Guys I need your help. I’m a novice GM do everything I try is a bit beyond my abilities. I’m not sure how to handle the engagement my party is about to do. Please advise on the following.
Bazso has tasked the team with assassinating a prominent new union boss because he’s Iruvian stirring up public sentiment in support of immigrant workers. Problem is, they’re also working with Mylera and she has asked them to secure her an ally against the Lampblacks, now that much of the Red Sashes treasury has been stolen (also by the party). The party wants to fake the union boss’s assassination, and use it to stage an actual assassination of Bazso himself. I…don’t know how to run this. They’ve already made contact with the would be target and he’s agreed to be part of their scheme. I could rewind and do that over as part of the engagement, I don’t think my players would mind. Any help would be hot. Game is tonight…
Well it seems like the players already have their plan for the most part (it’s a deception plan) you know the general players and probably just need to figure out their roles in this.
Red Sashes: do the Red Sashes know about this plan? If so are they actively helping? If not would the Red Sashes be in a position to be actively protecting the target or working against the group in any way for this mission?
Lamplacks: has Bazso had any reason to doubt the crew in the past? Has Bazso had any reason to be extra wary or on guard as of late that would make him suspicious or harder to get in a vulnerable position?
Union Boss: seems like he’s on page with this, but how far does that extend? Is he willing to allow harm to come to any body guards or people around him? Does he expect this to be clean? Does he want Bazso dead or does he just want to not die?
Figure those things out and then let the engagement roll tell you how things are going to go. You can pregame hash out what the likely complications of the engagement roll will be.
Maybe on a 1-3 Bazso gets impatient and wants to send his lieutenants with the group to kill the boss. Or maybe the Red Sashes don’t know about the plan and they have sent some people to body guard the boss and now the crew has to deal with that complication.
One thing i think I would probably go for here is to split this up. I think the fake assassination is probably a set up for how they’re going to kill Bazso. Depending on how that score goes would set the tone for how killing Bazso would go in the future.
I should have tagged this as a game question. Won’t let me change that it seems…
I agree with Chris Mcdoland here, it seems the faking of the Assassination is a setup action for the engagement roll of ‘plan’ for killing the Bazso. So depending on how the setup roll goes (in broad strokes)
1-3, something clues Bazso in that the players are not on the up and up.
4-5, Bazso buys the fake assassination but some other undesirable event in tandem.
6, It all goes as planned players get what they want.
Crit, The setup goes like clockwork and those deceived totally buy in.
In each setup roll result you can make the position or effect of the engagement roll be modified as appropriate for your fiction.
It would obviously be bad if Bazso is suspicious, the Red Sashes have a reason to turn on the players, or past complications take this opportunity to make their presence felt.
Hope that helps.
Sounds like linked jobs? Like, you’re going to do a Deception plan to get word out that the target has been killed. Clocks for “Control the Word on the Street” and “Obscure the Truth” or the like. Succeeding on those will get Bazso to hear about it and buy it, and doing less than great on those will either mean he’s unsure or that maybe the wrong people hear about it or more people come gunning for the crew and they’re not ready for it. But regardless it would lead into the second job which is the one where you kill Bazso.
Sounds like a linked plan: assault depending on deception (do those in order), possibly with the assault being set up by a stealth plan to get +1d
Yeah, depending on how interested your players are, I’d definitely be looking at running the score tonight of the fake assassination (if they want to do it publicly) and then the score of actually assassinating Baszo second (perhaps tonight, perhaps in a future session). If your players just want to get the fake assassination target to hide while they tell Baszo that they’ve done it, that’s probably just a roll to see how well it was done, maybe with some downtime roleplau to add ticks to a clock to improve/worsen position.
As for the specifics of how they assassinate either target, that’s up to the players. Get them doing some of the legwork for you. If they gather information, ask them where they think he would be and if it sounds reasonable, go with it. Maybe have a couple of ideas in mind in case they don’t. Perhaps he is in their base, maybe he’s out to dinner with allies, maybe he asks them to visit him at home.
