That Time My Players Fought a Demon or Blades in the Dark: You’re Doing It Wrong
I’ve fallen off the actual play wagon for my Dead Setters group, but this happened a while back when they were still Tier II and Teatime the Whisper and Richter the Spider accidentally freed a trapped demon from Lord Strangford’s family mausoleum. Taking a page from SNL’s skit about getting rid of bats, a cabal of Brightstone nobles thought a good way to stop this demon from possessing them one by one would be to summon another demon to fight the first one. Teatime helped them during downtime in a bizarre abomination of a wedding ceremony, and that’s how we ended up with an entity known as the Burned King gallivanting around Duskwall, collecting people’s arms.
For some reason (perhaps too many games playing heroic personas), my players decided to follow in the Winchester brothers’ footsteps and banish this Burned King guy.
I had been rolling some clocks for the demon during this lead-in and they knew it got six dice. I was trying to keep to the mechanics in every way I understood while allowing for my players’ obvious interest in pursuing this to color my responses. To their credit, they researched weaknesses and the entity’s history. The Burned King was once a warlord from before the Cataclysm. It was summoned by a perverted wedding ceremony, and Teatime actually critted and found details of the historical King’s nuptials. They modified that into a sort of exorcism chant. They got their electroplasmic ammo and their demonbane charms and their heavy armor. They studied the Burned King’s victims and figured out that it was taking the arms of artists and other makers – sculptors, writers, poets, clerks. They staked out a likely target, a local sculptor, and infiltrated his manor house posing as staff who then let the heavily-geared-up crew members in from outside.
Their engagement roll was great! In fact, most all of their rolls were great. The Burned King stepped out of the sculptor’s fireplace directly into an ambush. It’s riddled with electroplasmic ammo and assaulted by its own wedding vows-turned-exorcism. It is overconfident, however, and presses on. It simply can’t overcome the dump truck’s worth of sixes my players seem to be able to pull out of their butts when death is on the line (and death was on the line with nearly every resistance roll and consequence). They banish it, the final blow coming when the Spider palm-strikes his demonbane charm directly into the King’s forehead, embedding the artifact into the entity’s ectoplasmic embers. The sculptor’s house burns around them, but they manage an escape during the halfhearted attempt by the Brigade to extinguish the unholy blaze.
It was a hell of a good time. I thought the Burned King was kind of a pushover, however, and that’s despite using nearly everything I could think of without simply shutting down my players:
1. Single boss fights in Blades are actually really great. Unlike other systems where the GM shares the turn economy with the players, having player-facing rolls with consequences for imperfect success means your boss monster essentially gets to act every time a PC interacts with it. And being a demon, the PCs had to resist dire consequences (usually being burned or ripped open) before they could even roll. The danger was there. Level 3 and 4 harm each time the Burned King did anything. How much harder can you push, as a GM, right? “Before you do anything save vs. death. Everyone save vs. death.”
2. PCs really, really do have an insane ability to absorb terrible things. Armor. Special ability armor. Foresight. Resistance rolls. Being that it was a stand-up fight, most resistance rolls were Prowess-based, and my players are beasts when it comes to Prowess. Most roll 3 dice, some have all 4. The toughest PCs would routinely take the hits for anyone the King targeted specifically with the Protect action (that part felt a bit like Hollowpoint). Five players also means there’s a lot of stress to spend.
3. The Burned King could tell when things actually weren’t going its way and tried to escape. That’s when things went supernatural and it was more about the Whisper trying to ritually lock down the entity. Resolve rolls, desperate Attune, etc. Meanwhile the beatings continued.
4. I had two 8-count clocks, one after the other. The first one was like its fire aura – while that clock was active the King could simply burn everyone in the room (fat chance with those resistance rolls, though). The second clock represented its hold on this material realm – once it was filled by appropriate attacks (of which there were many), it was banished from this plane and sent back to Oakland or wherever.
There’s just no substitute for sixes. That’s #goodroleplaying.
#heestcomplete
Sounds like you had a good time. Were there any resistance rolls where the harm was downgraded instead of avoided?
I think we ended up with some level 1s, yeah. We set our sliders early on to where applicable armor (and a good resistance roll) just shuts down the hurt, and didn’t want to throw off player expectations there.
Yeah once expectations are set you don’t want to deviate. I’ve gone with armor being a total block and resistance rolls being downgrades to harm. But then I’ll get too clever and have multiple consequences and have the player choose one. If they choose to avoid the harm I usually let them fully avoid it.
My players tend to assist and push themselves for all their stress, so the resistance rolls are kind of rare at my table. But so are desperate rolls.
I miss the Dead Setters actual play reports. They were some of the most entertaining. Glad to hear that their antics continue!
Thanks Will! I’ll try and recap their road so far in another post.
Hooray! Dead Setters! Always so good.
Sounds like you have the boss fights down pat, but if you want to get really nasty with the demons, dig in to those “stress & the supernatural” rules. See how they like it when they start the fight with 4 stress just from seeing the horrifying mofo. 🙂
Hah! That is nasty. The guys chose Ghost Echoes as their initial crew ability, and early on we talked about how they wanted to focus on the supernatural and didn’t really want that ambient ghost fear messing with them every time. We agreed that Ghost Echoes would come with tolerance for that sort of thing based on if you see dead people all the time, you will get used to it.
I bring it up every now and then, usually while contrasting some hapless NPCs’ reaction to the awful crap the Whisper summons.
Demons surely aren’t ghosts, though… I’ll think on that. They’re currently in a contract with a different demon as of last session.
We had a low attendance week at my table and decided to give Ghost Lines a whirl. Where steampunk ghostbusters take trauma like dominoes falling. Afterwards we returned to BitD and the players had a new found respect in the ghosts they were peddling.
Yeah, that’s cool, Adam Schwaninger. It sounds like your group “difficulty slider” is over on the easier mode — which is totally fine! That’s why the slider is there.
(Never listen to the edge-lords who insist that hardcore is the only way to play anything. They have issues.)
LOL. We’re definitely doing Blades in the style of Leverage.
For my Glow in the Dark playtest, however, I’m keeping things a bit more centered. And I love that you can do that without having to really DO anything.