After over a dozen sessions of play, half of those not using the Engagement Roll (simply because we started by using the basic rules and then forgot about the rest of them for a while) I’ve come to a sort of impasse with the notion of the Engagement Roll.
The Engagement Roll is supposed to be an integral part of the game’s inclination toward leaping into the middle of the action and working out what happened later, eliminating the prep that took up so many sessions of Shadowrun with the Street Samurai getting increasingly more angsty.
But, what the Engagement Roll actually makes my players do, is plan in advance. You see, if, on the turn of the dice, you can have the tables turned completely on you and essentially be put in a Desperate position from the get-go (that’s how I read Bad Outcome, anyway) then you will want to weight the roll heavily in your favour. How do you do that? Well, it’s based on the “preparation” of your target. So, the players are encouraged to ensure that the group is as little prepared as possible through various planning and wily means.
Note: I’m fine with this. I don’t have a problem with prep. The other game I run is Shadowrun (albeit with a different system) where the vast majority of the game has been going around and talking to people. I do not mind a game with prep. In fact, when I first played Blades back in v1, I felt like I was in a “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” scenario because my instinct is to prepare.
But! I run Blades in a pub where everyone’s drinking and sometimes we play for less than three hours. Trying to get everyone at the table to understand each others’ elaborate plan is hard at the best of times. I have grown attached to Blades’ approach to the Shadowrun archetype. I’m feeling like, since we’ve gotten to grips with the Engagement Roll, things have been drawing out rather than becoming more succinct.
Am I playing the Engagement Roll wrong?
P.S. Reading through v5 and loving it.
If anything, I feel like the engagement roll encourages players to get stuck in. Mainly because it reinforces that things can go wrong, right from the start, and it isn’t just the GM flipping your table.
So, trust to your scoundrels and their prep. Thinking fast is rewarded more than thinking deep here. Players think fast, and trust that their characters thought deep (and that’s what the flashbacks are for.)
This does encourage scoundrels to aim for less prepared, easier targets. It also makes a difference if the target is NOT an easy one, reinforcing that they’re undertaking something more difficult and perilous.
Basically it adds some uncertainty to the heist. I would think that’s useful in general. If that leads to the players trying to spend more time in prep, then EITHER I would encourage them to tackle easier targets OR I would stick to the “one question/prep element per charcter then we start” that I usually do when they have time in the fiction.
I’ve been mulling over Engagement rolls, flashbacks, and armor (like the Spider’s armor). In particular, I think it would be helpful to put some mechanical weight behind the engagement roll by giving armor, based on the roll, against “bad stuff” in the form of having already planned for it. Or a pool of stress to pay for flashbacks to retroactively pay for avoiding problems. Something like that.
I have no solid handle on it, just half-formed thoughts.
Daniel Helman In the last session I ran, one PC did a downtime “gather information” roll to survey the target. I couldn’t think of anything really impressive they would have noticed, so I said he had two dice he could add to someone’s rolls (like two stress-free Assist actions). That was for him to reflect what he’d learnt becoming useful at some point in the job.
It seems like your players may be trying to do stuff the flashback rules were intended to handle. The engagement roll only covers the very initial part of the mission. If the PCs are spending inordinate amounts of time figuring out how to get in the front door, they are necessarily neglecting what the F the do once they are “safely” inside. Heck, there is nothing saying you can’t (and I imagine you are intended to) use the flashback rules if your engagement roll comes up a Bad or Mixed outcome. That’s when you should do the prep, when you end up in a situation that sucks, but you might have prepped for. Flashback to the preparation at the point. Not only will this avoided wasted time preparing for some eventuality that never happens, but it will be more tense as the PCs know that if the flashback action (the prep) fails, it immediately screws them.
To placate players that insisting on taking every precaution imaginable, you could just tell them you assume the PCs are doing the best and most thorough job they could possibly do in preparing for the challenge at hand. Tell them their outstanding prep is worth 1d on the engagement roll. If the plan detail is particularly clever, or there are other beneficial circumstances in line with the fiction, award +1d. Then add/subtract die as per Tier and opposition preparedness as described in the rules. Roll the engagement roll, and let flashbacks handle any other prep. If your players aren’t satisfied with that, you could even say that flashbacks to deal with problems from the engagement roll are discounted 1 stress.
That’s excellent advice, Richard. “Plan in a flashback action if your engagement roll is bad. If it isn’t, you’re good to go.” I need to say as much in the text. (I’m working on a ‘Players Best Practices’ section)
John Harper Thanks!
