I’m working on adapting Blades to the particular brand of Shadowrun I like to run and to do that I think I need to significantly alter the current structure of the game. I’d appreciate advice doing so.
So, in Shadowrun when you break into a corporate facility to steal/place/kidnap/observe and then bug out, Blades’ current structure works fine. But, for example, our last mission involved a two-week timeframe where the objective was to “convince” six members of a corporation’s board to vote a particular way.
If we were using BitD, there would have been half a dozen Scores with no Downtime in between, with how Blades defines Downtime. After all, you’re still on the clock, you’re still in the middle of a mission, you can’t go on a wild party or take a day off to gamble. The runners may well have Trauma’d their characters into retirement in that mission because there would be no traditional “Downtime”.
So, essentially the idea is to place a fourth frame over Score -> Downtime -> Free Play. The Mission. Within the Mission, you pull off Scores which contribute to the mission, then get Downtime recontextualised in the fiction as less time to go on a drunken bender, and more those breathers where things aren’t up to 11. Where you have a few hours, maybe even a day, to regroup. But you’re professionals, so I don’t see Vices as appropriate to the fiction I want.
And of course, Downtime consists of Heat and Entanglements (but not Payoff). Heat is less Blades’ traditional representation, and more Sprawl’s Legwork clock. Because after all, you aren’t running a criminal enterprise which the police are getting closer and closer to unravelling. You’re shadows that bleed into the darkness after the mission is over, the only time Heat matters is when the job is on. So after each Score of the mission, you attract more and more attention, but you have the Downtime actions to try to divert that attention away.
This is all my current speculation at the moment. I’d appreciate any advice on the subject. The main issues I see are when you do get more traditional single-Score Missions, as my current concept is to wipe the slate clean Heat, Harm and Stress, after each Mission ends. And if they’re only one Score, then it makes it feel like Harm and Stress doesn’t matter that much (although the threat of death and incapacitation certainly helps a little there).
Do you have other examples that came up in play as to why you want this? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for hacking games (particularly use them to play in the Shadowrun setting), but this seems a little extreme, just to handle the example you mention.
For example, why not just abstract convincing the six people into one Score instead?
Similar to what Lester Ward says, my first thought was that convincing all six board members to vote a certain way would be one mission. Not six.
This idea is interesting, but it seems like a better fit for something trying to emulate a procedural show. For Shadowrun, I’d agree with the others that having it all be one score makes more sense, but in the context of a procedural drama I think it sounds like a neat concept. Scores would be the jobs-of-the-week that pop up every episode, and the Mission would be the over-arcing plot of the season.
One big conspiracy to take down/plot to unravel/etc per season, when you are done with that everything takes a breather until the second season.
It’s worth noting that in that model scores don’t have to relate directly to the overarcing Mission; in Burn Notice, for instance, helping a hospital get rid of drug dealers that are destroying the neighborhood is a score, but so is breaking into a building to steal files on the conspiracy that burned Westen. But since the group still is under pressure from the conspiracy’s influence and whatnot, it still fits with your model.
Ultimately, though, I’m not sure what this looks like mechanically. Right now, there is just some overarcing goal that when you complete it, you wipe heat and stress. That’s fine but it doesn’t seem to accomplish much. The rest of it is just different ways of looking at and thinking about Heat/Downtime/Vice, which is a neat way of looking at things but seems to fit just fine into Blades’ mechanical framework.
It is one mission, but it turned out to be around half a dozen Scores in total, with what might have been called Downtime and Free Play in between. There would have been no conceivable way I could have abstracted convincing six people with six different agendas in six different places all into a single Score. I didn’t decide what the Scores were anyway, I was the GM, I just laid out the details and the players did what they wanted.
Any kind of “investigation” mission would require this, as they often require multiple “scores” to complete, with what would be called Free Play and Downtime in between. Any mission where there are multiple targets.
To clarify, that example is not extreme. The kind of Shadowrun missions that I most enjoy running are exactly those kinds. Where there’s a sandbox and the players navigate it the way they want to.
Will Adkisson The idea is really just a fictional adjustment, with some mechanical ones to boot. The concept of the Mission in this case isn’t so much the overarching plot of a procedural show, but a representation of a single instance of employment and all work and events that involve that employment.
You are hired to find out who the employees were at this free clinic between these dates and then systematically assassinate them. You have a large period of time to complete the job (say, a month) but unlike a procedural show with large breaks in the action, here they are shorter breathers. After all, you are on the clock. The faster you finish the mission, the faster you get paid and things are over.
What is accomplished by adjusting the way this is structured is essentially so that Downtime can take place during a Mission, which within its current fiction, it can’t really. Downtime in normal Blades in the Dark can take weeks. In this structure, it could take an hour.
You usually track things like this with progress clocks, updating as circumstances changes, but perhaps I misunderstand what you mean. Also please explain why you think there is no downtime possible while there are six different things happening.
It’s really about how much you zoom in on the details. In our game, we just ran a score that was actually a series of linked jobs that took place over the course of two weeks. The crew was attempting to eliminate (through one method or another) a number of shop stewards in the Docks, in order to install their own replacements.
Mark Cleveland Massengale It’s less that there are six different things happening, and more that the fictional position of Downtime is not brief. It’s not a breather. It’s Downtime. Really, in this hack I might call it Respite rather than Downtime, because there is no downtime while the mission is still happening.
Ben Morgan Right, but in the case that we wanted to zoom in on every step of those two weeks, because that is what our group wants to do. If it were one, long, uninterrupted string of Linked Plans would cause such stress to accumulate that you would end up with a bunch of retired scoundrels after only two weeks in the biz.
In the Blades in the Dark game I played with Sean Nittner our goal was to steal guns from the hive and sell them to the Skovlan revolutionaries. We handled that as two scores: One to steal the guns and the other to hawk them.
I can’t see any reason not to run that mission as 6 separate linked scores much like we did since dealing with each board member is likely a very different task with different needs and difficulties.
You could umbrella those linked scores with a Mission but it’s not really needed from a game mechanics perspective.
Colin Fahrion Because firstly, there would not be time for the necessary Downtime in between. Two Scores a scoundrel could survive without Trauma if they started off low and were a little conservative. Six, not so.
Secondly, the mission wasn’t just six Linked Scores. It had events in between that would have been described better as Downtime and Free Play. In fact, I’d say the majority of the mission was Downtime and Free Play.
If you feel you the need for some change in the system, you could treat the crew as if they’re at war. So only one free Downtime action each. Maybe they have to spend time monitoring the mark, preparing to move or covering their tracks.
Otherwise, I’d just stipulate you have no more than a day or so for Downtime because we know the mark will X. That could affect what Downtime actions they do, or could just change their flavour. Either way, I don’t see the run of scores you describe as being that different to normal Blades play. If there’s no payoff, well there’s no payoff; that’s standard procedure.
