Hi guys, just couple of questions regarding running the games. Did my first Blades in the Dark session today (to a bunch of utter RPG newbies, no less!) and in general I really liked how it flowed, but there’s a few things:
We essentially did the opening bit mentioned in the book where I gave plenty of hooks to the players to choose between working for Crows, Lampblacks or Red Sashes – we started off in the Lampblacks HQ and the players negotiated a bit of a deal to help them. Out of habit, I kind of had figured out a few ways where this could go, but kept it fairly loose overall.
What ended up happening was that the players found their way into a Red Sashes speakeasy, cracked some non-red sash skulls to get on their good side and using this to their advantage, gained a bit of info on their drug den they were supposed to take over and steal for Lampblacks. So in a way, this was a bit of a pre-score moment.
Next, they made it to the drug den and even though I mentioned it couple of times that they can play it pretty loose with the planning (guns blazing or stealth etc), it still ended up going pretty similar to any other RPG in that one Hound stayed behind to cover the entrance, one went in the front door to cause a bit of a customer hassle while three guys climbed upstairs from the back – so in a way, I didn’t really get a good shot for ever making that engagement roll – it also naturally made sense for the guys to spread out like they did, so it kinda felt like RPG-wise everything was fine, but we just couldn’t hack the BitD approach into the start of the score.
Also, we didn’t have that many fights, or if we did, they were over fairly fast – and I absolutely loved that. But we did end up having a rather rough skirmish downstairs, in a situation where most of the crew was upstairs and one or two guys were trying to fix the situation from an underdog position – it made sense that the battle isn’t over with one die roll, but it also kind of felt like a progress clock would just make the scene a bit too artificial – essentially the player ended up rolling dice a few times, with his position/effect changing as the battle went on, ultimately ending up getting nailed to the stairs by a sword that was plunged into him by a red sash who just got his head shot off by another player who came to after bleeding on the floor for a while.
I tend to GM any game pretty fast and loose, putting story and momentum over rules. We had a good game, people were happy and excited to try RPGs for the first time, but I still feel there has to be some nicer ways of running combat encounters or putting 5 players onto a score without it being done the “old fashioned way”.
I also played pretty fast and loose with the position/effect bit, especially in the combat, so rather than explicitly stating them out, I just gauged the potential effect from the player’s description. I always try to keeps fights viceral, fast, with plenty of fog of war for all sides so that’s why I shun most combat rules in a lot of games (good example is our latest D&D campaign where I didn’t really give a rats ass about the players hitpoints, damage etc since they got in the way of a good story :D)
Any thoughts on the above? Any Youtube videos (with specific timestamps) that describe combat or engagement roll setups? I’ve tried watching a lot of the Roll20 videos in Youtube, but my problem is that there’s tens of episodes and it’s actually really hard to find relevant spots from hours of footage – I’d actually welcome written synopsis over videos, but o tempora o mores 🙂
Thanks!