As a person who’s seen various playthroughs of Blades but doesn’t own a copy of the game, can you use Wreck to demolish someone’s emotional state with your words?
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As a person who’s seen various playthroughs of Blades but doesn’t own a copy of the game, can you use Wreck to…
As a person who’s seen various playthroughs of Blades but doesn’t own a copy of the game, can you use Wreck to…
Its up to the player to say what action they are taking, but hurting someone with words isn’t Wreck. You can tell from the short descriptions of the actions:
Wreck a place, item, or obstacle with savage force or carefully applied sabotage; breach defenses with force; create distractions and chaos.
That’s an interesting question!
A lot of the actions are defined broadly (e.g. the way Wreck is both “bust everything up” and also “perform delicate sabotage” or “treat a room with chemicals”).
Ultimately it’s always the player’s choice which action to use. But then it’s up to the GM to interpret what that means, and what position and effect that action gets you.
So it’ll pretty much be the GM’s call how effective Wreck can be – possibly based on (a) the player’s justification for the action and (b) the group’s playstyle and previous agreement.
I think you’ve got a decent case for Wreck being applicable – I can see why Command, Consort and Sway aren’t quite covering that.
Personally, I’d be cool with this if it was agreed upon before much investment in Wreck – during character creation, or XP. Basically, I’m fine with somebody building an abusive manipulator, but I’d have more issue with someone building a character who’s a tank of rage and violence, and then suddenly going “oh hey BTW I’m ALSO a master of emotional manipulation.”
Sound like the time my Leech wanted to persuade someone with tinker. If you want to socially interact with someone, you’re going to need to use those social interaction actions. Sometimes in Blades you just have to roll those 0 dice actions, but that’s what bargains and pushing is for.
While it’s hard to think of ways to use the social skills in non-social ways, it’s easy to apply non-social skills to social situations. That makes it a potential balance problem if you make them equally viable in social situations.
The solution, I think is rather than saying “no,” to treat it as generally the wrong tool for the job, but one that might work at times. I think it’s fine to use wreck socially if you keep to the initial definition, “When you wreck, you unleash savage force.” That could literally mean punching someone or launching into an incoherent temper tantrum. If you want to try to use that for a social persuasion type situation, that sort of thing can work, but it often has a tendency to backfire, and when it does work, it’s usually only enough to get the tantrum thrower to shut up or leave the building. So limited/standard effect, desperate/risky action. If your goal is to make someone feel bad, then that can go any number of ways – if someone throws an abusive tantrum at me, it’s got a good chance of leaving me feeling fine about myself, while making me judge them poorly. If I were a victim of abuse, then this might trigger me, and it would potentially leave me an emotional mess…
A sway action would imply subtly insulting me in a persuasive manner, while a command role might use status or presence for a similar effect (depending on my relative position and views toward that sort of thing, it might be more or less effective than sway). A social finesse roll might use misdirection to change a topic or imply a falsehood without outright lying. In very constrained situations this might even be the best tool for the job, but most often sway will be a better choice. I also think Tinker can be used socially, and I would treat that as nerding out on something. I use it all the time in my real life to grease the wheels with fellow nerds, but it’s risky if the topics don’t line up, or if you use it on a non-nerd. In the same spirit,
In the spirit of fairness and balance, I would also let players try to use skills like consort to pick a lock if they explained how they had asked a lock expert friend of theirs how this particular one works. That sounds like a desperate roll with a limited effect to me, but I’d still let the roll happen, I might even role-play the conversation with excruciating technical details as the guy nerds out on locks. I might also allow sway in combat, if the player explains how they are using guile to gain advantage. It’s still not usually as effective as skirmish though, since knowing how to fight is usually better than just knowing how to cheat.
After spending money to indulging in my vice for reading the rules of RPGs, and looking at the responses, how would you feel about using Wreck “socially” not to get someone to do something or get information but to ruin someone’s day? Like wrecking someone’s house but metaphorically.
Emile Mulder : You make very good points about game balance.
To such extent that I’d be leery of actually making all those skills transition — e.g., your example of “consort to pick a lock” sounds to me like a straight-cut example of a set-up action; Consort in flashback for greater effect in the present. I wouldn’t want to mess that up by making everything transferable.
What I think makes Gorinich Serpant’s question interesting is that the action they’re describing doesn’t seem well-covered by the existing social skills. It’s not the ability to change what somebody does (which Sway and Command do, with different flavors), it’s the ability to change how someone feels (in a very particular direction).
It actually sounds to me like something ultra-specific that would be unlikely to be used heavily in a game that isn’t focused on social scores – I don’t see being able to use it against, say, random Bluecoats, or targets who are strangers to you. (Unless you’re just hurling out insults at them, which sounds to me like intimidation, which I’d place under Command I guess?). Which is part of what makes it an edge case, IMO.
Emile Mulder You’re of course free to GM the game however you’d like, but one of the examples you give is the one the book uses to tell you NOT to allow this sort of thing. On page 31 (in version 7.1 anyway):
“For example, when you roll tinker, it’s because
you tinker with something. When you roll sway,
it’s because you sway someone’s opinion. If your
crafty Leech shows off a cool gadget they made
in order to sway a potential client, then the Leech
is swaying them. They’re not “using tinker” to
impress the person. That’s not how actions work.”
Consorting to pick a lock and swaying to fight are other perfect examples of this. Basically to do the thing, you need to roll the thing you’re doing. You’re picking a lock, not conversing with a friend (unless you flashback to actually convincing the friend to come with you, but then you’re probably still going to need to roll the friend’s quality to pick the lock).
I had a leech player in a game who had 3 dice in tinker, and argued that every single roll he made should be done with tinker. He had gadgets for everything, and so he interacted with the world solely through his one best stat. It was boring, and not what being a scoundrel in blades is about. You should make bad choices, attempt things you aren’t good at and succeed through sheer force of will and teamwork.
This is of course just what works for me, and with the right kind of players it might not be a problem at all.
Mark Griffin​ good points…I think the most important of those is the one about encouraging people to try things they aren’t good at. If a player has three dots in wreck and then starts using wreck for everything, even if it’s all desperate/limited rolls – they will be rewarded with loads of XP and decent odds of success. Most importantly, you wind up with a boring story…So yeah maybe you do need to just say no…Or at least say, “really? Do you need to powergame your way through this whole thing?” I do think for an occasional interesting and creative use like that can be rewarded, but you’re right that it can be a slippery slope.