Initially I was a bit confused by this question.
I think this part of the text on page 8 is relevant here:
“The phases are a conceptual model to help you organize the game. They’re not meant to be rigid structures that restrict your options (this is why they’re presented as amorphous blobs of ink without hard edges). Think of the phases as a menu of options to fit whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish in play. Each phase suits a different goal.”
While you may well want to create a new Mission system for other reasons, doing so because you can’t figure out how Scores and Downtime can all happen in the right orders is a misinterpretation of how the game is intended; that’s recommended as a baseline pacing that seems to work well, but the game is not designed so as to only function as: Free Play -> Score or Linked Scores -> Downtime -> Repeat. That’s a model to help the GM decide how to run things not a model required for the system to work well.
When “everyone leans in” and you’re zooming into the action? Most of the time that’s a good indication you should be leveraging the game’s Score system. If everyone is taking a break and there’s nothing in the works except long term projects and you just pulled off a mission/score/whatever? That’s a good indication that you should be leveraging the Downtime rules.
But the dice are still on the table in “free play”; you can still pull off criminal shenanigans, track things with progress clocks, and so forth. Scores and Downtime leverage additional mechanics to enhance certain narrative beats; if you’re not in those beats–even if the PCs are doing things similar to what they might do in those beats–look to the core mechanics from a free play perspective.
What I would ask is: what does this new mission framework bring to the table mechanically?
Downtime is about getting a mechanically enforced breather as well as linking up the Scores system with the Crew and Faction level of the game. You’re not supposed to tell players that they can’t try acquire assets outside of Downtime–it’s just that in Downtime they can use the Acquire Assets action for “free.” Outside of Downtime, you have to spend the time, coin, rep and fictional positioning more explicitly. Same with advancing long term projects. If you and the players feel that a Downtime phase isn’t triggering right now … then you’re redirecting your energies from scores to that project. Exactly how you set up the costs of that and the fiction of that is left mostly to your discretion, but as a nice baseline, additional downtime activities past the free ones during Downtime cost 1 Coin and 1 Rep. Start with that in mind and tweak as necessary.
For long objectives that have free play or even Scores happening in between the individual pieces of their completion, it makes sense to use Long Term Project clocks or a Series Countdown (page 206) rather than explicitly breaking it up into individual Scores.
Touching on your example a bit, it’s possible that you’d be better served by zooming out here; the game encourages you to zoom in and out and not always play on the same scale of action or time. As others have said, doing it as one big score that zooms in and out and skip the slow bits is a good approach. Blades in the Dark doesn’t envision you typically waiting while the characters are set up for big jobs. Cut to the good stuff and do flashbacks as needed.
Put differently, getting to these six board members may be interesting enough to zoom all the way in on key conversations and action beats, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be one big Score that itself zooms in and out and jumps forward in time. Nor does it mean it can’t be free play!
But lets say each one deserves lavish attention. We might be doing a disservice to the characters and factions involved by focusing on how to make each person into a Score. Surely each board member’s motivations and allegiances–if interesting enough to deserve individualized Scores–will produce profound ripple effects as the PCs work toward their objective. Consider instead looking to the broader faction system and to the fiction of the board members involved. Who are they? What do they want? How would their behavior be affected by the PCs attempting to interfere with the other board members?
All in all, if you can’t do it in one Score … I’d be curious as to why it couldn’t be a big chunk of story told by Free Play, Scores and Downtime altogether in a fluid back and forth that skips forward in time, squeezes in flashbacks where needed, jumps to Scores when you’re doing a more immediate coin-and-rep gathering mission, follows scores with Downtime, and allows the PCs to deal with the intricacies of the board members with whatever of these tools–including free play–is most appropriate to the evolving narrative of the vote. In other words, a normal games of Blades in the Dark. 🙂
As an addendum, if you aren’t sure how to move between phases more fluidly so as to accomplish the fiction you’re aiming for, I’d simplify rather than add systems.
Scores are your crew making money, making noise, and getting by. Maybe n your Shadowrun characters need less explicit mechanical enforcement of their Crew’s upkeep as they do those things.
Rather than building a new mission system, you can play the whole game in Free Play–adjusting Factions and offering Coin and Rep in a more fluid fashion. You could look to, say, Fate Core for advice on pacing recovery from Stress and Harm/Consequences with “scene” and session based pacing or you could do it the hard way and just rely on fictional positioning to establish when “downtime activities” are occurring and what costs might have to be paid in addition to making the moves.
The main things that change other than “free” downtime are the Engagement Roll, Entanglements and the assignment of Heat and Coin for Scores at the start of Downtime. All of this can still be used, but it becomes like the Fortune Roll–you apply those concepts when you want to disclaim decision making rather than in a prescribed manner following a Score.
Let me get this straight, you’re willing to create a new system for missions but not mess around with the order or duration of existing systems like free play, scores, and downtime?
Ultimately if you are the GM you get to set all durations and time frames. Why not dump the two week time frame for the vote to account for multiple downtimes? Why not make it 6 weeks? 2 months?
Even modern day corporations can move at a snail’s pace with initiatives that take years to kickoff.
I think all the mechanics for what you need are already there; you just need to rearrange them or change their frequency and duration to match the type of story you want to emerge..
In my opinion, doing that eliminates the benefit of Engagement and Scores overall, “Cut to the Action” that is the point, it’s not “Handle all the Minutia”.
In that case I think it would be easy to simply make a decisive score or two instead of six scores. The game should represent the fiction, yes but not the boring parts. That is the whole point of planning and engagement rolls, “Cut to the Action” and a significant part of the mechanics of Blades, hacking those so they work less will not work well. If there is one thing Shadowrun would benefit from Blades is those parts.
A solution would be pretty simple and that would be, making this into less scores rather than an absurd amount of scores, some would be easier to convince than others, have a glaring weakness that would force them to vote one or the other with little effort, some would be convinced to vote that way because the others would. Cut to the interesting parts, the actual obstacles and challenges not every obstacle and challenge.
I think this is solving reintroducing a problem that Blades already solved by designed.
In my opinion, Harm and Stress are resources to be used to gain an advantage, you can abuse them or not, it’s fairly difficult to completely reset your Harm and Stress after each score without spending all your actions and some money on it, and if they do, good for the player.
I think Heat would be better recontextualized as how “Hireable” the team is, what is the team’s image not in the streets but with the possible employers and the targets, people with means will go after the group, track them around, target them and other people of the shadows can be hired to get them.
Being a professional in Shadowrun establishes the tone and the kind of problems you will get into, if you start killing people around and make too much noise you will attract a lot of attention from the authorities and those in the shadows. That reputation goes way past a Score.
