TL;DR – Trying to Make the Characters Last Longer (Maybe)
I’ve been sitting down in front of the open book and the assorted sheets for a time, with a single question burning away in my brain:
How do I make Blades last longer?
See, I run with a group of very long-term players. We’re running two campaigns that are expected to go into the multi-year stretch by the end of it. The shortest campaign we ever ran was one where I was GM, and that one was weekly sessions for a little over a year, and most of the table noted at the end that it felt – compared to past efforts – like a mini-series rather than a campaign. They enjoy the feeling of rising to the challenge, of taking on bigger and bigger threats…and an almost absolute hatred of having to start over at ‘level 1.’ 3 of our campaigns – including the two I mentioned above – didn’t even start there.
(In retrospect, this may be why they make the campaigns last so long.)
So a game like Blades – which I have described to them in detail, and they sound really jazzed about – with its ‘retire your Blade at max Trauma, start a new character’ setup might not go over really well with them, especially if they’re running around with a bunch of more skilled (but probably higher Trauma) characters.
Which got me thinking about the above question. To which I came up with two possible answers:
Answer A is to create rules for making ‘veteran’ Blade characters. Characters with more than the single Special Ability and seven Action dots…but probably also more Traumas to compensate. Think like how when a major crew loses a significant player/character, they don’t go to the nearest recruiting center for whatever scrub turned up today. No, they go looking for someone close to their level. (For those of you who know it, think Gaunt’s Ghosts.)
My initial thoughts on how to handle this were as follows: for every Trauma a character accepts as part of their build, they gain 7 Action dots, and 2 Special Abilities. The Action dots cannot take a character over Rating 3 (unless the Crew has the Mastery option), and you can take Veteran only once for every Trauma. I’m willing to hear alternatives on this.
Answer B is to make individual characters last longer. In-game, there’s 2, maybe 3 ways to finish a character: Level 4 Harm, suffer your last Trauma, or (alternately) accumulate enough Stash to hit the top-tier and retire the character.
The latter one is the Golden Ending, the first is easy enough to avoid if watch when you’re Desperate, but the middle one…that’s the one that, IMO, makes most Blades tap out. To wit, how do I change that in order to accommodate longer-lasting players?
See, in a book series, or video games, it’s all about (more or less) a single character and their life. To use two example, one from each – the Jhereg novels are all about Vlad and his adventures. So when Vlad finally retires, that’ll be the end of the stories, since following him was the whole point of the series. Similarly, in Dishonored, the viewpoint character is Corvo, following him through one specific adventure he has in his life. Vlad and Corvo may have their friends and enemies, but ultimately their properties are about them.
But Blades doesn’t work that way. Blades is about many MANY adventures, but more importantly, is about several characters, not just one.
Initially, I wanted a way to remove Traumas from players, despite the game’s insistence that Traumas are permanent. The best idea I had for this was a long-term project clock with 12+ segments, which had to be re-started if you acquired a new Trauma during the project’s duration, and could only be used a limited number of times…the idea is still out there, but I’m not staking myself on it.
I gave it more thought, and what I came up next with is a game hack that manipulates the Trauma system a bit.
First off, while you can accumulate multiple Traumas, you only ever accumulate 2 of the personality quirks that help you gain XP. (Some of the quirks are almost antithetical to each other – like Soft and Vicious – and while a player can play up 3-4 quirks, I’d rather have them play 1 up consistently than rotate between them.)
Second…okay, this is the part I was really struggling with, but basically what I had initially in mind was the idea that after every Trauma you gain, you roll dice equal to the number of Traumas you have. 1 = 1d; 2 = 2d, etc. Then you roll your Vice Attribute without modifiers, and compare the results. If you have a better result on your Trauma roll than on your Vice roll, then you retire the character. I realized the problem with this halfway through – that while it does at least initially favor the player – you can get a 3 & 5 on your Vice roll but an errant 6 on your first Trauma…and then out you go. Which was not the point. Plus, it left the question of advances that give you extra Trauma boxes (like Unbroken) up in the air. My initial thoughts here were for one of a few effects – the advance lets you roll your strongest Attribute (as opposed to Vice, which is your weakest), it lets you go on for one more Trauma after a failed roll, or you can re-roll a failed roll. (Probably just once per character, but I did entertain the notion of one per Retirement roll.)
I think I’ve managed to strike a good balance. For every Trauma after your fourth that you accumulate, you roll dice equal to the number of Traumas over 4. 5 = 1d, 6 = 2d, etc. Then you roll your Vice Attribute. If the Trauma roll gets a better result than your Vice roll, then you retire the character. If you have the crew advance that gives you an extra Trauma box, this extends your track normally. (So a Crew with +1 Trauma doesn’t start rolling until their 6th Trauma.)
This allows for Trauma Crew Upgrades to remain as-is, still allow for the possibility of retirement due to just having seen too much, but allows Blades to hang in there just a LITTLE longer…