Facebook tells me today is John Harper’s birthday.
Facebook tells me today is John Harper’s birthday. If so: Happy Birthday to a great game designer! Hope you get as much of what you give to us gamers.
#HappyBirthday , #NotAtAllCreepyFanboyism
Last Saturday, we played our first session of BitD.
Last Saturday, we played our first session of BitD. All veteran roleplayers except for a new friend who had his first experience with tabletop RPGs. Three players plus me as the GM. We’re from Porto, Portugal, where we organize monthly events to try new games and find new players, so we usually feel comfortable learning different RPGs and hosting sessions for people who never played before.
We play in Portuguese but have no problems with the material in English. It was close to a five hour session, which included me explaining everything to the new player and everyone making characters. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to take a photo (which we usually do to keep an album of all the RPGs we play). I essentially printed out the whole quick-start and we had several copies of the pages that need to be used as reference. I normally also use clear acrylic sheets that I set over maps and use whiteboard markers to write on them. This was how we handled progress clocks.
Although I’ve been following John Harper’s work since Agon, this group had never played any of his games before. However, two of the players had some experience with either Apocalypse World or Dungeon World and had supported the BitD’s kickstarter.
Characters created were the Whisperer who used to build steamships before being involved in an accident, the Lurk that was cast out of his noble family for reasons he doesn’t yet know and the Hound that, while smuggling forbidden goods into Duskwall, discovered that he has a knack for making people pay what was agreed for them.
To put all the options on the table, I set it up so that each character spoke with each leader of the three factions and the group went for the score they liked the most: robbing the Red Sashes. Infiltration was the plan and the detail was obtained both by speaking to Mylera Klev when she offered them a score against the Lampblacks and by having a chat with Scurlock, the vampire that the Whisperer considers his best friend. Through conversation, we established that the Red Sashes used to stock vintage wine in a big cellar under their school/temple which has an underground access to and old gate hidden under the nearest bridge. We also talked about an old spirit that is revered by the Red Sashes and that sleeps in that old cellar.
I decided on the following progress clocks: Cellar Security (4), Old Spirit (4), Guards (4) and Treasury Security (8). I didn’t find anything about the recommended number of segments on the quick-start, but I noticed that the examples use a total of 20 segments so that’s what I did.
Progress went smooth up to the old spirit. Even after taking a devil’s bargain that will allow the spirit to find the scoundrels in the future, the danger of it awakening manifested and they had to run. This also raised a ruckus, the guards came running and quiet infiltration was no longer an option. However, the guards were quickly slaughtered by accepting the bargain of only pretending to fight them in a fair duel. On the other hand, this greatly offended a visiting senior swordsman that was at the temple admiring its treasury. This was to be the hardest progress clock to beat, which involved shooting, intimidation, and the Hound getting traumatized because his dog got severely wounded. It was a successful score, but the session ended with no time to do any downtime, heat or development.
A few relevant notes:
1) Turns out we didn’t play teamwork correctly. For some reason, I thought that the character on point only changes through Set Up, but it actually changes on any special move. This led to the Lurk always having point up to the Old Spirit, then the Whisperer up to the Guards and then the Hound for the rest of the score, spending stress for each switch.
2) When going through the dark underground tunnel, we didn’t find any item on the characters that could produce light. This was solved by the Whisperer spending 0 stress on his Channel special ability to create supernatural light, which sounded better than “I guess one you guys brought a lantern?”
3) There was some doubts if a group action can be attempted when one of the characters doesn’t have any dots on that action. I believe it can and that this is how teamwork compensates for the initial lack of dots. Who is on point takes stress to help these characters go through the action.
4) There was a question about Daring being used in a group action. Is it the character on point that needs to have this special ability? The wording of Daring also led a player to ask if the re-roll can be applied to Effect.
5) During teamwork, we always used special moves and I don’t see how you would roll just a normal action. If the team splits and each character faces the progress clocks alone, I guess you would, but why would the characters want to do that? Separating the team sounds like a cool possible danger that the GM can use.
I was already expecting some fiddling about the details, so despite the learning curve, I enjoyed the session. I can see how some people may struggle with playing BitD rules-as-written, but I like the game as it’s presented, specially in the way teamwork includes tension. A bit too much tension if you play it wrong like we did 🙂 but I’m eager to have another go next month.
What gang types do we know are going to be in Blades in the Dark?
What gang types do we know are going to be in Blades in the Dark?
Thieves (in the quickstart)
Hawkers (draft available somewhere)
Cultists (draft available somewhere)
Vigilantes
Bluecoats (a supplement)
Assassins
Breakers
Smugglers
Am I missing any?
GM’d my first game of Blades last night, and my group finished a barely successful score. They loved the setting…
GM’d my first game of Blades last night, and my group finished a barely successful score. They loved the setting and the dark and gloomy weirdness, loved the idea of sitting down to play a fledgling gang of thieves, and whipped up a really interesting trio of scum — but ended the night frustrated with the system. Of three characters, we had one take a level of Trauma and the other two at 7 Stress.
