I’m having some trouble figuring out how to make the character I’ve put together work with the stats.

17 thoughts on “I’m having some trouble figuring out how to make the character I’ve put together work with the stats.”

1. Why wouldn’t you be able to roll it?

   It’s VERY easy to “cheat” the game if you want to always win, if you want to get the maximum benefit from your skills, or if you want to “trick” the GM. BITD works best when all the players are happy to limit themselves to only doing what makes sense within the story, and when they don’t try to always force a situation where they can roll their highest skill.

   Often failing a roll can make the game more fun.

   So don’t worry about your character idea limiting when you can roll those skills. Embrace it!

   Those limitations will push you towards playing more and more like the character you designed. Which will create more and more opportunities to roll those skills in a way that’s appropriate for your character.

   And since it’s more fun to play the character you designed rather than just playing a standard generic character, you (and everyone else) will have more fun!

2. All skills are limited by your character concept. A character with high skirmish skill probably doesn’t know how to fight using a seven section martial arts staff. Or maybe they do. It would depend on the character idea, history, and what makes sense in that game.

   They might fight as leader of a small squad, and might think that it’s punitive that they also need to invest in the command skill.

   All of the skills are designed to be very broad. Command might be a squad leader charging into skirmish with troops, or a research administrator managing a group of scholars, or a charismatic charletan who can sell snake-oil to a crowd.

   Whichever of those concepts you picked, it’d give you a use for the command skill, but also need you to limit yourself to only using the skill in a way that’s appropriate for your character.

   So… put your skills wherever makes more sense for the character. Then do those actions – and roleplay your character being a social chameleon. You might find that everything comes together nicely – because you’re roleplaying the social chamelon type of activities, you’ll be in a good situation to roll those skills and be able to easily explain why they’re something your character can do. You might find that you’re not actually limited when it comes to rolling the skill – but you are pushed to describe those dice rolls as something the character does.

   For example, if you want to find a secret entrance into a cult’s inner sanctum, a standard player might say “I’m going to use “Study” to look through the library for architecture plans of the original city, and see if I can find anything that we could use as an entrance” – but your character might say “I’m going to spend some time in the sewers, using my skills as a street rat, to watch the water flow, rat behaviour, and pay attention to how smells change in different areas so I can figure out if there are any hidden tunnels. I’m also good at watching people, so I’ll take note if anyone comes and goes without using the front entrance, and start following them to see how they’re entering.”

   Either way, you’d still roll your study skill to find another entrance. And it probably takes the same amount of time during your game session.

   The more you play this street rat chameleon, the more you’ll become familiar with how they go around discovering information. And the easier it’ll be to describe an appropriate action when you roll the skill.

   And when you can’t roll it? Go with it! Not being able to roll the skill you want forces you to do something different, or have another PC step into that gap. It keeps the game from becoming dull because you always use the same strategies, or roll the same skills. It might even mean you rush in blind and unprepared – and that can make the game session really exciting!

   How fun would it be to have your street rat successfully sneak into a warlock’s library, looking to gather information about their secret weakness – surrounded by books and unable to read a single one! How fun would it be to try to guess which books to steal, or look for other clues about the weakness that don’t require reading? – I can’t speak for you, but I’d love to be put in that situation!

3. Tony Demetriou I think the problem is often the other way around. Like, I feel like what my character is specialized in is often split across 2 to 3 action ratings, even though it feels like 1 skill to me. So the games we’ve played, what’s actually happening a lot of times is the action ratings feel frustrating or like I’m doing pretty much the same thing I did last time, but this time it’s a different action rating and I’m suddenly not good at what I’m supposed to be good at (or at least not any more than a character who’s been avoiding that skill). Or alternately 2 or 3 disparate skills, only some of which fit the character, are grouped under one action rating.

   So what is actually happening is, ok, I built a character that’s good at reading people and social situations. So that sort of situational awareness sounded like survey to me, when I was building the character. Except when I actually go in to play it, I go to use that skill and we read the book and, oh, this time your character’s main thing is actually represented by studying, too bad you put the dots that represent that thing into survey instead. Suddenly I have the same chance at doing my main thing as the party hound who avoids social stuff, except there doesn’t seem to be any reason in game why that’s a different action rating other than that the book had to split up the ratings somehow.

