Blaze Azelski – Page 2 – Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

You know how people constantly want to join a game? Yeah, that’s me this time.

Be it Blades, Vigilantes, or even that Scummy game, I’m interested. I’m highly familiar with the Blades rules, and have an extremely open schedule this December through early January, and a still fairly open schedule after that point. I’ll cut my resume off there. If you’ve got an open spot, let me know!

Everyone’s been gushing about Scum & Villainy (for good reason), but I want to give a little love to Vigilantes.

Our crew just finished their first mission. They planned on having their Whisper’s possessor spirit contact (you know the one) possess the leader of the Fog Hounds, so she’d not harass the tavern that was giving help and jobs to Skovlan refugees.

They rolled a mixed result on engagement. Who ends up at the meeting with Whist, the Fog Hounds leader, but Master Creep (Oscarr Skurlock). Not a great thing to happen when you’re transporting a secret spirit inside one of your crew member’s bodies. Just when Oscar was about to bust the whole operation wide open, they cracked his spirit mask by “accident” and got him to leave by offering to help reconstruct the mask. Then Settara became fascinated with our own Whisper.

Our crew was really unprepared for how amicable Whist was. She seemed like such a nice, down to earth person. Two out of three of the crew decided to abandon the plan, but the Whisper carrying the spirit inside him went ahead anyway, and Whist became possessed as planned. Frog, Whist’s child spy, ended up being “adopted” by the crew, though he still doesn’t trust them.

Being able to throw one of the legendary Bloodletters at the crew and watch them circumvent him felt great and bolstered their reputation as Savvy quite a bit. Watching them abandon their plan when a gang leader wasn’t just a brutal monster showed that they’re still the good guys. When one followed through with the plan, it really developed the characters and created wonderful friction between them.

Our crew overcame great challenges flawlessly and the plan went off with barely a hitch, yet they still felt a bit guilty about it. The “good guys” spin on Blades as well as the great starting situation made this session and our characters come alive.

An opinion piece on the Leech’s Analyst:

This question is mostly for John, but speculation by others is welcome as well. It seems that the Leech is a long-term project kind of playbook because of the Tinkerer and Alchemist abilities, and our table found it kind of strange that the Leech doesn’t have any abilities to be more effective at long-term projects, but can be better at gathering information. It feels kind of like a non-sequitur compared to what it could be. As of right now, Analyst also seems like an objectively worse variant of the Spider’s Connected.

I believe the Spider’s Foresight used to make them better at long-term projects, but that’s not the case anymore. I then noticed that NO playbook has access to abilities that make long-term projects resolve more quickly – excepting the healing-only Resilient and Physicker – and felt a bit dejected for our Leech. Is this by design and if so, why?

On eliminating 1 person factions:

So this is only relevant for Lord Scurlock and Ulf Ironborn, but it’s relevant in our game and I hope somewhat worthy of discussion in general. I’ll discuss Ulf here, because he doesn’t appear to be undead and that simplifies things a little.

We found ourselves in a situation in which it seemed that we might try to kill Ulf Ironborn, since he had made an appearance during our score. Our GM then notified us that the worst we’d be able to do is harm him a bit – but not kill him – due to him being a Tier 1 faction with Strong hold.

Ulf’s a badass, no doubt. Trying to get into a skirmish to the death with him would be ill-advised, most of the time. It would likely be represented with reduced effect, desperate positions, and a sizable clock, at the very least. But under the ideal fictional circumstances, could a Hound find themselves in a position to shoot him in the head from a distance with a long rifle, effectively ending a faction with a single roll?

In other words: What’s the difference between a badass who leads a faction, like Mylera Klev, and a badass who IS a faction, like Ulf? Should there be any special “rules of engagement,” so to speak?

A couple questions for anyone who can answer them.

1. Does a gang start out with 1 armor or no? It’s unclear to our group if my Cutter has to take the Leader ability for our Thugs to have any armor.

2. “When you send a gang to achieve a goal, roll their Quality to see how it goes. Or, a PC can oversee the gang operation by leading a group action (the PC rolls Command, the gang rolls Quality).”

Can I get some clarification on what this means exactly? When our Loyal, Fearsome, Savage Thugs and I all rush into bloody combat together, it seemed to us that it would make sense for it to be a Skirmish group action to see how well we fight, rather than a Command action to see if they’re willing to do something their nature would imply they’d be eager to do. Am I thinking about this from the wrong angle or misunderstanding the text?

On intimidating warring factions (standing up to bullies):

Our group ran into something that might be considered a problem. To our players, it made a lot of sense to do a job to mess up a faction who decided to start a war with us (See Entanglements: Show of Force) to send the message of, “This war ends when you stop deciding you want our turf so damn bad.” We wanted to make a plan to steal a few of their smuggling boats, showing them we’ll take what’s theirs until they decide they don’t need to take what’s ours. We saw this as a job capable of narratively moving the faction status to -2. We even considered putting heads on spikes and painting the walls red with blood. Ya know, the usual.

Our GM pointed out that the mechanics seem to make this kind of idea impossible, and as far as I can tell, he’s right. The rules say, “When you execute an operation, you gain -1 or -2 status with

any factions that are hurt by your actions.” Being

at war means your status with a faction is -3, and vice versa. As a result, it seems like after the job we’d just immediately go back to being at war.

Was this an oversight? Is this the kind of situation where you forego the rules due to house common sense? Is it supposed to be impossible to teach a faction that their war with you is unwise, because all factions in Doskvol are hardened/ambitious enough to not care?

