I’m really struggling with the Downtime phases. My group doesn’t like boardgames type of play and mechanically driven scenes.
When playing the downtime phase, it feels like a boardgame with limitations: pick an action on the list – play the scene. I know the phases are meant to be played loosely, as indications, but I just fail at providing a smooth rp experience when dealing with it. This really leads to a dealbreaker when everything else works perfectly fine for us. I’m planning to skip the downtime phases from the campaign, but I’m pretty sure I’m missing something.
Anyone would have advices to play it smoothly, not breaking the game too much, or mentions actual play episode where John or anyone deals with that phase after a score?
You don’t show everything that happens during downtime “on screen”. But if you and your players struggle to understand why they can e.g. only do two downtime activities, show them what their characters do the rest of the time. What does the crew do off the score? What are the characters tied up in? Family, friends, hobbies, being lazy? How does the gang as a whole work, not just the crew itself? If they make money with something, then the crew will collect dues from the gang members, will have to haggle over deals that are just to keep things running. Being a criminal enterprise has lots to do with legwork and paperwork! Also you have to do the same chores we have to: get something to eat, buy clothes, keep the family happy. That is tedious and that’s why we don’t show it on screen. But it leaves only limited time for actual productive endeavours. These are the two free downtime activities. If you need to do more, these other activities suffer, costing you money. This is represented in the game rules.
Yes, it feels boardgame like. But this is to prevent the players from playing their characters as superhumans that are only focused on their criminal enterprise. They are not! They are criminals trying to somehow get by and gain something in the end. I also want to achieve something in life, but most of the time I’m just trotting through the same motions day by day. Blades characters lead more dangerous lives, but they still are humans with family, friends, own needs and personal weaknesses. They are not there to fulfill a player’s power fantasies and just run off to the next score. They want to enjoy life, be lazy, party and they have boring stuff to do just as we have.
That being said, I should get to work 😅
“But this is to prevent the players from playing their characters as superhumans that are only focused on their criminal enterprise. They are not! “
Which is not an issue for us, just we’d rather play the game in freeform than with free actions. Which we would naturally do but here, we are stopped by the downtime phase. It doesn’t feel “fiction first” during the downtime phase, it feels “mechanic first”. I’m sure there are ways to play the downtime phase loosely without this problem, but the design actually put our mindset into a boardgame style of play with this phase. Where players wants to roleplay! Not discussing about what mechanics they have access to. I’m really looking to “stay into the fiction” instead of discussing about how mechanics affects the fiction.
I don’t have time to watch all the actual plays, even if I find them very enlighting. Any idea of which episode I should look at to help me deal with this phase?
I cannot really look up the the episodes right now, but I can remember at least 1 episode each of Bloodletters and Rollplay: Blades that totally focuses on Downtime … I’ll see if I can drag it out later if someone else doesn’t do it first.
I think one suggestion would be to treat downtime actions like Moves, in that you naturally follow the things your players do after a score, and if one of them so happens to be a downtime action, you follow the rules for downtime actions to resolve what happens, if not it’s just free play — remember that downtime actions by the book are not the only things you can do during downtime, they are just the only thing you can do a limited number of.
.
Grégory Meurant I felt the same way, especially since you are supposed to do the entanglements and payoff directly after the score, this feels forced.
When I ran the Few-Shot, we once did is as the book told us to and it felt very gamy. Next downtime phase we just kept explaining what everyone did and I pushed the entenglement in somewhere where it fit. My characters did things and when these things were downtime activities, I told them to cross off one of their free ones. When they tried to do more, I asked them to pay for it with coins, since they were not running other important activities.
The problem is: this leads to play moving from one action into the next. “I do this, then I do that, then that” – this leads to a feeling of the characters doing all this within a few hours or days. Because you leave out the tedious stuff in the middle. When you then tell the players “10 days have passed since the last score”, they start to argue, because they could do so much more in this time.
Asking them to just do 2 important, impactful things and saying the rest of the time is spent with stuff, mitigates this somewhat.
Sorry, it’s hard to explain. I have this trouble all the time in my D&D games. The players go visit everyone in town and do loads of stuff in just one afternoon. But this is only because they don’t tend to their needs and the world is kind of waiting on them. In reality if you wanted to speak to someone right now, chances are you won’t catch them or need to make an appointment for 2 weeks from now. Playing that as a simulation is tedious. So Blades cuts this out and just tells you “well, 2 things will work before the next job, somehow”.