   I’ve had it come up the other way around too, where I want my character to try something that really should be the sort of thing they have to push themselves to have a decent shot, except because it was under the same action rating as something I did put points in I’d actually have a good shot. I wanted the blind rush you describe, where a character who usually hides and lies his way to avoid combat suddenly runs in to help a friend even though they don’t know what they’re doing. It should be an exciting, desperate rush where I’m taking stress or a devil’s bargain to have a decent shot, not something that I’m likely to succeed at because I put dots there to specialize in something completely different.

   Basically, I’m struggling because the skills and focuses I chose for this character seem to not align with the action ratings very well. So a character who is good at reading people and social situations, sometimes that’s survey, sometimes that’s study. A character who’s good at blending in and looking like they belong, sometimes that’s consort and sometimes it’s sway. And it ends up being a different action rating often enough that I feel like I’m not actually specialized in my specialties, but in something very different.

4. Hey, firstly, thanks for reading my replies!

   I know I write a LOT. Hopefully it’s relevant 🙂

   I think the problem is often the other way around. Like, I feel like what my character is specialized in is often split across 2 to 3 action ratings, even though it feels like 1 skill to me.

   How long have you been playing BitD? What games did you mostly play before?

   We had a similar issue – although we came across it in an earlier home-made game.

   We decided that, instead of having different skills that the character could use, we’d write out the different outcomes that they could create.

   This totally changed the feel of the game. Previously we’d played White Wolf games, and players would look at their list of skills when deciding what they wanted to do.

   Players were deciding WHAT they do, which told them how many dice to roll, then hoping for the right outcome. They were thinking of creative ways to use different skills to achieve the outcome they wanted (“punch the enemy vs drive into them with a car”) and picking the one that gave the best result.

   With this change, players were deciding what outcome they wanted (beat the enemy) and deciding which skills applied to that outcome (“fighting.”) After that, they were free to describe what their PC did. Since the description doesn’t really change the mechanics, the players can have a lot more freedom to describe anything that’s appropriate for their character and game setting.

   It worked particularly well for this game because we were playing superheroes. It meant that we didn’t have to worry as much about listing all the powers or balancing their effects – one player could roll “fighting” and describe shooting at enemies with their pistol, while another player could roll “fighting” and describe throwing fireballs.

   It’s not really as clear-cut in BitD as in our game, but using a similar attitude about the BitD actions really helped.

   So the games we’ve played, what’s actually happening a lot of times is the action ratings feel frustrating or like I’m doing pretty much the same thing I did last time, but this time it’s a different action rating and I’m suddenly not good at what I’m supposed to be good at (or at least not any more than a character who’s been avoiding that skill). Or alternately 2 or 3 disparate skills, only some of which fit the character, are grouped under one action rating.

   I think I know what you mean – and I’ve felt that same frustration. But could you give a specific example, just to make sure we’re talking about the same thing?

   When you say “doing pretty much the same thing” but you’re rolling a different action – it might need a shift in thinking, and a shift about how you and the GM describe the outcome of the dice roll.

   In a traditional game, if you’re lost in the forest you might roll “climb” to climb a tree and see where you are. But you’re only rolling to see whether you successfully reach the top of that tree, and after that the GM decides if you actually discover anything useful or not. It’s not really very clear to the player whether getting to the top of the tree will help or not.

   In one game you might roll the “climb” skill because the GM was thinking that you need to get high enough to see the terrain. In another game, the GM might ask you to roll “tracking”, because they were thinking more about whether you could recognise any landmarks once you reached the top. And the GM has to make a judgement call to decide whether this strategy has any chance of working, regardless of what the dice say.

   In BitD you consider the outcome that you want – in this case, you want to find out information about a location, so you are going to “Survey” the location. If you succeed at that roll, you discover information. It’s up to the player to describe how they go about surveying the location.

   If they fail the dice roll to survey the location, that does NOT mean that the acrobat PC has forgotten how to climb a tree. It doesn’t mean the tracker is suddenly unable to follow a trail. That’s not what you rolled for. You didn’t fail at that. The action you failed at – surveying the location – is an action that exists in BitD, but not in our traditional example. You’re rolling for that “did they discover anything useful?” decision that the GM would normally make.

