11 thoughts on “Hey folks!”

  1. Usually I, and other GMs I’ve played with, just allow them to create separate contacts as they’d like. If they want to have the same contacts, though, then that’s fine too!

    Making up your own contacts shouldn’t break the game or anything, so long as you avoid obvious bad ideas like “The Immortal Emperor.”

  2. Do you think it’s a problem for them to have the same contacts?

    A contact is both a resource, and a way to develop your character and crew. Set “contact as a resource” aside for a moment:

    If two players chose Eckerd the Corpse Thief as their contact, one player might have him as a former mentor and another as a current lover. Or maybe Eckerd was the former mentor of both characters, but one has him down as “close friend” while the other has him as “rival” — their apprenticeships turned out very differently from one another…

    I think that makes the game more interesting, not less, because that creates interesting dynamics between players, and makes the shared contact a bigger, more significant part of the game. 🙂

    Yes, if the players pick a contact in common, that’s one less “resource” for them to draw upon, or one less foe to struggle against — but in Blades, gaining access to new resources is fairly easy and a lot of fun, and picking up new rivals is 100% inevitable :P.

    So all it really means is that the players are focusing more attention on a common NPC, instead of dividing up their attention between a few different (and less-significant) ones.

    As long as (A) the players are interested in the choices they’ve made and (B) they don’t create copy-clones of one another’s characters, I think you’re golden 🙂

  3. Yes, I believe it’s a problem. I’ve taken to allowing players to swap out “known NPCs” with people we meet in the game, so the starting lists customize in a few sessions.

  5. We’ve always treated the contacts as more of guidelines than anything. No reason there can’t be too competing pawnbrokers. Or a Hound can’t have a friend that’s a Leviathan Hunter. I also don’t see a problem with having the same contact for two different people. Before too long, your crew is going to be sharing cohorts and experts, no reason not to start early.

  6. As a gm I dont see a problem, its up to the players to figure out how to run their characters not the gm. But if people want to swap out to custom npcs, I let them. But Im not going to make them do that if they dont want to..

  7. Actually, what I have seen which I still dont think was a problem for me as the GM was one player picked a contact as a friend and another picked it as a rival. But that just led to interesting game play. Actually I can see a cool love triangle storyline forming with two crew mates sharing the same contact as a lover or something. Knowing the crews I run, it’d probably end some Shakespearean self destructive manner

  8. Tangentially related: Am I the only one who is bothered when a player wants to change a name on the contact’s list? It’s happened to me a couple of times. It’s like inviting someone to come play in your sandbox and they show up with a ziplock baggy of some caribbean white sand and they’re like “do you mind?”

  9. Levon Jihanian I usually take it to mean they are putting some thought into it and trying to personalize the story. It’s more like inviting someone to a party and they show up with extra beer and say “Hey, just wanted to bring you something in case you end up needing it.”

  11. Levon Jihanian I allow it, but does bother me. I make it clear that contact is an npc which I will be running with complexity factors that I control. But if they are cool with that and flesh out the contact I roll with it.

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