Blades in the Dark: Game Questions – Page 21 – Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

Good evening you crooks!

The whisper in my local group of shadows is thinking about setting up a ritual in order to put to sleep the inhabitants of a house.

the idea being an object to smash or a mark to place on the front door prepared in advance as per the ritual rules.

HOWEVER, i’m having a hard time ruling on the cost/effects on the ritual. any ideas?

Question – does the BitD text imply a principled distinction between the handling of the two examples on page 220…

Question – does the BitD text imply a principled distinction between the handling of the two examples on page 220 (sea demon wave and Whisper hurricance)? Or is it just saying, in essence, “the GM makes a judgement based on whatever seems reasonable to them”?

Bit of an odd question, but do guns in Duskvol use black powder?

Bit of an odd question, but do guns in Duskvol use black powder? Had a situation come up where how much smoke gets generated by firearms mattered, and none of us were on the same page. We settled on an answer that worked for us (they use black powder and make a lot of smoke) but is there a canonical one?

Hi all

Hi all,

Played a few sessions of BitD now and i’m really enjoying it. I’ve been toying with the idea of my character making themselves a range of arcane trinkets to help in various situations, but there are a few things in the crafting section of the rulebook that aren’t too clear to me.

1. Downtime activities can get +1d if you have a friend or contact to help you, does this apply to crafting too?

2. What are people’s thoughts on using attune instead of tinker when crafting an arcane item, or giving an item an arcane modification? This feels like a yes from a fiction perspective, but i’d like to know what others think

3. How do you draw the line between a modification and an invention? A lot of the ideas I have involve taking a relatively mundane item and enchanting it with additional properties; this seems like the demon harming dagger given as an example of arcane modification, but how far can you go before it becomes a completely new invention?

4. A slightly more general downtime question as my last one; there are a few ways of increasing your effect during downtime (crafting abilities, pushing yourself), if a player does this and then rolls a crit, do they get rewarded beyond the crit amount (6 ticks to a clock, tier +3 item) or is the crit result a cap on what you can get in a roll?

So, just GM’d my first session of BitD (first time GMing anything, yikes!).

So, just GM’d my first session of BitD (first time GMing anything, yikes!). Had a great time. Definitely kept me on my toes, but looking forward to our next session. Couple questions came up from that first session, though:

1) How “binding” are the results of an Engagement roll? My group’s first Score involved ambushing a group of Lampblacks en route to a deal with the Fog Hounds. Their plan was to hit the Lampblacks as they were crossing a bridge into the Docks, steal their clothes and Coin, and then pose as Lampblacks to complete the deal.

They got a 6 on their Engagement roll, so I figure, “Cool, Controlled position to start.” The group’s Hound is set up in a prime sniping position overlooking the bridge, with the group’s Cutter lying in wait ahead. The Lampblacks take the bridge as expected, wary but not anticipating any trouble. Rather than just jump the Lampblacks, however, the Cutter swaggers up to them, blocks their way, and demands that they “pay the toll.”

Huh.

I gave him Controlled position for his Command roll (they’d earned it), but mulling it over, it seemed a pretty Desperate thing to do. I mean, it’s one guy, threatening a bunch of armed, hardened thugs on their own turf. That… seems pretty dangerous. Made me wonder what the best practice is when players are given an optimal situation but do something that potentially squanders their opportunity (say, during a Social operation, the players get a 6 on their Engagement roll and then inexplicably decide to Wreck something to impress their affluent host; still Controlled?).

2) What’s a good way to do traps? Once the fighting broke out, one of the Lampblacks went after the crew’s Leech, who’d been hiding off to the side, trying (and failing) to use his blowgun. He quickly flashbacked to setting up a snare near his position that would string up anyone who came after him. I thought it was a cool idea, but I wasn’t immediately sure how to play it out.

I wound up having him to a Tinker roll to craft the trap (minimum Tier 2); I had him pay Stress, wasn’t sure if I should’ve had him pay Coin instead. I then used the trap’s Quality (2) in a Fortune roll to determine its effectiveness. Still, I wasn’t sure if I should’ve had the Leech do another roll (probably Tinker or Wreck?) to effectively place the trap beforehand. The way I did it doesn’t really take the target’s capabilities into account (are they able to see it, avoid it, etc.). Definitely not something I want the group abusing going forward.

Hi everyone!

Hi everyone! I’m a new Blades GM (30-year veteran of many other systems) and ran our first score last night. It was fun – our old group has a bit of adjustment to go yet but we can see the potential.

One thing that totally stumped us though was the Spiritbane Charm item on almost every playbook sheet. Its effects are vaguely described and I was happy to just make up that it helped keep at bay the first ghost that they encountered (the very first engagement roll they ever made was a 1-3 despite heavy prep and 4 dice :o) – BUT a sharp-eyed player spotted that it cost 0 Load.

Since carrying a Spiritbane charm is zero load, why wouldn’t every character who has access to one (all except Leech and Whisper) just always carry one? In which case, doesn’t that basically nullify its advantages if everyone always has one – that just becomes the baseline defence against spirits? I’m confused about how much advantage to factor in for that if they’re always carried.

Maybe I’m overthinking it in systems terms but in my head you burn a Load box to give you an advantage, but if it doesn’t add to your Load it’s just a freebie and so maybe shouldn’t be that useful in mechanical terms? On the fly I decided that against an average ghost it gave you a minimum of 1d instead of 0d if you had no Attune dots. How does everyone else handle this?

Thanks in advance!

Hey all!

Quick question about the Blades Sheets in Roll20

Is there any way I can move the clocks from a character sheet to the main screen? Maybe place it on top of a map or something?

Thank you very much!

-M

First of all, love the game, it’s the best modern RPG I’ve played, and everyone in my group is having a great time…

First of all, love the game, it’s the best modern RPG I’ve played, and everyone in my group is having a great time so far.

I did have a question about Smugglers though regarding Hunting Grounds. I couldn’t find this answered anywhere else, and ran into this during my game the other night.

Every other Crew type has both:

Hunting Grounds (substituted for something else in the case of Cults and Hawkers also).

A Favored Operation type (even Cults and Hawkers have operation types listed here).

The bonus says it activates when both the score takes place within the hunting grounds, and is of the favored operation.

But for Smugglers, it says they have Cargo Types instead of Hunting Grounds, which would be fine, except then instead of Operation Types, it just lists cargo types again, with some examples.

This seems like an error, or i’m just missing something. If this is Intended, does that mean they get the bonus for every operation that involved that favored cargo type, regardless of where it’s happening? That would be a much stronger bonus than any other type of crew gets. Did I miss something?

Thanks for anyone who can help clear up the confusion!

We had a question in our game. Quite a simple situation.

A leech with 3 points in tinker has a physiker abilty. The abilty states that everyone in the crew get +1d to their healing rolls. Does that mean that this leech rolls 4d when healing a crew member during downtime?

Hi guys, just couple of questions regarding running the games.

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!