A couple issues have snagged onto the most recent campaign of BitD I’ve been running, and I could use some help with exterminating them.
1. Gathering Boredom: My group absolutely HATES the way we’ve been doing Gathering Information, so let me describe it to you. Downtime finishes, a score is decided on. A couple players decide to gather info about how to best to approach it. They usually use contacts on their sheet, and I tell them what they learn from that contact that’s of use. The players ultimately feel uninvolved and disinterested but like gathering info is a necessary evil, whether the scene is played out or glossed over.
Their proposed solution to this problem is being able to decide what they learn instead of me telling them, and then having me complicate/constrain afterwards as necessary. Is this viable? What issues could arise from this method? Has anyone tried this before? How does your group handle gather information actions pre-score, and have they gotten your group excited?
2. Constriction of Freedom: My group has offered the criticism that they feel constricted by some of the fiction/consequences I’ve put on them. Specifically, they feel that they’ve been forced into scores they weren’t really interested in.
One took an arcane “totem” from the Fog Hounds promising to use it to sabotage the Hounds’ rivals. When his player mentioned that he was probably just going to take the totem for his private use, I mentioned that would result in a loss of faction status with the Hounds when they realized the agreed task wasn’t being done. They then felt pressured to do the score.
In another instance, a player took a Devil’s Bargain that her (evil, wealthy, terrible man) father knew she was alive and active. I started a clock for him to kidnap their (nice girl) Informants claim. That clock filled and it happened, and now the crew feels obligated to take her back as a score before the evil father does something else, instead of doing some other cool score they have in mind.
Of course, then there’s also the fact that they were at war with the Dimmer Sisters for a session and felt obligated (mechanically) to take on a score to end that war.
I’m a bit worried that the consequences of their actions and Devil’s Bargains are actually making them have less freedom/fun. It’s also possible I’m thinking about this too narrowly. What can I do as GM to stop/alleviate the feelings of obligation that arise?
Thanks for any input!
It sounds like they’re fucking with people and then wondering why they’re getting fucked with in return.
They clearly need to leave no witnesses. 🙂
A little more seriously – it sounds like you might need to manage expectations. BitD really has a lot of push and pull, action and reaction. It’s what makes a sandbox game work well. Maybe you could save the impending badness and spring it as potential engagement roll complications on a score of their choosing?
“Nah, I’m going to screw over the Fog Hounds. Wait what do you mean they’re pissed I did that? I thought we were cool, man!”
“Wait, you mean Devil’s Bargains mean I don’t just get a bonus die? Something bad happens too!?”
“Hold on, dude. Wars don’t just blow over?”
1. This sounds like a wonderful idea. I look forward to hearing how it works in practice.
2. I don’t have any real context, as I wasn’t there, but I fail to see any problem with the way you’re handling it. I’d echo what Adam said. Oh, and on the plus side, story is happening.
Ben Morgan Context is so important, and it’s really hard to provide it all in a brief text. I’m sure I’m not doing an adequate job representing the players’ POV.
I think the problem hinges on the fact that the consequences I provide make it so that I’m giving them story to tell, rather than letting them tell me the story. It might not be a fault in my GMing, but rather a conflict between my GMing style and their playing style, both of which are legitimate. shrug
I’ll definitely update here if we decide to go with the collaborative gather info idea.
It doesn’t feel like you’re giving the story to them, it seems (from the perspective you are giving here) that you are providing natural consequences for what they are doing. And for the Devil’s Bargain, they had a choice! Why did they take the choice if they did not want to deal with the consequences?
Blades, by default, is definitely a game about consequences and never quite getting away clean. It sounds like your players are expecting to leave things nice and tidy, not feeling the pressure from a thousand things mounting up as they struggle to get ahead as everyone wants to keep them down, which is just not what normally happens.
Of course, if your players aren’t enjoying this kind of ruthlessly honest portrayal of the world, you can always dial the consequences down from the default to give your game another bent.
I would echo what some of the others have said here as well. However I can also understand where your players are coming from. Especially if they are coming from games like D&D (I dont know what their background is just making some general points). Blades is very much about the back and forth between the GM presenting situations for the players to respond to, the players respond, mechanics come into play when needed, consequences happen, the GM narrates the consequences, the players respond, ect. I would recommend everyone reading the “Players Best Practices” section as it discusses some of this a bit more. A discussion that would be worth having is talking with your players about the fact that these things are what Blades is all about. If thats not what they feel like playing right now thats totally cool. There are other RPGs that may be better suited to what they are looking to get out of their play experience.
