GM’d my first game of Blades last night, and my group finished a barely successful score. They loved the setting…
GM’d my first game of Blades last night, and my group finished a barely successful score. They loved the setting and the dark and gloomy weirdness, loved the idea of sitting down to play a fledgling gang of thieves, and whipped up a really interesting trio of scum — but ended the night frustrated with the system. Of three characters, we had one take a level of Trauma and the other two at 7 Stress.
Feedback from our evening, apologies for the length:
1. Alas, my players complained nonstop about needing a six to get a full success – i.e. since danger manifested on a 4/5 it felt like they weren’t ‘really’ succeeding. They really, really wanted more dice to begin with, instead of grasping at Bargains and spending stress on Backup/Assist. (My comment: They are powergamers who are used to playing PCs who come out of the box Awesome, so maybe a little culture shock; their dice were a little below average on the evening which contributed to the grumpiness; I think a few more good rolls would have turned their attitude around. As it is they rolled mostly 4/5s all night which ate up a lot of stress, and we saw zero crit successes. All this contributed to their moodiness.)
2. The players were highly frustrated with the size of the stress track given the number of things that ‘require’ stress to function: acting as backup (to give +1D), triggering many flashbacks, group actions, and of course buying off effects. Especially since that 8th point isn’t one you can safely spend – it knocks you out of the score and gives you Trauma, right then right there. (My comment: I can understand their frustration; they got into stress trouble early. Maybe if that 8th box was usable? Also contributing to their frustration was that none of them carried Armor and their dice were not firing well)
3. They didn’t really ‘get’ Flashbacks and didn’t use them effectively. When we did use them, I think I may have made a mistake. You pay your stress do to a Flashback, then make your Action roll. If it’s Risky, there’s a danger, right? – so my players were frustrated at possibly failing that roll and suffering stress/effects/whatever during a Flashback, making their present situation worse rather than better. Should the danger for a flashback action almost always be simply, “And you failed at that, paid your stress for nothing, moving on back to the present”?
4. Shining moments where the system was working as it should be were the two times they used the Lead a Group Action mechanic. Everyone was really happy with that, although (in line with their complaining about stress) they griped that the bigger the group, the quicker you’d stress out your point man. Also, my question for those group actions – do you offer each PC a separate Devil’s Bargain, or one that (if accepted) gives +1D to the whole group, or something else?
5. Something I found a little ambiguous about the team Overcome action: if you roll something other than a 6 as the point man, do YOU ALSO take a point of Stress, on top of whatever you’ll need to use to deal with the danger that manifests? The rule sentence clearly states “all members” take the extra stress, but the flavor text immediately after states it’s hard to watch someone else fail – implying it’s everyone else.
6. I found it difficult as the GM to come up with a ‘danger’ that could manifest on a successful OR unsuccessful roll before the fact. Are you supposed to be speaking the name of the danger before the action roll or waiting until the table sees the dice result? Because if you’re trying to Prowl past a sentry and the danger is ‘he spots you’, that doesn’t work on a 4/5 roll at all.
7. Can acting solo affect task clocks for the entire team? I was confused on this – it seems to make sense in the fiction that the most physical git on the team can sneak forward alone and gut a couple of guards, allowing everyone to progress. However, since the whole team benefits from that – is it actually a Team Overcome action regardless?
8. As a GM I struggled a little bit with abstracting the amount of hazards based on the countdown clock. i.e. you find and successfully unlock the back entrance to the building, BUT since you rolled a crappy Effect roll, there are ticks on the Locks clock — so now I have to place a couple other locked barriers later in the heist that wouldn’t have been there otherwise? Was I doing it wrong –should clocks only represent a single fictional obstacle ever, rather than an abstraction of ‘there are this many locks/guards/wards/whatever in the place’?
9. If you have your gang do something offscreen, must you roll Command? None of my 3 PCs had a dot in Command and therefore they didn’t bother using the Thugs they bought during character creation, at all. The idea of rolling 2D-take-lowest for anything had them seething.
10. You’re abducting someone at knifepoint quickly, quietly — dragging them off to be interrogated. Murder, Mayhem, or something else? It seems like the precision-violence of Murder applies, but it’s clearly nothing like an actual bloody murder given that nobody is being cut. I was torn on this when my group did it.