Consider reworking and reframing the parts that tie to being a Shadowrunner, like Fixers, Rep(With Whom) and Heat(With Whom), the fiction of Shadowrun gives answers to these pretty easily if you are familiar with it.
Thanks for all the advice everyone. To clarify, this isn’t so much a radical change or introduction of a new system, so much as a change to how the current mechanical structures of the game are fictionally portrayed. There are mechanical diversions, as one would expect from any hack, but things aren’t really as different as you seem to be interpreting.
With regard to “reintroducing a problem Blades has already solved”, first of all, how a group enjoys playing isn’t a problem for that group. Let’s not start throwing around badwrongfun. Second of all, as I said above, the structure of the game, with cutting to the action, is still all there, we would just fictionally portray Blades’ normal Score -> Downtime -> Score loop differently. That is all. There is literally zero need to try to always cram everything into one score. None.
They are different Scores with one overall goal? The game already does that, some things take more than one score to accomplish. So idk why there is any issue with how the game does it?
This is just doing big complicated things be big and complicated. I think the question about “Cutting to the Action” and how long you should stay there is if doing all of that is any fun? If it is, cool.
As for badwrongfun, if a mechanic or w/e undercuts what I was saying it just reintroduces that problem not present in the original, if that is your intention? Sweet! You find value in that? Cool, just pointed that out.
Blades cut some things out for the some reasons. You can reintroduce those things for your own reasons.
Also Blades makes Downtime pretty vague, how long it is and such, if there is no time to do something in downtime, it’s up to the players they are the ones making the choices of which scores to do, follow the fiction and those problems will solve themselves.
Dylan Durrant
I don’t think the advice was intended to tell you you’re trying to play it wrong. The way you describe portraying the “normal” loop differently implies you might not be using the “normal” system to it’s full potential.
Similarly, the way you describe what you would change Downtime to in your original post is what many players already interpret Downtime to be; the game encourages you to play with time and scale as best fits the stories and scenes you want to tell. That means that Downtime is quite often only a few hours or an evening or a day or two.
As Laneofthought said, follow the fiction. Even in fresh off the page Blades in the Dark, it doesn’t take days or weeks to indulge in Vice or do any of the other downtime activities–unless the players want it to. You can spend a few hours drinking, tinkering with a long term project, or chasing some leads on a long acquiring an asset. Or you could spend days–however long you spend, time waits for no scoundrels. If the players use their free Downtime activities to do weeks worth of work on a longterm project … they miss that key vote. If they use their free Downtime acitivities to do hours of work on a longterm project, they’re probably still on schedule. If you get “lost” in your vice, sure! It takes a very long time! But that’s merely one option when you overindulge and it’s like getting arrested–you’re expected to play another character in the interim so the other PCs can keep doing their thing while your character is off overindulging.
You asked for how to change the game to fit a kind of storytelling and a pace of storytelling that it’s already well suited to. It’s possible you described what you want to do poorly, but it really seems like you might not need to make any substantive changes to the game’s pacing, but might instead just need to expand your understanding of the tools the game already provides.
Dylan Durrant
“To clarify, this isn’t so much a radical change or introduction of a new system, so much as a change to how the current mechanical structures of the game are fictionally portrayed”
It’s difficult for some of to see were the “fictional portrayal” is actually changing with your “mission” structure since most of what is RAW is [insert your fiction here]; that includes things like using long term project clocks for things like a vote that can only be filled in by completed scores or downtime that has no fixed duration…
I still don’t understand why you believe this is big and complicated. I don’t think it’s a substantial change.
So, with your interpretation, Downtime can last for only a few hours or a day, if you want it to. The point is my mechanics intend to codify that. They cannot last longer. In my hack, Downtime is mechanically geared toward a brief period of respite rather than being designed for flexibility and broadness.
That’s how I like to design. With creating one specific, narrow experience rather than accommodating many. I am designing for how my group likes to play.
We want to play self-contained Missions in which there are often multiple shadowruns (not actions that fill LTP clocks) with short periods of respite, dealing with entanglements and information gathering in between that are all overall connected purely to the mission.
Once the mission is over, it’s over, then we play the next mission.
So I am creating the (not very complex) structures for this. It’s not “big and complicated”. It’s pretty simple.
I don’t understand this insistence that a game about deniable assets pulling off discreet, self-contained operations for pay in the Sixth World, should for some reason religiously stick to the mechanics of a game about dangerous scoundrels who live fast and die young running criminal enterprises in the haunted city of Doskvol.
What people are telling you is that you are already playing a game that does just that.
If you don’t believe it hack away and make it look like you want it to.
Also:
“I don’t understand this insistence that a game about deniable assets pulling off discreet, self-contained operations for pay in the Sixth World, should for some reason religiously stick to the mechanics of a game about dangerous scoundrels who live fast and die young running criminal enterprises in the haunted city of Doskvol.”
Does not resemble anything anyone here has told you. It’s fairly simple, make a Shadowrun hack, but the game already has mechanics that permit what you are saying, the problem you presented doesn’t exist, but if you wanna design it to be more explicit and precise, hack away.
The game might need work on the playbooks(they just don’t fit SR) framing, crews(playbooks, rep, heat, claims), factions, mythos and a lot of other things but Downtime and Scores is, in my opinion where the game ddoes not need changing for Shadowrun.
But you can always just make your SR. Hack away, good man. Hack. Away.
This is not a community that hates hacking or custom rules by any means. Religion is not the reason you are getting these responses. People here would feel comfortable reproducing your game sessions with the rules as written and offered explanations of how and why. Suggesting this advice is a “religious” aversion to house-ruling seems a bit of an odd response to that.
Based on your clarifications, you seem to want to add not so much new mechanics or systems, but merely a new specificity to a few things to formally force your group to play the way they like to play. It seems it would be trivial to instead play the way they like to play.
If it does not seem that way to you, perhaps you could further clarify which aspects of your plan are still causing you trouble.
One thing I noted re-reading, is that you’re considering wiping the slate clean after every mission. I wonder why this is. What is it about finishing a mission that allows your Crew to suddenly ignore heat and entanglements, no longer be wanted and your Shadowrunners no longer be stressed? This seems like it would make the world feel less alive and interesting. Is there some reason you would need this reset in-between missions? Perhaps in-between missions you simply get a “longer” Downtime with more free actions or with less sharp restrictions on fictional duration.
Well, it does resemble what I’ve been told, which is: why are you doing this, the game already does this? In the frankly dismissive manner that it is somehow trivial and pointless that I do this.
The point is not that the game cannot do this, so much that it can do so much. I want to make a hack that is far narrower, because I want to craft a particular type of play, not accommodate many.
