How do you deal “fiction first” with “You have only two downtime actions” ? If the players just do their stuff, how do I say “hmm you only have 2 actions and you just played them”, or these kind of stuffs? Seems that there is a system restrictions to fiction, no? How do you deal with that?
How do you deal “fiction first” with “You have only two downtime actions”
How do you deal “fiction first” with “You have only two downtime actions”
We basically think of the free downtime actions as what you can reasonably accomplish without hiring messengers, cabbies, or paying factors to get work done for you (hence the 1 coin per extra action).
We do not, by mutual agreement, think of downtime actions as a specific number of hours or days, just the amount of time and attention you can give the gang outside of scores and the rest of your lives. That last part is super important to keep in mind for BitD – our characters are not D&D style murder-hobos who literally do nothing but adventure. Our characters are maintaining contacts, having liaisons with allies, drinking away our ill-gotten coin and all the other sorts of things a fairly sedentary, urban group of thugs would do in addition to maintaining their hideout and gang.
Hope that helps!
Evan Louscher, you’ve got this perfectly!
Thank you for your answer! Maybe I have to rephrase, my question is more about the 2 actions restriction: if it’s “fiction first”, what if the PCs just plays and do more actions. How do I answer : “sorry you played your two actions”, because here it’s the system that constrains the fiction, not the fiction that activate the system. Am I getting it wrong?
Hi. I may be wrong, but you seem to have a bit of a misunderstanding about the meaning of the term “fiction-first” in the context of RPGs (and in this case Blades In The Dark). Fiction First is no related to restricting or not restricting the fiction. It is merely a description of the way the mechanics interact with the fiction in such games. It basically describes games in which the narration triggers the mechanics of the game when the conditions established by those rules are met. Or to say it the Apocalypse World way: “To do it (mechanically), you have to do it (in the fiction)”. So coming back to your example, the reason of why the player saying “I want to indulge on my vice again” after having already spent tow actions doesn’t triggers the mechanics is because it’s not meeting the requirements of the rules. That is, that you can only use those mechanics two times per downtime (unless you do something like paying coin). And of course, in the fiction of the game that is justified because the characters simply don’t have more time to spare in such things, they have many other things to attend (like having an actual life for example) as Evan Louscher explained much better that I did. I hope this helps you understand the more “theoretical” side of this issue. Good luck with your game and have fun!
I think Evan Louscher was taling about that when he mentioned that you’re not just keeping track of the minute to minute actions, you’re assuming time passes between them, and that the actions themselves take up the precious free time a Blade has.
So, it’ isn’t about taking two actions, it’s about playing through the fiction. If a character says I indulge my vice, you ask how, and about their vice purveyor, and what they do while indulging. Then when they go to train, ask what that looks, who is involved, who they have to pay or learn from. And in the middle of all that, they are still running a crew and taking care of business.
If they want to do that third downtime action, that is fine, but their free time has been used up. Other factions are encroaching on their turf, entanglements demand their attention, and the Bluecoats are sniffing around. If they want to take more leisure time before getting back to work, they can, but it’s going to cost them (hence the rep or coin).
But the big take away is that those two free actions, are also part of the fiction. They aren’t really “free” either, they take up time and resources, those are just the time and resources we think the scoundrels can usually muster on their own.
+Evan Louscher, I will now forever think of / refer to D&D characters as “murder-hobos.” That’s perfect.
It’s time-management. The character doesn’t have the time, without straining his or her resources. Downtime activities are time investments, as is all the day-to-day life that happens off-screen, that Evan mentioned. They CAN still do more than two things, by spending coin or rep, but it’s a strain. Because these characters are supposed to be complex people, with lives, interests, relationships, and commitments, and the two-action limitation is shorthand for all of that.
“Sorry, you don’t have time to do all that without straining either your finances or your relationships.”
You have two free downtime actions, if you want more, you can pay 1 coin for it.
In the fiction, it means that if the crew doesn’t do another score and wants to continue to do some downtime actions, they draw on their reserves.
So that’s possible, but not really subtainable for a long time. The crew has to work.
It’s much more fluid: you get to do 2 DTAs for free which constitutes your day-to-day. If you want to accomplish more you can do so easily but it requires some investment/taxing your resources: you spend rep or coin to get additional ones. So you are not constrained by just 2.
It’s like: sure you can spend time consorting the Dockers to get on their good side (long term project) but if you want to spend every night at their regular tavern (i.e. get several rolls on that clock) it adds up in cost eating out and buying drinks and “forcing” good acquaintances.
Also, as players you can always go into free play if you are willing to accept a risk. But that might tax your stress or lead to other consequences.
Also: Duskvol is a pressure cooker. You can’t really sit on your butts for too long. Other factions might make a move. So yes, there is in fiction reason for why you get only 2 free ones and can’t just continue playing Downtime.
The players just doing their stuff might be considered free play and would therefore not cost downtime actions.
Only the 6 activities listed on page 153 count against the 2 downtime actions.
The mechanical benefit of handling something as a long-term project instead of simply using an action in free play is that no consequences occur and even a result of 1-3 gives a tick on the project clock.
