I used to play Pathfinder, but I converted to 5E after seeing how it cut out so much unnecessary complexity, thereby shortening combats a great deal. Still 5E can drag, like most games can, during downtime when players aren’t sure of what to do.
Case in point, last night I played in a 2 hour 5E session that was all downtime. This was the second such session with the party tying up some loose ends in Waterdeep before heading out to continue our main mission. I don’t think anyone is having a great time with these downtime activities because they drag on, but we all feel obliged to complete various side quests. I think if someone said “Hey, can we fast forward through this part?” everyone would agree, but no one wants to say so. It really makes me appreciate the downtime system in Blades where, by default, everyone gets 2 actions and you move on (zooming in when you find those activities exciting, or glossing over things that are not).
I am consistently pleased with how much we can do in three hours online. The speed is one of my favorite things about Blades in the Dark, right next to its ability to generate possibilities for what happens next. So, you don’t have to prep out ahead, and you can move at a good clip. A wonderful combination.
Last night I did tell my players that I was optioning movie rights, so I wanted them to get on with it and do something cool. =)
That sounds like a poor GM job more than the rules.
Aaron Griffin True, any system can be used in unhelpful ways. I think it’s also true that systems can provide tools to help groups deal with things in a way that feels good mechanically and provides focus.
When a game focuses on an aspect of play and provides mechanics for it, then that aspect is important. I think Blades in the Dark focuses on the rhythm of one or more down time cycles connected to one or more heists, feeding each other.
Once you get out of the dungeon in more traditional fantasy games (dungeon crawling has a base/crawl rhythm of sorts) then you have to find your own rhythm to keep the interest high.
Aaron Griffin I wouldn’t put the blame solely on the GM, but I’m not the kind of person that puts the groups failure to have fun on the GM above others. I think the group as a whole failed to communicate what they wanted.
That failure, of course, had nothing to do with 5E, because we weren’t really interacting with game mechanics in any meaningful way (not including a few unimportant knowledge rolls, I think there were 2 rolls in the whole session). My point is that downtime in Blades does provide mechanics to smooth out this process, and it’s not something I realized I needed until I saw it in action.
Pacing is something I’ve been wrestling with in a Savage Worlds campaign. I’ve been realizing that the system has to be able to manage a continuum of detail and abstraction (which Blades and Savage Worlds have clear ways to do), but also, more importantly for me as a GM, the players need a way to effortlessly communicate to the GM where on the continuum they want a particular narrative event to fall. Abstracting too much loses some of the emergent opportunities for characterization that can define characters most vividly over the long haul. Abstracting too little gets tedious and can take the fun and cinematics out of the story, making it too much like real life.
I noticed also that many more traditional games don’t support or encourage liberal GM scene framing, where the next scene might be start a couple months later. In my experience with party-of-adventurer games, if I made a scene cut that liberally, everyone would wonder what what the party has been doing in the meantime and what they missed (in terms of loot, advancement, or story progress). Adventurers typically don’t have lives outside of adventuring, so if you skip time, they may not have anything to do in all that gameworld time. “Why would I not have raided a few more bandits in that time and have something to show for it?” Meanwhile I as a GM might wonder, “Where were they staying and what did they eat all this time?” I have gathered a few tricks from games that assume the passage of time more (like Pendragon), but it is still tricky to reframe player assumptions surrounding some classic game tropes.
Adam Minnie makes good points. I have a game where I struggle to keep the ratio to a comic-book-like 5 years in real life to 1 year in the game. I offer them down time chunks where they can pursue individual interests to develop their characters more abstractly. Even so, the game focuses on daily activity. Things that happened two years ago might only be a couple months old in game.
The first game where I really got that balance right was Warhammer, and a big part of that was those damned convenient six week journeys the characters would undertake moving from one area to another. =)
Mark Griffin it does sound a bit like you’re saying “with Blades in the Dark, we don’t need to address our group communication issues because of rule X” though.