   And you’re not rolling for success vs failure. You’re rolling for how effectively you succeed vs whether there are consequences. The consequence could be “you failed”, but it could be something else entirely!

   This gives a lot of options for how you want to describe the situation. You could certainly describe the PC falling out of the tree, but you could also describe them climbing to the top and not recognising any landmarks. You could describe them climbing to the top, successfully discovering where they are, but introduce some new consequence from the failed dice roll. Maybe they got stung by a tree-scorpion on the way back down, so now they aren’t lost anymore but they’re in a race against time to get to a hospital.

   A traditional game is pretty limiting – if your great climber PC fails that climb roll, we know they failed to get the information. There’s only really two options to describe how they failed – either they couldn’t climb it, or some external factor stopped them climbing it (no trees tall enough, too windy etc.) In BitD, you can use those same descriptions for the PCs failure, but the dice don’t force you to say that the PC failed.

   So yeah, think of the skills in BitD as the outcomes. Don’t think of your Hunt rating as “how good your PC is at shooting”, think of it as “how successful are you overall at hunting something down” – that sure can include shooting. But even the world’s best sharpshooter can fail in a hunt for any number of other reasons. Find a way to describe the hunt so that your sharpshooter isn’t missing their shots. Find a way to describe it so your sharpshooter still has interesting challenges to face, but their failures are fun, and make the character seem more awesome.

   So what is actually happening is, ok, I built a character that’s good at reading people and social situations. So that sort of situational awareness sounded like survey to me, when I was building the character.

   I’d have said Study. But Survey also works.

   They’re different skills, with different outcomes, so there’s no “right” choice.

   A character who’s good at reading social situations with the survey skill would walk into a ballroom and figure out the different social groups, spot that there’s an argument brewing over by the bar, realise that the host is oblivious to the brewing trouble, and spot that there’s a lot of guards hanging around.

   A character who’s good at reading social situations with the study skill would join a conversation, and really learn a lot about this one person who they’re paying attention to. They might not spot that trouble is brewing or realise there are so many armed guards standing by – but they’d discover that the host is distracted because the family is in huge debt and the banks are about to foreclose. The host is spending more than they can afford because they’re desperate to show that their family is still wealthy while trying to convince another noble who managed a group of Leviathan-hunting ships to go into business with him. And then hope that the new business venture will be profitable enough for the banks to delay the foreclosure. The noble doesn’t know who is sending them, but there’s been a number of veiled threats against his life.

   A character who’s good at both might come in, survey the room to get that broad impression, then study the host to find out the specific details.

   So you’re “paying twice” to be able to find out 100% of the information, but you’re not really paying twice for the same skill. You’re deciding how you want to express the character’s social skills.

   Except when I actually go in to play it, I go to use that skill and we read the book and, oh, this time your character’s main thing is actually represented by studying, too bad you put the dots that represent that thing into survey instead.

   Um, I’m confused.

   Didn’t you read the book first, so you knew what the skills did?

   If not, ask the GM if you can move some of your points around?

   Suddenly I have the same chance at doing my main thing as the party hound who avoids social stuff, except there doesn’t seem to be any reason in game why that’s a different action rating other than that the book had to split up the ratings somehow.

   Every skill list will have to split things up somehow. This is a problem for every game.

   Buuuuut…. if you have to roll “study” then the easy answer is that the party hound is better at studying people than your street rat. So, use the situation as an opportunity to develop the character’s further. To explain why this happens.

   The party hound is always spending time at parties. They’ve got a lot of practice talking to people one-on-one or in small groups. They pick up members of the opposite sex (or the same sex!) with regularity, and part of their success is because they have become really good at watching for different social cues. They can tell when someone is bored, or when someone is nervous. They can tell if someone is lying, and if they’re lying they can tell whether it’s just a white lie from a boastful braggart or a manipulative lie to try and trick them into making a bad choice. These are useful abilities that the party hound has just absorbed over time, even though they try to avoid social things. In fact, because they avoid social situations, they usually avoid larger crowds, and because they’re often alone any conversations they do have is more likely to be with only one other person – giving them more practice with this “close study” of the one person that they’re paying attention to.

