The nice thing for Star Wars is that you probably don't need any more of a map than a bunch of vaguely drawn circles with words in them if it comes to it.
That's what I did so far. I just like to be able to plop down little scenery objects.
"So, shit was fucked up. And some of it was set on fire. There was a lawnmower involved. And a teenage girl because they're clearly the new insects."
There is also the whole Pinocchio/adoption/teamster story line.
We're just going to let that go without comment. All completely normal.
Huh, you guys are going crazier than my group Surprising given in the first session they almost ate a cop..But they've only had a few sessions.
Our first session, one of our number stuffed himself into an apparently interdimensional trash can to pursue a lead. He was then crushed and immolated. Now he lives in my foyer with a racoon and lawn flamingo.
"So, shit was fucked up. And some of it was set on fire. There was a lawnmower involved. And a teenage girl because they're clearly the new insects."
There is also the whole Pinocchio/adoption/teamster story line.
We're just going to let that go without comment. All completely normal.
Huh, you guys are going crazier than my group Surprising given in the first session they almost ate a cop..But they've only had a few sessions.
Our first session, one of our number stuffed himself into an apparently interdimensional trash can to pursue a lead. He was then crushed and immolated. Now he lives in my foyer with a racoon and lawn flamingo.
Honestly? Frank is probably smart enough not to ask.
Also going to batsignal @jdarksun for his DFA thoughts since he's the guy running this.
If it wasn't clear from the above, I love running mostly narrative games. The "Accelerated" portions really speed up the clunkier aspects of DF, though I'd like to play a few sessions before I declare it another of my many Best Games Ever.
Erin The RedThe Name's Erin! Woman, Podcaster, Dungeon Master, IT nerd, Parent, Trans. AMABaton Rouge, LARegistered Userregular
Uhhh. We played Blades in the Dark tonight and I'm pretty sure my punch guy maaaaay be compromised? Like I have a second voice in my head after we came into contact with weird hissing people weeping blood and a creepy statue tainted by the moon and I died for a minute and came back and now I hear extra voices.
Uhhh. We played Blades in the Dark tonight and I'm pretty sure my punch guy maaaaay be compromised? Like I have a second voice in my head after we came into contact with weird hissing people weeping blood and a creepy statue tainted by the moon and I died for a minute and came back and now I hear extra voices.
The velvety voice in your head tells you everything is probably fine.
In other news I super super enjoy Blades in the Dark y'all it's fun on a bun.
+8
Erin The RedThe Name's Erin! Woman, Podcaster, Dungeon Master, IT nerd, Parent, Trans. AMABaton Rouge, LARegistered Userregular
I know exactly what's going on! narrator: he doesn't
Everything will be fine. narrator: it won't
Uhhh. We played Blades in the Dark tonight and I'm pretty sure my punch guy maaaaay be compromised? Like I have a second voice in my head after we came into contact with weird hissing people weeping blood and a creepy statue tainted by the moon and I died for a minute and came back and now I hear extra voices.
People with experience with SR5. Is there like, a quick list for the minimum gear requirements/recommendations for some of the weirder roles like wizard, riggers and deckers? I feel pretty confident putting together physical adepts and stuff but not the others.
There are a lot of stabs towards that, but the reality is that each GM would need to throw those lists at the players because what they're going to want to have is going to vary by GM.
The gear book had some pre-made plug-and-play kits though, IIRC. To like, cover the bases.
I think those are in Run Faster? Which I don't have regretfully.
For tools and gadgets it's mostly fine because like, I know what a climbing kit or RFID tag does. It's for the stuff that's both technical and mechanical like rigger or mages that I need a little more. I'll probably just throw together something passable and let them re-do whatever winds up being dumb.
Can someone give me the skinny on what Blades in the Dark is about? What genre is it setting, what sort of mechanics does it implement?
It's a Dark Fantasy game with a little bit of steam / clock-punk influence where you play a gang of rogues trying to survive in a decaying metropolis. Think Dishonored and the Thief games with more than a little Fritz Leiber, Thieves' World, and Glen Cook for seasoning.