Feedback from our evening, apologies for the length:
1. Alas, my players complained nonstop about needing a six to get a full success – i.e. since danger manifested on a 4/5 it felt like they weren’t ‘really’ succeeding. They really, really wanted more dice to begin with, instead of grasping at Bargains and spending stress on Backup/Assist. (My comment: They are powergamers who are used to playing PCs who come out of the box Awesome, so maybe a little culture shock; their dice were a little below average on the evening which contributed to the grumpiness; I think a few more good rolls would have turned their attitude around. As it is they rolled mostly 4/5s all night which ate up a lot of stress, and we saw zero crit successes. All this contributed to their moodiness.)
2. The players were highly frustrated with the size of the stress track given the number of things that ‘require’ stress to function: acting as backup (to give +1D), triggering many flashbacks, group actions, and of course buying off effects. Especially since that 8th point isn’t one you can safely spend – it knocks you out of the score and gives you Trauma, right then right there. (My comment: I can understand their frustration; they got into stress trouble early. Maybe if that 8th box was usable? Also contributing to their frustration was that none of them carried Armor and their dice were not firing well)
3. They didn’t really ‘get’ Flashbacks and didn’t use them effectively. When we did use them, I think I may have made a mistake. You pay your stress do to a Flashback, then make your Action roll. If it’s Risky, there’s a danger, right? – so my players were frustrated at possibly failing that roll and suffering stress/effects/whatever during a Flashback, making their present situation worse rather than better. Should the danger for a flashback action almost always be simply, “And you failed at that, paid your stress for nothing, moving on back to the present”?
4. Shining moments where the system was working as it should be were the two times they used the Lead a Group Action mechanic. Everyone was really happy with that, although (in line with their complaining about stress) they griped that the bigger the group, the quicker you’d stress out your point man. Also, my question for those group actions – do you offer each PC a separate Devil’s Bargain, or one that (if accepted) gives +1D to the whole group, or something else?
5. Something I found a little ambiguous about the team Overcome action: if you roll something other than a 6 as the point man, do YOU ALSO take a point of Stress, on top of whatever you’ll need to use to deal with the danger that manifests? The rule sentence clearly states “all members” take the extra stress, but the flavor text immediately after states it’s hard to watch someone else fail – implying it’s everyone else.
6. I found it difficult as the GM to come up with a ‘danger’ that could manifest on a successful OR unsuccessful roll before the fact. Are you supposed to be speaking the name of the danger before the action roll or waiting until the table sees the dice result? Because if you’re trying to Prowl past a sentry and the danger is ‘he spots you’, that doesn’t work on a 4/5 roll at all.
7. Can acting solo affect task clocks for the entire team? I was confused on this – it seems to make sense in the fiction that the most physical git on the team can sneak forward alone and gut a couple of guards, allowing everyone to progress. However, since the whole team benefits from that – is it actually a Team Overcome action regardless?
8. As a GM I struggled a little bit with abstracting the amount of hazards based on the countdown clock. i.e. you find and successfully unlock the back entrance to the building, BUT since you rolled a crappy Effect roll, there are ticks on the Locks clock — so now I have to place a couple other locked barriers later in the heist that wouldn’t have been there otherwise? Was I doing it wrong –should clocks only represent a single fictional obstacle ever, rather than an abstraction of ‘there are this many locks/guards/wards/whatever in the place’?
9. If you have your gang do something offscreen, must you roll Command? None of my 3 PCs had a dot in Command and therefore they didn’t bother using the Thugs they bought during character creation, at all. The idea of rolling 2D-take-lowest for anything had them seething.
10. You’re abducting someone at knifepoint quickly, quietly — dragging them off to be interrogated. Murder, Mayhem, or something else? It seems like the precision-violence of Murder applies, but it’s clearly nothing like an actual bloody murder given that nobody is being cut. I was torn on this when my group did it.
No rest for the weary though.
No rest for the weary though.
I streamed a session on twitch and recorded it! If you like watching this sort of thing, you can do that here!
I streamed a session on twitch and recorded it! If you like watching this sort of thing, you can do that here! http://www.twitch.tv/trustyfish/c/6605693 I am not doing a write-up right now because I am lazy, but perhaps I will edit this post to include one in the future. Cheers!
I’m doing NPC downtime tonight for one the two Blades games I’m running & it’s got me thinking about the Bluecoats.
I’m doing NPC downtime tonight for one the two Blades games I’m running & it’s got me thinking about the Bluecoats.
Even if Duskwall is on the sparse end of the population bell curve we’re guessing, the number of watch/patrol people they could theoretically field against any one gang is daunting.
To balance this out, the amount of intercity ward rivalry and/or corruption must be staggering.
That or the Bluecoats are a very special kind of Tier III faction…
That or the thought exercise tells us more about the kind of power a Tier III faction might be able to wield within the city within their “area of influence.” Maybe the PCs need to be pretty careful about getting on the wrong side of groups like The Unseen, The Spirit Wardens or the Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh anytime in the first dozen sessions of any given Blades campaign.