   This street rat, on the other hand – they’re socially aware and WAY better at reading the situation as that antisocial drunken party hound lout! But they’re a street rat, they’ve always watching for trouble, they know that things can turn dangerous at any time. They also don’t have a lot of experience in upper class situations – sure, they can fake it, but that means they’re concentrating on their charade, they’re figuring out what they’re doing on the fly, and they’re covering any mistakes so they don’t get caught. They can walk into the room at spot the trouble that’s brewing, because those are the survival skills that they’ve honed over their lifetime. They’re able to lie well enough to fit in, because they’re good at social deception. They aren’t very good at understanding the host’s hidden motivation, because they don’t have enough experience with the upper class to know what it means when the host is fiddling with his buttons. For all they know, the host’s jacket is just uncomfortable. They aren’t particularly paying attention to the host fiddling with their buttons anyway, because they’re concentrating on too many other things at the same time. They’re great at figuring out the overall mood of the crowd, and to pick out key people and events. As a street urchin, that’s when they’d normally either get out of there, or they’d pick a target and make their move to mug or deceive. They aren’t so comfortable in social situations that require close scrutiny because they actively avoid those situations, because that’s when they’re most likely to be discovered as the fake they are.

   …. that’s just my description of those two characters. I don’t play in your game or know how you play them. But hopefully it shows how we can describe the different point values of the skills on the character sheet can be used to inspire more detail into the character and story.

   It’s not that they failed at doing “their thing” – it’s that they are great at doing their thing. We’ve just added more subtle detail about what “their thing” specifically is.

   I’ve had it come up the other way around too, where I want my character to try something that really should be the sort of thing they have to push themselves to have a decent shot, except because it was under the same action rating as something I did put points in I’d actually have a good shot.

   It sounds like maybe your group isn’t playing the game how my group plays. In our games, if you were trying to do something that you should have to push yourself to do, we’d either decide that it can’t be attempted, we’d say it’s a desperate action, or we’d say it only has limited effect. Whatever was appropriate.

   An architect using their “study” skill to spot a flaw in the battle strategy would have limited effect. That same architect using their “study” skill to look for a secret door in the sewers would have great effect. The strategist would have great effect with the battle strategy and limited effect finding the door.

   This is a really important part of the “fiction first” part of the BitD rules. The fictional situation, including who the characters are and what they’re good at, needs to be taken into account because it’s used to decide what needs to be rolled.

   I wanted the blind rush you describe, where a character who usually hides and lies his way to avoid combat suddenly runs in to help a friend even though they don’t know what they’re doing. It should be an exciting, desperate rush where I’m taking stress or a devil’s bargain to have a decent shot, not something that I’m likely to succeed at because I put dots there to specialize in something completely different.

   Exactly!

   And… that’s how we play it!

   I’ve gotta do something, but after I’ll make another post explaining how I’d run that action.

5. I wanted the blind rush you describe, where a character who usually hides and lies his way to avoid combat suddenly runs in to help a friend even though they don’t know what they’re doing. It should be an exciting, desperate rush where I’m taking stress or a devil’s bargain to have a decent shot, not something that I’m likely to succeed at because I put dots there to specialize in something completely different.

   So, here’s how I’d run something like that.

   I wouldn’t try to force a desperate roll – I’d let the game flow based on the dice and whatever comes naturally from the story. But I’d also allow things to go wrong, and when the players roll badly instead of describing that as “you fail” I’d describe it as “you’re awesome, but things are going wrong.”

   So let’s say that there was a mostly-successful mission to steal from some guarded location. The PCs failed a few rolls, and instead of saying that they didn’t get the loot, I said that they DID grab the loot, but were spotted by the guards, who are now chasing them. I use their failure to make something exciting happen in the story that increases the risk, rather than using it to block the players from succeeding.

   Let’s say that the PCs fled over the rooftops, and during the rooftop chase your friend has was shot by the guards. Instead of just giving them direct harm, I describe that they’re down, injured, and exposed on that rooftop. You decide to rush over to help, so your goal is to drag them behind cover so the guards can’t shoot them again, and then to somehow escape while dragging an injured, bleeding friend. Sounds like you might not make it – so the first choice is whether to save yourself or take this risk.

