I run a game for a small crew of Shadows — just 3 PCs. They took the Daring reputation, and they’ve been hitting pretty far above their weight-class so far, and just generally getting in over their heads. They’ve been pretty successful overall. Their main exploits so far have included:
– Stealing the “Sevoy Square”, a supernatural painting that allows the Whisper to view people and locations remotely, among other things.
– Robbing a chapel of the Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh, stealing 10 coin worth of tithes and killing half a dozen mercenary guards in the process.
– Burgling one of the Crows’ gambling houses while Lyssa was there conducting a meeting — when things went awry and their distraction fire got out of control, Lyssa was caught in the fire and killed, all but finishing off the already weakened Crows.
– Stealing from a pub the Wraiths have been operating out of, taking a bunch of their ill-gotten gains before the Wraiths could get them fenced. During the score, the distraction caused by their Savage and Wild cohort of thugs got out of hand, resulting in several deaths on both sides of the brawl.
The common factor here is inadvertent violence. They always start with a deception or stealth plan, and inevitably some bad rolls will lead to violence. This has led to a TON of heat buildup — averaging probably around 6 heat every score based on the table in the book. They’re now sitting on 2 wanted levels, and rapidly approaching a third…
I’m concerned that maybe I’m being too tough on them with heat, or reading those 1-3 rolls too unfavorably and leading them into violence that spikes their heat even further. Some of it’s on them for not doing anything in downtime to mitigate heat, and they haven’t been resisting consequences as much as they probably should. Even so, this feels like a lot for such a fledgling group of what are supposed to be sneaky burglars.
Have any of you run into this? How have you corrected it, or does it even need correcting?
Just because the crew is turning into a train wreck
It doesn’t mean they aren’t having fun
Embrace the chaos
I think this is a real style of play choice. Based on their actions I read your players as saying “bring it on, we’ll take the heat” and maybe they are curios to see what running from the Bluecoats looks like.
Alternatively, if they are turning to violence because they see that as their only option when stealth fails, you might want to pause the game when that happens and ask if that is their preferred method of escalation or if they’d like to consider another avenue. Blackmail, promises, charm, occult and other means are all at their disposal. Further if they get the 1-3 result that ends up in them getting caught a handy flashback might make all the difference. Maybe they bribed the guard, wore disguises, set up another distraction, etc.
If they aren’t resisting consequences leading to violence, aren’t reducing heat, voluntarily bring along a cohort of Savage and Wild thugs (I’m assuming they picked the flaws), and are punching well above their Tier, I don’t see how gaining Wanted levels quickly could be accidental on their part or your fault.
Talk to your table. Ask if they’re concerned about their Heat/Wanted level. If they somehow don’t realize what they’re getting themselves into, let them know. If they think it’s getting out of control, remind them of what they can do to keep it in check.
If they are interested in correcting it, they have the tools to do so. If they aren’t, then no worries! It’s not on you either way.
Thanks guys! Looking at it that way, it does seem like more of a conscious effort on my players’ part to let things escalate. Good point on the cohort choice, Blaze Azelski — they did indeed choose those flaws, to go along with the Loyal and Tenacious edges. I missed it at the time, but looking at it now it definitely telegraphs what they’re interested in exploring. We’ll talk it over before our next session, but now I’m thinking I should do the opposite of my initial inclination, and start hitting them harder with the consequences of generating so much heat. At this point there’s surely an active investigation into their activities, and a warrant can’t be too far off.
In a weird way, having so much heat hasn’t really burned them yet, so I’m not sure they even really understand how bad their situation is. They’ve only had one entanglement roll on the highest table, as each time they gained a wanted level they’ve rolled over to have just 2-3 heat. They also just picked up the Slippery crew ability, which should give them even more leeway in terms of dealing with those consequences in the future.
Going forward, I’ll work on pausing to discuss options more often — I think we have a tendency to rush through some of the mechanics to continue exploring the narrative scene, which has probably made it less obvious that they can resist just about anything through stress and/or flashbacks. I also need to keep other escalation options in mind — I think I have a bad habit of defaulting to things like “You open the door and bump into one of the guards — what do you do?!” on partial successes, when there are probably much more interesting avenues that could be explored as complications.
If you haven’t already, I’d go over the Incarceration rules with them. If they want to solve the problem of a high Wanted level, they can send one of their own to jail or frame another faction.
Or if they really love having a high Wanted level, perhaps suggest the Fiends special ability from the Bravos? It plays into that really well.
This same thing happened with the group I ran through the playtest/beta documents with about 18 months ago. They still joke about how they didn’t intend for every job to end in killing and fire, but most of them did anyway.
Echoing the above – some players like when things get out of control. My players saw multiple faction progress clocks filling and explicitly decided to let one of them go, just because they wanted to see the chaos that would result.
Sounds like you’re having fun, so maybe you don’t need to.change anything.
If you want to, consider using a clock for stealthy scenes — something like an Alert clock for the guards. So a Prowl failure isn’t automatically getting spotted, but it’s 1-3 ticks on the clock so they’re on thin ice.