#glowinthedarkrpg The Third Rails (out of Prism City) recovered a cache of anti-rads from the Boneyard, beating the Boneyard Bulldogs, Sheltered, and the Monarchs to the punch.
The previous session (https://plus.google.com/u/0/109333990936576277189/posts/JsrFwMb9D3A) ended with Ol’ Zeke the Junker collapsing a building. Since Johnny Tabernacle’s player couldn’t make the game, we ruled he appeared crushed in the rubble and was left for dead (until next game where he can return none the worse for wear). Dan Halen (the Reaper) and Zeke head into the mutant-dingo-infested subway tunnels, trying to come at the cache’s location from behind and catch any of the other factions looking for the treasure off-guard. This all works out pretty well, and although it gets dicey when Zeke accidentally drops some security doors in their path during a chase/firefight with the Bulldogs, they escape and return to Prism City with their loot.
This was just a good Blades session, hacked or not. I felt I had Devil’s Bargains tuned pretty well. I had plenty of consequences lined up that weren’t just “and then you take harm”. The duo of PCs had a tricky challenge in the form of a guard robot (Elysium/Chappie style), but they managed to defeat it with a Raid setup action by Dan which let Zeke get around behind it and use some jumper cables to stun it and then Hack it to help them carry the heavy crate of supplies. Both characters were running pretty high on stress by the end – I believe Dan Halen had 1 stress left and although Zeke was doing better, I think he had a level 1 harm he’ll need to clear. The high stress came less from resistance rolls and more from the fact that with 2 people, there’s only so many options for getting bonus dice and they’re Tier 0 starting characters. You need those dice but you’ve only got so much stress. The game’s tuned pretty well for this level, however. It forces you to get in and get out. My vanilla Blades game is for 5 people and someone always has a stress to spare for a bonus die, plus they’ve accumulated enough XP to where their starting dice pools are pretty beefy. This was a welcome change, and even I could feel that “scarcity” was actually being enforced as a theme by the mechanics.
The Third Rails’ supply situation looks like this:
2 Starting supplies
-1 paid to Westchester Woodhouse (their mutant contact) for exceptional gather info
-1 paid for medium loadout
+1 from looting Monarchs scouting party
+5 for anti-rad cache
-1 for crew upkeep
They stored 4 in their lair and plan on burning 1 immediately on either fallout (my entanglements hack) or on an extra downtime action.
Speaking of scarcity, load (and what to spend it on) was definitely somewhere between a meaty tactical decision and a pain point. I like my hack to add light ammo tracking into the game, but it does make a medium load feel like light, since if you’re going to roll Raid at any point it’s going to cost 2 load in ammunition. I either need to reconsider how to “weight” ammo, or I need to maybe up the load limits by, say, 1 point per level. It makes light load pretty useless as it is, and if you wanted to take light load and use a pistol, well, you’re looking at 3 load for that. 1 for the pistol and 2 load in ammo if you’re going to actually use the thing more than once. But then I’m flipflopping back to thinking, well, it should be a hard choice. Does reinforcing the theme here get too much in the way of player choice and freedom to act? Medium load costs 1 supply, light load doesn’t. Is the benefit of not dinging your crew’s resources worth taking light load?
On to XP: I didn’t have improved XP triggers yet but we did use the “if you did X, you get 1 XP. If you did it a lot, it’s 2 XP” rules. That helps, plus we had more desperate rolls this time too.
Next session should see our first downtime!
As far as balancing scarcity/load/ammo… default can be more on the pain side if there are crew upgrades that shift it towards freedom… yeah?
I was talking it about it more with my players, and I think I’m just going to adjust ammo load down 1 point across the board rather than grant a global load increase.
0 dots of ammo is basically what’s in your weapon. Good for one or more Hunt rolls, depending on the fiction of your weapon (a crossbow is only good for ONE Hunt roll, for example. A Glock is good for a handful). I might even let you make a Raid roll once, after which you are definitely out of ammo.
1 dot of ammo means you remembered to bring enough in case you got into a real gunfight. This’ll let you make Raid rolls involving shooting people all session (until you agree to a consequence, or there’s a devil’s bargain, or the fiction intercedes).
Squandering ammo simply costs an additional load dot to cover the overage.