I apologize for the shotgun questions. My group played Blades yesterday, and a couple of questions came up.
1) Wanted Level:
1a) Can Wanted Level go above 4?
1b) When you roll entanglements, you roll a number of dice equal to your Wanted Level. Do you resolve an entanglement for EACH die rolled? Or do you take the highest die result if you have a Wanted Level of 2+?
2) Why do I think that Lord Scurlock is/was the (maybe secret?) head of the Spirit Wardens? I could have sworn I read it in the book, but have been searching and not finding it. I’ve also watched a lot of Actual Plays… so was it maybe in one of those and I am just misremembering? Anyone else have the same memory?
Thanks for any help with these!
1a) I guess, it cannot. Its maximum is 4, as any other stat (except Tier, which maximum is 6).
1b) You roll all the dice once and take the best result, as usual.
2) Lord Scurlock is a part of the setting and, exactly as any other part of the setting, is yours to define. Do you want to make him the secret head of the Spirit Wardens? That’s it!
I’ve seen people suggest that if your Wanted Level would go above 4, the crew is probably so notorious and under so much pressure from law enforcement that they’re forced to disband (or are all caught and thrown in prison forever / executed), so it could be a sort of Game Over condition. Which makes sense, as motivation to manage your Heat and Wanted Level, rather than just take Slippery and a couple Bravos abilities and ignore it forever.
An addendum to Daniele Di Rubbo’s point, Tier is max 6 for factions, but probably max 4 for the crew. Haha, really, if the crew is as powerful as the City Council or the Imperial Military, the players have kind of already “won,” I think; at any rate, they’re no longer underdog scoundrels trying to carve out a living.
Said another way, you treat the entanglement roll as if it were an action roll, and there’s only one entanglement. Unless the crew wants to activate Hard Mode.
On Lord Scurlock, I’ve read several versions of the book, and don’t remember that detail (also can’t find it with Ctrl+f), so it was probably from someone else’s game? (In the book, Lord Scurlock and the Spirit Wardens are listed as enemies.)
1a) If you can think of a good use for a Wanted Level about 4, the Wanted Level can go above 4. 🙂
But if you’re looking for the book’s ruling than 4 is the maximum wanted level. Other than the character sheets and the Incarceration section by implication, it’s also mentioned on page 106 under the ability “Fiends.”
Bear in mind, that when you take the fall for your crew’s Wanted Level, at Level 4 you face lifelong incarceration or execution. That seems about as high as it goes! Not because one can’t concoct a worse fate in the fiction, but because that’s getting close to as extreme a removal from the story as a character can face.
1b) Entanglements rolls give a single result from the number of dice equal to your Wanted Level, so I presume they are rolled like the other major rolls. It specifically mentions that if your Wanted Level is zero you roll two and take the lowest.
I think it was in the last word campaign on Actual Play that Lord Scurlock was reactivated from retirement. I’m not sure anymore from what he retired, but my guess is it was not the Spirit Wardens. His allies are City Council, Bluecoats and Inspectors, so probably something like that.
About Wanted Level: as I see it, Heat and Wanted Level are the crew counterparts to stress and trauma.
Level 4 is maximum, and it means a prison sentence is either life or execution.
A crew should reduce heat every now and then, to keep the wanted level as low as possible.
Thanks everyone! Jörg Mintel, I think you are right that the detail I am remembering about Scurlock was in the Last Word campaign. As Steven Dodds mentions, a search through the book (several PDF versions even), doesn’t bring up anything of the sort. Thanks again!
One last thing: whereas you can reduce heat through the homonyn downtime activity (p. 155), the Wanted level is a different story. The only way you have to reduce it is incarceration (p. 148).
Therefore, thread softly when you have much heat: it’s easy to gain Wanted levels, but it’s hard to go back from there.
I think it’s fine to cap Wanted Level at 4. Remember, if you’re Wanted Level gets to 4 and then you max out your Heat, you’re probably going to roll an Arrest entanglement after every score and their going to be sending 40 heavily armed Bluecoats to bring you in. And when they do bring you in, you’re going for a life sentence or execution. I guess you could just pay them off, but that’s 7 coin.
Point is, no crew in their right mind would want to stay at that level of heat.
Unless…