First-timer advice ping…
Okay, tonight I run my first (ever) session of Blades for the crew of “Smugglers of Arcane/Weird” that my players put together. I was going to point them towards heading outl to a near-ish shoal where a famous Leviathan Hunter captain met his demise fighting a Leviathan to try to capture his ghost, sneak it back into the city and hock it to Lady Ankhayat so she can try to coax out the directions to his secret hunting grounds. (These are all brand-new players to anything fiction-first/story-driven, pretty much all D&D players.)
My basic plan was…
* Engagement roll to set the state of things as they arrive at this ruined lighthouse/shoal in an ongoing storm, ranging from “the only thing worse than hurricanes are hurricanes in the dark” to “irritating but non-consequential rain” kind of deal.
* Finding the ghost of the captain and making their way to it (I’ve got two Leeches that will need stuff to blow up).
* Capturing the ghost (also two Whispers so this may help occupy them both).
* Heading back to the city and a shakedown from the Dockers/”equivalent to port authority”.
So, to those who have done this before: Does that sound like what all should be in a Score? Is that too much? Not enough?
(I also kind of feel like that’s a Smuggling mission attached to the end of a Hunt mission.)
Subbing to this one as I’m curious myself. Judging the number of obstacles in a Score is one of the things I find myself wondering at. With Andrew Shields Heist deck, I gather that 3 obstacles is something of a good number, and I’ve used 3 in the past myself, but I’m always curious. Too much? Too little?
3 sounds like a good number, easy to come up with and easy to remember, and allows room for things to escalate with bad rolls, but I’d like to hear from more experienced GMs.
I noticed I highlight 2-5 major obstacles per score based mostly on the complexity of their goal and or payoff.
This is not a hard-and-fast rule I actually follow but rather a tendency I noticed after GMing a bunch.
I suspect that the number of obstacles is supposed to emerge organically for each group, but I also feel that some sort of guidance to serve as a launching pad can be helpful.
I’ve got two competing notions about how to create rough guidelines for a Score’s complexity.
1. The simple “easy/medium/hard” approach. An easy Score has three objectives, a medium Score has four, and a hard one has five.
2. The contextual approach. A Score has a number of objectives equal to the Tier of the primary opposition. Scores against Tier 0 opponents default to one objective. Add a number of additional objectives equal to the number of relevant assets held by the opponent. So if the opponent is Tier 1 but also has a cohort of savage thugs, that’s a two-objective Score. The advantage to this system is that the assets are objectives and that spares you having to come up with extra objectives off the top of your head.
I prefer not to think of a Scores as a number of obstacles. Start with engagement, then follow the fiction and call for rolls when that trigger happens. “Look around” in the fictional space. What are they trying to do? What’s in their way?
I’ve never had a satisfying session by creating a number of obstacles as a challenge rating (this is something we playtested). It feels too contrived for this part of the game.
I understand the impulse to do this, of course. Many games tell the GM to create challenges according to some calculation of threat levels or whatever. But Blades vey intentionally does not, by design.
Yeah, I’m not trying to turn it into “the math of making a Score” I’m still trying to get a feel for “how much stuff should be in the Score portion of a trip through the game loop?” (Which does kind of read as “is there a quota to fill?”) Figuring out where to draw that line between “this is a discrete chunk of story/action, done” vs “I planned crappy, you inadvertently get tangled up for like 3 sessions, THEN you get a downtime cycle.”
The more I think about it, though, the more this is mostly, “I haven’t run or played Blades yet, I’m not sure how this will work for timing, especially with new players.” Which is (spoilers!) obviously going to depend on our group anyway. I’m more thinking in terms of putting in items that will shine a spotlight on different characters to give everyone a bit of time in the limelight.
I wouldn’t worry about the limelight thing, either. It’s not much of a GM responsibility in this game. Blades is a game in which the GM should follow the PCs around. It’s the players’ job to lead with things they want to do (which presumably will be focused on what their characters and crew are about).
Like, instead of “Hey GM, what do you have for us tonight?” it’s more like, “Hey, PCs, you started this criminal crew to do stuff. What do you do?”
I only once had to worry about allowing everyone to hit their role play XP triggers and that was because I had a Slide in the group who tried to solve EVERY problem by talking. It only happened once and after that he realised that he is only one member of the crew and that it is the crew which succeeds in the scores not the individual
For your first rodeo it might be helpful to think about where you would like your scoundrels to end up in terms of stress and consequences and use that to guide you towards how many challenges to place and how threatening you want them to be.
Assume for example that each of your scoundrels will, on average, do one each of push themselves, provide assistance, narrate a flashback, resist a consequence and suffer a consequence during the score – if they did that they would end up pretty stressed, perhaps hurting (or otherwise worried about a longer term issue) but probably not traumatised. So that sounds like a pretty challenging score, but basically survivable unless they have some horrible luck when the dice hit the table.
In order to get that stretched each scoundrel would need to be making around 5 action rolls so multiply this by number of scoundrels and you have an upper bound for an ‘action roll budget’ (I say an upper bound because multiple scoundrels will get involved in a fair few actions). Assign up to a third of this notional budget to the ‘spine’ of the score as obstacles that need to be overcome in order to get the payoff and keep the rest for complications, twists and additional opportunities.
Can’t predict stress expenditure or resistance frequency. Advise against this line of thinking
Definitely do not plan where you want the PCs to end up with stress or whatever. That is not how the Blades GM role works at all.
I’ll say that again: Do not plan outcomes.
Do not try to manage how things will go.
Read the GM section again. Read the player section again.
Okay, post mortem report: Just a single 3 hour session thus far…
The score went okay, I padded it with a couple more obstacles as things went along so we could try to get a little more “this is how you handle doing things” in there. But still had time to do a score and give everyone their downtime.
Things I’m going to need to keep myself thinking in terms of:
1. Complications for mixed result rolls (mostly “keep the list of ideas where you can see it”).
2. Establishing position/effect for actions.
Things I’m definitely going to need to get them thinking in terms of:
1. Flashbacks being a thing. One player posted some feedback in a discussion afterwards saying “we as a group should have done a bit more planning” and I tried going over why NOT to do that. (Plus, I love explaining how a Score works in terms of The Godfather.)
2. That they get to have a real say in framing A- actions in general, and B- Downtime scenes in particular. At the end of session one for all new players I wasn’t going to chide them for “I indulge my vice to reduce stress dice” but it’s way more of an opportunity for them than just “I roll some dice” and that’s an education/mindset thing I think I need to help get them into.
As new players (and coming from a resource-management driven game where god forbid that bucket of HPs ends up empty!) they were hesitant to start spending Stress often for themselves (and stuff here was relatively low-stakes as a starter session), but everyone did stack up a little bit (and several of them are still 1-Harm “Shaken” from an ugly outcome while trying to capture a ghost with a lightning hook) so they did have some motivation to experiment a bit with what the different Downtime actions actually do for them.
They have expressed an interest in what they’re thinking of for their next Score though (to capture some more Turf), so I think once there’s a bit more “getting to know what’s around us” they’ll start to settle in more.