Tag: Neil Smith

Scum and Villainy “playtest” session 3

Our final playtest session. The PCs raced to the Hantu Gate with the Aleph Key, managing to beat the Nightspeakers there, but also blowing off the Vigilance and getting embroiled in a faction war with them. That caused problems because, while the PCs beat the Nightspeakers to the Hantu Gate, they didn’t beat the Vigilance there. We then had a two-dimensional struggle with some PCs fighting off the Vigilance while others were trying to install the Key and open the Gate (some mechanics, some negotiation with the Precursor Ur-intelligence they woke up). They just about got there in the end, with some judicious use of Gambits.

Some playtest comments:

We rolled “Reprisals” for the entanglement, and that brought out that there’s no Rep in S&V, so you can’t pay off an enemy Faction with Rep, only Cred. And in terms of presentation, that little parenthetical statement in the core BitD book: “An enemy faction makes a move against you (or a friend, contact, or vice purveyor)” really helps the GM at the table see what that looks like in the Fiction.

Another thing we drifted into was that the crew creation guidelines are, I think, presented unclearly. All the information is there, but it’s not obvious to a new reader on first run through. I’d put an additional section (of a paragraph or two) about Quality on page 113, before “Choose Initial Reputation.” That section would be something like:

—

” Crew and Ship System Quality

“Both your Crew overall and the various parts of your ship have a Quality rating. Your Crew Quality is a measure of the quality of the equipment you have and how together and professional you are as a team. You compare your Crew Quality to other Factions’ Tiers to judge whether you outclass them or they outclass you. You use Crew Quality for things like Acquiring Assets (page XX) and the effect of your reputation when you namedrop. See page XX for how to advance in Crew Quality.

“Your ship has different systems: engines, hull, comms, and weapons. Each system has a Quality as well. Use the ship system rating as base dice pool when you’re rolling for how well the ship does. Roll the Engines Quality to race another ship; use the Comms Quality to cut through the Hegemonic frigate’s jamming. (PCs can use Teamwork, page XX, to boost the ship systems as needed.)”

—

It might also be worth spelling out the rough equivalence that ship system quality is a bit like PC action ratings, and ship modules are a bit like PC special abilities. I know I got confused on first reading, thinking that system quality was somehow tied to the number of modules installed.

Another playtest comment as about Gambits. They seemed quite easy to get, and made the crew rather effective. It didn’t help that they were a reward for doing well. We thought they would be better if awarded on a 1-3 result for Risky (and perhaps Desperate) rolls, to help get people out of a nasty situation. We’ve not tried that, as it only came up in a post-session discussion, but the existing way of generating Gambits seemed off.

Scum and Villainy “playtest” session 2

“Mind the oranges, Marlon!”

This week’s session was a bit abbreviated due to club business (voting for games for the next block), so we didn’t get too much done.

We opened with characters having spent one Downtime action recovering from last week’s escape from the Vigilance and planting of a fake Aleph Key on some members of Drexler’s Raiders. Before they finished Downtime, I threw three follow-up jobs at them:

* A plea from Citani to hand the Key over to the Nightspeakers, or rescue him from them. He was scared as they’d already used their Way gravity-powers to crush one of his feet.

* A lead on Hicks, an expert on Way artefacts who could tell the PCs more about the Key, complicated by Hicks being the chosen enemy of the Mystic PC.

* A call from Manda, the Speaker’s friend, to smuggle some information to Mem in the Holt system. As they PCs want to get to Holt an the Hantu gate (connected to the Aleph Key), this seemed like a way to make some money doing what they wanted.

We “discovered” that Mem communicate by changing patterns of bioluminesence rather than sound.

The PCs decided to leave Citani to his own devices and take the job from Manda. She said she’d heard reports of the unscrupulous owner of a water-treatment plant on Warren using Mem slave labour (perhaps child slaves). She wanted the PCs, as trusted friends, to sneak in and obtain evidence of the slavery, then smuggle Manda and the evidence to Mem.