In short Blades is about the players fighting against a deck that is completely stacked against them. In the words of John Harper on page 182,
“The scoundrel’s lot is a tough one, to be sure. The world in which they are trapped is deeply, cruelly unfair—created by the powerful to maintain their power and punish anyone who dares to resist. Some of the systems of the game are built to bring these injustices into play. No matter how cool or how capable the PCs are, the heat will pile on, entanglements will blindside them, the powers-that-be will try to kick them down with no regard. “
When you give conflicts and consequences, try to often make them things that the players can shrug and just accept.
Hopefully show the consequences via RP.
Then escalate slowly over time if you don’t think it’s something they should ignore.
So, for example, “You kept the token and didn’t follow through. OK, so while you’re out gatherine information, you spot Blizzy, one of the Fog Hounds, waving to you. She comes over and asks what’s happening. She seems confused and asks if you’ve made any progress against their enemies.”
But, of course, play it out as a conversation so there’s more in-character roleplaying fun. But lead up to her basically saying “We thought you’d do this job for us. That’s why we gave you that thing” and then mark the faction loss.
Then let it go. You’re done, they’ve got the negative consequence from their action. Keep the RP, so if you need to RP why they fog hounds aren’t as friendly it’s because of that broken promise. But otherwise, let it go.
The players can then choose to attack the fog hounds enemy, and when that score is completed one of the rewards can be an increase in faction status. So, essentially, the end result is the same as if they got the item and did the score. But there’s a temporary drop in status while they didn’t show interest in completing their promise.
That way it’s also open to the players deciding “well, it’s just as much effort to get friendly with the fog hounds as it is to get friendly with the red sashes. Who cares about those smugglers?” and go do something else. And remind the players of this, that the faction statuses change and they don’t have to keep them high.
And don’t make all the RP negative. Their friend who’s a member of the fog hounds is still their friend. But isn’t likely to do them favours if the faction status is neutral or unpleasant. “Oh, I don’t know buddy. I’d love to smuggle that for you, but I doubt the boss will allow it. He’s still waiting for you to do that job and return the item. You think maybe you should make amends?”
You can also think of the broken promise as a tiny little social score. They lied to the fog hounds to get an item they wanted, their reward was the item, and the score led to a reduced faction status. Easy. Done. Now moving on to the next score!
Keep scale in mind too. A devils bargain doesn’t have to be something huge or dramatic – after all, it only gives one extra dice. Instead of “he kidnaps your informants” maybe each time they take that same bargain the “he knows where you are” clock fills more and more. So they get 4 or 6 dice before it’s full.
Then maybe when he’s close to knowing, their NPC friends or informants talk about this guy skulking around asking questions. He’s figured out that they’re in this part of the city, even the general suburb, but hasn’t yet found where they’re staying. Doesn’t know their hideout, doesn’t know where they sleep.
The players can then ignore that, and he’ll turn up after they fill that clock (or maybe the clock fills because of a consequence on a dice roll. They have a street fight scuffle, word getting back to the bad guy seems like a perfect consequence!)
Ideally, the players have plenty of opportunity to deal with the bad guy, and that might involve moving their hideout somewhere else (to clear the clock), or ambushing him, or tricking him into thinking that his info is wrong, or whatever.
Or they can ignore it. And the clock can fill. And something can happen.
When it comes to “something can happen”, sure, he might kidnap the informant. At that point, remind the players “You can leave it be. You’ve lost an informant, but you can always replace them!” – of course, they probably will want to save the NPC, if they’ve got an emotional connection. That’s part of the game, sometimes stuff happens that your PCs don’t want to happen.
But “something might happen” doesn’t have to be instigated by you directly. You could decide that he knows where they are, but not do anything, and wait until some other dice roll needs a complication. So they’re having a street brawl with the bluecoats, they fail and need a consequence. You’d expect them to be sent to jail – why are they packing the one PC into a carriage? Who is that? HE FOUND US! And bribed the bluecoats to turn the PC over to him! (and obviously that would be a situation where they can’t just ignore it. But it only happened after filling the clock that they were ignoring.)
In general, I don’t think the players feeling pressured is a bad thing. It allows you to be more passive with your GMing, to sit back, roll the dice, and find out what happens. Let the bad consequences happen, let the good consequences happen. But make it so that the players don’t feel like they need to stop all the bad stuff.
