Looking for general advice on running a Oneshot of BITD.
I’ll be running my first IRL roleplaying game, seemed like BITD was a perfect fit, the only issue being that I’ll be running for the group of a friend of mine who usually runs a very goofy game of D&D. I’m wanting to do something a bit gritter. Any general advice on making such a transition? I think I’ve got buy-in from the players but once the dice hit the table I want to make sure the darker tone sticks. Thanks in advance! General advice is appreciated as well.
General advice which occasionally works for me:
1 – Make sure that the group has a clear and important goal with a tight time schedule. That way the players will be less inclined to do the silly/fun things for fear of wasting time.
2 – Punish bad rolls, then the players should prioritise success over hilarity when choosing what to do.
Hopefully that will help. At the very least it should keep the antics on our side of the fourth wall.
If you’ve got a good handle on the system, and a good sense of how to make dice rolls – i.e. “What are you trying to achieve? Is this controlled/risky/desperate? What are the complications?”
Then… I’d suggest you just use the system itself to keep things to your “right” level of gritty.
Players can be silly. They can play a goofy jester who backflips away from trouble. And you can say “OK, that’s a desperate roll. The consequence will be that you get stabbed through the chest while flipping around the room. Do you still want to do this action? Yes? OK, roll. So you succeed, and totally do the thing you wanted, but you get stabbed through the chest. Do you want to resist that?”
Then, basically, they either embrace the gritty and go along with it. Or they resist it, but they pay for their ability to resist it with stress.
That gives the players some control over the gritty. If something is TOO gritty for them to accept they can resist it. But if they’re enjoying the gritty outcomes, they can go along with it without resisting. Giving that “you can resist this outcome” option is a really good idea for players who are used to goofy games.
Keep the Reference sheets handy and explain the mechanics as needed (I find printing them is best). Also, follow page 62 (v7,1) very closely when you start the game – it is well-designed for what you want.
I always add this question to those on p.62 as well: “Are you a crew or not?” Then you can decide if skipping the crew creation rules makes sense (text advises this for one-shots) or not. If not, a way to touch on the crew mechanics lightly is to follow Andrew Shields’ Gangs guide (linked below) at that point instead of the text’s crew creation rules. I can’t recommend it enough as a way to get from “Who are we?” back to the “The Situation” and some actual gaming
docs.google.com – Blades in the Dark Gangs 9.15
Thanks for the responses, i think that use of the three types of rolls will be key to this. using a desperate roll to discourage a triple-backflip but saying “you could also just finesse into cover with a risky roll” that seems to be the intended way to work around that.
I should have clarified I’ve never run the system either but I’ve got my handy-dandy rulebook with examples of controlled, risky and desperate rolls so i should be okay.
I would note that desperate rolls also give xp, it seems like a party could force desperate rolls to level up their characters much faster. A lot of the system seems to put faith in the players not to abuse it (at least at the literal ruling).
That’s a neat little alternate start you’ve got there, I like it. I’ll talk to the party and see if they’d be cool with it.
True, but desperate roles can also cause a lot of harm, stress, trauma or other negative consequences, so forcing them might be a quick way to level up, but also a quick way to get killed or retired.
In terms of dealing with a goofy group, I have some similar players. I say let them be goofy if they want, but if you want the world to be grittier, don’t pull punches. They’ll either become more serious in response or they’ll make it work for them. The time limit idea is a good one too, especially for a one-shot. Chad from Fear The Boot made a Dread hack/spin-off/whatever called Silent Memories and when you play that, you give the group a real time deadline (e.g. three hours) to complete their mission before the game is over and something bad happens. That really helped with my group engaging with the game.
It’s worth nothing that the XP reward for desperate action is anything but abusable. The XP is well deserved because they earn it for being daring scoundrels, and if that is every action, well they can expect great victories and great defeats (And will probably reconsider quickly).
