Category: Blades in the Dark: Discussion

So, Blades is quite a bit faction-sandboxy, which means you get to have fun thinking about what all the non-PC factions are doing offscreen. So far, so good. But, well, the web possible of interactions is fat and robust. Even if you’re doing the sane thing and limiting your offscreen musings to gangs either the players or you have an active interest in, there’s still loads of potentially relevant stuff that happens offscreen but has onscreen implications. And you want the players to be informed about these goings on, so they could intervene and change stuff up, right? But at the same time, a session is usually mostly about a score, and a score is usually about the immediate concerns of why demon and when fire. There is only so much bandwith for offscreen information to leak into, especially when you also want to just want to just focus on the characters when they’re not criming.

For the first few sessions of the game, I prepared possible job offers from all the gangs the crew was friendly-ish with. This was good because it forced me to have a very clear idea of what all these people were trying to accomplish, and I could have them move on with their plans if the PCs weren’t forthcoming, creating either new opportunities or mayhem.

After I a while, I noticed that the players would basically pick whichever job I mentioned first, so (and this really should have been obvious to me from the start, I agree!) all the effort put in on the other score offers basically went unused. Also, having a “job offers” system at all meant that the players weren’t planning their own scores, and weren’t engaging with the claims system much.

So we moved on to the players planning out their own scores, and me keeping track of long-term complications(/opportunities) through notes and just a whole bunch of clocks. This has worked pretty well so far, but I’ve been running the game a while, and it turns out just having a bunch of mostly-GM-facing clocks just isn’t that feasible. There are now so many that I keep forgetting about one or the other all time (either because I mentally discount them in a “well, that won’t immediately be relevant for the next session no matter how the roll goes, so I’ll just do it later” manner for several sessions in a row; or just because my notes are more like doodles with questions rather than any sort reliable record), and it just feels cumbersome.

At the same time, the players have created a power vacuum a whole bunch of previously unknown groups will flow in to fill, so being able to introduce new factions and their plans and weaknesses while also allowing profitable scores to happen is definitely something that I need right now.

How do you deal with putting the offscreen on screen in your game?