You wanted feedback, and presented a problem that doesn’t exist in the game, the game already addresses what you presented. It’s very simple, the table agrees that downtime only lasts so long, because they only have so much time before the next score. That is it.
If you want to change that, hack away. If you want to eliminate that ambiguity not through conversation(as the game has a whole section addressing and also talks about in many others), hack away.
You both say that it’s not a big change, but also that what is present in the game, even tho it’s flexible and already addresses what your change would do, does need changing.
I, personally, am not telling you that you shouldn’t, but that it’s unnecessary, would likely end up in a worse game and that your efforts are better focused elsewhere because that problem you are trying to solve doesn’t exist.
The thing is that you know what your table is about and those things that you could get through with the format the game explicitly provides flexibility to accommodate effortlessly, are not enough for your table. So, once again, hack away.
I am very interested in seeing what these changes do for your game.
Firndeloth Dinsule The issue isn’t that we cannot play the way we like so much as Blades in the Dark isn’t geared RAW toward playing the way we like. You can play courtly intrigue with D&D. It’s an extreme example, but there’s a reason you don’t play courtly intrigue with D&D, even though it’s mechanically possible.
It isn’t important that it’s possible to play this way. It’s that it doesn’t encourage, reward and overall isn’t designed with this kind of play at the forefront. I interact with a breadth of people who have played Blades and I have never heard of anyone ever playing Blades the way we want to play it. I have never played it the way my current group wants to play it. It might be possible, but there’s clearly a reason why they don’t play this way.
I only feel defensive because I’m getting a dismissive and badwrongfun vibe. It doesn’t feel like advice. It feels like being told “no, you should play this way”. No, I don’t want to put everything into one Score. No, I don’t want to use Long-Term Projects instead of Scores. etc. etc.
Dylan Durrant Sorry. While you were typing, I apparently ninja edited my last post. I edited it for clarity and responded more specifically to an earlier concern that seems unaddressed in the thread so far.
Your DnD example doesn’t make sense to me. DnD is most robust when it comes to minis-inspired combat, loot, and dungeon-style adventures. People do use it for courtly intrigue, but you’re right that’s not really it’s specialty.
Blades in the Dark suggests starting out with one-off scores because they’re easier to set up for the GM and they’re a nice way to start to understand the game’s systems. It then encourages you to make things messy anyway with the Crew and Faction system. The game very much wants you to play a complex campaign with complex objectives and socio-political systems. That sounds like what you want, to me.
Instead of taking this as a harsh judgement of the way you want to play, perhaps take it more at face value: several people here so far aren’t sure how to advise you on certain changes, because in order to play the way you want to play … they wouldn’t feel compelled to make those changes and at worst might find those changes an unnecessary distraction. Everyone GMs a little differently, so do what you think will work. But if the consensus you encounter is that what you’re proposing is already encouraged and rewarded by the system, I’d recommend flipping through the rulebook with fresh eyes and reevaluating whether or not you still feel those changes are really efficient in achieving your play goals.
Firndeloth Dinsule The courtly intrigue example was extreme as I said, Blades accommodates this play far better than D&D accommodates courtly intrigue. But the point was, just because a system can do something, doesn’t mean it’s built for that purpose.
A complex campaign is not the same as a Mission. A Mission exists within a complex campaign. It’s a self-contained event of one or more shadowruns that has a beginning and an ending. In between the shadowruns are short breathers where the option to rest and prepare is available, but no time to fuck your neighbour or shoot heroin. You’re on the clock. Time is of the essence.
This is sort of possible to do with Blades, but I’ve never done it, never seen it done, never heard of it being done. And I say sort of, because Blades gives exactly zero shits about the beginning and end of a Mission mechanically-speaking. And this delineation is something important to our game.
And to answer your earlier question about wiping after each Mission, it’s exactly for the reason above. After a Mission is over, there is relief. By the time the next Mission starts, our shadowrunners are refreshed.
Heat also is fictionally different in my hack, that’s why it disappears. It’s not something persistent, it’s like the Legwork clock in The Sprawl.
What you are trying to do, I already do in Blades, since my party is once of schemers and did three linked scores, with short time in between for a particular purpose and then single scores because they needed one-off things to prepare for a bigger thing. All of that in two sessions, my first two sessions as a GM and I had all the tools I needed to handle that sort of pacing because the book already addresses that. Both things happened, linked scores and one-off scores using the same mechanics, the only thing that changed was the conversation and it made 100% because we just followed the fiction which is supported by the game without issues.
You want a bigger change, contrary to what you said earlier, this is a change in the framing and pacing of that particular part of the system, with specific intent that does very much changes those parts of the system of Score and Downtime and partly excludes it from the conversation, I assume because that conversation already happened at your table. I do that without codifying it because the book already deals with that. But you want more and you just wanna codify it to make it a more narrow and specific mechanic to your table.
I think codifying Linked Scores into a hard start and end, that would constitute “Missions”, I recommend that Rep, Heat and Claims are heavily modified recontextualized, because the larger network of working in the shadows, what you impact does and how the world responds to it doesn’t end when you go back into the shadows, what you do very much matters specially if you continue working as a shadowrunner and exposing yourself.
Making a specific Rules for Missions sounds helpful, answering questions:
-How different Missions are from scores?:
-What happens with Engagement,
-How do you gain dice for them?
-When do you “Cut to the Action?
-When does a “Score” within a “Mission” ends?
-What can you do in “Missions” downtime?
-How do you as a GM deal with prolonged “Missions”?
-What ways can players avoid getting punished by long “Missions” or how does this new system addresses that?
I wanna see how it looks like. I am all in for seeing what your vision looks like put in mechanics. Hack away, good man, hack away.
Laneofthought Rep, Heat and Claims will of course. be recontextualised.
With regard to things following you into the shadows after the Mission, I agree, but I only intend to represent that in a track that I will probably call Noise, but would basically be “Anti-Rep”. It doesn’t create entanglements, it basically represents how discreet you are viewed within the shadow community. It will affect the “get the job” roll.
Any other “consequences” will only occur as a result of your faction rep.
I’ll definitely share it all once I’ve gotten it done.
Dylan Durrant
“In between the shadowruns are short breathers where the option to rest and prepare is available, but no time to fuck your neighbour or shoot heroin. You’re on the clock. Time is of the essence.”
I guess I’m curious what happens during this breather, exactly, and how long it is. Earlier you said something about hours or maybe at most a day or two. Now you’re saying there isn’t time for sex.
If time is of the essence, that’s best presented with the fiction. You’re not using DnD combat rules to represent missions for a reason, right? You’re not looking for “each round is approximately 2 seconds” type tight timing here. We’re still in Fiction First territory, right?
