Hello scoundrels!
I’m starting a Blades game in a couple of weeks and I thought I’d run my little hack for online play with the group here.
To preface, I’ve run several RPG campaigns with one group of players attending the face-to-face game and another playing online, running different factions that shape the events of the game world.
Examples include
* A D&D game with the online players playing evil overlords, setting up plans and encounters for the offline heroes to thwart.
* A 2300AD game with the offline players as colonists on a planet supplied by nation states and corporations run by the online players.
* The Great Pendragon Campaign with offline players as knights in the service of the online players’ noble houses.
This may sound like a very work-intensive process, but at least for me it hasn’t been: with the online players controlling the factions, they tend to generate plenty of plot hooks and opportunities for the offline game, and vice versa, thus minimizing my prep time for sessions. The games don’t quite run themselves, but they’ve often allowed me as the GM to take the back seat and just see new developments unfolding via player choices without my guiding hand. In a sense, the online players act as glorified assistant GMs with the rules guiding them toward certain type of in-game behaviour.
For Blades, this framework seems like a natural fit, the game coming with a built-in Faction Game after all.
So I cooked up this ruleset hack for playing rival (or allied, or neutral) Crews online:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nJaUSOn28FBdZHs_ZSWfV3it52MQwLnfmTOBTkNUizk/edit
Please note that this is still very much a draft: I’ll likely end up tweaking the numbers and rewriting some sections later. Also, I’m hardly a game designer so some rules may be overwritten or obtuse.
The rules intend to increase scale, so that one player controls a faction represented by one character and add abstraction to the point where a score can be solved by one die roll.
One notable omission now is how you define starting relationships between the online player factions, but I intend to address that later.
If you like, you can share your thoughts – I’d appreciate it!
Do the rules as written make sense to you? What’s unclear?
Do you see any broken rules or possible exploits?
What would you add or remove from the rules?
Would you consider using such an online component in your game or participating in one?
Have you tried using any similar online frameworks in your games? How did it work out?
Lastly, kudos to the community for good discussion and the very useful collection of resources at the sidebar – and of course to Mr. Harper & Co for an interesting game!