After reading the quickstart a few times, I came up with this (fairly extensive) list of things that I’d appreciate some more detail on, or that I found a bit confusing. Most (if not all) of it could fairly easily be decided or handwaved during play, but it would be great to hear what the intended functionality is.
Blades in the Dark questions:
Scale: Examples of Scale modifiers? When is this used?
Large Weapons: What does having a large weapon do? Clearly it has a cost associated with it, is this an example of scale?
Lasting effects: Should all lasting effects have a recovery clock? Or should some be permanent instead? For example, at one point you describe a situation where a PC can either take 4 stress or a knife to the eye, how would you play that scenario if the player doesn’t spend the stress? Losing an eye seems like it could be non-lethal, but a permanent disability.
Downtime Recovery Roll: it says 1d for each action dot, which action, and who’s dots? This question also goes for the other downtime rolls, “reduce heat” and “work on a long-term project”, although those are a bit clearer, that you would describe how you go about accomplishing those tasks and use an applicable skill. In the recovery roll however it seems reasonable to expect that the success may depend on the skill of an NPC, (a hired healer for instance) and I was under the impression NPCs do not have Action dots.
Entanglements: When you roll Development, there are no entanglements listed for 0 heat. Do you get no entanglement instead?
Retirement Stash: What represents this in-universe? Presumably that’s up for the players to decide and narrate, but should it come up in game? Can your stash get stolen? If so, in what way is it different from other forms of coin in the game?
Effect rolls: As a counterpart to action rolls, it says very clearly that the action that is rolled is always decided by the player, is that also true for effects? I didn’t see that mentioned, how is it decided when there is overlap? For example, if an assassin sneaks into a bedchamber and slips a noble’s throat, is it a finesse or force roll? or something else? What if he wakes and struggles at the last second?
NPC Faction Project Clocks: In the quick start story, but also for using this mechanic in other stories, when should the faction clocks advance without PC intervention? One segment each session? If the PCs didn’t exist, or decided to sit around doing nothing, or went to do completely unrelated jobs in another part of the city, what should happen to these clocks? Do the crows reestablish control of the district before either of the other factions are destroyed since they have a 6 segment clock? But then does the turf war just end between the lampblacks and red sashes since it is back under crow control and no longer up for grabs?
Trauma: It says, ” You may choose to be “left for dead” or otherwise dropped out of the current conflict” is there a reason to do this mechanically? or can you just stand up and continue with 0 stress? it says May, but I’m not sure what sort of hard choice a player would be making here.
Devil’s Bargain: The answer to my question here seems fairly obvious to me, but because of the way it’s written it seems reasonable to ask. It says anyone can offer a devil’s bargain, but I imagine it is the GM’s prerogative to confirm or deny that a bargain is reasonable, or to choose which of several suggested bargains to offer. (This wouldn’t happen in most reasonable groups, but I could imagine someone offering a trivial bargain)
Snowballing moves: A bit of clarification on how this works would be good. For the controlled crit, how does it differ from just saying you’re going to take another action?
For the failure clauses where you try again with greater risk, on the desperate 1-5 or risky 1-3, I’m guessing that face the effect of the danger whether you decide to roll again or not? the roll doesn’t replace this? And when you roll again from a desperate roll, how does the risk increase? by having a more serious effect to resist?
Desperate move advancement: this is hinted at but I didn’t see it actually said in the quick start. Do you take a tick of “wild experience” every time you roll a desperate move? what about when the desperate move was rolled because you failed a risky move? or if you roll multiple desperate moves for the same reason?
/sub
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Hey dude, great questions!
I can’t help you with all your questions but:
Scale: Scale is sort of like a position for effects to cover additional use cases.
General modifiers:
Mismatch: (+1d effect if you’re larger. -1d effect if you’re smaller.)
Overwhelmed: (+1 effect result level if you’re larger. -1 effect result level if you’re smaller.)
Outclassed: (Larger unit gets critical effect while smaller unit has a weak effect.)
Large weapons come into play and contribute to the Positions of actions. (You might move from desperate to risky with your claymore in an street brawl when going Gangs of New York-style, but how good is a bulky sword in ultra close quarters in the back alleys?)
The knife to eye example has been talked about in different threads. The game is flexible, but John mentioned he’d make ita lasting effect with a recovery clock. In my mind, the “Recovery clock” for that means you getting used to only having one eye and not that you get your eye back.