Unless I’m misreading, the way I’d play that is by giving players as much of a breather as they want with the understanding that the fiction moves with or without them. You can indulge in your vice but if it’s more than 15 minutes, you’re going to miss the rendezvous. If it’s more than an hour you’re going to be too late for the whole thing. That sort of thing.
Why? Because if the players can’t make decisions, it’s not really a “breather”; it’s a free opportunity to … what? Erase some Stress? I don’t find that very interesting, so I wouldn’t present the high-stakes missions you’re talking about that way. But maybe the answer to your Downtime problem is a simple move: “When you find a moment to breathe between legs of a long job, reduce Stress by X.” You could even replace or augment Vice with this as a normal option for reducing Stress: “When you take the time to really breathe and try to relax roll your lowest attribute […] When you let the fatigue get to you choose: Trouble Finds You, Lights Out, Bug Out/Lay Low, Insomnia” These work kind like the ones for overindulgence, with some thematic tweaking.
Just so, if you don’t want to move to Downtime as written after a Score, and don’t want to run a bunch of Linked Scores … it’s possible these smaller “Scores” aren’t best as, well, Scores. It sounds like your Shadowrunners might have a fundamentally different approach to funding themselves than Blades Scoundrels, which means with or without Missions the Score concept and how it interacts with Downtime might not be a good fit in the first place.
Way earlier I suggested maybe ditching the Score and Downtime altogether–keeping the various rolls and track-able values for use whenever it feels appropriate. Any thoughts on an approach more in that vein?
P.S. In the rest/relax version of the Vice move I proposed, you might want to roll something other than your lowest attribute. Perhaps you roll some trait that represents how much time you’ve got, with a minimum of zero meaning you roll two and take the lowest as normal. Something like 0 — A few minutes break. 1–Not quite an hour to go. 2–An hour or so. 3–A few hours to kill. 4–A day off. 5–A few days to yourself. 6–You’re good for now; they’ll call when they need you.
Or something.
To clarify, I’m sure it’s possible to have sex in this Respite time. But it’s like having sex in the middle of the work day. You’re on the job. Even beyond that, Entanglements in this structure are a matter of hours/days. It’s very much a Long Rest kind of thing. Someone needs to keep watch, because there are monsters afoot.
During this time, you can perform every action in Blades’ Downtime (except obviously LTPs would be STPs) the fiction is just changed. Time is condensed.
I’m not crazy about Vices, so I appreciate your suggestion of an alternate method for reducing stress.
Scores are definitely a structure I think is
still important. Delineating the Missions from the Shadowruns from the Respite time, is still something we have done and still want to do.
Hmm. I’m not sure you answered my question with the level of detail I was fishing for. Let’s try asking another way.
I can delineate between a Mission, a Shadowrun and Respite time with the fiction. In Blades, Scores bring a few things to the table. They bring Heat, Entanglements, Coin/Rep Payouts, changes to Faction status, and the Engagement roll. Technically you could say some of those happen in “Downtime” but ithey’re still triggered by the end of the Score.
What I’m having trouble figuring out is which of those tools you want to apply to Shadowruns and which you want to apply to Missions and how you envision that syncing up. Especially since you want Mission completion to erase everything regardless of the fiction but still want to have single Shadowrun Missions be interesting. I remain concerned the “clean slate” approach to missions isn’t going to get you what you want.
“(except obviously LTPs would be STPs)”
A Long Term Project in Blades is just something you’re working on across multiple scenes/Scores. Depending on the fictional position of the project and the number of segments you use for the clock (if you use a clock) … a Long Term Project can still literally be “short term”.
Working on either project takes exactly as much time as makes sense. You can spend 5 minutes on 3000 piece jigsaw puzzle, you’re just not going to get much done which will affect the roll you make or the clock you fill.
If you’re just taking a breather between legs of a mission, odds are you don’t have the fictional positioning to work on most side-projects in the first place–whether you call them short term or not. Once again, I feel like leveraging the fiction here goes a lot further than changing the wording or adding in new restrictions.
I think this discussion would benefit from taking a step back and addressing specifically which parts of blades you want to change, very specifically which parts of blades won’t do or need changing for them to work and why.
Then we can start a conversation of what you want and then we can get somewhere even close to advice. Because right now it’s very confusing, the “small change” that was not far from the start seems to be a lot of reframing sometimes and a whole change to a core part of the game in others.
Let’s take a step back and talk specifics disagreements with Blades and we can move from there. Bring some light into this for us.
I wrote 11 bullet points that outline the changes I am making, hopefully they clarify things.
* Missions now contain Scores, Respite and Free Play.
* After each score there is a short period of Respite where you can perform 2 of the typical actions of Downtime (LTP renamed to Short-Term Project) and an additional 1 for every Rep you expend.
* Heat is now called Noise. There is a separate, long-term track that persists over the course of missions called Heat. This represents how discreet you are considered in the underworld. When you reach max Heat, you gain a Notoriety level. This is a factor in the fiction and influences your Get the Job roll.
* There is no normal way to remove Noise.
* At the end of each Score, if you gained 4+ Noise, +1 Heat. If it involved someone high profile or well-connected, +1 Heat. If you killed someone, +1 Heat.
* At the end of each Mission, all Noise, Stress and Harm is cleared.
* For every 4 Noise cleared, +1 Heat.
* For every 4 Stress cleared, -1 Cred.
* For every harm box cleared, you start the next Mission with 1 Stress.
* In between Missions, you can pay 1 Cred per action to perform the Acquire Asset and Long-Term Project actions. No other actions are possible.
* No xp for Desperate actions, instead you mark xp for Set Up actions.
* At the start of a Mission you have a Get the Job roll much like an Engagement Roll.
Apart from that the systems are the same.
Could you explain why of these changes? No XP for Desperate Actions is a huge change.
This are not simple changes, these fundamentally alter reward structure, pacing, dangers and how to manage them.
Knowing why and what you are looking for helps a lot.
Hmm. Before I asses the specific mechanical ideas, I’m curious about the fictional framework here.
*How are stress, noise and harm clearing between missions?
*Similarly, why aren’t players able to enter Free Play in-between having Missions despite being able to engage in free-play during Missions between Scores?
*How are you envisioning the distinction you’ve mentioned between on and off the clock here? Is the crew always working for an hourly rate?
*Why does Stress cost coin only and Noise cost Heat only?
*Why does persistent harm add persistent Stress but not require recovery?
*What do Heat and Notoriety represent that Noise doesn’t?
*What does the Get the Job roll represent and what triggers it?
*With the fictional changes to Respite, where do (short term) projects come into play?
You make fair points in support of your speculative hack. You certainly don’t need anyone’s permission to steam full ahead. However, you asked for “any advice on the subject”. If the advice you’re getting so far isn’t helpful, maybe be more specific about the advice you want.