The mechanics are the pretty-light "roll some d6s, more if you want to badly enough or abilities permit, and hope for a 6 but probably get a sorta-success like in Apocalypse World instead."
Can someone give me the skinny on what Blades in the Dark is about? What genre is it setting, what sort of mechanics does it implement?
Dishonoured style fantasy city with a mix of tech and light magic. You play grim criminals doing criminal stuff. The system is narrative with players using a dice pool and either succeeding, succeeding with a cost (severity of the stakes are defined before the roll) or failing.
Can someone give me the skinny on what Blades in the Dark is about? What genre is it setting, what sort of mechanics does it implement?
Dishonoured style fantasy city with a mix of tech and light magic. You play grim criminals doing criminal stuff. The system is narrative with players using a dice pool and either succeeding, succeeding with a cost (severity of the stakes are defined before the roll) or failing.
It's absolutely worth the price of entry if you like that elevator pitch. The setting's pretty fun (ghost apocalypse keeps everyone hidden in protected cities) and the mechanics are all there for a very specific purpose. It's really light and easy to run.
+4
Erin The RedThe Name's Erin! Woman, Podcaster, Dungeon Master, IT nerd, Parent, Trans. AMABaton Rouge, LARegistered Userregular
Can someone give me the skinny on what Blades in the Dark is about? What genre is it setting, what sort of mechanics does it implement?
Dishonoured style fantasy city with a mix of tech and light magic. You play grim criminals doing criminal stuff. The system is narrative with players using a dice pool and either succeeding, succeeding with a cost (severity of the stakes are defined before the roll) or failing.
Hmm sounds intriguing.
We will be putting our play sessions up on YouTube sometime in the near future. I can link you if you are interested when we do?
There's a lot of little things that are real nice in the Blades ruleset too.
Like, there's ~20 factions within the default city with some compelling as fuck names, including The Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh.
A player can push themselves and take 2 Stress (think Strain from FFG Star Wars if you're familiar) for an extra die in the pool, or the GM (or other players with the GM's final approval) can offer the player a devil's bargain which is exactly what you think it is: "Oh sure, take an extra die, but pass or fail <TERRIBLE IDEA HERE>".
If you're into seeing Blades in play, here is John Harper, the creator of the game running it for Rollplay:
This is one I have saved but haven't gotten to watch yet, but I'm sure it's good, and I'm sure I want to play Blades. My understanding is that it's built on PbtA but goes outside the framework in a bigger way than PbtA games usually do. Some of the mechanics of the game that I've heard about sound utterly fantastic.
What style of system is it? Some sort of pinko commie liberal wine-sipping new fangled one I imagine
It's narrative based but honestly the mechanics cover pretty much everything I'd want focused on. The only thing that felt kinda fuzzy/poorly done was the tiers of equipment.
Yeah, it's all humans, you pick a class like Whisper, Cutter, Hound, Spider, ect. and make your character from there. Then the group makes up their guild and how they fit in the world, create your crew, ect. Then you plan heist, then go and do them.
It almost entirely bypasses the planning phase, so if you really like the part in Shadowrun where the party come up with a plan for an hour you may be disappointed.
You ask your players for the approach (Assault, Subterfuge, etc) which is the broad stroke of the plan, and then depending on the approach they also owe you a detail (the route they take for a Transport/Smuggling mission).
With X varying by quality of the plan, you roll Xd6k1 and that defines how well the party are able to get inside.
It almost entirely bypasses the planning phase, so if you really like the part in Shadowrun where the party come up with a plan for an hour you may be disappointed.
I have yet to meet a whole group that actually likes this shit. Usually it's just ONE dude, and god forbid if it's the GM...
I don't mind legwork, as that's usually an interesting conversation or roleplaying encounter. But shit, the planning... at some point, you just have to accept that you're Shadowrunners, and your go-to move is driving a Humvee through the front door and yelling through the turret "Where is Mr. Coogle?"
