Tag: Kyle Wende

Why does the game start a new crew at Tier 0 AND weak hold? I didn’t notice that until reading through the final book. My players are about to fill up their Rep bar, and are looking forward to advancing in Tier and finally not having to roll 2 dice and take the lowest every time they’re rolling Tier. Tier 0 is having nothing. It doesn’t make sense to me that a crew can have weak hold on nothing. I’m considering treating a Tier 0 crew as always having strong hold, so they can get out of Tier 0 reasonably fast. Will that mess anything else up in the game? We’ve already had four sessions of about 90 minutes. How long is it ‘supposed’ to take a new crew to get to Tier 1?

Changelog question re v8.

I notice the Lurk’s “Ghost Veil” ability no longer lists “you may pass through solid objects” as a thing you can do for extra stress. Was this an intentional nerf of the ability, or just an accident? My Tier 0 crew just assassinated a bluecoat watch commander by having the Lurk walk through a wall. It was nuts, and they’re totally getting away with it. My brother (who plays the Lurk) really likes the idea of his character slowly learning to do new cool things with this ability. I’m thinking I should let him do long term projects to learn new applications of Ghost Veil, then just assign a stress cost depending on how bonkers the effect is. Has anyone else done something like this?

Looking for GM advice. How do you play out a crew taking over new turf? I’m having trouble translating in my mind how this would amount to a genuine “score” with interesting stakes and a good back and forth of roleplay. Can you guys give me some examples of how you’ve done it? I’m trying to have my players tell me what they want to do, rather than me telling them what they can do, but it’s proving to not be that simple. I don’t want to end up just doing pure roleplay. We devolved to that in the very first session and it wasn’t very enjoyable. I want to use the rules, but I’m having some difficulty translating some of the abstraction into concrete story events.

Last one this morning I swear.

Can you guys give me some guidance on social engagements? The last two times my party has run into social interactions with real stakes, we ended up just role-playing it without rolling dice. A lot of that is because I didn’t prepare the conversations in advance, but I couldn’t have because I didn’t know they were going to happen. Are there done good tricks for making social encounters feel as active and risky as combat?

I’ve got some general questions about “the score,” that I’m having trouble conceptualizing.

(1) how big is an engagement? Obviously the PCs need to put themselves at risk to earn the rewards, but how do I decide whether the thing they want to do counts as an engagement? How many action rolls will an average engagement consist of for a given PC? I’m worried that my desire to move plot forward for my players is causing me to make challenges too short and not dangerous enough.

(2) if my PCs are collecting information needed to begin their engagement, how do I add stakes to that process? Do they have to use downtime actions to gather info for a score? Should I be giving them bad intel if they roll poorly? Should I roll for them so they don’t know? If they get bad intel, shouldn’t they be able to pull out of the job once they find out they were misinformed?

(3) time clocks. How many should I be using in an average score? How do I decide in a score whether the player’s roll gets them past the obstacle or just starts a clock? I’m worried that clocks used in this way can just artificially delay success.

(4) for this game, what’s the balance of players knowledge vs character knowledge? We already tell the players what bad stuff is going to happen to the character from a roll, so they can choose to negate things with resistance. Does that mean I always tell them all consequences? Do I tell the players all the progress clocks ticking against them? What do I do if the player’s bad roll ticks the clock for a villain’s secret plan or hidden defense system. Or what if I don’t want the party to know whether the mark believes their lies and I’m using a clock “I’m onto you”? Does this game require players to be omniscient and strive to play their characters accurately?

I know this is a lot. Thanks in advance.