As I said, I might be doing a bad job explaining what I mean, sorry! Hope it still helps.
Michael B. The book does not tell you to do the entanglement right after the score: “Bring the entanglement into play immediately, or hold off until an appropriate moment. For example, if you get the Interrogation entanglement, you might wait until a PC indulges their vice, then say the Bluecoats picked them up when they were distracted by its pleasures.”
I just roleplay downtime. The players love it. We finish the score, roll entanglements, and then we just go around, people picking their actions, and I frame Scenes for them if there’s something worth seeing.
We’ve used a Vice roll to reunite a Spider’s with her childhood friend, a Healing roll to learn about a Cutter’s fight club past and get a lead about a score, a Project roll to find the tension between a Leech and his sometimes-girlfriend about his lifestyle, and so on.
Somewhere in there, I weave the entanglement, making their lives difficult.
Downtime Actions are only that list of actions done after a score. Everything that’s not a score is freeplay, where you’re just roleplaying, like any other tabletop game. Remembering this is what helped me out. You’re roleplaying, setting scenes, being your characters, and your downtime actions are just mechanical moments in that freeplay. That’s how I keep my table from feeling like a board game.
Downtime actions aren’t the only things you can do, however they are the only limited things you can do. They cost to keep the crew hungry. They make you prioritize resources, not fiction. It’s really no different than any other resource management.
As far as Payoff and Entanglements go, insert them as you feel is appropriate and interesting. Engage with the Heat and Entanglement mechanic to guide the fiction, then place the results into the narrative as it makes sense.
These rules aren’t steps in a board game, they’re essentially “fictional initiative”, meaning you engage with them to set the stage, then you enter said stage and see what happens. Use the mechanics as dials and adjust them as necessary.
FWIW, I had the same issue and struggled with the “board game” feeling, but it quickly clicked and I let things flow naturally. Since then things have soared along beautifully.
Nitpick, but it seems obvious to me that payoff should happen right after the score. I mean, what? Does the loot they got not materialize immediately? o.o
Em, fencing the stuff away? Or first having to go to a meeting to get payed? Or first waiting for the dust to settle before starting to spend? Just saying.
But since the unit of measure is a more abstract one, yes, payoff should be right away.
Michael B.
“Waiting for the dust to settle before starting to spend” is irrelevant. You still HAVE the money. You might just choose not to spend it.
Fencing stuff is implied, generally – unless it’s stuff that’s Very Hard To Move, in which case I give them a clock to work on instead.
I had a player complain about having only two downtime actions because of how much he could do over the week period I said had passed. I simply asked him, “How much have you accomplished to further your own career in the past week?” Everyone laughed and we spent 15 minutes talking about all the other “downtime” actions he is forced to spend that aren’t directly focused on his career; spouse, kids, softball, dog training, shopping, housework, classes, taking his mom to the doctor, etc.
Players get into this mode of trying to role-play out every minute of their character’s existence. They sometimes forget that there is a good chance that much of their characters’ lives are uninteresting (in terms of being a daring scoundrel) and not really worthy of “screen time.” And, everybody tends to grossly underestimate how long it takes to get something done (how many times has someone been running late at your table? “Sorry, there was traffic.”).
Everything takes time, lots of time. Your fence isn’t just sitting at his favorite bar 24 hours a day waiting for you to show up (like a video game). You probably need to get in touch with the guy who gets you in touch with the guy who gets you an appointment to see the fence. Everyone is busy doing the things they do. Working on a Long-Term Project? Days spent in the library, leads followed, including several dead-ends, interviews, experiments, acquiring suitable materials; you’d be lucky if weeks or months haven’t passed.
Mechanically, I follow the various parts of Downtime as written in terms of dice rolls and such but keep it loose and narrative driven in regards to how things actually play out (that entanglement may play out in a few days, or in the middle of your Acquire an Asset).
