Blades in the Dark: Game Questions – Page 59 – Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

Last one this morning I swear.

Can you guys give me some guidance on social engagements? The last two times my party has run into social interactions with real stakes, we ended up just role-playing it without rolling dice. A lot of that is because I didn’t prepare the conversations in advance, but I couldn’t have because I didn’t know they were going to happen. Are there done good tricks for making social encounters feel as active and risky as combat?

I’ve got some general questions about “the score,” that I’m having trouble conceptualizing.

(1) how big is an engagement? Obviously the PCs need to put themselves at risk to earn the rewards, but how do I decide whether the thing they want to do counts as an engagement? How many action rolls will an average engagement consist of for a given PC? I’m worried that my desire to move plot forward for my players is causing me to make challenges too short and not dangerous enough.

(2) if my PCs are collecting information needed to begin their engagement, how do I add stakes to that process? Do they have to use downtime actions to gather info for a score? Should I be giving them bad intel if they roll poorly? Should I roll for them so they don’t know? If they get bad intel, shouldn’t they be able to pull out of the job once they find out they were misinformed?

(3) time clocks. How many should I be using in an average score? How do I decide in a score whether the player’s roll gets them past the obstacle or just starts a clock? I’m worried that clocks used in this way can just artificially delay success.

(4) for this game, what’s the balance of players knowledge vs character knowledge? We already tell the players what bad stuff is going to happen to the character from a roll, so they can choose to negate things with resistance. Does that mean I always tell them all consequences? Do I tell the players all the progress clocks ticking against them? What do I do if the player’s bad roll ticks the clock for a villain’s secret plan or hidden defense system. Or what if I don’t want the party to know whether the mark believes their lies and I’m using a clock “I’m onto you”? Does this game require players to be omniscient and strive to play their characters accurately?

I know this is a lot. Thanks in advance.

John Harper one of my players just asked an interesting question.

John Harper one of my players just asked an interesting question. Is there a “sell asset” roll? For example, if the team aquire a drug den, can they then sell it for a quick profit?

What do “Arrow-Swift” and “Mind-Link” do?

What do “Arrow-Swift” and “Mind-Link” do? They’re listed under abilities the Hounds pet can learn but aren’t referenced anywhere in the book.

I have a Scum & Villainy question (because naturally I inhaled that immediately).

S&V added the action “Doctor” which includes doctoring someone who is hurt. In the Stitch’s special abilities it gives some specific examples, but for everyone else how does doctoring interact mechanically with harm, especially during a score (i.e. not as a recover action during downtime)?

Or can you only use the doctor action to help heal people during downtime, and the rest of the time the action is used for the other things in the description?

Hoping to run this supplement in the next week or two, and that seems like an important mechanic to understand.

How many players?

Someone enthused to me about how awesome this game is and it sounds very interesting to me but the group I want to run this for is a bit large. I couldn’t find any information about suggested number of players. How many players (not including the GM) do you think is ideal for this? How many do you think it will work with? My group would be six players not including me.

I know I’ve seen it before, but I think it deserves revisiting now.

I know I’ve seen it before, but I think it deserves revisiting now. I have been playing since v3, also watched Six Towers Gang/the Bloodletters AP.

* Scurlock is a Tier III

* Crews can be Tier III, eventually

..and as of v7 or so..

* Citizens of Six Towers is also a Tier III

Scurlock is, by all accounts, just one nefarious vampire. Citizens is (I would guess) all of the people within a neighborhood. The text gives values for “scale of that faction’s gangs” as 10, 20, 40, or 80 people (for Tiers I, II, III, and IV respectively). Which gives rise to my question: When are those figures actually meaningful and how should I use them in play?

Also: I have been using it as a general “they have the influence and capabilities of this many criminals” but other interpretations arise if you use a very literal reading of the text while hunting for an answer one can use across the board: that the value indicates the size of the entire gang even though it says “each” and “gangs” and also says “per gang” OR literally each of the faction’s gangs is that size, and that there might be multiple of them but there is no telling how many

I have a question about Trauma. When a character takes trauma they drop from the action and/or are left for dead.

How is this roleplayed? Are they out for the rest of the session? Do they take level 3 harm “Traumatised”? Are they out of the action for just this scene and return conveniently later with a new trait? Can they defend themselves?

Let’s take an example just for reference. Frost and his crew are infiltrating an enemy factions base he has 7 stress filled. They get ambushed and a fight breaks out, he gets slashed and opts to resist harm. He rolls are gets a 3, maxing out his stress (and overflowing it by one). What happens to Frost? And what happens to that excess stress point?

Hey everyone!

Hey everyone! I’m going to be running a game soon and we just went through character creation and the Whisper (who is a bit of a power gamer) instantly fixated on the ability to attune to summon a ghost and command it.

He asked if he would be able to keep doing that for basically any action (attack this guy, steal this thing), which felt wrong to me but I didn’t have a solid answer for him.

My ideas were that you couldn’t get a ghost to do anything and that the more you knew about a ghost (or had objects close to them) the more you could get it to do. And that obviously you need a new roll each time and that failing would be dangerous plus sometimes you can’t find a ghost. Maybe he needs to find a specific Ghost to do his bidding?

Any thoughts or ideas? I don’t want to be a mean GM and just say no all the time but letting him do whatever seems like it would be game breaking.

Started GMing my first campaign of BitD a few days ago, and came across a rules lawyering question with one of my…

Started GMing my first campaign of BitD a few days ago, and came across a rules lawyering question with one of my players I’m unsure how to definitively rule on.

In the rules, it says “At the end of each session, for each item below, mark 1 xp (in your playbook or an attribute)”

I read this as meaning the applicable gain goes to the applicable point. Desperate action rolls = attribute xp gain, and end of session playbook xp gain applies only to playbook xp. My player insists that the wording means end of session xp can be applied to either.