No XP for Desperate actions is a very purposeful change. My Shadowrunners aren’t dangerous scoundrels who live fast and die young. They’re deniable assets, expert professionals who get the job done. I am not going to reward them for taking risks. I am going to reward them for working as a team. All of my changes are to essentially provide a better framework for the kind of stories we like to tell.
Stress and Harm are clearing through recuperation that is expected, but not dwelled upon. Cred is assumed to be a component of relieving that stress. You are expected not to be going into the next mission fully rested if you left the last one harmed.
Noise is a ticking clock toward convergence on the part of your Mission target. If at the end of the Mission you’re still on that clock in a significant way, you bleed back into the shadows so it no longer endangers you, but it does increase your notoriety in the underworld. That is what Heat is.
There may well be Free Play in between Missions (we’ve experimented with it) but we prefer to focus on the Missions.
During a Mission, you are always on the clock. The faster you get the job done, the faster you get paid, the faster you can take the next Mission.
A Get the Job roll is triggered at the start of a Mission. It represents the result of your meeting with your employer.
Respite isn’t minutes where you put your head between your knees. You have time to do things that would fall into Short-Term Projects. The important distinction between STPs and LTPs though, is that STPs are about the Mission.
The noise –> heat –> notoriety seems like it doesn’t need to be that complicated. Notoriety is a number that goes up when Heat goes up enough which in turn goes up when noise went up enough during a score. I really don’t think you’re gaining any fictional benefit from tracking things this way.
I’m still not seeing why you can’t work on Long Term Projects when you’re “on the clock.” It sounds like they still get paid when a job is done, just like Blades Scoundrels, not as some kind of hourly wage for an employer that strictly regulates what they can and can’t do while working. This distinction doesn’t serve any purpose, then, even if the STP vs. LTP distinction itself does. That is, if a character wants to “waste” time during a Mission to work on side projects not directly related to the mission given time and opportunity to do so … that seems like a choice the players and their characters should get to make. It might not come up, but even if it doesn’t the rules aren’t made simpler or clearer by explicitly prohibiting LTP work during a Mission.
I’m wondering why recuperation is automatic; not dwelling on it while it happens is one thing. But in this way you’re deciding a few things. You’re saying that operatives never get long term injuries that last more than a single mission. They never need the cash (or the political side effects) of a Mission badly enough to go in while hurt, even if recovery takes weeks or months after one Mission and mere days or hours after another. You’re also taking away the ability for the player characters to manage their own time. Going straight from one mission to the next without needing to beat pavement to hunt down the next contract makes sense given you fictional setup. But even with a similarly professional setup, a Blades crew gets to decide how important recuperation, reputation, and payout are. Because healing isn’t automatic, they get to decide when they can afford to press or how much time they need to take off–time during which the rest of the city keeps on moving around them. You can skip the recovery itself and get right back to the action while still keeping these choices. It’s another situation where even the PCs not making use of the choice doesn’t mean the game is better or clearer or more precise when you take away that potential dramatic tool.
Consider, too, situations where the PCs do not have enough Rep or Coin to lose. In these situations, either the problems they encountered during a Mission end up meaningless, or they proceed as injured anyway (or you stack on additional penalties or make this some kind of fail state). This seems inelegant compared to the solution of making between-mission recovery an optional expenditure of the appropriate time, effort and expense. Then the same clear rules apply regardless of how much coin and rep the players have AND you give them more interesting choices about how to spend their resources from a Mission.
Yeah, what you are describing is far from a simple change, it really does changes almost everything either directly or through it’s supporting systems.
You seem to be stripping a lot of the humanizing elements and systems, focusing more on the scores. I would recommend bolstering the systems you are focusing on. The systems that are being designed out or ignored because of the new structured should maybe be simplified, for example just getting a number of segments for your clocks every respite depending on something else. I also reccomend further changing the XP triggers since this is already looking like a game that doesn’t care nuch for the defaukt ones. Overall just making the game a lean mean mission machine and letting your players do the same. Cut the stuff getting in the way and make what you care about better for you.
This is as far from my style of running SR or Blades as it can be. I am curious to see how that experiment works out, for SR, your table and as a Blades Hack. Good luck making this work.
Firndeloth Dinsule The fictional benefit from tracking it this way is that Noise is not the same thing as Heat. It’s just not. So it shouldn’t be treated the same mechanically.
I don’t think my Monsterhearts players should be able to use the Go Aggro and Seize by Force Moves. This is the short answer to most of your queries. I don’t think options = good.
Dylan Durrant
” Heat is now called Noise. There is a separate, long-term track that persists over the course of missions called Heat.”
So you gain Noise on the “Heat track” instead of heat? If so why not just call it the “Noise track”?
“There is no normal way to remove Noise.”
What is the abnormal way then?
“Cred is assumed to be a component of relieving that stress”
Can you describe how that looks fictionally. Not sure how relieving stress results in the loss of reputation, influence, or money?
(if “Cred” does not mean any one of those things in your hack, then what does it represent?)
“The faster you get the job done, the faster you get paid, the faster you can take the next Mission.”
Why does this matter to players; is their a bonus/penalty for completing a job in a certain time frame? Are there upkeep cost players need to worry about that are on timers?
Have you considered hacking a few Blades systems into The Sprawl instead of taking the direction your are now.? Seems like a bit less work to be honest since the Sprawl is already very mission focused (and it’s obviously inspiring parts of your hack anyway).
“I don’t think options = good”
Wow, just wow…
Omari Brooks No, Noise is on a separate track to Heat.
A Long-Term Project or Mission.
Fictionally, we’re in a hypercapitalist world of wageslaves. Money = happiness. Stress relief costs cash. To clarify, Cred = Coin.
Why does that matter to the players? I don’t know, you’d have to ask them. Mechanically, speaking the short timeframe is codified.
“Wow, just wow…” GURPS must be the best game ever if options = good.
Dylan Durrant I am not sure if you do it intentionally but you either misunderstand what people are saying or grossly misrepresent it and then argue against it. It’s very different to have conversations when you do that.
Laneofthought There’s no point in arguing against an argument that hasn’t been made. If I’m doing it, it’s unintentional. I’m not sure what about the last post I misunderstood though.
Dylan Durrant
“I don’t think my Monsterhearts players should be able to use the Go Aggro and Seize by Force Moves. This is the short answer to most of your queries. I don’t think options = good”
Your example doesn’t make sense here. For one thing, I don’t know where I’ve said options = good. I have, however, talked about specific situations where rules make distinctions that impede the fiction in ways that don’t seem to make a lot of sense to me with no discernible mechanical or narrative benefit. The fiction already narrows our options. If you’re on the clock and you’ve only got an hour or two or whatever, your options are already limited by circumstance.
