Tag: Joseph Levey

In my last post I talked about language used in the actions available in your blades hack.

I then talked about a bunch of alternative social words that could be used instead of command, consort, sway.

I came up with the trio Clarify, Obfuscate and Imply. I was so horrified with what that implied, that that I started to write a Hack.

It is about awful people in a bureaucracy (maybe in Akoros).

Attributes and Actions:

Power: Impose, Crush, Dismiss

Guile: Slink, Obscure, Imply

Insight: Predict, Reveal, Refine

Very rough at this point these probably wouldn’t be the final actions that I would settle on; and I have no idea what setting I would put it in. I don’t know if I even want to do anything more with it than this, but it was a fun exercise.

I have some thoughts about actions and attributes in blades hacks.

The names chosen in BitD are so perfect for that game and a real mix from fairly generic to incredibly specific. I can see the temptation for leaving a system that works well intact until you have other stuff figured out.

But, In my opinion it is one of the first things you should think about hacking.

The action words are some of the things that stand out most on the playbook sheets and they are the biggest part of the player interface. The players are contently going to be using these words to describe their characters’ actions in the context of your setting.

It seems that about half of blades hacks make no changes, and most of the rest change the names of a couple of moves that the author could think of a particularly on theme word for, but leave the rest. The most interesting hacks (again in my opinion) completely change how actions are organised in the philosophy of the setting.

Some words that I would highly suggest changing.

Attune – This is highly specific. Even if there is magic is your default action to attune to it?

Consort – This word says a lot about the setting. Do your characters consort? to they chat? do the mingle? is this the default friendly interaction in your setting?

Sway – I love how evocative this word is. I also think it should probably change in a lot of settings.

Finding the exact right word is hard and I understand the urge to put it off when there is already a great list of actions that works, but if you can change even a few of these words to actions that you want to see characters taking all the time I think you will be in a much better place.

I have been thinking about FATE and Blades recently. FATE has a fantastic tool the “FATE Fractal” where anything can become a character with aspects.

Blades already has a bit of this baked in, the concept of having crew and character playbooks and being able to use any number in a 0-5 range as a stat for fortune rolls gives a lot of this functionality.

However there is a lot of parts of the game that could be expanded. Different hacks often change what the shared blaybook is, in many sci fi hacks it changes the crew playbook to a ship playbook or in girl by moonlight it changes it to a season playbook that changes the types of threats you face.

It seems like just about any part of the game could be expanded. you could give one of your gangs, vehicles, sites, or experts their own playbook and that should work. you could also give affiliated factions their own playbooks. There are definately diminishing returns here, a playbook along with all the additional abilities and overhead would increase both the amount of needed development and the amount of cognative overhead for the players.

So with that in mind I have the kernel of a hack designed to work in the core blades setting. Instead of being a complete crew you are a gang or a team of operatives inside a bigger faction.The crew sheet would need to be split and augmented into the faction sheet and the team sheet. The Team sheet would have the specific assets and abilities of the team and would level up at the same rate that a normal crew sheet does. The faction playbook would have to level up much more slowly and have different triggers.

This would also facilitate having multiple groups play as one faction but with different priorities and they would share the larg faction progression while having their own team sheet that was only theirs.