Yo, was wondering if anyone has optimal strats for managing Stress.
My Blades are getting hosed between pushing themselves (coin toss rolls are not good odds), flashbacks, resisting and teamwork.
I don’t want to change the rules, so I’m hoping for some pointers.
The Spider ability Functioning Vice is pretty great for allowing characters to optimize their vice rolls to clear as much stress as possible during downtime without overindulging.
First off: it’s not on you to manage the PCs stress – it’s on them. They always get to decide if the want to risk stress, so I’d recommend not worrying about it.
Now, if they’re new to the system and want some advice on abilities to take to help with stress, I’d point them first to the Special Armor abilities. Every playbook has one and it gives you a free Push or Resistance every score, which should help with stress a bunch.
The Spider abilities Foresight, Connected and Functioning Vice (already mentioned) should also help, as would the Hound ability Survivor.
If they’re Hawkers, Shadows or Smugglers, they can spend Crew upgrades to get an extra stress box. They could also take the Bravos ability Forged in the Fire to get better at resisting.
You can also start offering more Devil’s Bargains so that they feel less need to push themselves.
Thomas Berton yeah, I get that it’s not on me but like I said, bad dice rolls + stress are hosing them.
We’re all new to the system.
Teamwork is always better than working alone for stress. Always. It cuts your costs in half for the extra die, statistically increases your odds a lot more in group rolls and protecting using your best attributes lets team mates resist more effectively. And I almost never see people use the protect teamwork options to min max their resistance options.
Skills like expertise are your friend and any character with a huge investment in one Stat that they use all the time should invest in this (and it scales better the more scoundrels you have). Taking 1 stress at most to roll Prowl for 4 scoundrels is such a good economy.
Forged in the fire in another awesome economy skill, 1 crew upgrqde and everyone gets an extra resistance die every time forever. It’s a must have for any crew I’m in.
Like Lukas Mohan mentioned the spider skills are also excellent for this and part of the reason they’re so good is because they’re modeled around the idea of working together.
Also trauma is GREAT. Playing a character who wasn’t afraid to get their first trauma was so much better than when I played characters afraid of trauma-ing out. Trauma gives you more role play opportunities, and incentives. Do you know how easy and fun it is to be reckless and get 2 xp every session? It’s super easy. Just throw yourself into all of the trouble!
So while stress management is important and useful it’s also totally a currency to be used. Including over spending and taking a dip in the trauma pool.
A few thoughts. First of all, the game is designed so that the characters should expect constant complications and difficulties and get kicked around A LOT.
If your players are burning stress because they want to feel like their characters are competent and successful, remember the game is oriented around the fun of mixed victory and painful consequences. If your players want to feel like their characters are good at what they do, and consequences get in the way of that, you might want to look at playing other games. This is a struggle that has endured at my game tables.
The design concept in the foundation of Blades in the Dark is that the best story and the most fun comes from character pain and deeply layered complications. It may get tiresome, but remind your players that a success with a complication is still a success, and their characters are SUPPOSED to be desperate.
Using abilities and dice to protect your characters from pain and consequences is stepping back from what the game’s design philosophy suggests is the most fun part.
An easy way to take less stress is to accept more injury and trauma.
Another way to take less stress is to back off and redirect high-risk plans, facing more controlled and risky situations and avoiding desperate situations.
Cost of flashbacks may be an issue. If it’s a “duh of course” thing like bringing backup lantern oil for a heist where they have to traverse sewers, then that’s free. I only charge 3 stress for flashbacks when they’re highly improbable and strain the end of credulity–but I figure it’s still in bounds as a remote possibility this was part of their preparation.
One option people aren’t mentioning: remind them that they can just TAKE the consequences. As a GM this is where maybe you can help them, by hitting them in ways other than giving them massive harm that no one wants to take.