Making STPs mechanically different from LTPs and making it so you can’t work on one or the other during certain phases doesn’t actually meaningfully limit the number of options players have. It’s still next to infinite. I can just use Action Rolls and narrate my ongoing efforts if the GM is going to get weird when I make it a Project. Unless you’re in the habit of telling players things like “no, you can’t do that; professionals don’t do stupid things like that” or of rules lawyering with your players rather than following the fiction, you can’t actually stop the characters from having these options. All you can do in this specific context is make the terminology more convoluted.
Projects are just a clean UI element for dealing with ongoing stuff; plenty of ongoing stuff can and does happen without being a project. Characters can still make unprofessional decisions on a Shadowrun, can still work on their side projects during a mission, just like they can still get drunk without Vice mechanics. But where Vice comes with a suite of enforced fictions that insinuate themselves into the game’s decision making and recovery process Projects are just a note-taking tool. It does not help you tell the stories you want to tell by arbitrarily breaking up when that note taking process can be used.
“The fictional benefit from tracking it this way is that Noise is not the same thing as Heat. It’s just not. So it shouldn’t be treated the same mechanically.
You can define Heat and Noise however you like. Presumably you don’t also have a stat for Gumption which is different from Noise and Heat or for the crew’s energy bill. My concern is that you have built a mechanical structure that could no doubt be more elegant.
If noise is how much attention we attract on a mission and Heat is our reputation for discretion in the underworld … why not just use Heat for the Get the Job roll? Why doesn’t our reputation for discretion affect our Getting the Job? It sounds like Heat would replace most of the functions Wanted Level serves in Blades in the Dark albeit with different thematic context and thus different narrative outcomes.
What extra fictional benefit do you get by using a third number that goes up when a number that goes up when a number that goes up goes up? Because it sure doesn’t sound more fun and interesting mechanically! I don’t think you need to mimic the relationship between Heat and Wanted Level with Heat and Notoriety Level. I don’t think it’s helping you here; Heat and Noise a different from Wanted Level and Heat but between the two of them I don’t think you’re missing any of the functionality Blades had and I’m not convinced Notoriety Level is bringing anything but book keeping to the table.
Dylan Durrant
“At the end of each Mission, all Noise, Stress and Harm is cleared.”
“For every 4 Stress cleared, -1 Cred.”
This doesn’t seem optional. Is it? Can somebody get into a spiral were they are always at negative cred?
“Heat is now called Noise. There is a separate, long-term track that persists over the course of missions called Heat”
“No, Noise is on a separate track to Heat.”
“Noise is a ticking clock toward convergence on the part of your Mission target. If at the end of the Mission you’re still on that clock in a significant way, you bleed back into the shadows so it no longer endangers you, but it does increase your notoriety in the underworld.”
OK, so you didn’t really change Heat. You kept the Heat track and changed the triggers for adding/removing heat and re-skined the Wanted Level generated from a full Heat track into “Notoriety”. And on top of those re-skins, you added another track to manage called Noise which “increases your lower case “notoriety in the underworld” but not your upper-case Notoriety, which is actually increased when the Heat track fills up?
Omari Brooks Your confusion regarding Noise and Heat may arise from the fact that in the process of building the system I switched them around.
Heat used to be Noise and Noise used to be Heat.
Noise, is the representation of in-Mission actions that could potentially alert your target to your presence as a threat, as well as other negative attention on a more general level. It’s your Wanted Level in GTA.
Heat, is the representation of how you are viewed in the underworld. It’s Anti-Rep. It’s how other shadowrunners, fixers and Johnson’s view your team. The reason for Notoriety levels is to have a smaller number to affect the Get the Job roll. I could just make Heat affect Get the Job, but that would likely involve things like dividing it by something or other complicated shit. Having it roll over into Notoriety is FAR simpler.
With regard to respite and connected actions, your ability to see the mechanical and fictional benefit is your own. Fictionally, of course the players can do anything. But only specific fiction triggers specific mechanics. If you put a gun to someone’s head and threaten to kill them in Monsterhearts, you aren’t rolling Go Aggro.
EDIT: Oh, and with regard to the Cred thing. No. The most they can get is -2 Cred and they’re probably getting at least 6 Cred from every job.
“I could just make Heat affect Get the Job, but that would likely involve things like dividing it by something or other complicated shit. Having it roll over into Notoriety is FAR simpler.”
It’s far simpler to make the Heat track small and adjust the conversion from Noise to Heat accordingly than it is to have Noise roll to Heat roll to Notoriety. You’re in charge of that conversion rate.
“With regard to respite and connected actions, your ability to see the mechanical and fictional benefit is your own. Fictionally, of course the players can do anything. But only specific fiction triggers specific mechanics. If you put a gun to someone’s head and threaten to kill them in Monsterhearts, you aren’t rolling Go Aggro.”
Projects are not a complicated mechanic like Go Aggro. They’re a note taking system for keeping track of things that last more than one action or more than one scene. And they exist in your hack not just in basic BitD or some random other game, but whatever.
Consider this. I have a long term project of tracking down my personal nemesis. I have a short term project of making a virus to help us hack a vault we’re targeting for this Mission. During Respite, I decide to do some work on tracking down my nemesis from a terminal we’ve gained access to as part of the Mission. When the Mission is over, I never finished that virus STP. But it might be useful in future Missions so I decide to keep working on it between Missions and then if it’s not finished keep working on it during Respite of the next Mission.
Even if we’re in the middle of a Score, if I have the means and opportunity to work on an STP or LTP? I should probably make the Long/Short Term Project move because it’s the right tool for the job. Just like Lash Out Physically doesn’t care if we’re taking a test in Social Studies or at the underground Vampire Fight Club.
I’d highly recommend re-reading page 161 of Blades in the Dark. It has some great advice about fiction-first gaming and in particular about using the right mechanic for the right job, rather than the right mechanic according to the phase diagram. I would strongly caution against duplicating mechanics the way you’re doing with STPs and LTPs; the fiction will tell you whether or not the project can be worked on right now. I think what you’re describing trips over it’s own feet to fix a problem you will not encounter during play.
Firndeloth Dinsule That blatantly won’t work because the number that influences Get the Job has to be tiny, a 1-4 scale. If Heat was on a 1-4 scale only enormous things would be justified to increase it and everything else ignored. There would be no capacity for detail.
Performing the STP/LTP action is a mechanic The fictional triggers for that mechanic can be changed. I’m not trying to fix any problem. I’m just trying to create a more narrow kind of play.
You already only increase Heat according to how much Noise is produced during a Mission. You can simply adjust how Noise and Heat interact.