   Running over to get them to safety would be Prowl. You’re traversing obstacles, and it’s the skill usually rolled to climb, swim, run, jump and tumble. (I’m using the quickstarter as reference. I don’t have the book with me. I think maybe the skill descriptions have changed since then?)

   But you’re playing a sneaky thief who hides in the shadows. That’s why their prowl rating is really high. They certainly aren’t strong or brash or bullet proof, so we aren’t sure why their high prowl skill should mean they’re able to do this. On the other hand, hiding in shadows and breaking into houses through a three story window and other thief skills requires a lot of athletic skill – they might not be strong but they’re probably very agile. And being so good at moving through shadows means the guards are unlikely to spot what they’re doing until the last moment.

   We decide that this action will have standard effect level. There’s no reason why your PC would be particularly ineffective at getting their friend into cover, but there’s also no reason why they’d be extra effective.

   The position sounds desperate. The guards were already chasing, they’re already shooting, and you’ll be exposed on that rooftop. This is absolutely a judgement call – my gut feeling is that it’s desperate, but it depends on the fiction. Is it desperate because you’re running along a slippery roof on a rainy night and might fall to your death? That sounds like a desperate situation for most people, but for our thief who uses rooftops like a highway this might not be a problem. For our thief maybe it’s only daring. Or is it desperate because there’s a LOT of guards, and they’re all lined up ready to fire and will shoot to kill? That also sounds desperate, and not in a way that our thief would shrug off.

   We also have a lot of freedom to make the roll higher risk by using the position (it’s Desperate) or by adding more consequences (it’s Daring, but there are three consequences!)

   Now we decide what consequences this roll might have. Some are obvious, but let’s look at the standard list from the book.

   – Extra time, reduced effect, worse position, lost opportunity, complication, harm.

   What might that look like for this particular action?

   – Extra time: You turn around and run back to your buddy, but won’t get there in time. Boring!

   – Reduced effect: You’re dragging your buddy into cover, but their weapon harness catches on a ledge. You’ll either have to cut the harness (losing their gear) or accept only limited effect (you’ve got a little more cover than before, but the guards can still shoot at you and your buddy)

   – Worse position: You’ve dragged your buddy off the edge of the roof and the guards can’t shoot at you for the moment. But now you’re dangling from the rooftop by one arm, while holding your buddy with the other arm. Out of the frying pan into the fire, and whatever you do next action is going to be desperate.

   – Lost opportunity: The guards have already surrounded and captured your buddy. You might still be able to rescue him, but you won’t be able to do it with a prowl roll to drag him into cover. You’ll have to try a new approach – are you going to leap into skirmish and cut him free? Reveal yourself and negotiate surrender in exchange for leniency?

   – Harm: This is easy! The guards shoot you! But it doesn’t have to be straight-up damage. And there can be more than one harm complication. So let’s say that you might get winged by a bullet (moderate harm), twist your ankle on the lose tiles (minor harm), and fall off the rooftop and break your leg (major harm)

   – Complications: What other problems might happen now? Maybe the building you’re on gets surrounded? Maybe you escape, but the guards have a spectral bloodhound that smells the blood left on the rooftop and is able to track the PCs through the ghost plane? Maybe your thief realises that they’re in the middle of an enemy gang’s territory, and all the noise has attracted their attention?

   So I’ve just listed eight complications. That’s WAY more than we want!

   This is a risky situation, so let’s go with three complications, and let’s make them pretty severe. I like the falling off the roof idea, because the player still gets to roll to resist consequences, so resisting that fall can be described as them grabbing the ledge. That kind of rolls two consequences into one. “Your plan didn’t work” is pretty boring, so I’m going to skip the reduced effect and lost opportunity consequences. It’s pretty obvious that the guards will be shooting at them, so I’m going to keep the “get shot” consequence. And… the PCs caught the guards by surprised, they won’t be organised enough to surround the building or anything like that. So let’s use the enemy gang territory idea, that way even if they escape they’ve still got problems.

   We also need to decide what a “standard success” means. I’m going to say that it means you grab your buddy and drag them into cover, but the guards are still shooting. On your buddy’s turn, he’ll need to either roll an action and describe what he’s doing to avoid being shot (with a similar roll with harm consequences, and other consequences like “pass out”) – if you want to get him into cover before he has to make that roll, then you need great effect rather than standard effect.