Also: it can be tempting to make each job this epic story when in fact many scores are over surprisingly quickly. Consider lessening the danger and focusing more on the social consequences of their actions (lost status and extra heat)
For another take:
So I run two games:
One with a crew of folks I’ve been GMing with a while. They are new to the system and are very cautious. They use a lot of teamwork actions and aren’t unwilling to run away from a lost fight. Their first crew upgrade was Forged in Fire and it’s served them well.
The other is a group of Story Gamers. They are used to playing GMless games and like to create drama. The first session one of them asked me if they could voluntarily over indulge. I told them no … not unless they had the extra coin or rep to voluntarily take a 3rd downtime action. They promptly stole a coin from the crew coffers and did it anyway.
Both methods of play, embracing harm and drama and whatnot, are rewarding.
It might also be a pacing issue? How much mileage are you getting out of the engagement roll?
For example, if the score is about stealing something from an estate’s safe: it is easily going to burn a lot of resources if they have to sneak onto the premises, make their way over to the house, climb its outside, enter a window, sneak through the house just to find themselves in front of the door to the study where the vault is.
The Engagement roll can cover all of that, no matter what the outcome of it is, they are in the house in front of that study door. Either they are in a controlled position and it’s gone smooth up to now; or there are some security measures that they didn’t expect, or the whole thing is actually a trap.
But you are right in the action, in the interesting bit about the heist.
For the players, it’s also valuable to make good tactical use of getting great effects on rolls by describing how they push it to a more risky/desperate position: if you know this is a crucial action, that you know as a team you are going to spend a lot of resources to getting this right, it’s often a good idea to lobby for it and offer the GM ideas of how you could be more daring in your actions.
Great effect can often mean you leapfrog other challenges that you might have to face otherwise, meaning you’ve spent stress more effectively.
Like in the above example, if you got whatever you needed from the safe but now you’ve guards chasing you through the house and you want to do an action to not get caught by them… sounds risky and if you fail you will likely be cornered and be in a desperate situation.
But if you push it to desperate immediately by saying you want to evade them by jumping off the balcony… so that you get great effect of having slipped through their fingers and outdistanced them then it will be so much more worth it to pour stress into this roll.
And much more likely to get that juicy crit, too (hello conveniently placed haystack).
If you don’t, it is still likely you get a 4,5 at least. So, okay, you take some serious harm but you still do it and get the great effect.
And if you do manage to get 1-3 with all those bonus dice, it’s a spectacular fail and fun because of that. Also, I guess you are now working for whoever’s mansion that was so that they don’t turn you over to the Inspectors.
Andrew Shields Yes to complications and consequences, best unforeseen ones. The best Devil’s Bargains to me are those that appear harmless but have repercussion later down the line.
While you have to be completely transparent with consequences so players can make informed decisions if they want to resist, this need not be the case with Devil’s Bargains.
I do think I disagree somewhat with what it sounds like you are saying re: competency: That the PCs are competent scoundrels is a baseline concept, in my eyes, and is never put in questioned by the game.
Mathias Belger It depends on what competence feels like to players. For some players, they are always getting a “yes but” result, “success” with negative consequences doesn’t feel very successful.
It is this kind of player that tends to burn through stress fast, to try and minimize the endless consequences. That’s why I brought it up. If players are burning through their characters’ stress really fast, they might be aiming for unencumbered success because consequences FEEL like failure to them.
I know this has been a real struggle for some of the people I’ve played with.
Regarding transparency, it may be useful to point out that the GM may have IDEAS for what consequences can emerge from devil’s bargains or complications, but even the GM usually can’t see far enough ahead to put together a master plan. Instead, these threads just keep getting woven back in. So, I put in complications all the time without knowing how they will blow up down the line. I’m not hiding possible consequences from the players, I just don’t see down those paths very far yet. =)
Andrew Shields Yeah, the comment re bargains was less aimed at you just something that popped into my head^^
And I agree, it’s seeds that you don’t know what they might grow into.