So if the score is “fake assassination,” then it’s a Deception plan with the goal of fooling the City (mostly Bazso) that the guy is dead. I already set it up that Bazso wants people to know the guy is dead but doesn’t care who people think did it. So…I’m having trouble conceptualizing this. I’m used to linear games, where the players would talk out their elaborate scheme first. The Blades system is supposed to jump straight to the action, so what’s the point of action I jump to? Everyone sitting in Bazso’s office telling him what happened? Then the whole scheme is done in flashbacks? I’d have to give lots of leeway on stress cost of flashback actions for that to work. So I’d need a bunch of different clocks I guess. Each time they offer a new piece of the lie, I’d need another clock set for Bazso to see a contradiction in it. The new Engagement Roll rules John just posted are also throwing me a bit. I’ve been thinking of the Engagement Roll as influencing the entire score. It kinda effed up our first session because the players wanted to do a break-in heist and it turned into a fancy party heist that left one player with little to do because I didn’t know how to ad-lib it. Now it only affects the crew’s first rolls, but if I wanted to somewhat randomize how ware Bazso is, how do I do that now? I can’t just rely on the Engagement Roll to tell me whether he’s got extra advisors in the room who can also spot inconsistencies with the crew’s story.
If this is the direction I take it, this score will turn into a kind of formal logic game. It starts with the players saying “it’s done; he’s dead.” They obviously don’t have a severed head, so Bazso says “tell me how you did it,” and the lying begins, and all the consequences are about incomplete syllogisms, causality errors, and fallacies. Huh…that’s doable. And if any of the clocks get to “I’m onto you,” Bazso knows they’re lying and has his guards move to block them in, then it becomes a fight.
Kyle Wende the difficulty with the 2 score system is why I suggested the fake assassination be a setup action instead. I didn’t specific because there is no ‘action” involved because the guy agreed to the deception and the other possible obstruction being the Red Sashes were on board I felt it shouldn’t be a score in of itself but instead be a setup action to modify the engagement roll for the action action of killing Bazso.
The Blades system is supposed to jump straight to the action, so what’s the point of action I jump to?
I’m gonna tackle this as a story question, not a system question. There are plenty of good answers for system already.
In the web of intrigue and counter-intrigue that you laid out (which I love, by the by), the thing that I’d be most interested in seeing play out is “how does Baszo react to the ‘assassination’? Does he key in on the fakeness? Does he buy in all the way? Does he show up at the payoff with something that introduces a wrinkle into the crew’s plans?”
Conversely, I’m not as interested in how the fake assassination would go. I imagine that a competent crew can pull off a fake assassination with the victim’s cooperation. Sure, there are things that could go wrong, but I’d be frustrated if the assassination just didn’t work. Maybe a wrinkle, or a hitch, or a loose end.
(This is my take as an outsider. I’m not sure what your players are most interested in. Check with them!)
There’s common GM advice that you should never make a PC roll the dice unless you can think of an interesting way things might go wrong. I can think of a lot of interesting ways the Baszo con could go wrong, but not as many for the fake assassination.
So, were I in your shoes, I would resolve the fake assassination as a setup action, or anything else that could be resolved in one or two rolls. I would make the “score” the Baszo con that lures him into an ambush.
All that said, if your players’ excitement tilts the other way – if they’re really jazzed about staging the assassination, and finishing off Baszo is an afterthought – do it the other way. Gauge the players first!
John Perich I’m thinking something in the middle. The focus is on whether Bazso believes that the guy is dead. We don’t actually play out the entire fake assassination, but the players are explaining to him what they did and how they made it public, and Bazso keeps asking questions and the players have to keep coming up with lies to cover up the inevitable holes in their story. It’d be kinda like mad-libs. Your suggestion is that the goal of this score should actually be Bazso’s death, and the faked assassination is just the starting point to make Bazso vulnerable. Hmm. I’ll have to talk to my players about this I think.
That is exactly how I would do it Kyle Wende. If they agree, then you use the result of that to affect the dice and heat from the coming engagement roll (the actual assassination) and to inform a suitable narration of how the “fake assassination plot and lie” phase flows into the assassination
Kyle Wende : defer to what your players are interested in over what I suggest by all means.
But yeah, if the goal of this whole complicated scheme is to put a knife in Bazso’s eye, then get to the fun part! Establish as much groundwork as is necessary to make it plausible, but don’t feel obligated to play out any prep or plans that would be boring or wouldn’t lead to interesting complications.