The drawback in fiction is that it costs more time (and mechanically one downtime action).
Work expands to fill the time available. You have resources available to do two things. If one player does those two things, move on to the other two.
You don’t need fiction to explain “that’s the rules of the game”. You don’t fictionally explain a dice roll, do you?
Everyone else has already explained the basics of the system and given some suggestions of how to handle it, but to go more specifically to your clarification comment, I guess you can either explain that, yes they can do the thing they want, but it will cost them additional money or strain on their status, or alternatively you can treat it as solely fiction, without the mechanical benefit. They train, but not enough to improve their skill. They make plans for their project or arrange some material to be delivered, but no actual building work has taken place. They indulge their vice again, but the stress it reduced is factored in to the total they got before.
This might seem pointless, but there’s two reasons I can see in favour of it. Firstly, it makes the progress on clocks and upgrades feel more natural rather than the binary yes/no the mechanics can feel like at times. And two, it allows the players to flesh put their character and the world. They can roleplay with you, maybe you can drop in some rumours and opportunities, and it can also give them a chance to hit some extra XP triggers (especially the ones about drives/beliefs/heritage and struggling with vice/trauma).
As I play my game, I treat the downtime phase as a whole game. Like a management simulation video game. We drop the freeplay roleplaying for a bit and I say “So we are now on the downtime phase. Let’s play it as the order [Payoff, Heat, Entanglement, Downtime Action].”. Then players announce their actions mechanically, and I, as a GM, process the action and let them know the results like some mini-game. I think it as the base management mode of XCOM (2013).
Of course, if we think some of the mechanically processed action can be an interesting scene, then we play it to find out 😛
Yeah, clarity can be helpful too, but that doesn’t mean you can’t roleplay whatever takes your group’s interest.
Thanks +Jason Lee and thank you all for a time. Most of the answers explained the mechanics and are not focused on “fiction first” to me. Generally people here justify the mechanics with the fiction (the minigame such as x-com is totally not fiction first). +Jason Lee your answer is the most helpful to me. The way we play “fiction first” is : we roleplay. Most of the time we do “free play”, that’s what rpg is. A difficult obstacle with ptba was to understand that the fiction triggers an action. Here, when playing downtime, ever you chose a mechanic from the list “i pick this action or this action” then you justify in the fiction. It’s mechanic first. The way we want to deal with it is to just let the fiction goes and triggers the mechanic when it comes to.
The difficulty is that if we do so .. Well we just play, and the Downtime Phase is actually not so clearly separated from the free play. If we play with the “fiction first”, we don’t clearly separate the phases, like: “Ok wait we still in the downtime phase so pick your downtime actions, and explain how do you do it”. This is a mechanic first, such as in a boardgame. Fiction first, to me, is “Ok we just got paid and now we want to organize a nice party to do that, – ok what kind of party, how do you do that”, etc. I can’t say “wait let’s do the downtime phase before”.
Maybe it’s not just important that the downtime actions are played? I can just throw incentives to players like, “of course go one with a party.. and just look at the the downphase action too, they are good things to do to expand your gang”. Then if the characters starts to plan a new score, even if they didn’t use there 2 actions (because we don’t count them, we just .. do free play, fiction first)
But it’s not so easy to handle, because fiction first doesn’t go by phase with a restricted number for actions. People just roleplay and things happens. The innovation in BitD is the way you cut into action with mechanics to be epic without in-game preparation before being in the action. When it comes to the faction game, I feel the game is more designed as a board game : this phase, this number of actions, this list of actions. Maybe it’s just some practice? An incentive for the MC’s discipline (“just pay one coin” is not an acceptable anwser to a PC for me, the answer should be in the fiction : “you go to train but they lack materials and the master asks you for some investment”, which doesn’t change the situation it’s just a way of describing it in the fiction: what I call discipline, because the MC has to do some interesting improvisation).
Also, if the city is a “pressure cooker”, which is a nice way to describe it, I feel there is some kind of difficulty because were between “the players give the input” (and they do!), and “something pushes you to do it”. Of course, I don’t have any problem to deal with the payment and entanglements, etc. They really create some pressures and some movements in the fictional situation at a general level. But still, I got the feeling to be pulled into different directions driven by different principes of the game : fiction-first to the north, downtime-actions to the south, players-drive to the est, etc. So the exposition of my situation is not about dealing with these principles. F
I want to add that the overall experience is really great! The game is great, we can feel the fiction, we love the mechanics (we = me and my players). And because we love it we question very fine details: this is absolutely not a negative critique. It’s an attempt to go deeper in the understanding in the game based on some of our experience, and to improve it!
+John Harper some thought with this? And anyone else of course!
Grégory Meurant hmm, that sounds to me more like roleplay first than fiction first 🙂
True, the faction game can be played like a board game. But you can also see it as a mechanic to handle the bigger picture of the story.
There IS a lot of preparation going on for a score, but it’s done by the characters and the game is doing a good job of hiding it from the players.
And the downtime activities are hiding boring stuff that comes with climbing up in the hierarchy of the underworld.
What I like about blades: it plays fast.
And that means I have actually a chance to really play a campaign through until the end of being tier 4 and more or less ruling the underworld.
