Hello Everyone. I do not know if there is such a hack for Blades yet but I and a friend of mine are making a Superhero hack, heavily inspired by Worm, written by Wildbow. It is the first game we are attempting to hack and I had a couple of questions since my experience with the game is somewhat incomplete.
First I was wondering how much RP you can have with this system outside of the task you are trying to accomplish. It feels to me that it’s very structured and requires me to restructure it to allow for more roleplaying or to maybe guide the roleplay for less active players.
My second question is, how do you all punish players for going kill-crazy. In my experience with the game we wiped out the Red Sashes after a prolonged war, killing most of them but in game terms my GM concluded that in our capture that would result to only a few months of jail time should we be captured. Can someone explain to me if this is my GM’s mistake or if I have to change the Heat and Prison systems to be a deterrent for that.
Thank you for your help in advance.
To your second question: you might want to replace heat / wanted level with a few detailed relationship tracks. This might be distinct from the faction tracking. Maybe:
– Relationship with government (are they actively working to catch you or are they coordinating with you)
– Public Relations – does the average person and / or the press love you or hate you
Going kill-crazy would hurt both those tracks and send the character down a path toward villainy
Randy Lubin That’s a very good idea. Thank you. I had the idea of doing that for the public but it never occurred to me to do it separately. While it might not matter as much if you are a Hero working for the government or a Villain but it might play a huge role if you play as a vigilante. I am also thinking of playing with the 3 strikes rule for prison. Basically if you commit 3 crimes that are not the level of serial killer or terrorist you will do only a short prison time. After that you either lose your character since he is put in the prison for ever (Though Maybe your crew could break you out before you are taken there) or if the players want to they can play in the prison setting that I plan on making. Either way, thank you. You gave me a good idea. I will post the game…here I presume after the first play-test in case anyone wants to try it and give us some feedback.
I haven’t read Worm, but assuming the PCs are inhabitting a less anarchic setting, you could also play around with what kind of things give heat (or Stigma or whatever your equivalant is going to be called). For instance, in Blades, murder just gives 2 heat because it gets the Spirit Wardens involved. It doesn’t matter how many people, whether they were children or hardened criminals – everyobe thinks you’re a bunch of violent drug addeled sociopaths already.
If you added stuff like +2 Stigma for an accident or criminal related death, +3 if it’s an innocent, +5 for mass murder etc. your players would probably shy away from ‘evil’ acts pretty quick if they want to manage their Wanted levels.
The other thing about jail in Blades is that you never really get ‘caught’ as such – you just get a mook from your gang to take the fall for everyone else, lower your wanted level and keep going. But the players themselves always elect to send that person to jail, not the other way around. Kinda like paying stress to boost a roll.
Maybe for a super hero setting without flunkies this could be replicated by spending coin on bribes or something instead. Or if you wanted morality to be an even greater sticking point, remove the system entirely and don’t let them lower their wanted level at all unless they do a job or long term project to redeem themeselves in the public’s eyes.
Anyway, that’s just some ideas I had. I look forward to seeing this when it’s done 🙂
Stephen Davey Oh! I see. So it’s more of a setting thing. Yea. Then I will definitely do something like that with heat and wanted levels. I am afraid that the PCs might feel restricted but it does not make much sense otherwise. I know that usually in most settings they make it so that murder is common and not really something people care about unless it’s right in front of them, the police does not investigate that much, etc, but I remember a game Adam Koebel brought up in office hours. It talked about killing another person in a very interesting way, making it sound like a stressful act and that while you had no choice at that point you made wrong decisions that took you there. I feel that it would fit a lot with the setting if it was somewhat like that. Maybe along with heat I will add stress to it.
Yeah, I think punishing them with stress could be really cool. It’d really go a long way towards hacking out some of the more cut throat amoral mechanics in vanilla blades. The game was loosly inspired by Dishonoured after all, so the tone will certainly need work.
If players were really iffy about it, I guess you could add a trait that negates the penalties or do a World of Darkness and render them jaded to certain sources of stress as they rack up additional traumas.
Stephen Davey I thought of the first idea but I don’t think that would work as well. I do like the Traumas idea. I think I will do that. Maybe after the first or second trauma you can kill someone in cold blood with no stress and at the third trauma you can torture someone, or maybe if you take the Cold trauma you get that though I am afraid of making Trauma too complicated since it is already the only way to get powers.