Long Term Play with Blades in the Dark

Long Term Play with Blades in the Dark

Long Term Play with Blades in the Dark

My group’s been playing weekly sessions since February and they’ve gone from a Tier 0 Thieves crew under v5 to Tier 3 Shadows using v7.1. Here’s some of the things I (or my players) have noticed about Blades’ campaign play:

1. Low dice pools lead to desperate actions: When you’re starting out you don’t have a lot of dice to throw around. A bad roll here or there can land you in a Desperate situation quickly, and for my group, that was often combat. A fight is usually what happens once stealth or parley fails – not always, but it’s what makes sense most of the time given the kind of PCs and NPCs we’re dealing with.

1. Desperate rolls feed into future choices: Those Desperate XP add up over time and you’re going to want to bolster those actions that you use the most in those desperate times. That meant Skirmish for most of my players, and beefing up at least one other Prowess dot to help their resistance rolls as well. That meant when they got XP or trained during downtime, they were usually a smidgen closer to a Prowess dot than not, so the advancement subtly reinforces the in-game fiction. This is NOT a problem IF you really like knife fights, but it has slowly lead us to the point where even the Spider is rocking Not to Be Trifled With, the Leech can carve her way through thugs with a bowie knife, and the friggin’ Hound is as tough as the Cutter. Since you tend to want to do what you’re good at, you end up making plans that have “let’s just kill everyone” as a thinly-veiled plan B.

My crew is really just Breakers at heart.

2. Tier, Rep gains, and punching up: I feel like my players’ crew, the Dead Setters, feels about right where their crew abilities and upgrades are concerned. They’re Shadows, with Slippery, Ghost Echoes, and Crow’s Veil (as Veteran). They have 2 Cohorts (thugs and now rovers), Thief Rigging, Underground maps/keys, Hidden, Quarters, Secure 1, Vault 1, and Workshop. There are TONS of choices left and TONS of abilities left to choose.

That said, they’re Tier 3 with Strong hold and they continue to effectively “punch up”. When you can punch up against Tier IVs, that’s a ton of Rep every score. I feel like it’s easier to advance Tier once you get that foothold and can affect larger factions, and it’s a little off for me. Sure, a Tier IV faction can make things hard on you, but it’s kind of like pissing off the Lampblacks at Tier 0. They can make life hard on you too, and besides, that’s all part of the game. I think the saving grace is the escalating Coin cost to advance Tier at this level, but I still feel maybe that’s still too fast somehow.

They ARE Tier III but they only have two Cohorts. To me at this level, that’s still on the small side. In my mind, some of these factions are going to have way more people at Tier III and IV. The Dead Setters still feel like the underdogs to me. This is good for me as GM but I don’t know if this is how my players feel, since I just realized that it might be a conceptual hangup and haven’t asked them. At what point should you feel like Stringer Bell instead of Omar Little?

3. Extra Double Turbo Badass: You can spend XP for days. We haven’t hit any limits except those from not having the Mastery crew upgrade. 🙂 When you’ve played the same PCs as long as my players have, you feel suitably badass most of the time, but I think the tension is still there because you’re really only one bad roll away from a trainwreck. Rook the Cutter is fucking scary. He has no problem with just fighting cops – or anyone, and he generally wins. Brutal, Not to be Trifled With, fine heavy weapon, and rage essence just in case all that’s not enough. Teatime the Whisper is almost as scary, because when he rolls Attune it’s generally going to work. They are all Leverage-level competent now, and it’s flavoring the kind of scores they’re planning. It’s interesting to see this evolution though, and competence alone doesn’t worry me as much as their attribute scores. That brings me to…

4. Resistance is Futile: Rook the Cutter and Raven the Hound each have at least 1 dot in all their Prowess actions. They are effectively nigh-invulnerable to physical harm, which means they opt to dish out said harm since they’re ironically at their safest when they’re fighting people. Now part of this is my fault for sure – early on we set our “damage sliders” so I’d let them roll resistance and then choose if they wanted to spend Armor. Additionally, I’ve let resistance rolls severely reduce any incoming harm. Avoiding harm is clearly important to these two players and they’re having fun. It’s not a capital-P Problem, but it is challenging to keep threats cerebral rather than physical. Creatively fatiguing and all that.

Furthermore, I don’t want to come off like dealing harm to PCs is how I gauge my worth as a GM (I consider how full their stress tracks are first lol). I wonder, however, what resources do we have as Blades GMs once our players have really beefed up their resistances? I suppose you’ve gotta start doubling up on resistable things, and letting players make hard choices about what they want to allow to happen and what they want to prevent? I feel like that’s next level Blades GMing, where I want to get to in order to keep the challenge fresh and have the players’ choices matter even when they’re shutting down the bad guys’ actions.