You ask your players for the approach (Assault, Subterfuge, etc) which is the broad stroke of the plan, and then depending on the approach they also owe you a detail (the route they take for a Transport/Smuggling mission).
With X varying by quality of the plan, you roll Xd6k1 and that defines how well the party are able to get inside.
Yeah, I like the Blades in the Dark implementation of gear (slots instead of specific gear) and planning. I mean, no matter what plan you throw out there, it's got to go horribly wrong at some point... that's what makes the game narrative interesting.
Can someone give me the skinny on what Blades in the Dark is about? What genre is it setting, what sort of mechanics does it implement?
Dishonoured style fantasy city with a mix of tech and light magic. You play grim criminals doing criminal stuff. The system is narrative with players using a dice pool and either succeeding, succeeding with a cost (severity of the stakes are defined before the roll) or failing.
Degree of grimmness optional. Our characters include a brick-fisted face-puncher (and ghost-eater), a revolutionary assassin (and weird degenerate), a second story man (and interior decorator of chaos), and a vehicle expert (and popinjay).
Our most recent heist included using the face-puncher as deal broker, which failed spectacularly, and a heated argument involving a bag of snakes while a rival team pulled up and threatened to kill us all.
It almost entirely bypasses the planning phase, so if you really like the part in Shadowrun where the party come up with a plan for an hour you may be disappointed.
You ask your players for the approach (Assault, Subterfuge, etc) which is the broad stroke of the plan, and then depending on the approach they also owe you a detail (the route they take for a Transport/Smuggling mission).
With X varying by quality of the plan, you roll Xd6k1 and that defines how well the party are able to get inside.
...that actually sounds terrible, because I would rather do some planning (I don't like hours of planning either but that's just a failure of a group to get on with it rather than because plans are inherently things that take hours to formulate) and not just leave it all to a dice roll that determines how shitty or not we are at planning.
Okay definitely not a system for me then. Is there plenty of background stuff in a separate chapter or is it quite light and interspersed?
The dice roll they call the fortune roll, and it's essentially that bit of wisdom that no plan survives contact with the enemy.
It's assumed your plan is good, but a 1-3 is the gang making a move against you first, 4-5 is your plan works pretty well and you've peeled back the first set of defenses, and a 6 is you've bypassed an obstacle of some kind.
It almost entirely bypasses the planning phase, so if you really like the part in Shadowrun where the party come up with a plan for an hour you may be disappointed.
You ask your players for the approach (Assault, Subterfuge, etc) which is the broad stroke of the plan, and then depending on the approach they also owe you a detail (the route they take for a Transport/Smuggling mission).
With X varying by quality of the plan, you roll Xd6k1 and that defines how well the party are able to get inside.
...that actually sounds terrible, because I would rather do some planning (I don't like hours of planning either but that's just a failure of a group to get on with it rather than because plans are inherently things that take hours to formulate) and not just leave it all to a dice roll that determines how shitty or not we are at planning.
Okay definitely not a system for me then. Is there plenty of background stuff in a separate chapter or is it quite light and interspersed?
To be honest there's nothing in the system that really stops you focusing more on planning and de-emphasizing the fortune roll for how prepared your target is.
My group tended to plan in more detail and did small leg work scenes and stuff.
Posts
That's what I did so far. I just like to be able to plop down little scenery objects.
Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan
Huh, you guys are going crazier than my group
Just about everything we do is a sidecast of some kind.
We put up a new episode of every Monday.
I think right now we've started uploading 13th Avatar Age and finishing off the FFG Star Wars. Dresden likely starts next.
I'm also doing Blades in the Dark stuff that we livestream (with VODs to go up on youtube in the vague future).
Our first session, one of our number stuffed himself into an apparently interdimensional trash can to pursue a lead. He was then crushed and immolated. Now he lives in my foyer with a racoon and lawn flamingo.
We go hard at this.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
If it wasn't clear from the above, I love running mostly narrative games. The "Accelerated" portions really speed up the clunkier aspects of DF, though I'd like to play a few sessions before I declare it another of my many Best Games Ever.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
The velvety voice in your head tells you everything is probably fine.
