One of the great things about Blades in the Dark is flashbacks. How to move that idea to other games? Here’s one suggestion.
In Blades in the Dark, the game assumes you’re scoundrels who plan heists, and the game has a stress mechanic that’s sufficiently abstract to provide a sensible cost for the flashback.
In games with other focus points, flashbacks could be something you purchase. Let’s call them “prep points.” Set a cost, I would suggest 4 hours and a fixed monetary amount, per prep point. Then, charge (stress cost in Blades +1) prep points per flashback. So, 1 for a 0 cost flashback, and 4 for a 3 cost flashback.
A character can get a maximum of 3 a day, representing over 12 hours of work and a significant financial investment.
For unspent prep points, have a converter to your system’s experience. The characters that laid in prep points and don’t use them in the mission get experience for the contingency plan, even though the players never find out what it was, and it never comes out in play. So the preparation becomes another way to turn the character’s time and money into experience offscreen.
Unspent prep points are normally converted at the end of the heist, but prep points can be invested in other things, like, “in case our base is hit” or “in case we need a politician on our side.”
Also, these prep points can be used for long term project costs. Four hours of effort and a fixed cost grants either a roll towards something, or guaranteed progress towards something, and you fill clocks like in Blades.
Just a thought.
You can also look at Preparedness of Gumshoe.
Would people just horde them for exp and downtime clocks? Might not be a bad thing. It also might not accomplish exactly what you want.
If people do burn their characters’ down time making plans and paying for them, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In games that involve treasure hunting, draining wealth in story-related ways is an important goal, after all. How do you keep the characters hungry?
In games that focus more on narrative issues, you can have a lot of fun with burning through time and treasure to set up more options for creative story telling and use of allies.
If the players are boring and use it as “money laundering” to turn time and treasure into experience, that’s only a problem if they are advancing too fast–a very subjective measure.
I found that gamers spend where they want to have fun. Gamers who love the drama will ignore stat increases, be curious about new moves, but have generally embraced adding more to thier turf. Heck the group even invented “Ghost Internet”
While other gamers who stick to the stats, tend to roleplay less and want instead to enjoy awesome combat scenes and insane fights.
Both have worked well under a single game. 🙂 I guess I am just lucky.
Interesting – but I wouldn’t connect it to experience at all. That’s a sure-fire way to encourage someone to not use a mechanic, in my experience – players will just horde XP to improve instead of playing around with flashbacks.
I would find a stress-like resource to use up (maybe Willpower in World of Darkness, for example) or just leave it free-floating to really encourage players to use flashbacks as much as possible.
I think with FATE, this works quite nicely, using the Fate Point Economy to ‘invoke’ a flashback – if its tied to an aspect of course – maybe to create an advantage as a ‘flashback’ in time to current events.
This seems reminiscent of the d20 Modern’s “gear pool” (equipment pool? something pool) mechanic, where you’d invest some amount of money and have an amount of undeclared gear you could draw from during a scenario.
So, if it turns out you needed a set of fine screwdrivers (sometimes labeled ‘jewelers tool kit’… though the ones I’ve seen, no self-respecting jeweler would use), it turns out you had them in your bag (and you reduce the size of your pool accordingly, and track them now).
Keith J Davies Yeah, like Batman’s utility belt. Sure you brought shark repellent. OF COURSE you did.
Trope-appropriate, so sure, why not?
I like the idea of providing some mechanical cost that underpins the narrative freedom. So, when you’re loaded for bear, that matters, and if you’re caught unprepared that matters too. =)
Agreed, there should be some balancing mechanism of some sort. However, the trope of having the Right Thing available when needed is a good one, even with limitations.