Contacts/friends and same-playbooks in the same crew. What’s up with that?
No, really. Yes, I realize that if I make a new cutter I just rename the dangerous friends, or even give them a different tag or two. Maybe I even take the Lurk’s Bluecoat friend and he’s our childhood friend or something. (I roll like that, I really do.)
BUT, what do the good folks of the Blades in the Dark Comminity do?
I ask this partly because I’ve wondered this since forever, and like Basco Baz being friends with the crew’s Slidesss and all, but recently the new player made a lurk replacement for his first score-encarcerated Cutter and chose for his ability the very same Shadow Form I based my character “The Ghost of Crow”s Foot”, or Ark(emis) which people call him to his face, on ….
…AND his backstory was that he had been adopted by Rosly Kelis, A Noble – the very same my character has had for a mistress for quite some time. We’re all Tycherosi complete with Devil’s Marks, by the way.
As the new Lurk declared his backstory EVERYONE became enthused, while I had to consider if I’ve ever spawned someone akin to myself or if my longtime lover just has a weird fetish for shadowy tycherosi.
So: 1. How do you handle the contacts/friends on the playbook sheet?
2. Any cool, interesting or plain weird stories on how character sheet-friends has impacted play?
I think with a game like Blades, there’s definitely plenty of room for having multiple characters with the same playbook since there’s so much room to expand in different directions.
However, I’d have much more of an issue with a character that either mechanically or narratively is too similar to another, unless both players were fine with it. Niche protection is something I and some of my group are pretty keen on, and if you feel your character’s toes are getting stepped on too much, it’s going to affect your enjoyment so it’s worth bringing up with that player, your GM or the group.
I made a document where I broke out groups of friends so they could be mixed and matched with any character. I labeled each with a descriptor; “Dangerous Friends” or “Sly Friends” etc. You may be a cutter, but you may not have dangerous friends.
Well, firstly, character creation should be a discussion. If someone’s choices are clashing with yours talk about it.
That considered, this sounds like a fun opportunity for some interesting story elements! I know in the game I run two characters each chose the same contact, one as a friend the other as a rival. That NPC is now a crew contact and the rivalry hasn’t been resolved in any way. I expect this to result in juicy drama.
Justin Ford I agree with you about collaborative character creation. The difficulty with BitD is that a player may have to create a second (or third, or fourth, etc) character mid-game while their first is incapacitated or imprisoned or whatever. I don’t know how most GMs do this practically; do you all be involved in the creation or does the player so it while the heist or other players’ downtime continues? If it’s the latter, and people aren’t involved, that’s where I can see potential problems occurring.
Personally if it was a situation in which it would be tedious to cooperate I’d simply make it clear that any problematic decisions could be changed, retroactively and on the fly. A name can always be changed, appearances can be reconciled.
We’ve got an interesting situation where we’ve got two Whispers and two Slides (though one of them is now an NPC) in the group now, and they all have Nyryx as a friend. It’s looking like Nyryx just got upgraded to a major supporting character, rather than just a few cameos.
Honestly I simply start with a question, I see the names on the playbooks as good “suggestions”. If a player wants to fictionally create someone as a friend or a rival outside of what’s there I ask a couple of questions to get a bit a background and the the NPC come out in play.