I can’t see that happen in d&d 🙂
Ah, I can see the hang up.
“Generally people here justify the mechanics with the fiction” is not an opposite to “fiction first”, in my mind. But you are pointing out something none of us here mentioned in detail:
Yes, in PbtA games the MC looks for triggers for the mechanics in the fiction. For any mechanic to happen, something has to go down in the fiction.
This also means if the game calls for a mechanic and we are lacking the fiction, yet, we look for and describe that justification.
Beginning of session moves in PbtA are prime examples where game structure calls for this.
Now, fiction first doesn’t mean “actor stance only”. As a player of a PC I can play big parts in an author’s stance, providing commentary and interpretation of a character and what they are doing and still be very much “fiction first”.
That is still roleplay.
And I am playing the game, too.
Fiction first means to me as a player if I want to do something in the mechanics, I need to root it in the fiction, first. But wanting to engage the mechanics is not a betrayal to fiction first.
“That scene is over? Cool. Okay, so we see my character in a dark alley shoving someone against a wall, a knife flashes and there is a close up of a trickle of blood as its tip pricks sensitive skin under the poor guy’s jaw. ‘Never bad mouth our crew again. Better you and your fellows keep your mouths shut and say you know of nothing if ever someone asks!’
Yeah I’m totally taking one of my free Downtime actions to reduce heat with command by intimidating the locals.”
This is still fiction first even if it is born out of a purely mechanical desire. BitD enables players to take such a wide authority through its mechanics because we all know: DTA don’t have direct risks associated so I as a player know I won’t be stepping on the GM’s toes by framing a quick scene like that.
And we can move on to the more interesting scenes where something is on the line. We can cover large swaths of time and know what happened in the fiction. They have weight to them because there were mechanics attached.
A good habit with fiction first for players is to give a description of what and how their character does something and then lay out the mechanical bit they are going for. But it’s totally fair to be motivated by the mechanics, think about how to root it in the fiction and then go to position yourself by giving a description to the rest of the table.
Does that make sense how fiction first and game mechanics and the structure they give are not opposites?
Grégory Meurant when we play BitD we, like you, roleplay the events and actions of the characters without thinking too much about what’s going on under the hood. It’s usually the GM who steps in to invoke mechanics – including DT actions – when triggered by the fiction and then he returns the outcome fictionally. During role-play there is often some discussion of stakes and consequences, with the GM making sure players understand the risks and possible rewards. We therefore have no real issues with players and the GM describing what’s happening fictionally first and triggering mechanics as a result when necessary. It’s also usually pretty clear when we have transitioned between the score, downtime and free play.
I also think that the mechanics help define what the game is about and what thw world is like. In the case of BitD they help us understand that high risk is dangerous but potentially very rewarding. They also help us grow our characters (trauma, xp triggers) and understand the underworld economy of getting things done (DT). Understanding the mechanics and their triggers really helps us with role-playing and interacting with the environment effectively.
We are a group that’s been rping since 1977 so we are very used to circumventing mechanics with role-playing 🙂 but the BitD way, as PbtA and Burning HQ games, is extremely liberating and rewarding for us and has helped us grow as gamers.
Mathias Belger “But it’s totally fair to be motivated by the mechanics, think about how to root it in the fiction and then go to position yourself by giving a description to the rest of the table.”
Yes. This is how you do it.
We have gotten to the point where “downtime activities” are nearly their own session. We roleplay nearly every downtime activity so with 4 players we’re looking at 8 plus activities. We try to give at least 5-15 minutes per activity. Even something as simple as recovering harm results in a conversation or two with medical cohorts or contacts, some narrative about healing, fighting inflection, physical therapy etc.
Like others have said, if you fill your downtime with story then suddenly no one feels like they are being restricted; things take time. If you just pick an activity, role dice, write something down it’s going to feel odd because you’ve completely ignored storytelling.
To drive this point home I actually had to point out to one of my players how little he ever managed to accomplish on his weekends!
I realize you want to be fiction first, but games have rules to achieve tension and balance. If you can go into every score fully healed with 0 stress and a vault full of coin then the tension leaks right out of the game.
Mechanically, Blades keeps tension high by limiting how much you can accomplish between scores. Fictionally, Blades justifies this by saying you have limited time between scores before other gangs will start coming for you, but you can accomplish more things in that limited time if you’re willing to spend money or favors (represented by coin and rep).
It’s recommended that you follow these rules because tension = excitement, just like its recommended that you follow any of the rules in Blades. However, it’s your game and you do not have to follow any of them if that increases the enjoyment of your group.
Yeah, at the end of the day, the rules are there for best practice as the designer sees for their vision of the game, but you’re the ones playing it and so, if something doesn’t work for you, you’re free to change it. Just be aware that changing something as core as whether downtime has structure will affect how the game feels and plays. Like Mark Griffin just said, if you allow your players more free rein, you might find that the tension achieved from stress and injuries isn’t as high, but maybe that’s not what your group wants anyway. You can always experiment with changing things and then discuss whether you all prefer the original or the new way of doing things. Ret cons and GM hand waving can fix any problems that arise from trying things out.