   So now you got choices to make! Do you push yourself for increased effect so you can drag him into cover before the guards shoot again? Are any other PCs spending stress so they can assist you with this roll?

   Even if you’re great at Prowl, you’re probably only rolling five dice at most, so you’ll probably succeed – but you’re likely to still face the consequences. You might be lucky and roll a 6. But there’s a good chance you won’t. And if you don’t, that means you’re taking a bullet and going over the edge of the rooftop into enemy territory.

   So that means… resistance rolls! Let’s say you rolled well enough to save your buddy, but got hit with these consequences. Now you’re describing how you resist them. And risking your remaining stress points.

   Going over the edge? I haven’t mentioned my idea of hanging from the rooftop, but it’s an obvious description to say that you grab the ledge as you go over. So I’ll stay quiet and let that exciting description come from the player. And maybe they’ll have a different idea!

   Getting shot? Maybe you’ll just take that consequence, if you don’t have any harm yet. Save your stress for later. Or maybe you’ll resist it with some clever description.

   Enemy gang territory? That sounds like a consequence we can ignore for now. It’ll make life interesting when we’re trying to escape, but for the moment you’re focused on getting off this rooftop alive.

   So you put it together, and describe how you pick up your friend and start carrying them off the roof. The guards shoot you – it hits the hip flask you carry in your shirt pocket, and you stagger from the hit, going over the edge of the roof and dragging your friend with you. The thief has such fast reflexes that he grabs the edge of the roof with one hand, grabbing his friend with the other, as they swing there in space. To the guards, it looks like you were shot and both fell to your death, and your scream of surprise when you got shot really sold that illusion. Heck, until you grabbed the ledge, YOU thought that you were about to fall to your death.

   It looks like things might work out. There’s no way you could have outrun the guards with your injured friend – even though you’re still facing death, getting down from this rooftop is a problem you can solve.

   After that, you’ve just got to navigate enemy territory, covered in blood, carrying priceless valuables, with an injured crew member. No sweat, any danger you face tonight will only help build your crew’s reputation!

   Whoa, that was a lot of text, all for one action!

   But honestly, once you get in the grove a lot of those decisions and discussions go really fast. During play that would be literally fifteen to thirty seconds or so.

   … I can now continue to improvise the game. I don’t plan ahead very far – I come up with ideas, like in this example, for consequences in response to the player’s actions. Then I let the players and dice decide which consequences they avoid and which they don’t. Depending on the consequences I’ll improvise the next part of the game.

   I wouldn’t have any plans to make the PCs escape enemy gang territory, but because of this roll and a random idea I have – and because of the player’s decision not to resist that particular consequence – most of my work as a GM has already been done for me! We’ve got an exciting story coming up, and I didn’t even have to plan for it!

   … and this is happening when you have a high skill in Prowl.

   Because the action should still be exciting even if your PC has a high skill. In fact, it should be MORE exciting when your PC has a high skill, because usually players gave it a higher skill because those are the actions that they want to do the most.

   I’m certainly not perfect when I’m running my games. I don’t know if you’re already running them like this, or if you have better ways of doing it. Hopefully there was something in this description where you can say “Oh, wait, we’re not doing it that way. That might work better!” and you can experiment and see if it fixes the problem 🙂

   Good luck!

6. So here’s how I picture this character’s typical approach. Enter a crowded room, you’re looking over the whole room and then sort of zeroing in on a specific person or group. They’re more of the hang back and see what happens – so they’re not going to be interacting, but they’re going to be looking around the room, seeing who looks like there might be something interesting going on, reading the situation and people’s thoughts and reactions, while trying to blend in to the background and look unimportant. But somewhere in that description it changes from “survey” to “study” – like if I’m trying to read a group to see what’s going on, that’s surveying, but if I’m trying to read an individual person, that’s studying. Except that whole process should be one smooth action. I can literally describe watching body language and tone and listening to snippets of conversation for a group, and that’s survey, but when I do the same thing for an individual person it’s study. And it can become strained enough that it feels like I can’t specialize in what my character’s supposed to be specialized in, because it takes too many different action ratings to do one action.

