Just introduced my group to Blades. I’ll have a Cutter, a Leech, a Lurk, a Slide and a Whisper working as a crew of Shadows. Just ran them through character creation and gave them the homework “I want a 5 page essay on your character” 😄
Will be interesting to see what they come up with over the next couple of weeks
Hmm. Tinkering with the Player Best Practices. Daring! What’s the intent of the change!
Mostly just to keep reminding a couple of them that this is a Fiction First game, they have been playing games where there characters are just a bunch of numbers and they look to min/max them, a game where most of the XP triggers are based on how you play the character is foreign to them
Huh. Okay. Let me know how it works out! I’m really excited to play a game that’s fiction first, but unlike Fate, doesn’t require a ton of “Aspects” and backstory, letting the characters get fleshed out through Flashbacks. I’m very interested to see how a traditional approach works.
While I was joking (mostly) about the 5 page essay, I do think that Blades requires a person to know his character well. Yes some of it you can do later in the fiction but having a person who says “My character is Bob, he likes to hit things” as their only backstory is going to make it a boring game for that player
There are a few hooks built into the character generation process; background, nationality, friends, and a rival (for example.) For me that’s enough. Every heist, the story should be pawing at the character seeking greater purchase.
He wanted to attack by jumping through the window and was offered a Devil’s Bargain that he was always breaking windows as a kid and has maybe a problem with loving to break windows.
He just cannot seem to succeed in rolls that involve swimming, and we find out he’s always been deathly afraid of water.
He does a flashback to get a backup set of armor stashed on the site of the heist, and we find out he could do it because his family is friends with the maid who works for the target.
Characters develop through play just fine, in my opinion. In fact, the development in play is guaranteed to mesh with the setting and feel of the game, where peoples’ individual visions independent of time at the table will often be so different that they are impossible to really satisfy at the game table.