It’s like a dice roll – you lay out the consequences and then they roll the dice, and then you ask if they want to resist those consequences. If you’re making the consequences interesting, the players may well often decide to accept the consequence rather than resisting.
Do the same with “bad stuff” from scores or RP or devils bargains.
And when I say “bad stuff” it doesn’t even have to be bad. One devils bargain I offered was that the NPC mistakes the PC for a homosexual trying to flirt with him – that wasn’t ‘bad’, but it shifted the RP situation and took the PC out of his comfort zone.
For the first part, try suggesting some alternate means of gathering information. It sort of sounds like when you’re asking “How do you go about finding that information?” what your players are hearing is “Who do you ask for that information?”
Gathering Information shouldn’t just be asking around with people you know. It can consist of anything from studying city records to casing a location to tailing a future target. If your players aren’t suggesting things like that, it’s because they haven’t thought of it or don’t know it’s possible, most likely.
You can directly suggest some alternate methods of getting info like that, or even do it through their usual contacts. “Jerry the Apothecary tells you he doesn’t know the answer to that, but suggests that you might try consulting the city records in Charterhall.” Once you’ve pushed alternate methods of information gathering a couple of times, your players should start to pick up that there are many ways to gather information, and coming up with more creative (and thus more interesting for them as well as you) ways to learn what they want.
re 1: Gather Info
Consider yourself lucky! This is a great situation!
This basically means you have to come up with less stuff for any which Score: next time go along with their suggestion and ask them what they hope to find out and what obstacles they think they will face.
This gets the players involved in creating what the Score is about. You can just check with your own prep to make sure things stay consistent.
In BitD you can basically go into a session with zero prep; just asking what they are looking for and what they want to try to achieve. Just use the info they suggest then ask how they think they can find out about it. Let them roll Gather Info and then make their suggestion your own: confirm as much as makes sense of their initial suggestion; think about which parts might be more or less complicated and which might be twisted around when the Engagement roll goes bad.
re 2: Consequences
I am not sure how much you are doing the “tell them the consequences and ask”-bit. Maybe just be more upfront about this? Was the kidnap clock public? Why didn’t the players do anything to stop that clock from filling up? During Downtime it could be a simple thing to keep that clock in check. So when they don’t choose to do anything about it, they are interested in that bit coming to pass, no?
Also consider that scores don’t need to fill a full session. The one for the Hounds could have just been an hour of play. Consider keeping such Scores that they feel are just obligations simple. They are probably lower in payout as well, then.
If the players want more from it (like disguising the ‘rescue’ by stealing a great deal of valuables) ask them how they want to achieve this and you suddenly have them onboard again, having them to be creative and come up with ideas and are as such invested, again.
Remind them that with consequences from 1-5 on a roll you will be very clear what they entail so that they can make informed decisions for resisting them. Devil’s Bargains on the other hand can be more vague and are a way for the GM to introduce and drive things they are interested in. But they usually are immediate and clear or more peripheral and long term fuckery that can still be addressed.
Oh yeah, what Tony Demetriou said about how all the RP doesn’t have to be negative: Remember to increment faction status with the enemies of who they’re screwing with. If they’re at war with the Dimmer Sisters, perhaps the Reconciled might have use for the crew. Hell, maybe even an informant for the Spirit Wardens slips them some info.
I like to use Gather Information as roleplay scenes where we find out stuff about the characters as well as about their contacts and their relationships. This often gives players a chance to express their drives and heritage, and if at the end of the game you point this out to them and give them XP, they may be more excited to play along.
As far as being constrained, you have set forth some pretty reasonable scenarios that I don’t see a problem with. A player never has to do anything, but they do have to live with the consequences of what they do or don’t do. It helps if they can see the clocks as they’re filling. Did the players know that the kidnapping clock existed, and did they see it ticking down? Also I frequently like to give the players choices between consequences when bad things happen, so they always feel like their misfortune if of their own making. “Alright, you keep the totem for personal use. Would you prefer to lose faction status with the fog hounds, or would you rather contend with angry spirits that are attracted to the totem and attack your base?”
At the start of the campaign the players requested that the faction clocks and whatnot remain mysterious. The clocks would tell them who was doing something, but not what they were doing. I just told the group that from now on all clocks will be as transparent as possible to prevent it from being an issue.
Out of sight out of mind I guess. I think transparency will suit this group better, and it makes PCs feel more competent.