   The way you describe “developing the characters further” just feels very metagamey to me. I’m going in, I already have an idea of how the character should work, and I put the dots on the sheet in a way that looks like it represents that. Changing how things are on the fly like means changing the character because of how the sheets are designed. Actually that’s how a lot of that description felt to me – I’m changing things based on the sheet and then changing the character around to represent the sheet. I’m not just doing what makes sense for my character and then rolling dice that make sense for that character.

   The thing that came up with survey – I’m trying to figure out something on the layout in the middle of a battle. That should be survey, by the book, but survey for me is intended to represent social skills. I can’t think of any way at all why my social skills would apply here. I didn’t really intend to give the character great skills at managing layouts and it feels jarring to suddenly add them in. Sure we could change the position or effect, but those seem to be more about how well the action affects the situation whether I succeed or fail. Whereas here I’m suddenly being told because I built a character that’s great at reading social situations, I suddenly have a high chance where I shouldn’t. I could probably justify it, but then we’re back to changing the character to match the sheet.

7. Study is the worst offender here, because it feels like it’s central to this character both that they’re good at reading people and that they’re bad at academic skills. So I initially chose survey to represent the more intuitive approach, but it often seems like what the character should be good at falls under study. Except one of their explicit weakness falls under study as well. So either way, it feels like the sheet is saying “sorry, you can’t play your character the way that makes sense to play them.”

8. Kay I would say that reading a room then honing in on one individual is distinctly two actions. They may happen in quick succession, from the same vantage point, but even in the character’s head there would be a distinct shift in focus, though I would say that the Survey would set up the Study, giving you a bonus die. Survey and Study, while similar are all about breadth vs. depth; do you want to get the general idea, or focus your attention on one thing, if you fully want both, then yes you have specialized, at least for the moment, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do other stuff.

   It also seems like you may have an very prescribed view of what your character is good or bad at. They’re good at surveying, but only in a social situation. Why? Why shouldn’t someone who can read a room not be able to read the flow of a battle? The same goes for study. If you give your character an eye for detail, and an analytic mind, even if they didn’t grow up around books, they wouldn’t suddenly become a gibbering idiot when reading one. The same skills are applicable in different situations, and I don’t see why that’s a problem.

9. I’m definitely picturing a particular sort of approach. The character is very intuitive. They could watch someone and say that person is nervous, or that person isn’t paying attention, but they wouldn’t really be able to tell you how they know that. They just do it instinctively. Whereas when confronted with a difficult book, their intuition doesn’t work here, and they don’t even know half the words. They’ll try but they’re struggling and don’t really know where to start or how to approach it. So it’s as much that study seems to represent a very different approach than what my character is doing.

   Part of the issue is also that the more my character’s modus operandi gets split across different skills, the less it’s actually possible to make a character that specializes in what they specialize in. Because you might end up needing 5 or 6 action ratings to pull it off reliably, while a different character might only need 2 to reliably accomplish what seems like a roughly equivalent level of specialty. And when you don’t find that out until after a few sessions, I end up feeling cheated.

10. It seems like ir’s the character and their approach that are being, perhaps, overspecialized. If you want a character who can somehow intuit deeper truths about someone, but isn’t analytical at all, and their skills are completely non-transferable to other situations, then yeah, you’re going to struggle, because, as far as I’m aware, that’s not a style of character the system’s meant for.

    So, back to your original question, of how to make a character who can read rooms and people, but who can’t read a book or a space, and how to do it without just not having your character do those things, and with a further caveat of not just limiting your effect when attempting things the character’s not good at? My answer is you don’t.

11. Zachary Miller See the problem for me is that the character doesn’t feel any more specialized than anyone else in the party. It’s just that other PC’s happened to be specialized in a way that they can have 3 or 4 things that they specialize in all fall under one action rating. So for example, our assassin can put finding out where a shot is coming from, actually taking the shot, and figuring out how to avoid being shot back, and tracking where the person went after being shot, those are all rolled using Hunt (despite being 4 very distinct actions). With that and prowl they can have a good shot at doing their thing in any situation. It just so happens that the character I built, their specialties don’t fit under one action rating neatly. So I end up feeling like the game is punishing me for trying to play my character in the way that fits the character, rather than fitting the character around the action ratings.

