Has anyone tried Blades with a large group? I’m running it with 3 players which feels perfect, but I have a group of 5-6 who may want to try it and I’m apprehensive.
Has anyone tried Blades with a large group?
Has anyone tried Blades with a large group?
I ran it for 6, I think. The main key was to keep things moving swiftly. In a group that big, you’re much more likely to have someone who doesn’t get “don’t plan ahead of time” and there’s a lot to be done as far as spotlight management.
It can also get pretty exhausting when you get a “failure snowball” and having to constantly think of new consequences. I tended to just give out stress or else make people think of their own/each others’.
I agree with Adam D that keeping the pace up is key.
If the group wants to split and split again and you end up with individuals everywhere, that can make spotlight management rough. If they stick to 2-3 clumps that’s more helpful.
That’s a lot of narrative power, so feel free to hit them with big challenges. They can counter with flashbacks and they’ve got a LOT of stress pools to soak up consequences, so ramp it up.
Especially since Coin abstractions get hard to split up when a group gets that big, if you want at least 1 for everyone and leftovers for the crew, you’ll want to aim them at big money. (Consider Coin relative values in the quickstart on page 20.)
If it is a like-minded group you can run 6 and be fine; if they scatter, it takes a lot more energy and finesse.
Good insight everyone. Thanks. I wish there was a FAQ somewhere, and a quick list of suggested consequences – on the fly I get stuck sometimes.
I run a weekly hangouts game for 5. We did run into some overplanning early on but I think that would’ve happened regardless. My biggest issue is spotlight time, and every heist degenerating into violence. It means that they usually end up Desperate in violent situations, which means bonus XP trickles into their violent actions, which means they’re more and more comfortable making murderhobo plans, which means the Leech and Whisper get left out more than the Hound and Cutter (the Spider took Not to Be Fucked With so he’s fine with brawls).
I run for a group of 5-6 which is a good mix of violence and non. Most of their plans are nonviolent and they go (mostly) according to plan a reasonable percentage of the time. The group has three members(the Leech, the Hound, and the Cutter) who are more violent and tend to find solutions that are somewhat questionable, though. Overall, it’s worked fine.
I tend to solve a lot of their problems as clocks where they do a montage, each person or team making a roll for a short scene they play out. That’s mostly been how things have worked best for their plans, though, so YMMV.
I’ve only run Blades once, and that was got a group of five. The session ran fine, although there were a few times when the action only focussed on two or three players. Fortunately it wasn’t always the same two or three.
I didn’t have much trouble with over planning, mainly because I’ve run several games of Leverage with three of the players.
When they did drift into hyper-planning mode I’d stop the discussion, ask the core planning sessions, and start the scene. That solved the problem, although it did freak the two new-to-not-planning players out the first couple of times I did it.
I have 4 players, and it’s running well. I don’t imagine adding another two players to that would create a problem.
Because the mechanics of the game run pretty quickly & smoothly, more players doesn’t really slow down the game – each action can still advance the plot the same amount. Unlike, say, a D&D combat where twice as many PCs and twice as many NPCs means combat takes twice as long. In blades, twice as many PCs means it might take twice as long, but the crew gets twice as much done.
From a game mechanics standpoint, the “resource management” part of the game is mostly around stress – having two more PCs gives two more stress tracks. Which means more opportunities to resist stress or spend stress to help with things. So that makes the crew more powerful. More downtime actions between heists, etc. I don’t see that as either a good or bad thing – just something to be aware of. So it might be reasonable to encourage them to take on tougher heists. Similarly, more PCs means the coin rewards don’t stretch as far.