Category: Blades in the Dark: Rules & Sheets (Official)

So my group hit on a rules question last session concerning prison time and wanted levels that we couldn’t figure out: what is the length of incarceration when your Wanted level is 0 to begin with? After our last score we’d acquired enough heat to roll entanglements from the 6+ table, we rolled up Arrest and it fit in the fiction, plus one of the players really wants a prison claim, and having that be a part of his character. But we’ve managed to clear our heat before getting our Wanted level raised to 1 so far, so we were wondering if there should be a length of incarceration shorter than “a month or two” for Wanted level 1. We could of course just agree on something together that makes sense, like a few weeks (we don’t track downtime very specifically anyway), but were wondering what John Harper thought and how other people may have handled this so far. Also, the PC who’s probably going to prison is playing a Spider and has just taken the Jailbird ability, which, among other things, makes his Wanted level count as 1 level lower when determining incarceration length. One of the prison claims does this as well. We’re not suggesting that there should be a hypothetical level -1 below the hypothetical level 0, just that this is something that could still come up even after we eventually reach Wanted level 1. I’m suspecting that having no incarceratrion length for level 0 is a conscious decision, making incarceration something serious and long-term, probably more than 1 session, thereby also giving the player more time to play a secondary character – it’s just kind of a bummer if we have to raise our Wanted level by 2 before the Spider can actually use (that part of) his newfound Jailbird ability. What do you guys think?