Running Blades for the first time tomorrow, and super excited. 🙂 So of course I have thousands of questions. But just one for now…
There’s probably already some conversation somewhere about this that I can’t find, but: how does Blades resolve player vs player action?
Page 41 of the PDF.
In short – the game uses the same rules as in everything else.
As stated in the book itself, Blades is not a PvP system, so the players have to collaborate and decide together on how they will resolve the in-game conflict (will it be an action, resistance or fortunes roll, or some combination of those and clocks).
I’m interested in the answer, too. In our game, since they were part of the same crew, it didn’t come up much.
The few times it did, I let the “acting” character roll, with the “reacting” character having a say in what the consequence should be.
So one character attempted to pickpocket the other. The other player agreed that the consequence would be that they get caught trying to pickpocket, and don’t get anything, but nothing else.
Because they had a mind-linked monkey familiar, and the attempt was during an argument, we agreed it was a desperate roll.
Then we played on with the result of that roll.
We haven’t had any “serious” conflicts, or anything that couldn’t be resolved with a single action. I don’t know what we’d do if there way, say, a fight to the death or a serious assassination attempt.
The difficulty of opposed rolls strikes me as a sticking point – I’d be frustrated if something significantly bad happened to my character without any chance at all to roll or resist.
Aurimas ÄŚerniauskas thanks. I knew it had to be in there somewhere, but I was looking for player vs player in the index and finding nothing.
When we started the game, I also had a brief conversation with the group, and explained that (unlike the games we usually play) the crew is the main focus of the game.
So the crew has a character sheet. They will make characters who are part of the crew, but they’re free to make multiple characters if they like, or free to swap to new characters each session. They only play one character at a time, but it doesn’t have to be the same character.
And we would follow the story of the crew. So if there’s a conflict and a PC is kicked out of the group, then we continue following the story of the group. If the player of the PC that was kicked out wants their character to become an opponent, then it’ll be played by the GM like any other opponent NPC. If they want the PC to come back to the group and try to be accepted back in, then they can play that like usual.
That shifts the “high stakes” decisions into something that is roleplayed between the different players and PCs, rather than something that is rolled for using the game mechanics.
It also gives an “easy out” where the player can grab a new blank sheet, rather than needing to play their “old” character in an escalating conflict if they don’t mesh well with the rest of the PCs.
Because of the way stress and trauma works, a new PC is able to contribute towards the group success just as effectively as the old experienced PCs. They have less skills or abilities, but they have more stress available to burn, and they can risk trauma more easily since they don’t have any yet.
The answer seems to be “have a meta conversation and work out the rules of engagement like a group of friends trying to tell a good story together, not like lone wolves hell bent on winning”.
There’s actually an example of this in John Harper’s AP on YouTube, in episode 4, where Arcy and Canter (Sean Nittner and Adam Koebel) have a go at each other. That bit inspired my question, since it got a bit meta and it wasn’t so clear to me how & why John was resolving it as he did. All clear now though.