All thoughts appreciated!

These are some of my thoughts in general about how the game might be run, and I’m wondering how other people’s…

These are some of my thoughts in general about how the game might be run, and I’m wondering how other people’s thoughts/experiences compare. This started as a response to Mark Griffin’s post, but quickly became almost irrelevant.

I can’t say that this is universally true, but in my HIGHLY limited experience, John is easier and better as a GM for the Bloodletters than other GMs might be in their games.

I can’t really point to any one thing and say “here is conclusive evidence” but for instance:

1. How often does John actually threaten to inflict harm? I’d guess he’s at least one standard deviation below the mean in this regard. I think he’s right to threaten harm as often as he does, to clarify.

2. The rules say that armor allows you to ignore or reduce consequences. My GM says it reduces harm by one. John said in this episode it allows you to ignore it.

3. Have you noticed how rarely the Devil’s Bargains are “Someone notices: Take +1 heat?” They usually are so much more narratively interesting and less mechanically (or immediately) disadvantageous, like demons or factions taking interest or changing relations with the PC crew. He (and Sean) offer some on almost every roll too. He could have told Stras “I don’t think there’s a Devil’s Bargain to help you Attune here. Sorry.” But he didn’t. Instead he made up something interesting out of left field, and they spent a good few minutes discussing the fiction surrounding that thing.

4. I feel that some GMs are going to struggle with playing fiction first. They’ll play the game more mechanically, moving from one die result or downtime action to the next without much discussion of the fiction in order to get a certain amount of “progression” out of the game. They’ll try to get planning, execution, and downtime all in a session. The Bloodletters don’t do this, and it’s definitely for the best. If a GM runs the game as a checklist, the players will probably gravitate in that direction as well, and the fiction will wither.

4.5. My GM seems to have a tendency to “balance” the game. For instance, he’ll refer to the rules to evaluate the fiction, rather than the fiction to evaluate the mechanical outcome. This is the death of “fiction first.” It also doesn’t “give the players what they earn” when the game is being adjusted (consciously or unconsciously) to remain a consistent challenge for the players/characters. For instance, when a PC gets a crit to acquire an asset in the form of a gang of thugs, the gang leader they were going to attack might be surrounded by his own gang of competent thugs, whereas he wouldn’t have otherwise.

There’s lots of other things I wanted to point out, but my brain is going a mile a minute now. For those who are watching the Bloodletters game, I’m curious what differences you might have noticed between how games of BitD are run for (or by) you and how John runs the game.

On The Spider’s “When you address a tough challenge with planning or calculation.”

Two major questions.

1: In what contexts do downtime actions count for this? When one has acquired an asset, finished a long-term project, or gathered information that was relevant for a completed score?

2: If you pull out climbing gear or wrecking tools from your Load when it turns out you need them, do you get experience for “planning” for that eventuality? Does anyone have examples of other ways that requirement might be satisfied outside of downtime actions or flashbacks?

I’m sure this has been asked 20 million times, but I don’t know how to search this forum for a topic.

What’s the difference between a Gather Information roll during downtime and a Gather Information roll other times? Are there certain questions you can only ask during downtime, or can you gather information about anything at any time? If so, why would you ever use a downtime action to Gather Information?

A couple questions from a recently started game of BitD.

1. You do it but the danger manifests: In a situation where a character was using a Prowl action to get on top of an inn to spy on a NPC, I thought the danger was of falling and taking a lasting effect. If he had rolled a 4/5 on a risky situation there, he does it but the danger manifests, so…. what happens there? He falls yet doesn’t fall? Should the danger have been of him being noticed, because then it still wouldn’t have happened? In another situation, a character tried to seduce a member of the Red Sashes, and rolled a 5. So the obvious danger seemed like that he caught on to her, but she was also supposed to have accomplished her goal a little bit? I must be thinking about “danger” all wrong, because the way I’m going about it results in contradiction.

2. Tried to go through the planning motion, but it quickly fell apart. Bear with me:

“Okay, so you’re going after the Red Sashes treasury. What’s your plan to do so?”

“Well, we have to figure out where it is.”

“Okay, so how do you do that?”

“I want to find the leader of the Red Sashes and interrogate her.”

“Alright, well trying to do that will be a Desperate action, as she is almost always on guard and has numerous bodyguards with her, but you could do things to make that easier. Maybe you find a lackey who knows her schedule and routes?”

“Okay, then we want to find a grunt who can tell us when she’s vulnerable.”

“Okay, then you’re going to Stalk some grunts leaving the Red Sashes HQ. Here’s a Devil’s Bargain, you can steal the Blacklamp’s sketches of the outside of the HQ to find a good place to Stalk from, but they’ll know you did.”

“Well, why don’t we just ask Baz for them rather than take them?”

Long story short, we ended up doing a reconnaissance mission to find out Mylera’s schedule, to ambush Mylera, to find out the treasury location and get a possible key to it. Then maybe we can worry about getting to it and opening it. We had plans to establish plans to establish plans. I felt like we were supposed to just have one big plan. If I’m right, how would I make that happen? Where did I make the crucial mistake?

One player was also worried about what was in the treasury and if they’d be able to transport it (if they needed the crew’s help). Obviously there has to be enough of value in it for the operation to be worth it to Baz, but also little enough for the PC’s to be able to transport it. How do I determine/mitigate that?

Thanks for any advice.