Our group is has a mildly fluctuating number of players, and because of that, an odd and interesting thing has come up.
The game difficulty varies highly with the number of players at the table. Specifically, going from three to two noticeably taxed my group’s downtime resources. They went from taking care of most of the resource problems (stress, heat, wounds) and having 1-2 coin left over, to spending every single coin and still having a significant heat problem.
Has this been the experience of anyone else?
I guess this shouldn’t be surprising – every player is basically worth 2 coin at downtime. Some of that is gone to deal with personal stress or wounds, but the amount of resource tax is generally determined by your setting’s action-to-grit scale, and doesn’t really rise with added players – if anything, it decreases, because they can specialize more and thus don’t need to take it on the chin as often.
My players are troopers and I rather enjoy making things be painful for them, so we are more than fine with things the way they are, but this might be a thing to keep in mind when setting up your own game!
My experience too. My player rather enjoy this in-built unfairness (but that might be something they developed in our long years of playing Warhammer). I immagine you could allow 2*players downtime actions and split them equally between the presents, but I actually prefer not to…
This is actually not only true of downtime, but everything involving stress as well! Flashbacks and all team mechanics will be used more often to avoid issues among larger groups.
I can’t believe I never realized this before.
You could give bonus Rep to small groups; since it’s harder to pull off a score with fewer members, it generates more impressive buzz. Or give less Heat since there are fewer people dropping clues around. I’d imagine +1 Rep and -1 Heat would be enough (but have no data to support that).
Will Scott That seems to make sense fictionally, at least.
I run an open game with a fluctuating number of players and actually, this is a reason I am transitioning to a new game. Blades has issues with an open game, which is sad because in everything other than difficulty, it serves it well. If I ran it with a max of 4 (more than 4 drops the difficulty fast) players per evening I would still do it, but because I’m not I have to be moving on.
My advice for the opposite problem? I think the idea of less heat and more rep makes sense fictionally. Another thing that makes sense fictionally is that gang members don’t just disappear into the thin air, so you can give extra downtime actions from them to the smaller groups.
The Rep/heat bonus makes sense to me. However, I am personally perhaps more interested in going the other direction – making the three-four player game feel more like the two-player game. That game makes my players sweaty. And I like my players sweaty!
I doubt my players would be as into a straightforward Rep/heat malus, though.
Maybe there are ways to sneak in extra action taxes, like making healing knock a wound down a category instead of disappearing it, or having multiple “you need to deal with this” long-term project clocks that lose invested progress at a slow rate, or are otherwise session-timed.
Related thought – if a long-term project is timed, then the players control their own difficulty by choosing how much they want to engage in the hard-to-do stuff. If long-term projects are not timed, they add not so much difficulty as campaign length.
I don’t think heat earned should be affected directory by the crew size, because it’s already indirectly affected: I think that operations by a smaller crew will tend to be quieter and result in less exposure anyways, and I wouldn’t want to artificially do what their fiction will likely already tend to do.
However, I Do think I far agree with giving more rep to a smaller crew that can pull off the work of a larger crew. Having crews larger than 4 might earn less rep though, too.