Just ended my 6 month campaign of Scum and Villainy in the Star Wars universe. It was a ton of fun and the players all got to have a moment of awesomeness when taking on their final job against the Czerka Corporation. Once the main action was over, we had a fun little series of scenes with a pair of detectives meeting with each member of the crew and engaging in some verbal sparring over their involvement with the final heist, and then each crew member got an epilogue, complete with a mid- and post-credits scenes.
I really love Blades, and Scum and Villainy especially, as I’ve always wanted a system that does what it does. Flashy heists and daring cons and planet-hopping space adventures are a lot of fun and the system does them quite well. My only criticism is that with the right combo of ability choices, a character built for combat can easily throw around 5 dice with a push/gambit, which can trivialize those sort of events for them. But this was also my first run with a Blades system, and I think I learned a lot about how to present situations that aren’t so clear-cut and on my next go-around I reckon I’ll be better at it.
There will definitely be a next time, too as I really want to run a campaign set in the base setting of S&V because its delightfully weird and cool. Right now I’m running Stars Without Number with mostly the same group, and after that I might take a break from sci-fi but there is definitely another S&V game coming in my future.
I’m running into that with the Muscle of our group, too; in melee he gets 4d6 to start, so it’s tough to imagine him ever losing a fight one-on-one. Of course, that’s what he built the character for, and who am I to steal his sunshine? I’m getting better about thinking of ways to challenge him because of that, though: making Scrap a choice, but with less effect than another option; requiring non-prowess Resistance rolls to be able to get to melee range; offering tough choices as a result of him throwing down; etc.
I didn’t end up going with the presented S&V setting entirely. I made some of my own factions, renamed others, added a planet here and there, and generally altered how the universe worked. I like that the authors left so much room for creation.
Your critique of the combat stuff is fair (though to be real the big fighty characters are often really good at big fighty scenes). But remember that scale and tier can often offset dice pools (where pushes go into effect, or 4-5 results land serious punishment), and it sounds like you already have great ideas.
Hearing “I just ran a ton of this and instead of being burnt out I think about doing it again in the future” is the best praise. I’m glad you had fun ^_^
Stras Acimovic Towards the end I started having them make resistance rolls to act against some of the tougher opponents. Although with 4 dots in every category they were most often either taking 0 stress or getting 1 back. This is an issue I’ve seen in both Blades and S&V where smart players will put 1 dot in every action and have very good odds of overcoming most resistance rolls with ease. And its not like doing so is easy, after all that’s a lot of Desperate rolls and xp put into those tracks, so they’re giving up other things in response. It just makes challenging them a bit more difficult a few months into a campaign. I do think this can be offset by just being a little less lenient as the GM, but that’s something I learned from running S&V, and will definitely be implementing in my next campaign.
Thanks again for making this great game!
Thanks for running it and writing it up 🙂
It’s not the GM’s job in Blades to “challenge” the PCs. If they’re really good at something… they should be really good at it. 🙂 But it sounds like you’ve got a good handle on it now. Even a really powerful PC is still just one person, and can be overwhelmed by scale, tier, quality, etc. when they get in over their head.