Tag: Steve Hickey

Are there form-fillable .pdfs of the character sheets around?

Both times I’ve run/played BitD (as a one-shot convention game), character creation and crew creation have taken a long time.

To speed that up, I’d like to set up 10 pre-gens. 5 of them would be archetypical versions of the character classes. 5 of them would be the character classes with a bit of a spin (a Cutter with a bunch of points in Cloak, for instance).

Has anyone else found character creation takes quite a while (30-40 minutes)? I can’t quite figure out why it takes that long … it could be because we’re orienting ourselves to the world of Duskwall at the same time.

OK, we played a second one-shot this weekend. I have two rules questions about the Effect roll (sort of a continuation of questions from this post: https://plus.google.com/116717584408386390013/posts/4c4uVHrjyCP)

But first I wanted to point out that the setting and character creation generated some really really great stuff, and the development rolls at the end of our first score seemed really good to me, too.

So, the rules questions. Here’s the situation:

Our crew broke into the grounds of a noblewoman’s estate to raid her mausoleum. Young Ned led the patrolling groundskeepers away from us. One series of bad rolls later and Young Ned is being hunted and is nearly cornered.

Young Ned has no choice but to hide against a tree, face pressed against the bark, camouflage cloak raised. He’s in a Desperate situation where the danger is that the groundskeepers will find him.

He rolls a 2.

“It gets worse! First, you face a more potent effect from the danger (-1 to your resistance result level). Then, choose: Abandon this goal (you can’t achieve it for now) or try again by taking a bigger risk and rolling a desperate move.”

First question: this is an example of the danger manifesting, right? Just like in the Desperate results for ‘6’ and for 4/5′? (If so, it might be worth adding that wording into this result.)

And that ‘danger manifesting’ requires Young Ned to roll to resist the effect?

Second question: Does ‘the danger manifests’ equal ‘the danger happens’?

Our group disagreed about that. In this situation, I proposed that you rolled to resist the effect and took Stress to avoid it (being discovered) happening. So for instance, if you had to take 4 Stress perhaps Young Ned had to hold his breath for 90 seconds while the guards talked right next to the tree he was hiding by.

The alternate position was that the danger had actually and concretely manifested as a result of getting a ‘2’ on the Action roll. Ned had been discovered and we were rolling to determine how much Stress he took from that happening. There’s an example on page 12 of the Quick Start that backs up that interpretation: Arlyn fails her roll and therefore falls, but avoids harm by taking 2 Stress.

(If we applied my interpretion to Arlyn’s example: when she fails her Action roll in fighting the Red Sash on the rooftop, Arlyn wouldn’t fall: instead she’d … say, strain her muscles as she nearly loses her balance and grabs hold of a nearby crumbling chimney.)

The difference between these two interpretations seems important (and it may already be in the rules and I’m just missing it):

Interpretation 1: Thieves can’t really fail; they take Stress to avoid having their situation change drastically and negatively

Interpretation 2: Thieves can fail and their situation can change drastically; they take Stress in order to avoid harm when the situation changes.

Rules questions and a mini-AP.

Just ran my first game. It went really well: the thieves used a dirigible to steal the Red Sashes’ treasury. Then they took advantage of a fight between the two gangs to infiltrate the Lampblacks, steal their coin, burn their drugs and frame the Red Sashes. And then they rolled 0 Heat for both missions!

There were aspects of the game I was unclear about. Most of this is because I read it at 3am in order to run it this morning! Can I check I understand this correctly:

– You should establish a risk or danger before an action roll

– The Devil’s Bargain always happens, regardless of outcome

– If you get a result like Risky’s “You do it and avoid the danger,” you still roll for effect to determine how many segments you tick off

Can you ever cut straight to an effect roll? I’m guessing you can when you’re resisting the negative effects of a threat that’s just emerged. Are there any other cases?

If you get a result like Risky’s “You do it but face the effect of the danger,” do you tick off segments as well as suffer stress?