Why does Notoriety Level have to be on a 1-4 scale as things stand in order to interact with Get the Job? Surely the Get the Job roll isn’t something fixed in mathematical stone either?
“Performing the STP/LTP action is a mechanic The fictional triggers for that mechanic can be changed. I’m not trying to fix any problem. I’m just trying to create a more narrow kind of play.”
.I’m assuming you chose BitD for a reason and you’ve made these mechanical changes for a reason. In the pursuit of giving advice, I’m trying to tease out clearer reasoning.
I gave you examples of how your mechanical phase restrictions for STP and LTP could easily end up clashing with the fiction of play. You don’t seem to be interested in those examples even though they’re hardly bizarre and imaginative circumstances. You don’t seem to have a clear reason for making two separate mechanical triggers for STP and LTP.
The fictional trigger for a Long Term Project in BitD is: work on a long term project. “Long term” can mean hours, days or weeks. Projects can involve one clock or several. They can require action rolls, fortune rolls, teamwork, or a variety of different things depending on the fiction. They’re a fiction first concept. When you say “change the fictional triggers” of STP and LTP you’re implying that players shouldn’t expect to use the rules for long term projects when their characters work on long term projects. Do you see why I find this a confusing response to my questions and examples? It is not a logical response.
Similarly, I presented some confusion as to why you set up heat etc a certain way, and your reason had to do with the specific mechanics of how those systems work. But you designed those systems. They’re not set in stone. This circular reasoning doesn’t seem like a good way to achieve the results you’re looking for.
For additional clarity, changing the rules for projects is fine! If you want a more complex set of rules, custom moves or whatever for projects? Sure! That could be interesting.
Similarly, you don’t need any rules for projects. You can just wing it; when players do something that takes hours, days, or weeks you keep track of it in the fiction and take notes and make Action rolls, Fortune rolls or whatever else as appropriate.
But as written, the trigger for projects is just “work on a project.” Changing that trigger quite simply isn’t fiction-first gaming. Presuming you’re using BitD for a reason … I’m wondering if you’re maybe making an ill-advised choice or if I’m misunderstanding you. Because the point of my examples with the virus and the nemesis was: the fictional trigger for ___ term project is work on __ term project, regardless of what game phase you’re in.
How would you deal with characters working on a __ term project in the “wrong” phase? Would you refuse to let them? Would you use different resolution mechanics? How would you deal with the unfinished virus carrying over between Missions? Would you reset the clock and start it as a new STP each time even though the fictional progress isn’t resetting? I’m having trouble understanding how–other than telling the players they can’t do things that make sense in fiction–you would enforce these changed triggers in a way that makes sense.
Firndeloth Dinsule “You already only increase Heat according to how much Noise is produced during a Mission. You can simply adjust how Noise and Heat interact.
Why does Notoriety Level have to be on a 1-4 scale as things stand in order to interact with Get the Job? Surely the Get the Job roll isn’t something fixed in mathematical stone either?”
Heat is not only increased by Noise. Modifying that beyond 1-4 would cause me to make dramatic changes in the resolution mechanics because of its effect on probability. You are trying to argue this is simpler when your change requires that I change everything else around it. That is not simpler.
With regard to the rest, as I said before, when you put a gun to someone’s head in Monsterhearts, you aren’t rolling Go Aggro. I’m not saying “no” to the players when I don’t let them roll Go Aggro. The mechanic just isn’t triggered.
Once again, this is very unlike your Go Aggro example. I’m not sure what else I can say to make that clear.
A player character has started a Long Term Project. They’re trying to track down the digital trail of some rival. There’s a series of project clocks for that trail. The player, during a Mission, has an opportunity that they use to work on tracking down that rival. What do you do?
What I would do, is use the LTP move. They are literally working on that LTP, so I’m going to use those mechanics. I would advance that clock in some way. If you don’t say “you can’t do that” and you don’t advance the LTP clock because Go Aggro isn’t a Monsterhearts move or whatever … what do you do? Let them hack the terminal and have it do nothing? Have it do something but not use the useful notation system of the clocks out of some sense of phasal propriety? Or something clever I haven’t thought of? This is why I gave examples. I don’t understand what you would do, and the things I can think of sound like bad ideas.
As for Heat, I’m confused. Let’s back up. Earlier when you outlined the changes you had planned, Noise replaces BitD’s Heat–roughly, it’s not exactly the same. Heat is a brand new thing. You’ve decided all these things that are going to make Heat go up … but then you don’t really use Heat. You actually use Noteriety Level. Is there some way you use the specific Heat number that you didn’t explain?
Because as far as I can tell, your system doesn’t seem to really care about Heat. Heat is just a convoluted way of converting all those other things (Noise, lethality, etc) into Notiriety Level. All of those little adjustments are your divider that you said would make things too complicated.
What makes this work tidily in BitD is that Heat doesn’t reset between Missions. When it hits a ceiling, Notiriety Level goes up. This makes things really clean and simple. Heat tracks how much of a fuss you’re making moment to moment, and Wanted Level tracks how much the cops care. Obviously, the fiction of your numbers is a bit different and also it’s not like that’s the only way to do it! My point is not that you have to do it the way BitD does it, but rather, BitD gets across very similarly complicated fiction with a much simpler numerical system.
But maybe we’re going in circles. You seem pretty married to every +1 this and -1 that you’ve thought up and find suggestions about re-examining any of them unpersuasive. I’m not much use to you if every single change you’ve thought up is the reason you won’t fiddle with any of the others.
Is there anything left you’re still unsure about or interested in changing that you would like other people to examine at this point?
Firndeloth Dinsule And I disagree that it’s not a pertinent example. Perhaps I could use another example. When my Vampire goes to start building a super-weapon to kill their Ghoul rival, it doesn’t trigger the Long-Term Project action. Similarly, during a Score in Blades, a character who starts working on their electroplasm flamethrower does not trigger the Long-Term Project action.
All of this, from Go Aggro to your example, is about fictional triggers.
As for Heat, I’m very confused, I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying at all. Your argument appears to be equivalent to basically “you don’t actually use Stress, it’s just a meter until you get a Trauma level”. Because there are no mechanics in the entire game that use the amount of Stress you have. This is precisely the same.
Things increase and decrease Heat like Stress, but in the end all it is is a meter until you get Trauma/Notoriety. This isn’t somehow a negative. This isn’t overcomplication.
I’m married to the numbers only because the entire system is married to the numbers. That is the nature of a system. I’m not going to create an entirely new resolution system just so I can get rid of the Heat meter. That, is overcomplication.
I’m not sure what to say differently to make those points clearer, so while I’m frustrated that they’re being thoroughly misunderstood I think I’m going to drop it unless you’re particularly interested in me clarifying.
Are there any other questions or concerns you have? You seem satisfied with what you have.