Effects are indeed rolled by the player. So in your example, the action is clearly a murder roll. Probably a 4 clock task. The effect die dictates the scope of your action (aka the number of clocks you tick off.) Your action or goal you’re accomplishing is murdering this son of a gun and getting away. Getting, say, a 6 action and a 2 effect means 2/4 of the clock for your goal is done. This is where abstraction comes in. This could literally mean a lot of things fictionally, but mechanically it just means you’re doing well there’s just more to do! Fictionally it means you may have killed the guy, but you’re covered in his blood, or something is left identifying you, or someone heard the commotion, basically not all of your desired action’s scope has been fulfilled.
I want to take a second and piggy back on your questions.
Effects: Can a player take a devil’s bargain on the action and the effect?
Eric Levanduski
Thanks! some things though: The question about effects being rolled by the player, yes the example I described is a murder roll, but murder is an action, when rolling effect, is it up to the player to decide if he rolls power or finesse or something else? what decides that? That’s what my question there was really about.
And as for Scale, your response was copied from the QS text, I guess I wasn’t clear, I asked the question because that text wasn’t clear to me. What constitutes outmatched, outclassed, etc? In what situations is that sort of scale relevant? Does it only refer to the size of groups, or also the size of characters? What about the size of weapons? etc. Some examples on what Scale is for, and what kinds of mismatches fall into each category would be very helpful.
John has said that the Desperate move advance was cut off by accident from the kick start. It basically says anytime you roll a risky move you get the tick of “wild experience”
Haha you’re welcome Chris! I think the player decides the effect mostly through describing the fiction and how he or she does whathaveyou, but the GM has final say over the flavor/tone that any particular combination results in.
Forgive me, I think scale is related to crew size and shape, actually. So situations where your crew is commanded to execute tasks they might be over/under prepared for is where scale can come into play. Example, your posse of droogs may not be able to stand toe-to-toe with a bluecoat tactical force.
Weapon size is still sort of covered by action positions.
each time you roll a desperate move you get a point of desperate xp
you can spend your accumulated desperate xp, 1 for 1, to advance another track early
Thanks for posting these questions, Chris! I can’t answer right now, but it looks like you’re in good hands. 🙂
Adam McConnaughey
Right, that’s what it seemed like, but what about when rolls snowball off of each other? Do they all generate advancement ticks? or do they count as one roll in that respect?
pretty sure every single desperate roll counts individually.
i mean, if someone’s soaking up that much stress/bad outcomes, they deserve some xp
haha fair enough. Sounds good. That implies a clarification of part of my question on details of how snowball rolls are supposed to work as well. It’s not entirely clear in the text where the OR refers to, but it seems to make the most sense that when you decide to try again you still suffer the danger of the first roll.
yes. if you fail a roll in a controlled situation, you can back out without facing danger. but a 1-3 in risky says “you face the effect of the danger” AND you can back out or go ahead, and 1-3 in desperate is even worse than that–you face the effect of the danger with -1 to your level.
I think most of your GM vs Player choice questions (like in effect and action rolls and Devil’s Bargains) come down to group consensus. I mean, don’t get bogged down in minutia, but be upfront when pitching the game that we ALL can have input into any given roll / scene, and not to be dicks about it.
So sure, the player could decide they are going for power or finesse and everyone just nods in agreement. Or the player is adamant that their fictional intent revolves around insight and we all ask for clarification in order to agree or riff off their explanation.
‘Yes and…’ springs to mind.
Oh and Eric Levanduski ? I would most certainly allow Devil’s Bargains for both action and effect. But they have to be juicy! Their needs to be a little instructional on targeting player flags via the Devil’s Bargain mechanic. I think it is the signature mechanic of the game. Its like a multipurpose compel/invoke/re-incorporate die.
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Adam McConnaughey That’s what seemed like the most reasonable interpretation to me as well, but it seemed worth listing mostly because the formatting could be clearer. Here is the text from 1-3 risky with brackets to show different ways it could be interpreted:
Things go badly. [You face the effect
of the danger at hand. You must abandon
this particular approach (you’ll have to
try another way)] OR [try again by taking a
bigger risk and rolling a desperate move.]
Things go badly. You face the effect
of the danger at hand. [You must abandon
this particular approach (you’ll have to
try another way)] OR [try again by taking a
bigger risk and rolling a desperate move.]
Curiously there’s actually no AND as written.
Regarding the “knife in the eye” scenario, I’m very sympathetic to the idea of setting up a progress clock to track the injury as a lasting effect. Another approach is to say that the loss of the eye is a permanent change in the fiction. No lasting effect; the character now just has one eye. At the start of a Blades game, a GM should listen to the effects being described by the players. If they’re describing actions and effects with strong changes in the fiction, then you can use fictional moves of similar strength when describing threats to the players. If they think they can dispatch a foe with a single stab, then foes of comparable strength should be able to do the same (unless the PC takes the stress).
