Hey, I have a question about how to handle a situation. In the game I’m running, our Cutter discovered which gang murdered his friend, found two members of that gang, beat them to a pulp, knee-capped one, and said “Tell your friends I’m coming for all of them.”
Well, the gang isn’t going to go quietly, and instead plans to attack the Cutter next session, basically just catching him out in the street and knifing him. I was wondering how to run this, since it’s a pretty NPC driven action instead of player driven. My thoughts were that I basically make it an impromptu Score, where the Cutter uses his Survey as the engagement roll to see if he sees the ambush coming. He can also choose score type at that time, is he going to stay and fight (Assault), try to flee (Stealth), or maybe even talk his way out (Deception or Social). Does that sound like the way to run it?
My other thoughts were just do it all as free play, but that seems too abstract and the group is probably going to take some stress, if not harm, so I want them to have downtime actions after. Thoughts?
I would handle it in Freeplay.
Retribution is rarely convenient. Use the Tier-level of the gang to determine the quality of the assassain, and from there Effect of the hit.
PC can always Resist. It’s a prime situation for some awesome Flashback-ing (“Ok, I saw this coming. How much Stress to have my cold-blooded murderer Contact/our Elite Crew Cohort/Gang of Thugs just around the corner?”), puts them in an interesting and new spot for the actual Score too (“Well guys, we need to be more conservative now. No more coming at this heist straight on…”). Don’t shy away from the grit 😉
You could handle it as the entanglement after a score; either instead of rolling dice on the entanglement table, or you simply wait until an appropriate result comes up.
Or you could use the ambush as a complication to an action roll in the next score of the group.
You could even use this gang in the engagement roll of the next score to answer the question “Are any enemies or rivals interfering in the operation?” with “yes”.
I don’t mind the gritty, the issue is the only way to heal is in downtime. My players already are usually full on stress and taking some harms, they don’t get to do a lot of long term projects or anything but heal up. Introducing a new source of damage with no recovery opportunity just means more time spent healing after scores.
If you’re playing to find out what happens, and they telegraphed to a nasty enemy that they’re coming for them, then isn’t this what happens? Why shy away from notching up a(nother?) Trauma? You can have 4. You say you don’t mind gritty, but this is it, this is the grit. Maybe next time they’ll wait for vengeance until they can take it to the whole gang at once at end it in one go? Or not let them know who just ganked ’em? Or maybe they won’t learn anything, and they’ll get sucker punched again?
I always say that the primary purpose of the GM and the NPCs is to make the PCs look good. This ambush is a golden opportunity to make the Cutter look absolutely badass.
That doesn’t mean you just hand them a win, of course. Make them work for it. Don’t be afraid to hammer them with Harm, especially after they send a message like that. And if it does end up taking them out of commission for a while, that’s fine. Blades works surprisingly well with multiple characters.
If you want some inspiration on how others have handled this, you could check out:
youtube.com – RollPlay: Blades – Week 10, Part 2
(Spoilers) During downtime/freeplay the crew gets ambushed, but they get a lot of options to handle the situation so they don’t feel like they just got “telefragged”.
Philip Kristoffersen Thanks, that video was very helpful. I figured they had similar situations somewhere in the videos, but finding them would have been tough.