I just started GMing Blades and I’m having a bit of trouble understanding the Recovery downtime activity. My intuition is that it should be possible for some types of lesser harm to heal quickly on their own, but there doesn’t seem to be any affordance in the rules for that.
For instance, if a character stayed up all night Studying and takes Level 1 harm, Exhausted (which was used as an example in the book, if I recall), I think it would feel immersion-breaking to me if the character had to spend multiple downtime activities, spend coin, and hire a doctor or medic to treat them for their exhaustion or else spend the whole next score with reduced effect level. It seems, in a case like that, that a good night’s rest (or even a nap) would suffice. This incongruence I perceive also might apply to harm such as, say, Twisted Ankle, Dazed, or, as an example from the Consort section, Trashed.
Maybe I’m just being too persnickety about flavor and maybe I should just let the mechanics do their work, since mechanics never map perfectly onto the fiction in games anyway. But maybe I’m missing something. Any thoughts?
It is allowed for some harm to be completely temporary or circumstantial but I would always consider temporary harm as less severe than it’s level and maybe add some other consequences.
Exhaustion wears you down and it’s hard to shake they say even if you slept in the next day the damage you did your body never catches back up to you. Not to mention a scoundrels life is hard, it’s full of danger stress and trauma. Studying isn’t like cramming for your mid term before spring break where you get a week vacation (though it could be if your character gets LOST and sits out a score, which does heal them) it’s more like cramming to pass the mid term in your morning class and then going to your graveyard shift job where you climb 50 foot radio towers and repair wiring in the dark. Even when scoundrels aren’t in a score or performing a specific downtime actions the overwhelming majority of them are still probably involved in some kind of low key savory danger and getting into some kind of mess. I don’t think many of them ever just get a good night’s rest and wake up refreshed. That’s for the pampered nobles.
Justin Ford That makes sense. Is that in the book somewhere, or is that more of a house rule you use?
Chris McDonald I like your explanation, but I just can’t imagine needing to hire a doctor to treat you for a hangover or something like that, you know?
Oh! I have another quick question. If a player suffers level 3 harm, which requires 12 recovery ticks to clear, does that mean it’s impossible to clear it with the two downtime activities they have? And, therefore, they’ll have reduced effect for the whole next score and keep having to use up all their downtime activities on it until it’s cleared? If I’m reading the rules correctly, that seems wayyyyy overly harsh! But again, I only just started my campaign so I may not have developed a good intuition for these things yet.
RAW on page 31 is that Harm represents long-lasting debility. For short-term exhaustion from Studying all night before a mission I’d handle it through Stress: either inflicted by a flashback cost to spend the night before buried in a pile of books, or by Pushing for the extra die, or by Resisting the Level 1 Harm inflicted by a partial success or failure. Think a tough as nails character should be able to shake off a bad Study roll that left their character severely sleep deprived? That’s exactly what Stress and Resistance are there for.
Rya FitzGerald recovery doesn’t have to be a doctor. Even if you haven’t personally there’s a very good chance you know someone or have heard stories of someone who in their life has gotten so drunk that they were bed ridden the next day and had to have someone come over and check on them. That’s a recovery action. It’s not every hang over every time and it may not be a trip to the emergency room but they’re in a state where they need someone to come take care or them. And let’s say they don’t, and instead you go to work with your mind rending hang over and you stumble around your job being sloppy in effective and potentially hurting yourself more and even if you don’t at this point you haven’t gotten any rest and your head is splitting and your body aches and you go to bed and still wake up feeling terrible because that 4 and a half hours of miserable sleep waking up in pain didn’t help you one bit. And now you’re about to go to work again and compound it even worse. And the only thing that is gonna help you shake it off is when you finally get to your next day off and can actually take the time to recover.
Rya FitzGerald you can spend coin or rep to purchase additional downtime actions as well as to increase the result level of downtime roll (including recover). If the player wants to spend 4 coin and pull 40 coin out of their stash they could perform 26 downtime actions. And then dip into the crew cash.
