I’m looking for some advice at adapting Blades in the Dark to an open table / West Marches style play. I’ve checked out some of the existing threads on the topic (links below) but I have a few twists / new questions.
The Context
– I’ll be running an open table with maybe 20 players (with only 4 playing on a given night)
– The players will all belong to the same crew
– While some nights might feel like one-shots the world will be persistent and there will definitely be room for campaign length stories to unfold
– The GMs will also rotate a bit and we’ll have an email thread to keep the world in sync
Some General Open Table Questions
– How should I handle character experience / leveling up? I recently ran a similar campaign in D&D 5e and kept all players at the same level, regardless of how many sessions they ran. Do you see any issues with that here? Should I give a stock about of XP per score / session?
– How should I handle downtime for absent players? In one of the other threads, someone suggested moving downtime to the start of a session; this makes sense as it makes it easier to prep for an upcoming score.
– Should I change anything about crew XP? I don’t think this is affected; am I missing anything?
Questions Regarding Multiple GMs
-We’re still figuring out what this will mean. One option is to give each GM a different part of the city. This lets them specialize a bit and hopefully minimizes the odds of contradicting storylines / NPCs across sessions. Characters can move between districts from session to session.
-If we take the multi-district approach, any advice on modifying faction relationships / fame by district?
-Any other thoughts on rotating GMs?
If you’ve run this style campaign in Blades, I’d love to hear what worked and what didn’t!
Thanks,
Randy
### Links
Somewhat recent thread on this style: https://plus.google.com/+ParkerDHicks/posts/TmResKTLar7?sfc=true
Andrew Shields gang-based approach: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QtJxtygvG33wWTfUt14Z10RxHUIkVbAICznRwwHwt3Y/edit – I want to have a crew that evolves.
I don’t think XP will be an issue – whilst Blades has a slightly larger skill curve than a PbtA, low level players can still easily contribute by investing stress to boost their rolls, and they only really need one stat at 3+ to stay compeditive with pretty much any level of group.
One approach I have seen done is to allow starting characters an extra 3 or 4 ability dots, and starting cap of 3 dots in any given skill rather than 2 – it might spoil that ‘just starting out’ feel (although your gang is already 20+ strong at T0, so maybe it’s a little too late for that anyway), but probably go a long way towards softening out the power gap.
I’ve been playing in an open table game, and I can honestly say xp isn’t an issue. It doesn’t come so fast that one group of pcs will steamroll another that quickly. The most powerful aspects of a character, like resistance and devil’s bargains, are there with a starting character. Players should just be careful to choose the starting special ability that appeals to them.
For downtime, we’ve been handling it as 2 downtime actions for your scores, 1 downtime action for everyone else’s, all taken together at session start. So if I played on Mondays, and two other groups played on Wednesdays and Fridays, I’d show up to the next Monday session with at least 4: 2 from my game and 1 each from the others. This has been alright, and I can’t complain about the extra actions, but it does devalue coin/rep for purchasing actions, and it means the downtime takes longer. You have plenty of downtime to train or pursue projects, which levels out the players who play less a bit.
Crew advancement strikes me as something to think of for this set-up, though. Having everyone in one crew means that the group’s resources will level faster than the characters, and that you’ll have to have some system in place for choosing the next upgrades. Democratically running the crew with 20 people may be very hard to coordinate. I might consider just taking over the crew advancement for them, choosing upgrades based on what they groups have been doing in the fiction. Alternatively, I suppose polls work alright, or round-robin choosing. We just have a few separate crews and allow some small amount of movement between them, although you have to declare a “permanent” crew that gives you your special abilities.
Regarding multiple GMs, it’s important that everyone is on the same page with factions, npcs, and game tone. For example, one GM shouldn’t be letting resistance undo wounds or consequences completely while the other only reduces or ameliorates the effect. I would just keep a central faction chart that shows everyone’s relationships that each GM updates every game.
Hey! I’m the GM for the game John Dornberger is talking about above, and I think he nailed it pretty well. Also, it sounds like you won’t face the same problem I detailed over on my post, since your pool of 20 won’t change and you’ve stipulated it will all be one crew.
One thing I might add to John’s comments is about multi-district play. If you want to heighten the feel of different districts, I would emphasize the listed-but-not-detailed factions of “Citizens of X District”. I might even start the crew at -1 with all Citizens except those of the district their lair is in. That provides some rules positioning to make the districts a little more insular.