Ziv Wities – Page 3 – Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

Is there any collected resource listing (and linking) the many, many hacks and add-ons for Blades?

Is there any collected resource listing (and linking) the many, many hacks and add-ons for Blades?

That would be a huge help, and probably an awesome document 🙂

EDIT: Well *now* there is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18HD0xNknDzED6vks5-E1c1V0L4ylGPgBt6IOWKDl5gM/edit?usp=sharing

Help build it up by making sure your favorite hacks and resources are included!

How do you handle failures that take place during flashbacks?

With a regular action roll that isn’t during a flashback, it’s fairly clear how a failure or a complication affects you immediately.

With a flashback, though, you’re in the funny position that you want a complication from the flashback to come back and bite you now.

I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it certainly seems more difficult.

If you flashback to getting some buddies to show up and lay in ambush for your enemies, but you fail the roll, then it’s not enough for them to have refused you then – you need something bad to happen now.

If you went planting pistols up on the roof last night, but failed, you can’t have fallen and broken your leg, because you haven’t been playing with a broken leg for the past hour.

…and so on.

I’m not saying there’s no good solutions – maybe your friends have betrayed you; maybe you thought you’d plated the pistols but somebody else has stolen them. But it seems that failures-in-flashback are rather harder to come up with, and they also seem like they might be prone to a somewhat repetitive failure mode of “you thought you had that thing ready but now it turns out you don’t.”

Any suggestions or advice for handling this well?

So in my latest BitD session, we ran an infiltration score into the Red Sashes treasury.

And unfortunately, the session fell pretty flat.

Part of it was likely due to low energy. But I actually found the score much harder to run compellingly than the previous one (which was a Deception score, and was fantastic ).

Mostly, it felt like the players’ object was for things to stay quiet and boring. And I whirled up a decent variety of challenges, but the various resolutions were mostly, “OK, we do X to get past Y quietly.”

The scope felt very limited, and the outcomes were uninteresting – a complete reversal of the previous session.

A big part of the problem was that the players kept getting complete successes (and taking a lot of stress to achieve them). So I had a lot of trouble finding places for things to start going south, or get more complicated. But… I don’t think that was all of it (and I suspect a lot of the reason the players were willing to take so much stress was because of the whole sense of “this entire plan depends on nothing going wrong and us continuing to avoid detection).

So… I don’t know. I had trouble “making bad things happen” in my previous session as well, since I feel that during scores I’m mostly responding to player actions. But this time was a whole different level.

Any advice? What can I be doing better?

Many thanks 🙂

Finally got a chance to run Blades!

It was a LOT of fun; the players loved it, and I had a blast. Bits and smatterings of reactions:

* I didn’t play v2, but v3 feels like it eases up a bit on stressing the PCs out, which I liked – I felt like I’d hoard ALL my stress under the previous version, and here I feel like I need to be cautious with it, but I can spend it when I feel like it’s worth it.

* There were a few bits and bobs that confused me in the Quick Start rules. I’ll make a list next time I read ’em, and see if it’s anything that wasn’t covered by the FAQ. One thing that particularly threw me was the Entanglement role; staying down to 0-3 Heat+Tier seems reeeeeeally hard to me. I might just be comparing to v2 here, though – I remember there the entanglement difficulty rose drastically with the heat category; when I saw my crew had a somewhat messy scene and some people also got killed (total 4 heat), I got to the Entanglements and went “no WAY they’re ready for the second tier at the end of their very first score!”. Reading over it now, you might’ve changed that around – they don’t look awful the way I recall.

* The Claim chart worked fantastically well. I was worried that a wide-open game would leave them hemming and hawing for an initial score, but they saw the flowchart and chose something they wanted, and BAM. I tied it in with the Crow’s Foot quickstart situation – easy. I took the advice to give ’em a couple of options – easy. That had me offering a pair of general directions that’s probably very unlike what I would’ve come up with on my own – pure awesome. (They decided they wanted to start by getting a Luxury Fence, I said, OK, the Crows’ fence feels like she’s about to be stabbed in the back amid all the turmoil and she wants to hide; the Lampblack fence will probably be won over if you just bring in a big enough haul. SO. EASY.)

* Character creation takes a LONG TIME for a quick start. There’s a ton of stuff to decide, and everything feels vague and unclear if the players don’t come in knowing the setting. I rolled with it and we had fun, but I think if I ran this at a convention or something I’d definitely come in with pregen characters, with maybe some extra flavor text, and just let each player do a minor customization or two. I am looking forward to seeing what awesome pregen characters this community’s going to produce 🙂

* Gameplay was great and flowed easily. I LOVED being able to tell them “OK, stop planning now.” And they go “No, but we need to figure out how–” And I say, “No, no you don’t.” Coming up with complications all the time was a heck of a lot of fun.

* I feel like I need to play a bit more to grok how to play the opposition properly. First I felt like the character’s action rolls move the scene forward, and I didn’t really know how to “make moves” for the opposition. Then I remembered to break out a bunch of clocks for Bad Things to Start Happening, and that worked like a charm. But I still felt like I lacked a way to say, “OK, bluecoat ghosts are swarming at you RIGHT NOW, what are you going to do about that?”. I don’t think this is a flaw, just something I need to play more to get a handle on.

* Probably the best moment of the game:

“OK, for the ‘planting false evidence’ clock, I’m going to flash back and say we found a particular type of oil that only the Lampblacks use, and got some of that.”

“Sure! Want a Devil’s Bargain? You were only able to get the oil in an enormous tank, which is now back in your lair.”

–any game that lets me lay out a Chekhov’s Gun so beautifully has surely won my heart.

(YES, they took it. OF COURSE THEY TOOK IT.)

So, this was fantastic. Thanks so much for this, and I’m really looking forward to playing more and reading more!

Hey all!

Hey all! Loving the KS campaign, and I spent all weekend poring over the quickstart rules, which look absolutely fantastic.

One area I’m still very very confused about is Assets. Obviously, I could fudge or houserule this reasonably well. But I’d love to hear a little more detail:

1. Is asset acquisition at downtime always “Temporary Use,” or is “Temporary Use” a special case (like its neighbors “Heal Thyself” and “Overindulgences”)?

1a. If “Temporary Use” is the norm, how do I acquire something long-term?

1b. If it’s a special case – when does it apply?

2. I’m not clear on the distinction between a “fine” asset and a “standard” one (except for +dice). Can any asset have both a “standard” version and a “fine” one, and then I declare which asset I’m after, and Acquire whichever version my roll gives me? Or are some types of assets “standard” (e.g. “a blade”) and others have to be “fine” (e.g. “a spirit mask”), and so my roll limits my asset options as well as its quality?

3. Are Assets going to have precise mechanical effects and limitations? Or are they defined mostly by narrative?

I’d assume that a character wouldn’t be able to fight effectively without A Blade Or Two, or pick locks effectively without Burglary Tools – but I’m not seeing where in the mechanics this fits in.

I’m guessing it’s something along the lines of “Use your best judgement, and apply penalties to action roles if your character’s poorly equipped”; I’m just wondering (given the focus on Assets as a mechanical element) if there’s anything more than that.

Thanks!