Hey all,
First time poster on here and i have no idea how G+ really works, so i hope this is kind of how it works ^^
I love BitD! A really inspiring piece of game-design. The actual plays on John’s own youtube channel and the one on Rollplay really sold me on this game. Love the campaigns.
Now as a big fan of Exalted (at least the setting, not so much the rules it comes with), i was wondering if i could hack BitD to do a Blades in Creation/Exalted in the Dark game.
It would start as not much of a hack, to be honest…more kind of a renaming and expanding of BitD. And i thought i’d show you guys and gals what i have so that you can give me your thoughts and collected BitD wisdom.
If you know Exalted, then you know that it has the solars as its main protagonists (at least if you go with the corebook). That is where i want to start as well. Players would be playing Solar characters.
As a player you chose one of the five castes every Solar character belongs to (Dawn, Zenith, Twilight, Night and Eclipse) and then you fill out classical attributes and skills, White Wolf style.
Now BitD works very different from that but i was thinking i wanted to port over some of the feel of that, so i want to make exaltedish attributes and skills…this leads me to more than 3 attributes which i named (so far) after the…how to call it…essence of the castes in Exalted.
So i have:
Warrior/Prophet/Diplomat/Savant and Criminal (or Thief or Scoundrel or …?). Those will replace Insight/Prowess/Resolve.
As for actions, i want to do something similar. I want to take (some of) the skills from Exalted and “translate” them. So far i have
For Warrior : Martial Arts (aka Skirmish), War (kind of a tactics thing, maybe also wreck?!), Command (aka Command ^^)
For Prophet: Presence (has something of a sway/consort vibe…but i need it to be something different)
For Diplomat: Socialize (aka Consort), Manipulate (aka Sway)
For Savant: Sorcery (aka Attune), Occult (kind of a study for the arcane), Craft (aka Tinker), Lore (aka Study)
For Scoundrel: Larceny (kind of the thief skill), Stealth (aka Prowl), Hunt (aka Hunt ^^), Awareness (aka Survey)
My problem so far – i think i want 4 actions for each attribute, to keep it in BitD style. As you can see, i don’t have that yet. Any ideas for useful addendums to some of the attributes/jobs? Also, do you have something catchy as a name for Scoundrel/Thief/Criminal? I’m not satisfied with it so far. The night castes are the spies/assassins/thieves of the Solars…but so far i have not had an epiphany.
Another question: If i go with 5 actions under each attribute…do you think that’d be too much? Exalted has 5 skills per Caste…but then again, as each first dot of an action gives a dot for your resistance in that attribute…maybe 5 is too much? I mean 4 dice is already pretty good. So i am not sure i want to go there. At least not yet. Sure, Exalted can do superhuman stuff…but only as long as they have their magical essence at hand (i guess that is what i will call stress in this…essence…because..well, it fits ^^).
Ok, i’ll stop now. Lots of text. Lets see if anyone even reads that at all ^^
If you think this has some merit, please post. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Cheers!
JB
One thing you might consider with Actions: they are all verbs. The reason for this is because the player chooses their actions. The player can say “I skirmish him” or “I Attune to the ghost field to…” and these sentences mean something. They mean something in the shared definition of these terms at your table. They mean something from the (quite elaborate) descriptions in the book.
This is really subtle and probably won’t give you any hiccups. But the reason they are verbs is part of the order of operations. The players can simply say “I wreck it” and the GM can set position and effect. We don’t have to get into a long debate about if the action you described counts and wreck or not. Because we know what the verb means (from the formal definition in the book as well as our informal understanding at the table) we can step around a long argument as to what the character actually did.
“I wreck it” is sufficent answer to the question “what do you do.”
RE: Number of Dots and what Exalted can do.
More dice in Blades really isn’t going to give you more epic results. The best you can get is a Critical, and the effect of that is constrained by your position. What you really are looking at is Position. What a lone criminal can do with a knife vs. what a Dragon Blooded can do is a huge difference that won’t be changed by one more dice. It’s really a question of what the possible range of outcomes is for this person.
Honestly, you could do this pretty easily by simply letting the fiction drive position. What’s “Desperate” for a Solar is very different than what’s “Desperate” for a normal person. As the GM, you set position. So set it based on what Exalted can do.
You could go in and re-work the basic position stuff, but I don’t think it’s neccesary.
Thanks for the insight so far, Dylan.
I agree with you about the verbs, it is a neat thing. In my case, i was trying to “copy” the Exalted structure. I agree, it’s not as elegant. I will see if i can come up with more exalted-ish verbs but it will probably be hard ^^
As for dice vs position. I agree. But in the case of attributes, it’s different…there is no position. It’s about resistance.
Also, dice do change something…namely probability for a critical. But i do get what you’re saying.
Actions are about what you do, not what you know.
John H shows us they should be general enough that they apply to variety of situations, but have a specific approach built in, rather than a field of knowledge. This means the effectiveness of an action almost always depends on the convergence of the action’s intent with the action taken. But you could use the approach most other games have, and create skill groups. games like that take varying approaches to making skill synergy “work” (like +1 if you have related skill, etc) YMMV
FWIW, Blades PCs can hit 5d in a resistance before character creation is over. So that’s fine I think.
Interested to see where this goes. I never played Exalted because of the system. Maybe one day you will help me delve into this intriguing fiction
Thanks, Mark!
Are you sure you can go to 5 in an attribute? That is, without a special “power” from a playbook? I was under the impression that each action that is >0 gives you one die in your resistance. As there are 4 actions per attribute, you can have at most 4 dice.
Anyway…
No ideas for further actions/skills and maybe a more poetic attribute-name for the Scoundrel/Thief/Criminal?
The question might be a bit difficult to answer if you don’t know Exalted ^^ Be that as it may, thanks in advance…
Oh, well no- you cant hit 5D without an ability and well placed action dots. But it’s doable.
And if you were concerned about too many dice/too easy you could offer abilities that give other things besides bonuses to resistance pools. Forged in the Fire (crew ability) is the first one id replace if I was working on something where I really wanted 15 actions instead of 12
Don’t know what to do there. I’d translate those skills way differently if it were me. The set of actions we have in Blades seems to cover most of the things you want your skills to do, so I might replace a couple (like Hunt with something like Battle to be more warlike, for example). And the terms Warrior, Prophet, etc seem to fit better as the names of playbooks
Being a war commander instead of a good shot is on the discussion layer in Blades, so there is more flexibility with actions than may appear at first.
My $0.02
Hey J B, how did you get on with this? Did you get any further.
I’ve been reading through Will Wight’s Cradle series (rather Exalted-esque novels about supernatural martial artists) and it reminded me about your post.