Even though I have a number of clocks that I keep hidden, I try make it a point to throw in a description of the effects of those clocks advancing whenever I tick off a slice. During our downtime phases, there’s usually an informal current events section where I throw stuff in, like “there’s been a lot of construction in Crow’s Foot lately, you’re noticing an influx of workers into the neighborhood.” Sometime, Constance will have one of the crew read her items from the newspaper.
Faction clocks make sense to keep hidden unless the PCs are somewhat involved. But PC facing clocks is something I keep out in the open. This just communicates more so that the players can make informed choices… also, when I choose to advance a clock as a consequence they need to know how many ticks it already had and will get to be able to know if the consequence is worth resisting or not.
Sometimes the clock’s name is vague (because I don’t know either what will happen once it’s full, for example), so narratively there still is mystery and intrigue about the details what will happen and things can swing and change as the fiction demands.
Just remember true freedom means the freedom to fail and the freedom to accept consequences to actions. Lets face it you are not rail-roading your players into anything. If they don’t want to give a promised item to the fog hounds they don’t have to. They could chose to just ignore the situation in which the fog hounds would be pissed at them, or handle it some other way. However the score is completely their choice, by providing consequences you are not removing choices, just informing them.
I would argue if you removed consequence from the player choice you’d actually be robing your players of both choice and agency. After all if all decisions have the same outcome, then all decisions are ultimately meaningless.
Likewise your crew shouldn’t feel obligated to do anything, remember they are scoundrels. What do they care if some innocent girl is crushed in their efforts to get coin?
I mean they could rescue the girl or they could just callously leave her to her grisly fate (if they did I’d totally make her come back as a hull enslaved to her father, forced to suffer at his hands for all eternity). Either way I would make the result of their decision meaningful. Maybe if they rescue her she is a new crew contact, or maybe if they leave her to her fate she becomes a rival to one of the crew (in her hull form ofcourse).
Regardless you present what their environment is, it’s their job not you to figure out how they react to it. This is the push-pull you’ll see people talking about here.
In many games, if the GM drops some obvious hints, it’s a jerk move to ignore them.
“So, the bartender mentions that the mill is haunted.”
“And the king asks you to go investigate the haunted mill”
“The crying kid tells you that his father was working at the mill, and didn’t come home”
“What, you’re all leaving town?”
In a traditional game, that’s just disheartening for a GM.
In Blades, events like a kidnapped contact might sound like a “plot” from a traditional game, and the players – trying to be considerate friends and play cooperatively with the GM so everyone has fun – tries to follow that plot that they assume the GM has prepared. They might not realise that ignoring it is also an interesting option.
So… just tell them outright. Tell them that there’s a lot going on right now, give three or so examples, tell them that they can ignore any or all of those and do their own thing, or they can follow up one or more of those things. And it’s OK to let stuff slide, that just leads to more story down the track.
In Blades, that haunted mill they ignored? That might be a great place for them to hide out from the Bluecoats later on, since they’ve got a Whisper with them and the Bluecoats don’t. It might be a terrible place to hide when running from the Spirit Wardens.
Or maybe a PC is is fleeing, and you need to offer a potential consequence. “OK, so although you get away, it’s only by hiding in the haunted mill.” and the player goes “Yeah, that’s cool. I’m not resisting that!”
Instead of these dangling plots being a bad thing, they can be kept up your sleeve when you’re GMing other stuff. Make sure the players know that it’s fine for them to leave the plots dangling.
Thanks for your input everyone! It has helped me solidify both some old and new ideas.
31 weeks ago, huh? Well, here’s the update I promised anyway!
1: I basically just took Mathias Belger’s advice, and it worked very well, but under the condition that my group was made of very cool and understanding players. They would make Gather Info rolls and on a success I’d let them dictate certain fiction about the score’s situation limited only by base-level common sense and the level of effect they had on the roll. They became more interested in gathering info and usually didn’t take as much advantage of the house rule as I’d have allowed or even anticipated. This would have worked less well with power-gamers, though.
2. The ultimate solution to this was just making all clocks player-facing, and it worked way better. Once they knew where something was headed ahead of time, they either figured out interesting ways to stop it, or accepted that things were going that way and thought ahead about how to handle it once it manifested. The experience taught me to always make clocks player-facing, even if the players request otherwise.
Blaze Azelski yay! That’s awesome to hear!
Thanks for following up.