It’s a little like the Golden Rule, I suppose.
When I say it’s a lasting effect, I mean that you have a horrible injury that impairs you (-1d) until you recover. You don’t re-grow the eye (obviously) and the loss of the eye is a permanent change in the fiction.
So, yes to everything Dave says. Plus you have recovery time on top of that. That’s what the lasting effect represents. A knife through the eye doesn’t just remove part of your vision. It’s a serious would that you need to heal.
Chris Boyd Your second construction of risky is correct.
I may re-write it like this:
Things go badly. First, you face the effect of the danger at hand. Then, choose: Abandon this approach (try another way) OR try again by taking a bigger risk and rolling a desperate move.
That reads much better John 🙂
Classy and fraught with dangerous potential!
Lots of great clarification question that parallel things I wondered.
Not that I know an answers, (I’m mostly posting to subscribe to other conversation) but here are some thoughts on the Trauma question.
Trauma: It says, ” You may choose to be “left for dead” or otherwise dropped out of the current conflict” is there a reason to do this mechanically? or can you just stand up and continue with 0 stress? it says May, but I’m not sure what sort of hard choice a player would be making here.
I interpreted that to mean when you take trauma, you are giving up your choice to continue. Your character is out of commission one way or another, but what the details are is up to you. The word “may” seems to me to refer to that freedom left to the player to define what ‘out’ looks like in the fiction: Panicking, humiliated, shaken, catatonic, unconscious, hollering in agony, stalwart but just unable to move, too moody to care, etc. I think stress is cool since it covers any possible effect, not just physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, etc. The player’s choice is whether to take trauma or take an effect; if the player chooses stress that leads to trauma then they are also choosing to be out of commission until they recover. Interestingly, I don’t see that even a stitch action from an ally can help, since that seems to only temporarily negate a penalty from a lasting effect.
The sub-point of trauma seems to be that while your character is out of the scene/score until you recover, you’re not dead: your story is far from over. You don’t die from stress and trauma, you only die from accepting an effect that includes you dying. Trauma just leads to retirement from scoundrelhood.
I get where you’re coming from though and agree that this is all my inference rather than anything indicated in the text.
When you take trauma you clear your stress. You then have the option to be “left for dead” or otherwise be out of action.
You choose this option if you’re in an un-winnable scenario and don’t want to keep facing nasty effects, high stress, or more trauma over and over again. You can just eject.
The act of taking trauma does not remove you from play.
Downtime Recovery Roll: it says 1d for each action dot, which action, and who’s dots? This question also goes for the other downtime rolls, “reduce heat” and “work on a long-term project”, although those are a bit clearer, that you would describe how you go about accomplishing those tasks and use an applicable skill. In the recovery roll however it seems reasonable to expect that the success may depend on the skill of an NPC, (a hired healer for instance) and I was under the impression NPCs do not have Action dots.
It seems that the text uses generic term “Action dot” to mean any action the player chooses and justifies adequately to the table’s satisfaction. I think it makes sense given the variety of lasting effects you may have. (In responding to your question about trauma, I realized that only the Stitch action specifically says it can negate the penalty from a lasting effect for a sequence of actions. I wondered why deceive or sway or command could not do something similar for a fear/morale-related lasting effect, or even more abstractly, something like supply to negate a financial lasting effect).
But the main thrust of your question seems to be that the text sort of assumes others help you recover: a physicker, legal advocate, etc since treating yourself has a stress penalty.
Obviously ally PCs could try to help with whatever action dot they choose, but your question remains: what is rolled if you hire a physicker? Maybe you just don’t roll for an NPC, you just have to spend coin to raise the effect from the minimum of one segment (similar to how you hire a railjack or whisper to deal with ghosts in the entanglements)? That makes sense with hiring someone, but it may be spendy unless you spend a lot. Maybe 1 segment is free since its the minimum for any reasonable attempt; then 1 coin = 2 segment, 2 coin = 4 segments, 3 coin = 6 segments? Since each person can only keep 2 coin cash, you’d have to either borrow from another PC, from the crew bank or use surplus from the score’s profits that would be lost if not used anyway.
Ah, right, the NPC physicker. That bit isn’t clarified in the quick start. Sorry about that!
When you recover, you (or someone else on the crew) roll the appropriate action (stitch for a wound) and then spend coin to bump it up. You’re not paying that coin to yourself, though. The coin you spend hires the physicker, and raises your roll result.
So, yeah, even if you blow the roll, you recover 1. Then you can spend from there.