The PCs got some evidence of the slavery, did some background research on the layout of the water treatment plant, and acquired a stealthy drone for the infiltration. Opening with a Desperate situation meant they almost triggered an alarm as soon as they started, but they were quickly able to get some more PCs into the compound, get secret files from the office, found the slaves and took some photos of them.

At this point, the slaves exclaimed/flashed, “It is the Chosen Ones! As fortold, they have come to save us!” and promptly burst out of their enclosure.

This is when they did a flashback to hiding a bomb as an orange, and earlier delivering that to the compound as a potential diversion (hence the subtitle, which caused some hilarity at our table). That was the first major flashback they’ve done, and took some prodding from me to convince the players that planting the bomb could be done in the flashback as well as preparing it.

The bomb went off, some guards were liberally sprayed by sewerage by crashing the drone into a pipe, and the PCs escaped with a few dozen Mem ex-slaves in tow.

Some playtest thoughts:

GM Reference sheet 4 is really useful, especially the aide memoire of Devil’s Bargains.

I struggled to make the Jobs interesting and engaging. Given that the Job-creation tables are the same structure as the ones in base Blades, I thought about why that is. One reason, I think, was because I wanted to keep the Factions to the small number already on the table, so didn’t use that part of the tables. But another was the lack of tables/inspiration for people, buildings, and locations. On reflection, a lot of what was engaging about previous Blades jobs was the other fictional positioning that came from those tables.

Those tables will be much harder to create for S&V, mainly because there’s just one Duskwall and many different places in S&V. To have all the S&V places feel distinct, you really need a separate table for each location, and that’s a lot of work to do!

Scum & Villainy “playtest” notes

(Not an “official” playtest, but I thought I’d post some notes here in case they’re useful.)

Last night was the first session of our three-week S&V tryout. I ended up with six players, which is more than ideal, but things went well. All the players seemed to enjoy it, and everyone’s keen to continue play next week. We mostly stayed with bog-standard BitD rules, but a couple of observations:

* Players didn’t use any Gambits. They were also wary of spending Stress and gaining extra Heat, and it was the first time playing Blades for all but one person. The reluctance to use Gambits could just be general reticence to spend in-game currency.

* No-one played a Xeno. But that could be me not explaining it well.

* I presume no PC starts with Cred, beyond what may be in some Abilities and the communal 2 Cred in the ship.

* The Stardancer starting situation is rather different in use from the war in Crow’s Foot start, in that Crow’s Foot nudges the group into a tighter situation. With the three significant factions already lined up in Crow’s Foot, the GM can suggest these factions when it comes to crew creation. The suggested jobs also fit into the same situation. The S&V start doesn’t have the same “tightness”, either in terms of suggested Factions or how the sample jobs fit into the situation.

This isn’t a criticism, but an observation.

Scum & Villainy heat and entanglement questions

* Can I confirm that you roll Entanglements in S&V differently from BitD? In BitD, you roll dice equal to Heat Wanted. S&V suggests you roll a single die. Is that the case?

* Given that Heat is tracked per-system, and the inter-system jump gates seem to be heavily Guild-controlled, it makes sense to me that travel between systems should be trickier than just being handwaved away. Perhaps it could cost some Cred for permits or bribes, or could be a special Score to get passage without attracting official attention, depending on Wanted level. Is that the intent of the game?

Scum & Villainy Xeno chargen question

Let’s say I’m creating a Chewbacca-esque character. I pick Mechanic as playbook. Rather than two Mechanic Abilities, I start play with one Mechanic Ability and the Xeno Ability. We collectively agree that abilities the “walking carpet” Xeno ability gives my character.

* Does the Xeno move replace the standard Tinker Starting Ability? Or can I take Xeno instead of the Special Ability chosen at chargen (such as Construct Speaker)?

* If Xeno replaces the Tinker Starting Ability, can I buy Tinker later with XP and advances?

* As Xeno replaces an Ability, are all the standard Mechanic Abilities still available to my character? For instance, do I still have three Veteran ability slots available?