I’ve been loosely daydreaming about converting Blades into something akin to a solo card game, and to do that I think I would need to reduce the amount of actions from 12 to 8 to make things a bit more manageable.
Sooo.. I’ve been thinking about….
A) removing Command from the list, arguing that it could be considered to just be an “angry or imposing sway”.
B) Combining Prowl and Skirmish into Scramble ( from SaV )
C) Removing Survey, arguing that it’s just a “larger study”.
I am looking for other ideas regarding removals, substitutions or replacements that may be possible due to the overlap of the way that actions work. Any ideas?
If you want to really strip it down, probably the smallest list you can get is along the lines of Fight/Sneak/Talk/Plan. Presumably with more evocative names, of course, but those are the core verbs of the heist-action genre. (Which I’m realizing now are exactly the stats of Leverage – Hitter, Thief, Grifter, Mastermind.) Toss in Attune or a similar magic stat (loosely corresponding to Leverage’s Hacker, I suppose) if you want.
Cutting it down like this takes out a lot of subtlety, but it still largely captures the range of what a Blades character is going to be doing.
I’m missing the connection between solo card game and reducing the number of actions.
Will Adkisson I seem to recall that there was an earlier iteration of the rules that had Blade, Book, Cloak, and Mask as the Attributes, which fairly quite well to your list there.
Benjamin Davis Well, reducing the actions probably has less to do with cards, and more to do with making possible outcomes from action rolls manageable with a simple A.I.