#heestcomplete

Also circling in Jason Eley, Adam Minnie since they expressed interest in my previous recap post. John Harper so he can read/ignore/troll my feedback. 🙂 Sean Nittner – your DSS game has been running a while too, right? Andrew Shields (I hope this is the right Andrew) have you run a lengthy campaign or do you typically deal with shorter runs? I wish I could guess at which Michael Yater g+ is trying to include, but I know he’s been running his Twitch game for a bit as well.

18 thoughts on “Long Term Play with Blades in the Dark”

  2. Hi Adam, you’re findings make a lot sense. My crew tends to keep spending their coin and rep and so have only advanced once (Tier 1) so I’m not familiar with Tier 3 play, but I have seem what happens when someone has 5 dice to resolve (all for skills in Resolve, plus Iron Will) and agree it often makes them unstoppable in that arena.

    Beyond the observations though (which all make sense) was there something you were looking to change or get other thought on. To me this sounds like the game is firing on all cylinders.

  3. Re: Stringer and Omar—- In the Factions of Baltimore, the Barksdale Organization is the Tier IV. They run all of western Baltimore, have political and prison connections, tons of money, etc. Omar probably starts at Tier I and advances somewhat, although his crew never gets that big or influential.

    The Barksdales are also a different crew type than Omar’s crew- Hawkers vs Breakers. I’d imagine the Barksdales have multiple low-quality gangs, and one good expert (Maurice Levy), while Omar maybe just has one high-quality gang. Likewise, a crew of Shadows is in a different business than a lot of the other Duskwall factions, and I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to have a bunch of underlings running around. So, while they’re on the small side numerically, it might not pose a conceptual problem at Tier III if they still have plenty of Turf and Claims and influence.

  4. As far as the branching out aspect… have they not encountered a arcane/supernatural faction say of ghosts, cultists, or demons in which punching the problem away is ill-advised?

    Thanks for writing up the longterm analysis! I’m curious how their wanted level for the crew and character trauma stuff sits? Has any of the crew or cohorts gone to jail? What about the overindulgence on vice? How has that worked in the longterm?

  6. Ben Wright – The crew’s totally dealt with the supernatural. The Dimmer Sisters and a spirit well, demons, the Hound’s downtime is heavily linked into the Path of Echoes, which between that and the Dimmers is bringing them into conflict with the Reconciled. The thing is, they’ve set up their characters so punching ghosts works just fine (I’m looking at you Cutter->Ghost Fighter). 🙂

    Their wanted level just hit 2 for the first time, but they’ve had Wanted 1 several times before. They are a fairly high Heat crew, and the Spider’s been to jail twice now. The second time was with the Cutter and it was both to reduce Heat and take down some Red Sashes.

    They are also a high-stress crew. The Leech is paranoid, the Whisper is unstable, and the Hound is obsessed. Overindulging is rare, and they typically choose to dump their vice purveyor when that happens, and it’s never happened multiple times to the same PC.

    Oh! Stash! So the Leech is by far the most foward-thinking of them, and is just 1-2 Coin away from her second Stash upgrade. The Whisper took the Veteran advance from Slide->A Little Something on the Side, so he’s catching up quickly. Everyone else is looking at cardboard boxes for retirement homes. They spend a lot of Coin on downtime bonuses.

  7. Jason Eley – That’s a good analysis. Omar’d always feel like an underdog, even if he was mechanically high-Tier simply because he never ran with any cohorts (his little group kind of struck me as “PCs” more than a “gang”). In fact, writing this just made me decide that Ulf Ironborn is friggin’ Omar for Duskvol now.

  9. Sean Nittner – Thank you! I’m not sure I’m looking to change much of anything, but rather wanted to post my experience with the game over time so other GMs can take the (very, very few) rough spots I’ve encountered and adjust their games for it. Stuff like not being too generous with what resistance rolls can stop, because you can get so many dice for them*. Trying harder to spread around consequences so not everything degenerates into a knife fight, especially early on in your scoundrels’ careers. Playing long-term games with confidence and knowing that it’s very unlikely that you’ll fill up all your abilities and upgrades, and as a corollary to that don’t be afraid to double up on playbooks because you can totally make them as mechanically different as you can narratively. Also don’t be afraid to shower a bit more XP on players (the 7.1 XP hooks help with that a great deal, still such a fan of those changes).

