Tag: John Scott

I have what I think is probably a dumb question about Set Up Actions. The answer may be obvious, but its come up enough at my table that I need to get a solid answer!

When performing a set up action, how is effect measured against future actions that take advantage of the set up?

If a character performs a set up action and the gm decides it’s a risky position with a standard effect, we assume +1 effect level or improved position for follow up actions. But say the effect is limited due to something like tier or magnitude, do the subsequent actions get the same benefit? And on the other hand, if our set up action is executed to great effect, should we consider raising the bonus?

Thanks in advance!

After about a 2 month hiatus, my Blades group is finally going to resume next week! The Holiday Season always messes up my gaming schedule 🙁

I tend to struggle to engage the players after they’ve been away for so long. Does anyone have any hot tips for getting the action rolling? My first instinct is to just jump right back into it, but inevitably there’s gonna be dozens of questions about “what happened with this?” or “who’s that guy again?” or the worst one “why are we doing this?”

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Hey all! I’ve got a question about Entanglements and Downtime/Free Play.

How do y’all handle it when an Entanglement dictates that the crew gets into major trouble outside a score? A couple sessions ago I rolled Rivals, and took an opportunity while the crew was gathering information at The Docks to impose on them that the Dockers weren’t very welcoming to them. It didn’t take long to break out into violence, and even though it wasn’t a score they were invoking flashbacks, using special abilities, and filling up on stress as per usual.

In the end I was pretty pleased with how it went, but I’m unsure how to proceed from here. Should I give them another round of Downtime before they launch into their next score? They had already done all that stuff before gathering info at the Docks. I like the idea of pushing them into a score bloodied and completely stressed, but is that a little too harsh?

Hey, do y’all have any interesting “weird” vices? The Leech in my group overindulged with the hooded proprietor of the sunken grotto, and asked if I could give him any ideas for a new vice purveyor before our next session. Busy life stuff has kept me away from my GM workbench lately so I figured I should try and outsource my brainstorming. Any thoughts?

Fun question about the “Venomous” special ability: What kind of nonsense should I prepare myself for now that the Leech at my table can secrete psychedelic drugs?

Follow up: Does anyone have any suggestions for scenarios that would lend themselves to this exciting yet mildly unsettling development?

Hey everyone! I have a fairly system agnostic GM question for y’all.

When a player can’t make it to a game night, how does it effect the progression of your story arcs? A guy in our group is often busy with work and personal life, and tends to miss about 1/3rd of our game sessions. Up til now I’ve been pushing through regardless of whether he shows up, but as the campaign goes on I feel the urge to hold back on major story beats, or try and suggest that the crew take on “side missions” to save the big main event scores for when everyone is at the table.

Is this a common approach? How do you deal with absences at your table?

So my group of Hawkers, the North Port Revenant, went strait from messing with the Fog Hounds in season 1 to “Let’s blow up the Crow’s Nest!” in season 2 when I revealed that the Crows had just barely interfered with one of their drug dealers. As far as I know none of them watch actual plays, so they didn’t just get the idea from the Bloodletters.

How many of y’all have had crews threatening to blow up the Crow’s Nest? Is this a common thing?

To be fair, my group blows things up and starts fires by default. They got their name by burning down a warehouse in the Old North Port.