Blades in the Dark: Game Questions – Page 38 – Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

How do you deal “fiction first” with “You have only two downtime actions”

How do you deal “fiction first” with “You have only two downtime actions” ? If the players just do their stuff, how do I say “hmm you only have 2 actions and you just played them”, or these kind of stuffs? Seems that there is a system restrictions to fiction, no? How do you deal with that?

Anybody have any thoughts on how Heat and Rep might turn out for a score that happened exclusively in the Deathlands?

My players got themselves purposefully sentenced to a Deathlands Scavengers chain gang to 1) Clear their Wanted level and drop their Heat, and 2) Infiltrate the Scavengers to steal Lady Thorn’s book of ritual sorcery.

It was a hell of a good showdown, but now they’ve gotten back to the Dusk with presumably everyone thinking they’re dead and no one having knowledge of their escapades in the terrifying realm beyond the barriers.

I suppose it could be said that in the vacuum of Scavengers’ leadership, some of the chain gang folks could have gotten back into the city and started talking though?

Thoughts?

Got another question for the collective.

Sample drugs and poisions have the volatile draw back. The rules state volatile produces the sideeffect for the user.

My question is if a leech injects, darts or otherwise administers the substance to someone is the leech the user or the victim? Does this mean that every time a leech uses the bandolier they effectively have to resist or take harm?

Can you give me some examples of how your group uses GHOST ECHOES?

Behind the screen, faction clock rolls.

So the web of faction ties is complex and confusing (I might make an entity relationship diagram to figure it out) and the faction clocks are equally challanging (Im going to need to build a series of sequence and stateflow diagrams to figure it out).

My question to gm’s out there is how do you drive a narrative backdrop based on these competting constraints (opposed to just ignoring it and making stuff up)?

Without putting more effort into it than is required to say design an amazon webservice….

I’ve been reading the book over the past couple of days and I really like what I see.

I’ve been reading the book over the past couple of days and I really like what I see. However I do have some questions about the Incarceration section:

1) Do you only make an Incarceration Roll when a PC does a stint in jail, or also when a cohort or crewmember does? (Obviously a friend or enemy taking the fall doesn’t seem like it can generate Prison Claims for the crew).

2) What is the purpose of the Smuggling Prison Claim? What does one do with gear on the inside? The rest of the section makes it seem like you gloss over the time in jail with just the Incarceration Roll, not more fine grained scenes.

3) I’m confused about the timing of incarceration. Everything else in the book works on a Score/Downtime cycle with no mention of how long that takes. So for some games that might be running a Score every week, others may have a month or longer between notable Scores. Incarceration is measured in time though, so it isn’t clear to me how that interacts with Scores/Downtime. Is the expectation that you sit out of some number of scores if you are arrested and the player just plays a different character then? If the assumption is that we gloss over the jail time, what happens to the Downtimes of that character?

Hey guys and gals.

Hey guys and gals. I was wondering how everybody was handling animals in their games. I have a Hound player and we came up with a kind of giant salamander/feline hybrid that he called a Depth Stalker for his pet, but it was a little challenging to create a beast that fit the world.

I was wondering what kinds of creatures y’all had come up with in your games. I’m interested in Hound pets, but any kind of fauna would be fantastic.

Is there absolutely no animal life outside of the cities, do you play that ghosts only desire human life force so animals are relatively safe, or have your animals adapted to life in the Deathlands and dealing with hungry ghosts? I’d love to see what animal life populates your worlds.

On blow guns and zero load.

I am running a game with a leech and in another game I am a leech, and I mean I have to ask, why are blow guns zero load?

In preparing for my leech I googled blow guns, and I mean they are huge. See for details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowgun

It’s not some pan flute sized thing, its a long pipe.

So I have to ask whats with the blow gun and 0 load? Oh and what is the view of ammo, can it be anything in the bandolier? Can you load it with spark(you know the drug in your bandolier) because spark is made with electroplasm, and use it on ghosts? What about fireoil, grenades, or smoke bombs?

Are there any limitations on ammo? Is it one per bandolier slot? That sounds overly restrictive, or is it unlimited? which sounds exploitable.

Also in terms of the economy of actions how does it work, is shooting a dart one action? Or do you need to fill the dart, then load the dart, then shoot?

Im hoping someone (or even John Harper himself) can provide insight here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowgun

Multiple Session heists?

My past two sessions were both spent on the same score. Admittedly, this is my fault as I threw a major sidequest into their main run. I had the sense this might happen, and built in a mini-refresh point, but it brought the issue to the forefront that runs in BitD don’t transition well into a second session. Has anyone else had this issue or come up with ways to deal with it?

Multiple PCs per Player

Multiple PCs per Player

Since it can often happen that a PC is temporarily removed from play (Due to incarceration, trauma, overindulging, and other funny things) I came up with this idea to build a common pool of PCs (let’s say two PCs per player). At the beginning of each game session, every player selects a single PC to be his or her “active PC”, however he or she can switch to a different one after a score if the first gets temporarily removed from play or for whatever reason. (“My first character broke his leg during the last score and he’s not fully healed yet, so I’d better send a different one on the next mission.” “Cool. Just be aware that your bedridden character could still get into trouble. He could be visited by some caring bluecoats. Just saying…”).

It all worked fine so far. I just got a question: how’d you manage downtime for stand-by characters?

Do you feel they should get the default two downtime activities? A single one? Should I just treat them as additional activity (1 coin or 1 rep worth)?