Author: Chris O'Keefe

John Harper

I was excited to receive the special edition the other day, but just now a regular version unexpectedly appeared on my doorstep as well. I’m not sure how this happened, I definitely just ordered the special edition.

I’m still trying to figure out if I was charged twice, will update when I know. =P

Anyway this is a bit of a puzzle to me, and I figure you might want to know.

So maybe someone can help answer a bit of a question.

To some extent, a lot of the time if you prepare a contingency in advance to avoid a problem, doing so often doesn’t actually matter.

Let me explain;

If I am a Lurk, and I use a vial of silence, and proceed to fail a Prowl roll, there is going to be a consequence. It just can’t be sound-related. Which in some cases might actually be worse. Making some sound might tick up an alarm clock, but if that can’t happen because of a silence potion, the GM is tasked with coming up with some other consequence. There’s no reason it couldn’t end up being damage, instead.

There’s nothing in the rules stating that a silence potion (still an example) gives you any benefits to your roll, though a GM could certainly choose to do so, and that would be its own benefit. But that’s sort of beside the point; if you plan for a contingency in such a way that it doesn’t provide a specific roll benefit but DOES make it impossible for a specific consequence to occur, is that actually helping?

Another question I have is whether or not it makes sense for something like a vial of silence to act like a special Armor when it makes sense for it to do so. Like the Lurk’s special armor related to stealth. Is it within the bounds of the rules for a Lurk to use silence, mess up a Prowl roll, and have the GM say ‘You stumble around, but the guards can’t hear it, so the consequence is automatically resisted.’

Obviously the rules don’t want to over-emphasize planning ahead, and the items exist for largely narrative purpose, but there’s a part of me that finds it rather unsatisfying that using a special tool to be silent doesn’t actually provide you with any particular advantage, it just shifts your consequences somewhere else.

I know I’m overthinking this, and one easy response is; your group can play it however they want. But I’d love to hear someone else’s take.

John Harper Small suggestion for the book layout!

There are probably good reasons for putting the backers at the very back of the book, so hopefully nobody will take offense if I suggest switching the order of the backer list with the index?

Having the index as the last pages in the book makes it a little quicker to find in both paper form and digital form. While playing a game, especially as kind of a new player to Blades, I’ve found myself hunting for the index a lot. Going to the bottom of the document and then having to scroll up a bunch to find the index is a pain. Much as I love the backers. 😉

The Thief crew special ability ‘Everyone Steals’ currently only allows you to raise an ability from 0 to 1. This means that it is basically at its most advantageous during character/crew creation, because people can avoid ‘losing’ the benefit of Everyone Steals.

For example, the Lurk starts with 2 of the 3 abilities listed in Everyone Steals (Prowl and Finesse), meaning the only way a Lurk can hope to benefit from Everyone Steals, is to leave Tinker empty until the crew takes it.

This is a little finicky and I think encourages min-maxing in a way that doesn’t feel appropriate for the game, in my opinion.

I’d recommend changing it from raising abilities from 0-1, to instead giving +1 to your lowest ability rating (to a maximum of 3). So if you have a 0, you must raise that to 1. If you have 1 Finesse, 1 in Tinker, and 2 in Prowl, then you must raise either Finesse or Tinker, and cannot raise Prowl.

Just a thought.

My group was discussing the ‘Hidden’ lair trait. In the QS there isn’t really a description of how this mechanically works in the game, so a couple of points/questions;

1) We were thinking that this would present itself as an Effect limiter on efforts of NPCs in finding the lair. They can’t engage the lair in any way until they find it, and finding it is harder than it would be for other lairs. Are there any other ways this might manifest in the game?

2) Does this only work once? If the lair is found, it is hard to imagine it really maintaining a ‘Hidden’ status, at the very least with the faction that has discovered the lair, and they might be willing to share that information with other factions. So what are some options here? You could simply make the Hidden feature no longer apply to factions that have individually overcome the Hidden feature. You could also remove Hidden from the sheet and force the crew to re-buy it if they can justify in in the fiction, or ‘suspend’ the Hidden feature until the crew has satisfactorily hidden themselves again (basically a free rebuy)

Thoughts?

I’m sure there’s already digital sheets out there and they might even be better than mine, but I felt like putting together something for an online game me and my friends are getting started. We like to keep everything in google docs so it’s accessible.

The sheet uses a lot of data validation for ticks, so you just double-click to change an empty cell to the appropriate symbol.

Anyway, figured I’d share in case someone is looking for something like this!