What you have noticed is that the game wants players to be desperate as much as possible. What you might not have noticed is that desperate actions that don’t turn up a 6 hurt – a LOT. Which the players will notice too if you are clear about what is at risk before they move forward with their action roll – and if they missed it, well a failure will surely help deliver the message
I feel like the use of clocks would also help, make a clock visible that shows how long till the watch shows up, then another before some other baddie comes over and starts tearing them to pieces. Would encourage them to focus on the job rather than hijinks.
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Benjamin herder Great idea. You could even just have a non-specific “Situation Worsens” clock alongside the others (maybe big and red so it looks ominous) and then have some general ideas about how the whole thing could get worse (e.g. Time becomes more limited, reinforcements arrive, rival gang shows up, the spirit walls have failed, a fire had started elsewhere in the neighbourhood and it’s spreading in this direction, etc.). Those desperate rolls are much less tempting when they drive up those clocks.
Jason Lee Such a great point, I don’t have to have the bad situation set in stone, i might look to the tables in the book or the situation at hand to figure out what’s gone incredibly wrong. I’m used to running d&d 5e where I’ve had a pretty firm idea of what the PCs will be dealing with in each session so I can properly pace XP handouts.
Don’t expect to know what will happen. It’s a general GMing advice, but it’s essential part of a good blades game. Your player will try to abuse the desperation XP. It’s a good thing – each time a desperate complication come into play the game gets more dramatic, and (if you wish so) MUCH darker: break their bones, cut their fingers or limbs, reveal their darkest secrets or even downright kill them. It’s fine, you aren’t playing dnd, they can resist it. If you want the grit to really stick, make resistance a partial thing – resist death and you will be gravely wounded, resist stab wound and get ugly cut, resist a dark revelation and get deep suspicion, don’t let them off the hook easily. One of my players is playing a comic relief ( practically) and he is regularly beaten almost to death, and almost died one time for real (no stress to resist, traumatize, with clear understanding from the player that death is on the line) and roll a six got out alive. Don’t fight the goof, just treat it with the proper hard to resist consequences and the tone will be set.
Have fun 🙂
Oh, and one more thing – careless crazy goofy madmans with a death wish get more XP in blades. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Just embrace it.
If you want to tone switch from the kind oaf game you normally play try to add stuff to the environment to make it feel right. A lot of the material in BitD is good. Print out the the map and the city graphics and have them on the table for people to look at so they can imagine Duskvol. Maybe print out other stuff too. John Harper had some good illustrations in a reset post. Others have also had some great illustrations that fit the bill. If you can fins stuff that shows what characters might look like even better as that gets them into the heads of the characters before they even make them — there is a reason most gaming books have evocative drawings of the people in the game.
If you got them, you can also add other props to the table like a candelabra or daggers or something. Also think of what the right music fits the grittiness of the game you are trying to do and have the music playing when people come over.
Benjamin herder When will you be running your one shot? I’d love to hear how it goes.
oh yes! I ran it this past Monday, the crew was super into it, they blackmailed The Grinders second Sercy into helping them break into their underground catacomb-y lair, started a brawl that climaxed in the bluecoats busting in.
After a harrowing escape through the tunnels (and a little help from a wandering spirit) the crew grabbed the young noble girl they’d been sent to rescue from a strange room marked such that spirits couldn’t enter… and exited just before the Spirit Wardens showed up.
We went an hour over to include downtime and what i wasn’t expecting was how quickly everyone got in on the idea of framing scenes and providing details for their Vice scenes. Coming from a very reactionary game of D&D I thought I’d have to coax them more.
The main issue I’m having is remembering to roll forward, I tended to use complications as a excuse to introduce a new obstacle, and by the end of the session every player had completely filled their stress tracks. I think I’ll have to learn to use clocks more instead of immediate physical complications. Need to work on that one…
That’s great – and perhaps their actions warranted those kinds of consequences (sorta sounds like it)
Benjamin herder Congrats on what sounds like a very successful and enjoyable game. I’d say for a one shot game, players finishing with full stress isn’t a problem. If I was playing, I’d be making the most of all the things I had at my disposal. But yeah, perhaps in longer campaign play, using clocks more might be a good idea.