I always thought that the consequences on a bad roll were “in addition” to “you don’t do it”: so, even if you Resisted them, you still didn’t get what you wanted.
However, in the Rollplay Part 3, when Miss Cattaby fails her Sway roll to convince the Leviathan Hunter that the masked man isn’t Kinclaith, she Resists the complication (Rothe unmasking) and John Harper basically gives her what she wanted.
So, here are my questions:
Is there a difference between the 1-3 “failure” condition (expressed by the absence of the “You do it” part) and the rest of the consequences?
If someone Resist all the consequences of a failed roll, is it still a failure?
Is it just a question of circumstances?
I think it was just a flub.
That was due to a specific ability of Miss Cattaby’s character, I can’t recall which one, but there is about a five minute discussion between the roll and when Wheat chooses to do something about it.
Alex Woodard I don’t think so: Miss Cattaby has “Foresight” which is used to assist without paying stress.
As I recall, the captain still knew it was Kinclaith, but the resistance roll kept Kinclaith from pulling his mask off and making a scene. So the roll was to convince the captain that Kinclaith was someone else, and that definitely failed. They got around the failure by having someone else sort of drag the captain away. The resistance roll just kept the situation from getting way worse.
MisterTia86 Possibly. I don’t remember it that well. I just remember the order of events being that the Captain recognized the sword, Wheat tried to play it off, failed a dice roll, was told something was going to happen, but he had a choice to prevent it, and he took it. The failed dice roll still counted, he just had an opportunity to avoid the outcome.
This was also part of where the engagement roll landed them all in the plan’s progress. Which I’ve seen sometimes people “resist” part of the engagement (not sure if that’s suppose to be allowed, but I’ve done it that way) or they immediately engage in an action roll w/ the goal of diffusing a situation (like Kinclaith calling Cattaby out for saying he’d ever left someone else have his sword).
Ben Wright I don’t think the resistance roll is meant to apply to the engagement roll–it isn’t worded as a “consequence,” just as an outcome. That being said, if it works for you, and nobody minds, then by all means.
Personally, I think paying stress through flashbacks to deal with a bad engagement roll is more appropriate. It’s unclear who should be resisting, and if you have a PC with 4+ dice to resist, it can sort of trivialize bad engagement rolls. I also just like that sometimes it goes bad, even when you had a ton of dice, and now the crew has to deal with some new problem. But again, if the table is happy playing it a certain way, that’s totally fine.
So listening to it and reading the rulebook, page 11 states if a GM chooses to do so, when a player resists the consequences, the GM can choose to let them avoid the consequences entirely.
So what happened in Blades Ep1 Pt3, was that John chose to exercise that option. So the rules place it to the GM’s discretion.
So, for example, if a player is rolls a 1 and chooses to resist, a GM can choose one of two things; allow a player to reduce the severity of the consequence+(6 stress-stress roll), or allow them to avoid the consequence entirely and instead suffer just the 6 stress minus the stress roll.
To reiterate, it is actually in the rules on page 11 under Resistance.
Alex Woodard I know that you can avoid a consequence entirely with a Resistance roll 🙂
So, you are saying that “failure” (the idea that you don’t get what you want) was avoided because she avoided the consequence entirely?
There’s certainly some gray area in the rules so the group can apply resistance in a way that suits the fictional circumstance.
You can’t “resist failure” by the rules. If you fight a guy and roll a 1-3, “you don’t stab him” isn’t one of the consequences inflicted by the GM, it’s simply the outcome of your action. You can only resist bad consequences that the GM inflicts on your character.
In the RollPlay session, it went like this:
1. The Leviathan Hunter Captain recognized Roethe (from the engagement roll, nothing they can do about that).
2. Then he approached and there was danger that he’d make a scene out of it. Wheat rolled and failed to smoothly stop that.
3. Then the consequence from the failed roll was a complication– Roethe unmasks and won’t go along with the skullduggery any further. Wheat chose to resist that last part.
Technically, I could have asked Geoff to roll to smoothly guide the Captain away, but I felt like the bad engagement roll had done its job already, so I chose to move on to something new. I did tell Geoff that the Captain didn’t believe them and was suspicious, but he didn’t do anything about that, so no roll for that either.
Thanks John Harper that was very helpful!