Author: Chris Boyd

Does anyone have thoughts on the Slide special ability “Adaptation?”  It reads “Take 1 stress to substitute one action rating for another”  It seems absurd to me, for two reasons, first just on pure value, being able to make the trade of 1 stress for 2 or even 3 or 4 dice (later in the game) is incredible, also it seems like it trivializes the decision making of deciding what your character is good at, with this you can pick one thing to max out and be incidentally good at everything.

Obviously it has some downsides associated with it, and maybe it isn’t so absurd during play.  I haven’t seen it in play because everyone I’ve played with has been avoiding it for the reasons I mentioned.  Has anyone had a player try to “break the game” with this?  How did it feel?

My initial reaction is that it will be changed before the full game is released, but maybe I am crazy?

(My first thought on how to change it would be make it only swap actions within a category)

I’m having trouble importing the full city Duskwall map to roll20, anyone else have this problem / have a fix?

On The Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh:  This faction is getting me really excited.  At first glance, it sounds super depraved, and by our outsider perspective, maybe it is.  But after reading up on them a bit, they’re starting to make a lot of sense.  So from my approximation, here’s why they’re the closest thing to a “state religion” in Duskwall / The Imperium.

In a world where the gates of the afterlife have been blown open, spirits walk the earth, and are the single greatest threat to human life as they become more and more feral over time, the spirit is not revered the way it is in our world, it is reviled.  The Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh refers to the spirit as “The Devil Inside,” in their dogma the spirit is not who you are, it is a corrupting influence, the essence of the self is the body.

As such, they preach both indulging the pleasures of the flesh, and also preserving and caring for the flesh.  In my group’s fiction for example the Church sponsors various brothels, drug dens, and bathhouses, and they are trying to get legislation passed that would require all brothels to be registered with the church.

The greatest achievement for a Disciple of the Ecstasy of the Flesh is to become a Hollow.  Where from our outsider perspective the concept is associated with zombies and horror, to the Church, it is the greatest purity of being that a person can achieve.  Of course such creatures tend to be mindless servants of the church…

There’s been talk about how some players are having problems with accomplishing goals in Blades sessions, and PCs getting stressed out too quickly.

I’ve found both in games I’ve ran and games I’ve played in, that how you avoid this problem, and adjust the feeling of power to the level desired by the people at your table, is by reducing the number of effect segments required to do things, and not being a slave to the number of clocks on the table.  You don’t always need to fill them all!  Try making a lot of the obstacles not actually have clocks, effectively clock size 1, (skip effect roll)

Another big aspect is that there’s actually and invisible 4th position to the right of Controlled.  You could call it “You Win.”  The positions in BitD are literally a way to adding mechanics to narrative positioning, how well you’re set up in the fiction to accomplish something.  A lot of the time your players have made a great plan, or are trying to do something that is effectively trivial, (or you don’t want to slow the game down spending too much time on it…) in those cases, when you can’t think of a danger use the “You Win” position, skip straight to effect.  (and a lot of those situations would be 1 segment clocks anyway)

Any advice on best practices for resolving dice rolls that read “you do it but the danger manifests” in situations where success and the danger seem mutually exclusive?  For example, climbing across a thin ledge, where the danger is “you fall”?