Is there a guide on how many obstacles, or how ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ a score should be (I’m preparing for what I hope will be the first session of many)?
Obviously it depends on the fiction, but the fiction is whatever I describe. Is roughly four obstacles that the players will need to roll or think their way around enough? 3? Clocks?
Or to use a direct example – obviously in, say, an assassination score, even if the Engagement roll goes perfectly, the job shouldn’t be as easy as “put Hound on high place (location based on Gather information), try to snipe target, push himself and get assistance for great effect, job done”.
So what /is/ an appropriate amount of obstacles?
aand after the first session (and realising i didn’t have comments enabled) I see the answer, or part of an answer – the target’s tier gives an overview of how many members of them might be in a given location in the form of a gang, which makes figuring things out not too bad.
I try to use the goal of the score (what does success look like) and the detail of the plan to imagine the difficulty. If they’re trying to assassinate Lord Strangford and the plan is to smuggle a ghost into his manor house, that sounds pretty complicated and tough. If they’re killing some random bookie and the plan is to corner him in an alley and shoot him in the head, that sounds pretty straightforward and easy.
I was running a session where the rogues were tasked with putting a box in a carriage, and they did the legwork and found out the carriage would be parked with others during a race while the aristocrat was spectating; they figured it was too easy for a heist and sent a gang to do it on their behalf, sorted it out with a roll.
That’s cool. They’ve got better friends and new enemies, and we move on to the next thing; it is difficult enough to be a heist? Meanwhile, that bombing means I’ve got new toys in the background that can complicate the foreground as needed. It also set a trajectory where they had animosity with a faction and that escalated.
So not every heist needs to be very difficult or complicated, and some actions don’t even need to be heists. The difficulty should center on the ambition of the crew at first, and then on the consequences of their adventuring as friends and enemies grind into action.
Varying the difficulty is fun. Maybe it was an easy heist when they helped the Guildmaster’s daughter elope. Maybe it’s a pretty impossible heist when the Tier 2 gang of assassins the Guildmaster hired hits them while they’re scattered and goes for the kill.
I was going to suggest that just starting out, especially if you and your players are learning the system, to not use any clocks at all (essentially one roll per obstacle).
Blades is a remarkably elegant game, playing just as well with the most basic rules as it does with the most detailed and complex. Which makes it a REALLY good game for learning. Other things you might want to leave out of the earliest sessions are Effect levels, stress costs for flashbacks, and a lot of the tier and faction relations stuff. And of course as we’ve seen a lot of people prefer to start without a Crew sheet.
This lets you and your players get a strong grip on the basics (the planning sequence, action rolls, flashbacks) without overwhelming them with everything at once. You can introduce other rules as you feel comfortable, or as circumstances dictate (“We want to attack the Spirit Wardens” is always a good time to bring up Effect, for example)
Mike’s idea of not using clocks for player goals ended up working for me, though I didn’t realise it at the time. The one ‘player-based’ clock was a simple four-step for ‘reach the enemy war treasury’ which was more of a pacing mechanism tied to the fiction than to any particular roll.
Since the system was new for all of us, I downplayed harsh consequences and instead mostly put them in desperate positions or filled in negative clocks. I also wanted to reward them for engaging with a system new to them, so I didn’t make consequences for Flashbacks and using their unique powers as bad as they might be in a ‘standard’ game. So by the end they were racing against ‘Red Sashes on Full Alert’ and ‘Ghost Hunters Arrive’ clocks to get the treasure and escape.
Ended up working really well! They ended up feeling like they barely escaped by the skin of their teeth, even though they hadn’t even taken any harm.
They do have six or seven heat after just a single job, though 🙂
I was recently thinking about this subject as well. I tend to structure scores as three distinct phases/obstacles: 1. Getting There. 2. Doing the Thing. 3. The Getaway
It’s worth mentioning that each complex objective during a score could have a progress clock. However, the complexity of the first phase is distinctly handled by the engagement roll – unlike the other phases of the score where the fiction is usually well-established but we might need a clock to track how things are going.
I’m tinkering with a system like this. This is all theoretical so far, but I want to test it in play.