Aaron Griffin Maybe it would be more accurate to say “With Blades in the Dark, we don’t have situations in which our communication breaks down”. It’s a very similar assertion, but instead of framing it as a crutch, like you do, I a framing it as the system eliminating a problem that would otherwise need to be fixed by negotiation. A good rules system reduces the need to haggle over things because it resolves problems and gets people on the same page.
Aaron Griffin Calling it an ‘issue’ makes it sound like there is some huge problem needing to be solved. In reality it’s just a bunch of friends being overly polite, not wanting to step on anyone’s character moments. Nobody wants to be the guy in the group who says “What we’re doing right now isn’t fun, and I think we should move on.” At least no one in my group wants to say that because it sounds dismissive towards the GM, and whichever players are currently doing downtime stuff.
What Blades does (in my very limited experience anyway) is frame downtime in a different way. The assumption from the beginning is that we’re going to quickly do some side thing and then cut back to the adventure. The exception is if a downtime action is interesting, then feel free to zoom in on it.
I will also add to this topic that players may have to be more proactive about developing their characters’ personal arcs in Blades than perhaps in other games. If a player doesn’t want to flesh out his or her character, that character can more easily remain a competent but detached professional. That can be a perk because it may encourage more troupe play and focus on the crew as the main character more than the individuals. On the other hand, I tend to enjoy round personas and relational drama, which isn’t necessarily emergent due to Blades’ focus on action and larger-scale faction politics.
I have found that the “downtime/heist” structure only works if I let the cracks between them breathe. There are often things that come up that don’t neatly fit either category, and I deal with them without system comment, then apply system to what comes next. The players are fine with that, and it gives me flexibility that may be harder to get rules-as-written.
In the latest session, for example, they did their downtime actions then wanted to check on an important NPC who was working on a project. That wasn’t a down time action, but it wasn’t a heist.
After the PCs talked to him, I framed his problem as something they could address with down time actions, and they did.
After THAT, no heist was obvious; but, they had some bad karma built up, and they were attacked by assassins because that’s what felt right to me at that point. That fight was not really a heist (though it ran in a similar shape, only they were the defending team.) Since it was in the nature of a complication, I did not follow it with an engagement as you do with heists. Back to back with that, they ran a heist to get revenge.
In a previous session I had one character wander off alone between the briefing and the heist, and we just handled his excursion as a tiny solo heist that didn’t trigger an engagement.
So, even with the more explicit form of heist and downtime actions, some flexibility is needed to keep things from feeling absurd or disjointed by rigidly adhering to one structure or the other.
Adam Minnie I find that players who want to flesh out their characters always find a way, and those who aren’t interested generally don’t. A PC is just as defined by the actions he takes during a mission as he is by his backstory and what he does in his free time.
If you watch John’s Blades game, Adam Koebel’s Cantor is a great example of a PC who is defined by his actions on the job (he is of course played by someone who has extensive roleplaying experience, so perhaps an unfair example)
Mark Griffin
I agree; There’s plenty of room in Blades for people with interest in developing a character to do so, and people who aren’t interested in doing so will tend to not do so unless you have a real system in place to make them want to. (See: Tenra Bansho Zero.) A person with no interest in developing a character in most RPGs won’t do so, regardless of how much ‘space’ the system gives them.
I have also seen a third kind of player that wants to play a more dramatic character but isn’t particularly good at it. Or the more dramatic characters tend to develop stronger connections to the setting and NPCs, that results in different spotlight which be appealing to a player, even though they don’t quite know why their own character doesn’t have that.
Adam Minnie Possible, but once again, I think compensating for that means more than just “giving them space”
Well, my players kept doing downtimes for 3hrs sessions, sometimes I wondered if something got wring in my GMing, but tjey enjoyed most of thoses.
Both Anima Prime and Mecha do interesting things with turning “down time” into a critical part of the game.
You could probably graft either of them onto 5e without too much trouble (maybe a little).
Many games fail to consider the pacing or cadence of the action, or when to move on. It’s a holdover from the Hobbys origination, exploring a dungeon as a single, extended series of events measured by the expenditure of resources.
Framing the game in scenes or acts, or phases is a great way to establish pacing, and give your players instruction on when to pull the trigger on a scene.