille to recover it.
Connected to : Argaz, the Fire Demon, and a Faction: the Forgotten Gods
Payoff: 632 silver coins, no questions asked. High profile.
I go from there, adding clocks I find interesting (for example in that score we started in media res with a bluecoats clock responding to the museum alarm). In my experience planning more than the set up of a mission is futile, part of the idea is having the players tackle the score on their own terms.
Jason Lee Most games are helped by the kind of planning you describe, but it can actually hamper a game of Blades in the Dark.
The details that are most helpful are sensational; having a sense of how to paint a scene. Keeping the threats and obstacles vague means you have flexibility to adjust them as complications arise.
The heist should map closely to play as it emerges, so you only prep what you need–but at the same time there’s plenty of room for players to contribute with flashbacks that change the fiction.
The fiction in Blades in the Dark is like a table where the GM and players all throw toys out and everyone plays with them.
The GM makes up a threat like there are fierce hounds on site. Then a player flashes back to making scent bulbs to attach to his hound’s pet bird, to lure the hounds away to a corner; another player asks if there is a canal dock abutting the property. That’s a cool idea! So the GM agrees there is.
The game is not about showcasing the adventure site and watching characters interact with it. The game is about showcasing the characters and watching the environment interact with them. The details of a heist setting, challenges, and rewards can be fluid. Heists come and go, but the characters are the enduring focus.
Not to say this is the “one true way” to play, but to state my view. Mileage may vary. =)
And if you get stuck and find you’re improvising the same sorts of challenges, targets, and NPCs over and over, I made a deck to help generate a heist. =)
https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/duskwall-heist-deck/
You can see some sample heists generated by the deck here.
https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/blades-in-the-dark/
There’s a score generator on the community here:
http://software.brentnewhall.com/blades/
There are also some one-page scores like this one on the site. I feel like they should be collected.
https://plus.google.com/+SeanNittner/posts/ZmJy6fxjkYd
https://plus.google.com/+SeanNittner/posts/TMfsEZm7NfU
Several others.
Andrew Shields That’s all good advice. Thanks. I particularly like the thought of it being about showcasing the players rather than the environment. I think it’s just going to take some getting used to since I feel like I should be doing lots of prep but from what most people are saying, it isn’t necessary as things can change so quickly, particularly when your players are also inventive. And thanks for the links. I’ll check them out later.
Duamn Figueroa I also really like your structure for heist outlines. It gives clear details on (essentially) fixed details but doesn’t provide too much detail and become inflexible. Thanks.
I’m 8 sessions in and what I do is look at my big picture, slow clocks like my neighborhood or skovlan riots clocks, character beliefs, backgrounds, and personal clocks. I then rewatch my last hour of my last episode on 2X speed while I roll up a possible heist based on the generator in the book as a possible thing if players get stuck.
My players have never been stuck, but having a mission to throw at them at the ready is always a good idea. By ready to go I mean, “what is the mission (rob/steal/etc)”, (“who/what is affected”), & “why is this challenging?”
In the future I’ll make 10 NPCs with names, descriptions, goals, and vague career trajectories just to be able to throw them into the mix when I need them.
So much of Blades is in the hands of the players. Sometimes you’re best focusing on the bringing Doskvol to life. Take some time and maybe memorize or Write down vignettes that make Doskvol come to life. Remix your favorite scenes from movies into Doskvol backgrounds etc. (Ive been thinking about the musical Newsies as a blades game, for instance, so kids shouting the headlines on the streets is a thing now.)
Great answers everyone.
I’ll add that the “map” of a score in Blades is really a map of challenges, actions, and consequences — rather than a space to explore (Andrew said it very well).
I find that an evocative image of the type of place is usually better than a specific map. You can go, “It has tall ceilings, like this, and lots of stairs and such. Glass everywhere, so lots of reflections to cast. You’re coming out of the cellar stairs — sort of down here in this image, by the fireplace.”
Then it’s easier to let the space ebb and flow with the actions, consequences, and clocks. For prep, I usually find an image or two for a place I know they’re going (like the Red Sashes HQ in our Bloodletters game).
To answer the original question, I never ever plan out encounters or NPCs that they’ll meet. There are plenty of NPCs already in the text, so I generally use those, or just grab a name on the fly and make someone up. The players decide what the encounters will be (its their crew to run) so no point trying to prep those.