Blades in the Dark: Game Questions – Page 70 – Blades in the Dark G+ Archives

Hey all

Hey all,

A bunch of questions, mostly to clarify things in my head. Thanks for any contributions!

COMBAT

1. A PC moves to attack an NPC. Is this resolved in a simple roll or with a clock? If a simple roll, how do you determine the difficulty of the action roll?

2. Say this was a bar brawl instead. A group of five thugs has surrounded the PC and the PC decides he’s going to make an example of them and wants to go lethal (so they fight with death in mind as well): is this resolved with a simple roll by the player on each opponent, a clock or a simple on all at desperate?

EFFECT

3. P5 suggests the effect of the roll is determined beforehand, but seems to lean towards an arbitrary position chosen by GM and/or player. Now in a scenario where players are not eager to suffer consequences and go straight for the insta-kill (unlike the the example set by the excellent Bloodletters AP) – is there some default stance a GM can use without having to be the one to pull the players back?

4. Obvious but while I have the mic – Do the “ticks” in the effect levels box on P10 refer to ticks you make on a clock?

CLOCKS

Faction clocks: “When the PCs take downtime (page 20) the GM ticks forward the faction clocks that they’re interested in.”

5. Does this mean nothing else moves until the players interact with it?

6. With the above in ming, the given scenario is that the players are working for/with the Lampblacks vs the Red Sashes. Both factions have “defeat opponent” as a clock – how do you trigger the rivals? Is this done via GM fiat, with a narrative – or by a fortune die? And how would you judge the effect offscreen?

-B

Say a crew of Thieves has Quality 1 Shadows/Thugs and the Elite Shadows upgrade.

Say a crew of Thieves has Quality 1 Shadows/Thugs and the Elite Shadows upgrade… are they Quality 2 Shadows/Thugs or Quality 2 Shadows/Quality 1 Thugs?

Request for clarification: the Whisper’s Tempest ability.

Request for clarification: the Whisper’s Tempest ability. Page 61 says “Every PC can roll their ATTUNE rating to attempt arcane actions, even if they’re not specifically a trained ‘Whisper.”” The page then goes on to list examples of various arcane effects at the various stress levels.

The rules are ambiguous here — is the Whisper’s “Tempest” ability required to produce flashy, overt effects, or no? The rules on page 61 seem to imply that it is not, but that would make the ability itself useless.

I understand that any playbook can take Tempest as a veteran ability, but the powers it opens up should be made more explicit.

Hey John

Hey John,

I’ve been wondering. In the sessions you play online your players get an extra die when they interact with somone from their own background.

But when i search v6 i cant find any reference towards getting an extra die.

Is it a rule which is out of the most up to date version and it is still there because you got used to it. Or is it out of the new version by accident?

I think I’ve been misreading the character sheet and stopping my players from nabbing advances more freely from…

I think I’ve been misreading the character sheet and stopping my players from nabbing advances more freely from other playbooks.

So, uh. The three dots next to the Veteran Advance. That’s not how many advances you would need to get a playbook ability from another source. That’s how many playbook abilities from other sources you can get, total, right?

It makes a lot more sense this way, but previously I just assumed that Blades is a lot more niche-defined, and you only dabble in other playbooks when you run out of stuff to do on your own.

Question – how hard can one play post-trauma results?

One of my player’s character got himself captured by the Red Sashes in the fiction. His last pre-trauma action was to resist getting stabbed in the throat, which put him in trauma range, and he was so helplessly out of position and without support that the only natural thing was to consider him caught and “interrogated” (don’t feel bad for the guy, what goes around comes around). The trauma rules say that you “come back later, shaken and drained,” so at the time, I thought that I was following the rules as written when I finangled the fiction to have a friendly-ish bouty hunter rescue him from the predicament.

Was I right in doing so? Or is saying “you can’t play this character until you do a mission of getting him out of there” the better option?

I know this is primarily a judgement call, but I’m still interested to know how “heavy” that particular rule is intended to be.

On The Spider’s “When you address a tough challenge with planning or calculation.”

Two major questions.

1: In what contexts do downtime actions count for this? When one has acquired an asset, finished a long-term project, or gathered information that was relevant for a completed score?

2: If you pull out climbing gear or wrecking tools from your Load when it turns out you need them, do you get experience for “planning” for that eventuality? Does anyone have examples of other ways that requirement might be satisfied outside of downtime actions or flashbacks?

Question: Someone in my campaign is creating a hound and wants to take the Ghost Hunter special ability, which gives…

Question: Someone in my campaign is creating a hound and wants to take the Ghost Hunter special ability, which gives him a choice between 3 arcane abilities.

However, none of these arcane abilities seem to be listed anywhere.

ghost-form is also a special ability of another playbook, so I can see what that is, but the other 2: mind-link and arrow-swift aren’t specified anywhere.

I’d appreciate help! thanks in advance.

So, while I was looking through the dangerous friends in the playbooks, I saw that the Whisper has a friend called…

So, while I was looking through the dangerous friends in the playbooks, I saw that the Whisper has a friend called Nyryx, a possessor ghost, and the slide has Nyryx a prostitute. Is this a typo, or does Nyryx have some fun with the bodies that it possesses? Just thought I’d ask.