I’m thinking about using Blades (or a hack) for a West Marches style campaign. My play group is great, but it’s been really tough to schedule everybody at the same time. This way I could run it once or twice a month, moving the onus of scheduling on the players. If I have at least two players, we’ll run a session. If you can make it, you’re in on the score. If not, you’re off doing something else. Seems like the game structure would lend itself really well to this, but is there anything I’m missing? Potential pitfalls? Anyone else tried this?
Edit: To clarify, I’m looking more at the West Marches style of scheduling – players pick a date and you run encapsulated sessions so that you can manage with those who show up and it’s easy for those who miss session to jump back in. Not necessarily the exploration aspect. The structure of scores made me think Blades could work.
Yep it worked out. I did a hack last year called Westward
Sounds cool. I’d be interested to hear more, Vandel J. Arden
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Thank you kindly.
I’m thinking of running the score as the in-person session, and then handling downtime in a social media group/e-mail list so that people who couldn’t make it stay informed. If you skip a score, should you still get downtime activities? I’m thinking yes, so that people who miss a couple sessions don’t fall to far behind.
joseph deckert a few social media groups have dice rollers and smartphone apps. Then you could do Free time, Down time, and some planning in a “Play-by-Text message” way.
discordapp.com – Discord – Free voice and text chat for gamers
I run a Blades hack (basic player-facing details here – https://mhuthulan.mediumquality.uk/2017/12/11/the-edge-of-the-forest-player-guide/) in the open-table model you describe. I’ve also run S&V this way. I think 13 sessions so far between those two.
It isn’t ideal, because Blades is quite complicated, and although it has a general structure it isn’t designed to be played in an extremely schedule-tight way (e.g. if you watch how John runs it in Rollplay: Blades, downtime and free play between scores can take hours. I think one of the early four-hour sessions is entirely that.) I make various adaptations (e.g. we rush through entanglements and downtime without much description) but it still feels uncomfortable.
But, then, West Marches play is always logistically difficult. And our sessions are usually quite short – we average about 2.5 hours of useful time.
When a PC isn’t in a session, we don’t give them downtime. No particular rationale, but as PCs tend to wear out eventually (one of ours got four traumas in five sessions) “getting behind” may be a temporary thing.
Your idea about doing downtime etc outside sessions is interesting. I may try it out. It has the advantage of letting all active players participate in crew-related decisions (e.g. what advance to buy), rather than a random subset who played at the time it mattered.
Crew advances and other crew-level decisions are why I was thinking social media so that everyone can have a say even if they missed the score that triggered it.
I have noticed that John’s downtimes are really lengthy – and I was surprised by that at first listen. Mine have generally been shorter, and I think moving them online should work fine – they’ll basically be play-by-post for those portions.
When you say Blades is “complicated,” is there anything else in particular that has been troublesome?
Complicated – nothubg specific leaps to mind, but there are lots of little details in the rules that could matter but are easy to forget. In particular, there are many different ways for a PC to get +1 something on a roll, which are important in a game as harsh as this.