Which has me thinking about the Duskwall Council & the potential muscle behind the Skovlander Refugees.
No great insights. Just procrastinating. Back to the lonely fun of what prep Blades allows…
Calling a wrap (for now) on another section of the city. The old city center.
Calling a wrap (for now) on another section of the city. The old city center.
Right on.
Right on. So, last night at around 6 PM, I GM’ed my first ever game (period, not just of Blades in the Dark), and while our group may have missed some rules and some other things, may have messed up a few of the dice mechanics and whatever, it was more of a “Hey, let’s see if we like this and then we’ll fix things as we go!” type of situation. We had an absolute blast playing.
It was me as the GM, and then a group of 5 players from all across the world that I have played a variety of video games with for years. I sat down with each of them prior to this session to work individually with them on their character sheets, and I was very open to pretty much any idea as to what they wanted their character to be. Everyone was very satisfied with what they created, and the party ended up consisting of two Whisper, one Hound, one Lurk and one Slide. They created their crew in ~45 minutes right at the beginning of the session (many jokes to be had when naming it, was fun) and then we were off and running. We played out of the scenario in the Quick Start and they decided (at least, for now) to side with the Lampblacks in the ongoing turf war with the Red Sashes. Their first real score was to steal from the Red Sashes treasury. So, they all went separate ways at first looking to find information on the whereabouts of the treasury, and only found some generalities at first in terms of location. After that, the Hound and the Slide decided to scope the area out to try and find out when the area had the least amount of guard / attention, but to no avail. So, they went with a deception plan (although, it ended up being more of a mix between deception and infiltration, which was no issue with me).
The Slide and the Lurk decided to deceive the door guards of the building that they had found to be the building containing the treasury / vault for the Red Sashes. The Hound and two Whisper decided to play distraction game on the outside, the Hound taking wounding pop-shots with his rifle towards guards from an advantageous position on a roof top (at the cost of being spotted from one Devil’s Bargain), and the Whisper’s worked together to create a sort of magical show of noise and explosions to draw attention away from the building.
The distraction outside started off okay, but man it ended up in a huge mess. People were getting shot left and right, the one whisper ended up getting spotted while trying to cause some Mayhem (as punishment for him rolling six straight 1’s….), and the Hound ended up falling off a roof at taking some stress when failing another prowl roll trying to relocate his position to cover the eventual escape from the building. The Lurk and Slide ended up using Slip and Deceive to get their way into the building, and then rolled a few 6’s on the inside to find the exact location of the vault within the building. Once they reached the fourth floor (where I decided to place the vault), the distraction on the outside was still going on and Mylera was, in a very concerned and confused fashion, conversing with two of her brute vault guards (not right in front of the door, but a little down the hall from the vault) about the situation arising outside. Yet again, the two guys inside rolled and the action ended up critting, so they ended up using Slip to go right past Mylera and enter the vault, where I decided it was only fair to have nobody in currently as they had just rolled like, approximately a million 6’s in a row.
They only had a couple of options to escape once inside: They could either go back out the way they came in and not cause a ruckus, or they could bust through a window on an opposing catwalk to the hallway outside of the vault, Prowl down into a main alleyway and attempt to get away through a (via flashback and 2 stress to our one Whisper) smoke bomb setup down in that specific alley. They went with that second option and, once down in the street, a massive amount of chaos ensued with Red Sashes running in, prepared to kill the invaders. But once in the smoke, yet again, the Lurk and Slide rolled a 6 with some help, and ended up using Slip to tuck into a building and dip out the other side, escaping the scene flawlessly. The other three that were creating distractions ended up regrouping, planning the best escape route ever, apparently (due to another 6…), and then rolled out together with a Prowl roll to climb through a building and escape together.
This isn’t obviously as detailed as the session truly was, but I think it gives a general idea. The session lasted four hours and everyone at the end was entirely on board for another session, which we’re planning to do in a few weeks. Also note that this was the first active experience with a pen-and-paper RPG for many of us (myself included), and the others that had some experience didn’t have much (just a few D&D sessions under their belt). All in all, we had an incredible time and everyone is super excited to see how the crew can continue to grow and expand through scores.
Also, from a first-time GM perspective… this game is very good for the first timer to run, in my opinion. Yeah, I know I didn’t get all of the rolls 100% right, but I fixed that as I went along, and I know that maybe the narrative and situations could have ended up being more punishing, but I wanted to see what I could do while putting them in a pretty insane situation, and everyone ended up having an incredible time, myself included. There were no complaints, there was no whining when something back happened. Just adjustment and rolling to fix the issue at hand. Will give another play report after we do another session!
Also, enjoy the photo of our one whisper rolling five 1’s and a 2 while rolling actions, effects and resistance to injury from a Red Sash grunt.
Yesterday we uncovered another useful background to add! Entertainer.
Yesterday we uncovered another useful background to add! Entertainer.
That covers buskers, circuses, artists with patrons, tavern shows, seedy actor troupes, etc.
That brings the total recommended new backgrounds to three: military, whaler, and entertainer.