Chances are the level 1 harm (exhaustion) example is a relic from rulesversions when your level 1 harm was cleared faster.
There is no mechanical reason to hand out that specific harm. And little fictional either. If you take another downtime action after your free ones you pay 1 coin like everyone else.
Putting the example aside keep in mind that the harm penalties only come into play when they are applicable.
(and of course, handing out exhaustion that applies to everything should have a serious reason. Not “skip one night of sleep”)
Chris McDonald Heiko Qd Oh wow, somehow I missed that you can buy additional downtime actions. That certainly makes things a bit more doable. Thanks for all the ideas/help, everyone.
In my opinion, temporary harm is covered under the same rule that allows the GM to lessen certain consequences, allow for resistance rolls to completely negate harm, etc.
An example might be: “yes, you can wrestle the ghost without Ghost Fighter, but I’m going to hit you with the temporary lvl 2 harm of ‘chilled to the bone’ until you can get some space between the two of you.”
Harm and consequences CAN be entirely fictional/narrative so I see no problem with that.
I say this as someone who once gave a player the harm “Confused” and made it require a healing check because it was incurred in a particularly dramatic manor. I wanted the recovery to be equally dramatic and we were all treated to an awesome scene of the player setting up a meditative aroma therapy session for themself and dealing with the harm internally.
I found my own group had trouble figuring out recovery rolls. Here’s how I handled it:
1) Narratively I assume all harm is severe and that the crew can rarely wait to heal naturally when they are movers and shakers who have turf to defend all week and a heist planned for the weekend. So they’re not just shaking off harm because they can never afford to spend a week lounging in bed, all their free time is severely limited by desperate circumstances.
2) For the actual recovery rolls I suggested they Acquire a Temporary Asset to hire a doctor and boost its value with coin on a bad roll. They ended up hiring a Doctor as a Cohort not long after to save on costs.
3) I encourage my players to pick out friends and contacts from their list who can add the +1d to downtime actions as suggested in the Downtime section. I try to be lenient on this so long as they make an effort to RP as this free die is huge for Tier 0 groups.
4) If a player is still messed up after running out of free Downtime Actions I remind them that they can unilaterally spend both Coin and Rep out of the Crew bank for extra Downtime actions. Far better to have an empty bank and a functional team than to go into a heist with Level 2 Harm.
Good answers, everyone. “Exhausted” isn’t a legacy issue, though. That’s perfectly valid harm (as well as Trashed, etc.). If you take it as harm, it’s not something you simply “get over.” If it was, it wouldn’t count as harm.
So don’t inflict exhausted or trashed or whatever if you can only conceive of it as temporary. Don’t paint yourself into a corner. Inflict the harm that you know how to handle in play. When you figure out how to make sense of “exhausted” harm and its recovery, then use it. But not before.
Yeah, sleep deprivation can be nasty, and not something that a good night’s rest gets you through, especially if it is also causing insomnia. I think Exhausted a great form of harm when the Whisper stays up all night channeling electroplasmic energy to safely dislocate her soul and comes back from the whole thing bleary eyed and bewildered.
For shorter term problems I’d consider the other options (like getting into a risky situation because of missing something, or suffering a consequence like missing class in the morning, etc). Save the harm for something that is going to linger!
Remember also that people in Doskvol do not have the same standard of living as most of us. Their beds are hard and lumpy. The subsist mostly on grubs and rats and mushrooms. The air is thick with smoke from the workhouses and the stench of wastewater in the canals. The buzz of the lightning barriers sits in the background of the city’s soundscape and means you never have a quiet moment. And you can never shake the feeling that when you lay down to rest you’ll soon wake to a ghost trying to pry its way into your body.
It’s honestly a wonder that people in Doskvol are ever not exhausted.
Sean Nittner as someone who has regularly gone into sleep deprivation (damn graveyard shifts) I agree it’s not something you can shake after a good nights sleep (if it’s even possible to get a good nights sleep, often it’s not)