Just when I thought I had the rules down pat, I realized today that I somehow, unintentionally snuck a house-rule into our game that fundamentally affects the way coin awards work in Blades
For each score, I had been mistakenly giving each player 1 extra coin in addition to the amount of coin that was awarded to the crew based on the ‘size’ of the score. (So, if they completed a ‘small job’, I was awarding 1 coin to each individual player, plus 4 coin to crew as a whole.) Looking back, I think early on I had misread the rule regarding individual PC coin awards during crew advancement, and then that to ‘the payoff’ for scores.
So now, looking at the way score coin awards actually work, I’m struck with a stark (and welcome) realization: if players make a score that awards a number of coin smaller than the number of players, they are forced to negotiate how the coin is divvied up amongst themselves. It’s so obvious that I’m not sure how I missed it. Of course, they had already been negotiating how to split the ‘crew’s coin’ already, but now that we don’t have the mistaken distinction that there are separate crew/PC score coin awards, it’ll make for that much more interesting play.
However, I have one question related to the above: If players are paying tithe to a ward boss, is it possible to complete a score that nets a zero coin award? For example if they are Tier 2 and complete a minor job (2 coin), do they gain no coin since it all goes to tithe? (i.e. “what are you doing wasting time on small time stuff if you reached that level?”)
I wondered about the tithe myself last night (doing some last minute reading for a campaign I’m starting tonight) – and my initial reaction was the same as yours: “why waste your time on such small scores?”.
But then I thought of another reaction: “do we really need to tell the boss about this?”
Yeah, Donogh McCarthy. I like that it sets up those sorts of choices, and the possible repercussions.
Vasco Brown for the +1 coin are you talking about the bonus coin they get at the end of session or were you adding +coin per player to the payout in addition?
Yep, Donogh, Vasco — that’s exactly right.
Colin J, I was adding +1 coin per player to the payout. I don’t regret it because that extra coin went into a lot of cool long term projects that have pushed the overall story forward in really fun ways.
However, it’s going to be even more fun to watch the payout split scenes, going forward.
Vasco Brown awesome, I was worried I had the rules about the bonus coin wrong!