– Each Score has an Obstacle score. The Obstacle score is simply a total of all the obstacles (small “o”) included in the Score.
– A Score’s base Obstacle is equal to the target’s Tier.
– Any additional NPCs, Assets, or Cohorts that are likely to be present during the Score are also an obstacle (and there for add to the total Obstacle rating).
That’s it. So, for example, your scoundrels are setting out on a Score against the Billhooks. Those thugs are a Tier II faction, so the Obstacle starts at 2. Everyone knows and agrees that Corvan’s going to be at the target location and that the group’s pack of death-dogs will be with him. That’s another obstacle for Corvan, one for the death-dogs, so the total Obstacle for the Score will be 4. The scoundrels have four obstacles to overcome before they can consider the Score complete. The GM already knows two of them (Corvan and the death-dogs) and will probably need to improvise the other two.
The down side to an Obstacle system is that it doesn’t take the fiction into account. If the rogues decide to scale the wall and hit the tower from the canal side, they don’t have to deal with the dogs. And if you make it equally difficult no matter what their plan is, it seems to me that discourages creatively avoiding difficulties.
If the fiction suggests that scaling the wall from the canal side avoids the dogs, then perhaps that’s not where the dogs were in the first place. But maybe scaling the wall is how the crew overcomes the Death-Dogs Obstacle? In that case, scaling the wall satisfies the requirement and the GM can cross that obstacle off of the list.
Nothing in my ad hoc Obstacle system stands in the way of Blades’ fiction-first approach. It only provides some scaffolding that a struggling GM can use to help create interesting Consequences.
The PCs aren’t exactly supposed to have a plan, are they? They pick the Plan and the Detail, make the Engagement Roll, and they’re off. Questions about how difficult a score should be and how many obstacles should be involved are ultimately pacing questions. When someone starts a thread like this, they’re asking for help in calibrating their personal sensibilities for pacing a score. They’re looking for something concrete to stand on until they’re ready to fly through the fiction on the winds of their intuition and experience.
I would also like some input on “scaling” scores appropriately. Seeing as how the PCs have a fixed stress-track, scores will be vastly differing in difficulty depending on the number of action-rolls they have to make.
One question I have is: How does the Engagement roll affect this? A critical lets you automatically overcome the first obstacle, but that only has mechanical value if it means you have fewer action-rolls to make. If it means that the GM will just think up another complication “to compensate” it means nothing.
Am I lost?
Tarald Røste​​​ you are on point, and fewer actions to get the Thing done is the intended benefit of the engagement Crit.
A GM adding difficulty to subvert the crew’s Crit on an engagement roll is another issue ( of the GM not following the game’s core principles, and kind of being a jerk in general )
Yeah, that makes sense. And I see that Blades is all about table consensus, so it makes sense to have an open meta-discussion about “allright, so how hard is this Score then? Karl knows you’re gunning for his stills, and all the heat you racked up last week means the Bluecoats are all over the streets… Sounds like 7 or 8 obstacles, right?”
I think Blades is too player directed to set the obstacles beforehand. Instead of just setting a number of obstacles, think about the fictional situation. “So there are Bluecoats around the distillery, and some guards and workers inside probably. What type of plan are you picking and what’s the detail?”
My first though was that there will keep being obstacles until the fiction resolves that our heroes get away clean (or run away).
I agree that fixing a number of rolls seems contrived, but at the same time, I do think there should be some correlation between a scores perceived difficulty and complexity and the number of action-rolls demanded of the players.
After all, the more detail we go into, the more granular the actions are treated, the more trouble the players will get themselves into. The fiction itself will not dictate difficulty/number of rolls, it will depend a great deal on how the table interprets and treats the resolution of action rolls, no?
The obstacle system above seems like a good guideline. But am i right that there is no such guidelines in the book as written?
Of course there would be a connection between the complexity of the score and the number of action rolls, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to lay that out at the outset, because it may artificially limit the players’ options. You don’t want to be in a situation where it feels like the score is over, but you said there were 7 obstacles and they’ve only rolled 5 times, so you need to contrive something to add.
If you really want to have a more transparent structure, I’d go with a vague “simple/standard/complex” designation.