12. Three things here:

    1. The distinction I’d make between specialization and overspecialization is that the assassin character sounds like they have one thing they excell at, but your character seems to only have one thing they’re good at.

    2. The category of “hunt” encapsulates many things, as does “study” and “survey.” You’re running into problems because you only want to use a single aspect of these skills and discarx the rest.

    3. RPGs are a framework of rules that help you and your friends tell a certain type of story, with certain types of characters. Each system encourages different types of stories and characters. I think it’s preferable to accept that this system isn’t the best fit for this specific character, rather than try to fight it.

13. I think I’d be less frustrated if I didn’t feel like I’d found out that the system wasn’t the best fit for this character after spending a lot of time getting invested in this character. It wasn’t clear at all when building the character and only came up after we’d been playing a while. It doesn’t help that we were working off of the player’s kit when creating characters, which doesn’t have very detailed descriptions of the skills. But once you’ve been playing, it feels like the options are “take a penalty for the skills not being clear to start, or discard your character and start over.” Both of those are game-enders for me; if I have to do that for something that doesn’t feel like it makes sense in the story, it’s basically that’s it for me being able to enjoy the game. Even if I start over I find myself missing the investment in the character and that the character never had a fair shot and feeling disappointed at having to switch characters without a story reason.

    I’ve been leaving out some of the other skills the character has. From my perspective the character has several things they’re good at, it’s just those things don’t match up to the action ratings. So the assassin has several things they’re good at, that all fall under hunt. This character has several things they’re good at, it’s just they fall under different ratings. So they’re good at blending in, they’re good at getting into places they don’t belong, they’re good at sleight of hand, they’re good at picking people out of a room and reading people, they’re good at convincing people of things, they’re good at happening to be in the right place to see or overhear something interesting. Those are all part of the character. It’s just that the action ratings cut right across the things they’re good at in a way that feels like it pulls me away from the fiction and story we’re telling and pushes me back into a metagaming mindset instead. The character feels like they’re perfect for the story Blades is trying to tell, it’s just that the action ratings feel like they don’t match up to the world.

    At the end of it, I feel like the game is punishing me for trying not to metagame when I built the character, and trying to create an interesting character that fit with the story that the system is presenting rather than the numbers on the sheet.

14. I think what I’m struggling is – I love the fiction of the game. I want to like the approach. And I really am invested in a character that I feel only comes to life within the game world and belongs in that world. I want to be able to tell their story, but I’m having trouble because I feel like I’m hitting distinctions in the action ratings that feel very arbitrary and that I can’t justify why they are there within the fiction. The character has a story that fits the world, but the action ratings are saying you can’t tell that story and not really giving me a reason I can wrap my head around for why. And it feels like the solution I’m getting is to give up on the story and the parts that make it an interesting story to tell, and stick to playing the dots instead.

15. What distinctions seem arbitrary? Aside from study vs survey, which we’ve already been over?

16. So the problem is that social perception is split across two skills, and social manipulation is split across two or three.

    In the rules, you the player pick what Action you’re rolling with, then the GM looks at the situation and decides Position and Effect. That includes internal and external factors, and the relevance of the Action you chose. I think it might help to talk with your GM about putting greater weight on character background as a factor when deciding Position and Effect.

    The description of Survey says “You might detect a person’s motivations or intentions (but Studying might be better).” To me, that says that whether Study is better depends on the situation. You could try pitching to the GM that in situations where your character is trying to determine NPC motivations, Survey has the same Effect as Study. That would let you combine both social perception uses into one Action rating. You can make a similar pitch for combining Sway and Consort. That puts your character specialties under just two Actions instead of four, consolidating them to be more similar mechanically to the assassin’s situation.

17. Just as a side note, I wouldn’t have allowed the assassin to do all those actions under only Hunt.

    Or I would. But it’d impact the position and outcome.

    Hearing where the shot came from seems like Survey to me. But looking at the terrain and guessing where you’d set up if you were the sniper is Hunt. So either roll might tell you where the shot came from, but the player’s description influences what they roll, how effective it is, and what consequences they might face.

    It’s pretty common that my players know they can roll either, but still need to consider which is best, because it’s not just “roll an extra 2 dice if you pick this one.”

Comments are closed.