In other news I super super enjoy Blades in the Dark y'all it's fun on a bun.
narrator: he doesn't
Everything will be fine.
narrator: it won't
Well yeah, we know that now. At the time, though, I was pretty sure we were feeding him to some horror from beyond the gates.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
The gear book had some pre-made plug-and-play kits though, IIRC. To like, cover the bases.
For tools and gadgets it's mostly fine because like, I know what a climbing kit or RFID tag does. It's for the stuff that's both technical and mechanical like rigger or mages that I need a little more. I'll probably just throw together something passable and let them re-do whatever winds up being dumb.
It's a Dark Fantasy game with a little bit of steam / clock-punk influence where you play a gang of rogues trying to survive in a decaying metropolis. Think Dishonored and the Thief games with more than a little Fritz Leiber, Thieves' World, and Glen Cook for seasoning.
The mechanics are the pretty-light "roll some d6s, more if you want to badly enough or abilities permit, and hope for a 6 but probably get a sorta-success like in Apocalypse World instead."
Dishonoured style fantasy city with a mix of tech and light magic. You play grim criminals doing criminal stuff. The system is narrative with players using a dice pool and either succeeding, succeeding with a cost (severity of the stakes are defined before the roll) or failing.
Everything Florida Man does is basically a Florida Man headline.
Hmm sounds intriguing.
Like, there's ~20 factions within the default city with some compelling as fuck names, including The Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh.
A player can push themselves and take 2 Stress (think Strain from FFG Star Wars if you're familiar) for an extra die in the pool, or the GM (or other players with the GM's final approval) can offer the player a devil's bargain which is exactly what you think it is: "Oh sure, take an extra die, but pass or fail <TERRIBLE IDEA HERE>".
This is one I have saved but haven't gotten to watch yet, but I'm sure it's good, and I'm sure I want to play Blades. My understanding is that it's built on PbtA but goes outside the framework in a bigger way than PbtA games usually do. Some of the mechanics of the game that I've heard about sound utterly fantastic.
What style of system is it? Some sort of pinko commie liberal wine-sipping new fangled one I imagine
It's narrative based but honestly the mechanics cover pretty much everything I'd want focused on. The only thing that felt kinda fuzzy/poorly done was the tiers of equipment.
You ask your players for the approach (Assault, Subterfuge, etc) which is the broad stroke of the plan, and then depending on the approach they also owe you a detail (the route they take for a Transport/Smuggling mission).
With X varying by quality of the plan, you roll Xd6k1 and that defines how well the party are able to get inside.
I don't mind legwork, as that's usually an interesting conversation or roleplaying encounter. But shit, the planning... at some point, you just have to accept that you're Shadowrunners, and your go-to move is driving a Humvee through the front door and yelling through the turret "Where is Mr. Coogle?"
Yeah, I like the Blades in the Dark implementation of gear (slots instead of specific gear) and planning. I mean, no matter what plan you throw out there, it's got to go horribly wrong at some point... that's what makes the game narrative interesting.
Our most recent heist included using the face-puncher as deal broker, which failed spectacularly, and a heated argument involving a bag of snakes while a rival team pulled up and threatened to kill us all.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
... that had been dead the whole time.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Would that make him an Insubstantial Snake?
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Or we think are dead but they are aliens that don't have lifesigns that we know of!
...that actually sounds terrible, because I would rather do some planning (I don't like hours of planning either but that's just a failure of a group to get on with it rather than because plans are inherently things that take hours to formulate) and not just leave it all to a dice roll that determines how shitty or not we are at planning.
Okay definitely not a system for me then. Is there plenty of background stuff in a separate chapter or is it quite light and interspersed?
It's assumed your plan is good, but a 1-3 is the gang making a move against you first, 4-5 is your plan works pretty well and you've peeled back the first set of defenses, and a 6 is you've bypassed an obstacle of some kind.
To be honest there's nothing in the system that really stops you focusing more on planning and de-emphasizing the fortune roll for how prepared your target is.
My group tended to plan in more detail and did small leg work scenes and stuff.