    *I know I say “so many dice” here despite seeing Wheat completely blow resistance rolls in RollPlay’s latest broadcast. YMMV. 🙂

    Writing all this stuff out actually helped me a lot. Like how explaining a problem to someone often presents the solution while you’re talking about it. I’ve got 2 main issues specific to my game:

    1. Rep increases much faster than expected when the crew hits high-tier factions, and it doesn’t make sense for crew Hold and Tier to skyrocket like that? Solution: well, the first is built-in. The Coin cost to move up in Tier increases a lot. Second, incentivize lower-profile actions that don’t add Rep. High-Tier, well-known factions do tend to be more secretive, or at least they seem to be more legitimate. The Unseen, the Hive, and so on are much lower profile despite being high Tier when compared to the warlike Lampblacks and Sashes. There’s gotta be a reason for that, right? And it’s probably the hydra heads that reach highest get decapitated first. I butchered that analogy, but you get the picture. Still, this is not that big a problem.

    2. Resistance rolls are increasingly easy to ace as characters advance and branch out. I think, however, in writing about this, my solution is to totally roll with it. We switched from gritty action movie to Leverage competence porn a month back or so, and need to focus on providing hard choices and motivations and drama rather than trying to make dice carry the weight. Embrace an enemy faction’s higher Tier as narrative permission to seize the initiative more often and set up multiple actions that must be addressed. Runners go for help (because it’s Rook the psycho Cutter ZOMG!) while the rest grit their teeth and do their best against the human blender. It’s not “will they hurt Rook?”, it’s “can Rook paste these fools fast enough to catch the escapees?”

  10. I too noticed that resist rolls can quickly get banal if the player spends their early dots with resistance in mind. I kind of noticed it in my first readings, and made the conscious decision to have resistance only reduce consequences unless there was no interesting way to reduce them.

    After reading this, I realize I actually might want to increase the effec of resist a bit in my games, such that resistance declarations are king in terms of consequence avoidance- but the dice rolled to determine stress taken are at 1 or 0 unless they really focused their character in one area. This, to keep the resist rolls from being such a safe option. & to keep that choice to resist a tough one for longer in a character’s advancement. So I am going to experiment with basing the PCs’ attributes off of the lowest rating in that category of action within an attribute instead – but also letting all resists avoid consequences completely .

    EDIT: This will make resisting a much tougher choice though, but since it makes consequences more likely to be accepted, I kind of like this and wonder how bad it will screw with the tone..

  12. Mark Cleveland Massengale that’s weird to me, and seems to incentivize focusing on a single action rating in each attribute, which in turn makes characters much less likely to entertain different courses of action. Everything’s a nail, if you know what I mean. It also means you get less tough if you have 3 dots in Skirmish and decide to take that first dot in Prowl.

  13. I’d also add in general that harm 2+ is serious business, and it has definitely influenced my group’s XP spending. When you’re a couple sessions dealing with “cracked ribs”, you’re much less willing to accept more harm later. There was an interesting post (https://plus.google.com/118355878586326623664/posts/cnkmEZoECtF) about having differing clocks depending on the harm level, and I think if I were to talk to my group about tweaking our resistance “sliders” I’d compromise by making lesser harm slightly easier to recover from. That’s just for my group though, the five violent savages with our sliders set on easy mode. 🙂

    Another poor precedent we set early on WRT resistance rolls was forgetting to take effect/tier into account as a gauge of how much you should be able to reduce a consequence. Not a complaint of the rules, just an observation and a warning to others. If your Hound skates by every physical consequence, you could rule a higher tier or potent consequence limits her resistance in the same way a low-quality cohort might have limited effect against a more numerous and better-trained force.

    Or just tear gas her and make her roll Resolve. 🙂

  15. Mm. Yea as I described in that thread, I houseruled the healing clock length by the most severe injury (severe is 8 clock, but moderate is 6 clock, and lesser is 4 clock). That definitely affects how my players have received my rulings.

    As I said above, I didn’t vary resistance’s reduction amount based on the tier so much as the fiction (I would always reduce it, rather than avoid it completely, unless there was no sense in that). I never found a problem with doing that (and in fact, I wasn’t aware the game prescribed to do anything in this regard based on tier).

    I wouldn’t change the impact of “moderate harm” from a high tier vs a low tier enemy. Or have someone roll Resolve against tear gas.

     Different strokes for different folks

  17. re: those sliders: I would just add that making resists so powerful pushes one up and the tougher dice calculation pushed another down, resulting in a similar level of difficulty rather than a drastically different one – but I think it also adds some motivation to the players to spread their dots evenly and consistently too – which I think you were after. A little bit more of a gradual curve in resistance dice. Perhaps this delivers, or some variant thereof does.

    I guess I am taking up some of the research btw – like, I am thinking about it and I like the way it doesn’t mess with the benefits of vertical advancement it just affects Resistance. So I want to try this change on a table to see if they (And I) like it. My qualms about it are that stress gets to be too much of a commodity, but since my players found their stress very manageable even in early game with the coin and rep they get on score #1 I am going to give the tougher calculation to resistance dice a shot in one of my hacks. Both the things I am working on have more of a heroic tone so it might actually be a cool fit

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