How long (in table time) do your scores last? Do you tend to do multiple scores per session or just one?
For our campaign, we only do one score per night and the score itself will last 90-120 minutes.
Our format is a little different because we have a ~15 player open table campaign. We start off the session with downtime actions, “word on the street” (what’s going on in Duskvol), and then score selection (usually selecting from a few narratively relevant options). Sometimes there’s a short unrelated vignette to tie up loose story ends. After the main score, we do payoff, heat, XP, and entanglements.
Ours vary – we had one last night where it took us a good long while to figure out what the score was, which I quite liked. The score itself was then on the shorter side, maybe 45 minutes?
I try to keep a Bloodletters-esque pace to the games I run. Usually a score plus downtime takes about 4-5 hours, but I like longer scores most of the time. The last session of Blades I ran was a 4 hour game that covered downtime and free play, no score included.
I’m loathe to let it fall into “cookie-cutter chono” so I prefer to keep the mechanisms while condensing/expanding the times accordingly, if that makes any sense.
My experience gravitates around single shot game days or 3 hour online game sessions.
We tend to get setup, a heist, a downtime, and sometimes another heist in 3 hours. We usually get a minimum of 1 heist and a downtime.
I like a crisp pace, and I like to let both the fiction and the dice do their work, so I do not encourage long conversations (unless it’s down time and the players are lining up what direction they want to take, and even then, I get twitchy.) I prefer to focus on the critical risks and decisions of what’s going on right now, and keep the game moving.
For campaign play, I feel there’s a natural shift: heists punctuated by down time at the beginning, and down time punctuated by heists as the crew gets established.
Personally, I like the tools that Blades in the Dark has to allow the action to propel forward and keep things from bogging down; the game WANTS to be fast, and I do my part to help it fly. That’s not to say other people are “doing it wrong,” just responding to the question of how mine time out.
My crew would typically start at 6:30 and play until 9. The first half hour is just catching up and chatting so we have on average 2 hours of play time per session. The majority of our scores have taken between 1-2 sessions to finish so we are definitely on the longer side of a lot of what i hear people saying. All our post score activities usually take at least a full session to get through as well.