How Do You Design Scores?
This one’s for fellow BitD GM’s. How do you go about designing the scores your players go on? Make it up on the fly? If so, how? What’s your thought process?
Do you prep? How/ what do you prep, what do you leave for the table? Do you draw maps?
Make them up on the fly. If I know that they’ve got a plan for next session, I’ll make a list of ideas for obstacles, consequences and Devil’s Bargains, but otherwise I just go with whatever they’re doing.
Otherwise, for prep, I just follow the Faction Downtime rules.
I draw maps in play as we need them to clarify things.
Historically, I’ve done it on the fly, and have become convinced that’s a bad idea more often than not.
So I do a little prep. And I lean on the players for a little more detail than the rules call for, specifically to set up the job. At the very least, I need a Mark (that is, the person who is being targeted). Having that fills in a surprising number of details because I can extrapolate the mark’s relationship with the target and the resources they have available. That tends to turn very naturally into the things that need to be overcome.
Beyond that, it really seems to vary by score type. Planning a break in or assassination is pretty simple – just need a little geography and a few threats to tie things together. A modified 5 room dungeon approach works surprisingly well.
Other kinds of scores though – I’m not satisfied withy methodology and am very curious what others suggest.
I’m a little crafty when it comes to scores. Between every session I create a newspaper that details what they’ve been up to, where all the clocks are, and then I give them a choice of opportunities that’s anything from “Help Coran and the Billhooks against the Magistrates” to “Baszo Baz’s Gunpowder Caper” to “A Dark Job for Lyssa” and behind the scenes I’ve sketched out the type of heist and the rough building.
For the opportunities they don’t choose, I recycle the planning into future heists. So for Baszo’s gunpowder train heist I’ve got the foundation for another train job, but I’ll make the thing they’re grabbing is a diplomat. That way most of my planning doesn’t go to waste.
One way to handle the task that’s somewhere in the middle is to use the heist deck.
fictivefantasies.wordpress.com – Duskwall Heist Deck
The idea here is you draw two people, who are powerful and shady enough to be either the employer or the target. Draw a card for a treasure worth heisting about. Then draw three obstacle cards.
Think about ways all those pieces might fit together, and it helps stretch your creativity in some directions you may not have thought of on your own. Also, those things become part of the world. And the cards are only suggestions, so drawing more cards or swapping out options or getting inspired and doing something else altogether are all possible.
The cards can be used on the spot, but it can be fun to draw them ahead of time and put some thought into unexpected ways they might fit together.
To see how the process might work, there are some samples here.
https://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/blades-in-the-dark/
I don’t do much explicit planning for scores, but I do get a pretty good sense of my players and what they want to do “on next week’s episode” so I spend a week creating a “thought cloud” of stuff that I could use as complications and maps.
For example, my crew has become obsessed with the announcement that a sparkwright group at the college has announced the development of a prototype submersible. So now I’m spending some time thinking about speed bumps that can occur at an industrial revolution era university research lab tainted with ghosts.
I roll about 40d6, go to the random tables and generate a mission, a place, and an npc about 30 minutes before a session, draw a couple tarot cards and scrap what i need to make it work if they pick a different mission.
I’ve done most of mine on the fly. Most of them have been born from the previous session’s Entanglement roll or from a Vice scene. That and I provide several rumors based on the natural outcomes of previous sessions. Clocks and such. Then the players ask questions/ gather info about the rumors they find most interesting.
That said, I’ve started to develop some templates for prep based on my growing knowledge of the natural flow of the game and the economy inherent in its odds and mechanics.
e.g. I want to set a timer on how long the opportunity remains open for a Score tonight. Given the amount of time we have to play, the skill level of the PCs, the tolerance of the players for risk, etc. how long should the clock be assuming I make 1 tick to it as all, half or one-third (Controlled/Risky/Desperate) of the cumulative complication consequences (1-5 results) likely to occur and have it work out to about a 50% chance of success assuming the PCs never add stress or take Devil’s Bargains?
Or… I want to have a chase scene at some point tonight. How am I going to handle that if the opportunity arises in the fiction where a chase scene makes sense?
That’s the extent of the prep. Having stuff like that figured out ahead of time allows me to concentrate on coloring the world, responding to the players, and following my moment-to-moment curiosity.
I’m still working out what and how much to prep, because the last two times I wound up improvising a lot anyway.
Some of my prep is just pre-rolling on random tables and filtering for results that look interesting, so I don’t have to do it at the table.
One bit of prep I’ve found useful was making a one-click generator on Perchance.org for Leverage Jobs. I mostly use the “Target’s weakness and vulnerability” part. That gives me something to reveal during the gather information phase that the players can tug on to create their plans.
Simple building plans are immensely helpful. I’m finally getting to use my copy of the AD&D setting book Lankhmar: City of Adventure. One tip I’ve seen is to roll dice and use how they fall to dictate the layout of the rooms.
Given some intrigue, players will usually tell me their ideas and I use that.
Otherwise I roll randomly and make it up on the fly by tying the goals of another faction (see faction section, and which projects they are pursuing). However I will not roll for the things I know they wanted. Like if they say “Let’s see what other jobs Lyle has for us..” and Lyle is their contact in Six Towers for assassination jobs, I won’t roll for the type of score- I probably will just roll the stuff I’m uncertain of.
On the fly because players have 100% autonomy on what score they do next.
Edit: and I actually encourage them to make the score most of the time.