A players best practices section sounds great. I just brought a couple new players with limited rpg experience through character and crew creation and I think this kind of thing would be greatly appreciated and helpful. The Black Feathers, a cult that worships a crazy black chicken demon with shiny black feathers and dripping blood. They give food, lodging and black feathers from the Whisper’s headdress to street kids. The feathers grow back but they make the children a little crazy, corrupting them and essentially turning them into adepts. It looks like it will be fun.
Richard McNutt The thing is, flashbacks don’t matter if they already had a Bad Outcome. You’re right to say that the Engagement Roll only affects the start of the mission, but the start of the mission affects the rest of the mission. Maybe I’m not understanding you correctly when you say that a flashback can be a response to a Bad Outcome. Do you mean that it could just ignore the result? Because that seems to make the Engagement Roll kind of arbitrary.
To clarify, my concern was not over what benefit preparation could have for the Engagement Roll, because obviously their prep could do a great deal more than +1d due to the position of the target changing. My concern was that preparation seems like a “no-brainer” if you want that advantage on the Engagement Roll.
Note: they haven’t been at this all the time, they kind of clued in when they most recently got a Bad Outcome. They were kind of distraught that their plan could have been screwed up by one roll (bear in mind, their plan at that point was as superficial as the game wanted it to be, with no prep) so, sensibly, they looked for ways they could reduce the possibility of that happening again.
I’m offering an example of this in the text (a bad engagement roll and a flashback to deal with it). I’ll post it below. You don’t ignore the result of the engagement roll — a flashback isn’t time travel. Instead, you attempt to address the current bad outcome by making a roll as normal, except in this case the action takes place in the past. The bad engagement roll still matters — you’re in a bad spot — but by using a flashback for your action you can show how your planning helped you you deal with it, if that’s the kind of crew you want to be. Or you can just stay in the moment and deal with the situation on the fly.
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From the Player’s Best Practices section: “Don’t let planning ruin the fun”
In roleplaying gaming, spending a bunch of time planning can be really boring and pointless. You have a long talk about a dozen “what if” scenarios which never come to pass in play. All the points and counter-points about hypothetical situations turn out to be wasted time. Instead, move on to the action—and then “plan” using flashbacks or downtime actions instead.
Plan with a flashback when the engagement roll goes wrong. You’re about to break into the museum of antiquities but the engagement roll comes up 2 — your crew is suddenly accosted by the patrol of moonlighting Bluecoats who are working as security. Oh no! We should have planned for this! Nah, just call for a flashback.
“Let’s have a flashback to the night before, where we see Silver consorting with our Bluecoat contact, Laroze. Maybe she was able to get some dirt on the local Bluecoat officers that she can use for leverage now — so we can sway him to look the other way….”
See how this is a much more badass form of planning? You could have discussed the merits of consorting with Laroze ahead of time, just in case, in an endless debate of risk and reward. Or, you can wait to see the trouble you’re in, then flashback to a preparation that exactly applies to the situation at hand — making your character look terribly clever and cool. Much better, yeah? One of the reasons why the PCs have all those stress boxes is so you can do sly retro-planning maneuvers like this. Sure, this business with Laroze is kind of far-fetched, but who cares? That’s what the stress cost is for. Pay the stress for the flashback and you have a perfect plan ready to go.
As long as you have stress to burn and a fun idea for a flashback, you can deflect or block some of the trouble from bad engagements after you see what they are, rather than trying to anticipate everything beforehand.
When other players start debating with planning questions like, “but what if this happens?” a good answer is “Then we’ll flashback to our plan to deal with it.”
You can also plan by working on a project in downtime. The engagement roll for a score depends on how prepared the target is for your operation. So, during downtime you can propose a long-term project like this: “I want to work on making the Red Sashes vulnerable to an assault.” The GM will ask you how you want to work on that, and you’ll make a roll, and when the clock is finished, whaddya know? The Red Sashes are now more vulnerable to an assault, and your engagement roll will have more dice. Since this preparation happens during downtime, you don’t need to debate its merits as a “plan” with the whole group. It’s simply something your character spends some of their time on, and it benefits everyone, so there’s no debate needed. And, if you can knock out the project in two actions, even better! The Red Sashes will be vulnerable right away.
I think another element that comes into play here is that the engagement roll may indicate things are tougher, but not be a crisis in the moment.
For example, one of my open table games had a bad engagement roll. So, instead of them trying to hit a warehouse that would be almost empty because everybody was going to “the big game” it turned out Baz’s son was “grounded” and had a bunch of his buddies with him, on guard duty, sober. They were grouchy and numerous.
So, the heist got harder, because the fiction changed, but the plan remained intact. It was more a matter of increasing the stakes for getting noticed, and the difficulty of sneaking around.
Dylan Durrant John’s answer to your question is exactly what I was thinking.
John Harper Thanks, that’s clarified it well for me. I’ll pass the info along to my players.
Glad that helped. 🙂