Category: Blades in the Dark: Game Questions

*Wall of text incoming. TLDR: Help me understand how to handle score planning.*

Hey all,

I’m a relatively new Blades GM, and have been absolutely loving the system, the scenes that it creates, and the flexibility that it all provides. Coming from a background of meticulously planned games and always yearning for a more flexible, improv-forward game, Blades is exactly what I have been looking for.

My group is still getting the feel for the game (we’re running our 5th session tonight), but I feel like the player’s have finally started to understand the amount of flexibility in the game, and their shared responsibility in creating opportunities that push their crew forward (rather than me just creating scores for them to go through) in the world. I tend to come to the table with a few skeletons of scores (that is, location outlines with some obstacles or dangers they’d encounter), but rely on the players (and their characters) decisions to ultimately create the score. I find it difficult to create meaningful, exciting scores in this improv-focused system.

Here’s an example from our last session: The players are in search of securing some more turf for their crew. They decided they wanted to steal some turf from their rival, the Fog Hounds. Having a target, I offered to cut to the chase, calling for an engagement roll if they would provide the plan and detail, or for them to gather information to help in their goals. The characters decided to Gather Information.

Through Gathering Information, the players wanted to know how to find their rival’s turf, and found that the Fog Hounds have a third party handle their turf in the Night Market – a property manager of sorts. They wanted more dirt, so through further Information Gathering, they found out that this third party has a nasty secret that he’d rather not get out: he is a pedophile with a preference for the children of drug-addled families (yeah, pretty dark).

The player’s chose a Deception score with the detail being that this individual wouldn’t get the service they requested, but would get the Crew’s plant and then get caught in the act. They rolled a critical, so they got through the doorman at a brothel known for its discretion as well as its selection of the “rare and exotic”, and we picked up the action with them sitting at the bar with enough time to get in position for their target to arrive.

As a GM, I couldn’t help but feel like they were trying to plan too much, but I didn’t know how else to allow the players to have control over their score, nor did I want to have an under-cooked score. On the one hand, they had created a very specific target and their weakness, but the rest of the score was a big question mark. The players walked away from the table smiling and celebrating their exploits, but I had a strange feeling telling me things could have gone better, that I had asked the wrong questions or missed opportunities. When do you guys say “enough is enough, let’s roll for engagement”? How do you create/decide/discern the obstacles that the players will have to overcome? How do you create your score?