Hi all!
I recently ran my first two sessions of Blades and a few issues popped up that I figured I should ask about:
Firstly, the compel ability:
One of our players plays a Whisper with the compel ability. During our sessions their typical approach to overcome obstacles was to summon a ghost and compel it to do so-and-so, for instance “attack that gang” or “scout ahead and look for the treasure”.
This raised a concern that this player could effectively bypass the need for actions like Hunt, Skirmish etc. and cover a wide range of actions with just Attune by using a ghostly stand-in.
How should I (if at all) balance this out? Is the natural response “Sure, you can do it, but ghosts are extremely dangerous and conspicuous so you’ll be in a desperate position if things backfire”? Is their approach “stealing” the spotlight from other players by denying them the chance to overcome the challenge with their non-arcane abilities, or is this appropriate use of the Whisper’s power and their function in the group.
More generally, how did your group interpret the compel ability, can the Whisper summon an endless stream of ghosts at will? One ghost per scene? Does the GM need to first describe the area as containing a spirit before the Whisper can compel it, or should the Whisper always be able to attune to locate a ghost (does this call for two separate rolls for the locating and compelling or just one)?
Secondly, quiet operations:
I’m not sure how to use the mechanic of keeping an operation completely quiet.
From my reading it seems that after each score the crew can decide if they want to “take responsibility” for it – thus accruing Rep and Heat according to the rules, or not – and thus get no Rep and no Heat.
Should it be as simple as deciding, or should it at least involve an action roll for “How do you keep this operation quiet” – possibly as a downtime action?
It also seems to me that this means a crew can have a score be as chaotic and explosive as they want, and suffer no faction-level consequences as long as they forfeit a potentially small amount of Rep (when attacking a small faction for instance), is this by design or am I misinterpreting?
More specifically to our group – our crew recently attacked a location owned by The Lost, but disguised themselves as a squad of Billhooks. This score was meant as a “set up” score for our next session where the crew will attack a Billhook location while they are busy figuring out what happened, who gave the orders to attack The Lost etc.
The score was successful (albeit with lots of mayhem and corpses) and of course, in order for the next score to go as planned, no one can find out that the Billhooks were not, in fact, behind the attack. We discussed it and proposed a tentative solution in which the Rep and Heat for the first score would be delayed until the end of the second score, when the jig will be up and the crew will be free to boast about how they pitted the two factions against each other. At which point they will receive the cumulative Rep and Heat from the two scores. Is this a good solution? Would it make the crew suffer too much heat at once without having a chance to reduce it, or is it an appropriate cost for keeping the lid quiet on the operation until the time is right? How would your group handle/has handled a similar situation?
And lastly, a smaller question regarding faction clocks, do you pick a few factions each downtime and increment their clocks by one, or do you make a fortune roll based on their tier and increment accordingly?
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and stories!