Everyone is different as well, some players are cool with just a minute or two of narration regarding their downtime activity, others want to role-play it out. My general rule is this, if your downtime activity only involves one or two players then it is going to be a brief narration because it isn’t fair to ask everyone else to sit around watching you play out a scene no one else is part of. On the other hand if the whole crew is involved then we do play it out, oftentimes this becomes a score however.
Grégory Meurant I also struggled with downtime at first: it felt too gamey. Then I realised that Downtime Activities is just a tool that needs to be tailored to your group.
Some groups like to run things outside the score as very abstract, while others prefer to be more detailed. You can do both, even in the same downtime, zooming out if you’re not interested or zooming in if you are.
Sometimes a Recovery is just two weeks of visiting a doctor and staying at home, and sometime it’s an amazing opportunity to free play an encounter with that same doctor.
My point is: the limits in the Downtime Activities prevent the game to stagnate and also give a feel of urgency to your crew’s criminal life: you’re not working as dockers day by day, you’re managing a chaotic mess where you only have so many opportunities for doing things while being CALM & SAFE (which is the implication of a downtime activity): if you want more, it costs you in coin (bribes, payments, loss of opportunities and earning) or reputation (favors, loss of respect from being “out of the game”, etc.).
For example, you can surely acquire a boat as asset with a DA or you can just steal it, during downtime, in free play, but that’s a risky roll which can bring you trouble.
On the same note, about payoff: nothing prevents you from holding the reward if it makes sense in the fiction and your player are interested in managing that sort of things.
Genuine question: How is your group with engagement rolls? Coin rewards, XP and Rep trackers? Having an explicit numeric status relationship with other factions? What does your group look for in a roleplaying game system?
You could, if you wanted, just rip out the downtime phase of the game out and just play it semi-freeform, with just the basic resolution mechanics. It’ll mess up a number of systems that you’ll need to step in and buttress yourself, and some playbook abilities would need to be redone as to not be useless, but you could do it. But it’d help to know in more detail on what your group is struggling with, because if it’s just “boardgaminess”, other things would likely have come up as issues as well.
Far as I can tell, there’s two functions the Downtime phase serves. One is to give a breather after a tense situation in a score, giving an ebb and flow to the game.
The second is to both give opportunity for and limit expression of a particular player’s interests in the fiction. A lot of the PCs of a game will have interests and goals in a game that have nothing to do with their interests as a team. Which can be a bummer – you either squash a player’s interests altogether, ignoring them in the game completely; or you let the character have their solo adventures and everyone sits on their asses or does their best to be an engaged audience; or you treat every divergent interest of a particular character as if it was a problem for the whole team and bring a gang of weaponized demi-humans to meetings with estranged family.
BitD’s downtime allows for those solo scenes without too many contortions, but also guarantees the scenes will be quick and won’t take over the game (because they can’t fail). If your group is interested in those scenes being long and taking over the game, it’ll certainly feel like the game is working at cross-purposes with your needs. Does this at all sound like it could be the issue?
Another option: free play the downtime actions with risks. the effect is not guaranteed (baseline of 0-3 effect, adjusted as needed), and the risk is “this may cost coin or rep (aka downtime activity) to get significant progress”. they can try to do things which normally cost a downtime action, without necessarily using one
Mark Cleveland Massengale, I offer Devil’s Bargains on DTAs. It keeps things interesting(-er) and lets me unleash ideas that pop into my head. ”You want to gather up a gang of thugs? Sounds great. Might word get around to Lyssa? Yes? Take a +1d and let’s say that she wants a meeting with you…”. Downtime has just as much potential to give good narrative as Free Play and Scores; don’t look at it as a small part of the game, unless your group wants to.
Blades is a different animal in some ways and no matter what issue you may have, I believe that once you feel comfortable with the game you’re going to have one of the best gaming experiences you’ve ever had. It is more than worth the struggle of learning it. 🙂
Hi
Thank you all your answers. There’s so much answers that I can’t engage a discussion, I’ll take it as food for thought.
One of my question has not been addressed: could anyone point me to actual play episodes where the downtime phase is played?
Grégory Meurant, here ya’ go! If not this episode then one(s) soon after. Either way, they’re very cool.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jsmw4wC7iOE
Ben Liepis thank you! However I’m looking for the specific episodes about downtime phase! Impossible for me to watch all episodes
Oh, hmmm. My bad. I can scour them, if you like.