Category: Blades in the Dark: Discussion

Do friends and contacts grant a +1d to downtime rolls? I ask because I’m watching Bloodletters, ep 7 and Oskarr gets a +1d to Quellyn’s quality to heal him. However, I’m spacing where that rule comes from, or has it been changed?

Oh, the whole “It puts the ‘love’ in ‘love-iathan’..” had me laughing my ass off. Kings to Stras!

Oh, another bit for John, Sean, Adam and/or Stras: since Arcy and Oskarr were running around hurt, were those harm penalties not mentioned because they wouldn’t have impacted the score at the party or were they accounted for already?

Need some advice from the Blades crew!

So, played today and some things popped up. Some are rules questions and some are “How do you handle it?”. I’m pre-apologizing for any lack of coherance, as I’m rushing to see John Wick 2. 🙂

Anyway, here goes:

1) How does/should faction status, friends and contacts interact with gaining assets? The way I see it, they should, if only a +1d. In our game tonight, I went with Doll Consorting with the Dimmer Sisters (+2 status) in order to get loan of a spirit minion.

We could’ve gone with an extra DTA, but I didn’t want them to be drained of coin (a Tier 0 crew can go broke getting decent assets). I figured there needed to be some benefit to buffing the +1 with the Sisters up to +2.

2) How do you handle gear, heat and rep if an NPC faction retaliates between scores? Do you make them track loadout? Do you account for heat if fools get smoked? Does the crew get rep?

We used the fiction (they were at a recently acquired claim, ready for the blowback) to account for loadout, but I decided the only heat that might drop is from DBs and consequences. As far as rep goes, I said you don’t get a boost for holding a claim you stole. The bennie’s the claim and it’s boost; a crew’s expected to hold their shit (that’s why you get rep in the first place, when you first stole it).

3) A biggie was if, after getting attacked, there should be some free DTAs. I went with “No” to keep the mechanical structure coherent, saying it’d be rep or coin if they wanted to use DTAs. My fictional reasoning was that such blowback’s are expected and if a crew can’t deal, it loses money or face.

4) I for some reason remember hitting Trauma not only clears your stress, but you return healed. If I’m correct, could somebody give me a reference?

5) If you fill an ability track mid-session from desperate rolls, do you upgrade an action rating right then and move on, or are you capped until the session’s end? We went with the latter, but I’m not sure what’s a better way to do it.

Well, that’s it for now. Thanks, everyone!

Benjamin Herder’s thread about his Leech’s grenade launcher got me wondering: What other “Jindoshian” inventions have groups created or want to create?

In ours, the Lurk wants a collapsing compound bow and arrows. That’s the base idea. He’s tossing around arcane arrowhead designs like Garret has in Thief (who wouldn’t want those?). There’s also the idea of having the bow contain a ghost and it doesn’t fire physical arrows, but instead electroplasmic arrow-shaped shards of the ghost, in all its rage, essentially shaving off bits of the once-soul with each shot. They would pierce most non-warded armors and instead of physical wounds, the arrows rip through the target’s soul, leaving blackened wounds akin to frostbite. For ghosts it would be as if they were struck with an arcanely-enhanced ghost weapon. We’re still figuring out details, such as what the magnitude would be*.

They also want true silencers (rune-covered tubes attached to the barrels) that suck the muzzle flash and report into the ghost field. On the other side, it’s loud and flashy, so anyone who happens to be attuned will definitely notice. One balancing penalty we thought of is each silencer counts as 1 load, due to the size. In any case we love the idea of a crew wearing darksight goggles thwip-thwipping a gang of scumbags in the dark!

There’s also a set of boots and gloves that allow for Spiderman-like movement, but that’s only a fledgling idea.

We have ghost grenades (trapped, pissed off spirits are released), the Crowkiller hull and lighteater armor (lights dim as it sucks away illumination).

(Forgot this!) *Is there a cap on magnitude when figuring quality?