To the point of players feeling incompetent: it is an issue and should be talked about because the game’s premise is that they are competent… it can also be that players feel the consequences and complications they get are uninteresting and make them feel incompetent.
It might be that the explanation for a miss needs to be placed more on the exterior to the PCs instead of inherent to them.
Like let the punch land but there is a whisp of energy escaping the adversary’s eyes. Something absorbed all the power you put into it and they are unharmed!
That kind of thing.
I hear you, dont mess with the mechanics. But the game is designed to beat the PCs up and forces them into a couple piles: lives a hard-won existence, or one sprinkled with defeat and most of the time consequences. This is baked into the resolution system.
In other words, you are going to playing a game with this level of “hardship” until you do something that messes with that (otherwise it’s just interpretive; and probably something you have to constantly remember to do, which is not convenient at all imo). Here’s something I used in my Star Trek hack to brighten the tone a bit without having to tweak a bunch of other things back n forth (and for a more linear roll results table) – so I figure you might find use in it even though you said you’re not wanting to change mechanics: Change the roll results. To 1 or 2 bad, 3/4 ok, 5/6 great, and a crit still requires multiple 6s. Which is just right for what I wanted since it doesn’t affect resistance or indulgence
Yeah, I’ve found ways around these issues over the last few years. The fact remains, there are some people who just aren’t going to enjoy the game, and that’s cool. They can play something else. It’s helpful to understand why they are struggling, and whether it can be addressed or it’s just not a good fit.
There’s a reason I’ve played the game mostly online or at game days and not with my home table. I want to play with people who are really going to enjoy it, and not every style fits every gamer.
Great discussion everyone!
To be clear, everyone is really digging the game. It’s just something I’ve noticed running it.
Not to try and be mean to anyone here but I find that 99% of the players feeling competent or not has to do with how the GM describes the complications and proper foreshadowing. Damage is, to me, the laziest most boring complication some times it’s obvious and very necessary (fights, high flying stunts) but if that’s your go to complication I fear you’re playing a fiction first game too much like DND or Pathfinder.
Karl Joseph This. I think it is not mean to point out that the book asks you to play like this, the relevant GM actions are:
-Telegraph Trouble Before It Strikes
-Follow Through
-Tell Them The Consequences And Ask
Especially the last one seems useful here, too. Give them a choice of their poison: “Okay, either you manage to get your blade in between but it gets twisted out of your hand, you are now in a desperate fight; or you don’t fend off the lunge and take 2-harm ‘slash to the ribs’. Or, of course, you can resist all that.”
So, next to the mechanical advice given, it might be worth to just review the Best Practices for Players and the Running the Game sections together as a group to see how your style of play contrasts.
Oh, and speaking of mechanics: The Resist rules give options for resisting harm to only reducing it or if you get to fully avoid it (pg. 32). So talk in the group about the tone and grittiness you want to go for in your game.
Stefan Struck proposed a nice middle ground: to let harm be reduced by two steps instead of one per resist. This means you still come out with a lot of scrapes, as it’s less efficient to spend stress on lesser harm and the severe harm gets reduced down to it.
Hi guys, good talk all around.
My players don’t feel incompetent and like, I’ve been running PbtA games for like ten years now? Ie playtesting the first iterations of AW? Like, with John at GoPlayNW in…2008? So fiction-first games aren’t an issue for me either, not that I’m some kinda hot shit MC or anything.
This all came out of me watching them stack the stress every score, and having few options and hard choices to make about dealing with it. Being only 2 Blades is hard, being At War is hard, and Duskvol is a hard place to start. I feel like on this first run-through their not going to have particularly high scores.
My intention for the question was system understanding and mastery because I find it faster to crowd source optimal maths than just thinking about it on my own. And that’s been true in this thread!
I allow a lot of Zero-stress flashbacks in my game which tends to reduce “stress fatigue” as well. Additionally my players rarely make resistance rolls unless the consequence is harm, and I only use harm maybe 5% of the time (probably less).