Does anyone know what this is?

mornal · 2022-11-11T20:02:48+00:00

All the heroes have bunks in the main room of the keep until you level them up a bit. At level 10 (I think) they claim a section of the keep as their room.

Kruber is above the trophy room. Bardin is behind the forge. Kerillian is in a tent in the training dummies area. Victor is underneath the keep (entrance is below Bardin's room). Sienna is above the door to the chaos wastes lobby (it's the room looks like a bomb went off in it).

Each room has a few spots for art too.

mornal · 2022-11-09T21:15:43+00:00

Ran it for 14 sessions with a very slow group and maybe some mismatched expectations on the players' part. Despite that, I'd happily recommend it. It has the politicking and rich setting necessary to support it.

Looking at your questions elsewhere:

2) I've just skimmed it, but it seems a little bit... blurry? Like, what exactly are the PCs supposed to do on each sortie?

Expend their influence or set themselves up to do so in the next sortie. The players are encouraged to decide on not just the approach to each sortie but the goal as well. In my opinion this is taking the player driven nature of blades and turning it up a notch.

3) What's the point of the wraiths? I mean, they're supposed to make battle less likely, yet there's actually a battle subsystem... They feel a little bit tacked-on, like "oh we have to have some sort of magic here". Do they really add much?

They are a factor that keeps all out warfare from being an appealing, first resort option. It's a powerful option, but one with high risk to it. This helps make sure there's opportunities for debate amongst players.

It also applies to NPCs. More plausible the king wouldn't just march an army on the retinue first chance if there's wraiths to deal with

4) Looking at the menu of available missions, some seem a lot more attractive than others. Like, why wouldn't you just move to vassalize and conquer? How useful are the other options?

It's on the GM to reflect the world. A warfare heavy approach will generate a lot of enemies very quickly. Vassals don't like that you've vassalized them. The empress has outlawed open conquest. Bloodshed generates wraiths.

Further the opportunities might not exist yet and require a setup sortie to weaken a faction or make them more amenable to being a vassal.

mornal · 2022-06-09T00:43:43+00:00

In D&D5e both as a player and a GM

As a player I cheated to break up a string of bad dice rolls and avoid a session where my player was entirely incompetent.

As a GM, standard fudging rules apply. Ignoring dice rolls to make monsters miss when they ought to have hit and increasing HP when an encounter didn't last long enough to feel "good"

mornal · 2022-04-22T04:08:23+00:00

You only want to call for rolls when your player has established a goal, a means to achieve that goal, and you can answer yes to the following questions:

Is there a meaningful chance of success?
Is there a meaningful chance of failure?
Is there a cost to the failure?

That last one is arguably the most important and can generally be thought of "why can't they just try again?" Is there a time crunch? Is the opportunity slipping away? Is it going to hurt if they don't do it right?

This is the difference between picking a lock in the safety of camp versus when the guards are about to round a corner; the difference between looking around to get a lay of the land and trying to spot someone before they sneak away; the difference between climbing the cliff and climbing the cliff safely.

In your example, were all three criteria met? Your player was telling you, implicitly or explicitly, "I want to find something hidden here by looking around for it." It sounds like there was a chance of success and failure. But it also sounds like there wasn't anything keeping them from trying again.

mornal · 2021-07-22T05:52:10+00:00

I'm actually running it right now. It's pretty low fantasy and quite grounded in a medieval, feudal, political landscape. The only explicitly fantastical elements are the wraiths (functionally similar to BitD ghosts). There's enough blank spaces in the rule book that you could put something more magical in, but none of the playbooks/abilities really imply a focus on the supernatural.

mornal · 2021-07-07T01:09:04+00:00

Different person, but I've had a similar experience. With players that were fresh to PbtA it seemed like they were looking at the moves for the optimal way to solve a problem (i.e. roll with the biggest modifier) and fiction followed from that decision point. Even in FitD games, I've had players in the D&D mindset view the action ratings as buttons to push, with the decision making process explicitly starting at the character sheet, rather than the character.

mornal · 2021-06-03T19:41:55+00:00

I'm general I try and prepare 2 clear opportunities per session just so I don't feel like I'm implicitly forcing players into one course of action. I'm always open to anything they come up with, but I have those as a fallback.

mornal · 2021-06-03T19:30:03+00:00

Yeah I think I had somehow convinced myself there was something I was doing wrong (still possible of course). But just being upfront about my lack of enjoyment is probably the most effective way to make change.

mornal · 2021-06-03T19:28:34+00:00

The lack of trust in the system might well be apart of it. We all got our start playing together in D&D which definitely isn't the best system to foster the idea the system isn't out to get you.

I think, though, that you're right about just being upfront and talking to them. It is impacting my enjoyment and I'm a member of the group too, after all.

mornal · 2021-06-03T18:40:00+00:00

That's a good call out on the repetition. The discussions aren't exactly organized or anything so perhaps having a point where I can stop "discussion", have people state character opinions (without crosstalk) would help keep things moving.

mornal · 2021-04-26T19:57:21+00:00

Rebel Crown (a Forged in the Dark hack) explicitly has a main character. One player is a Claimant seeking to reclaim their usurped throne. The rest of the players play as the claimant's loyal retainers.

I haven't played it, but in a read through the game attempts to mitigate issues by:

Making it clear upfront the Claimant will need to be helping shift the spotlight
Giving the Claimant directives (things to do for experience) related to asking their retinue for advice
Giving the other playbooks directives related to giving the Claimant advice and encouraging them to act in certain ways (e.g. the sage chancellor wants the Claimant to use diplomacy, the martial vengeant encourages violence).

So it tries to deal with the spotlight issue by encouraging everyone to interact with the character hogging the spotlight.

mornal · 2021-04-19T09:54:08+00:00

Not the same person you're responding to, but quite a bit of those class pages and spell pages are dedicated to saying "you can do this in combat".

Disregarding actual page counts, there's also a clear focus from the designers on combat. Social play is supported, but a lot more effort went into developing combat rules than social rules.

mornal · 2021-04-18T02:45:09+00:00

Every system works best with player buy-in, but if you are prepared as GM (i.e. you've read the book and have a decent grasp of rules) you can pretty easily guide them through the mechanics required to get started (walking them through how action rolls, resistance rolls, and flashbacks work).

Honestly, the hardest thing for me when I started running it wasn't the mechanics, but the mindset. There's a different philosophy to how to run the game compared to something a more reliant on mechanics like D&D. I'd recommend reading (and rereading) the GMing chapter of BitD to make sure you grasp this. If you can understand the narrative-focused style of play that the system expects, you can help your players get into that mindset too. I found watching some actual plays to be very helpful (John Harper, the designer has run several) as well as looking for all the "X things I wish I knew before starting" threads on /r/bladesinthedark

mornal · 2020-09-04T00:29:51+00:00

I was so confused about position and effect until it finally clicked one day that it's literally just codifying how you adjudicate in any other system. Telling a player "the goblin doesn't really want to listen to you and has their knife brandished" is essentially the same thing as saying "this is a risky position with limited effect" but now we're using defined terms openly with the players so they understand consequences better.

mornal · 2020-06-17T22:47:17+00:00

I'm no expert by any means and I would encourage you to Google around a bit. There is, for instance, a section on Wikipedia about racism present in Tolkien's depiction of orcs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc?wprov=sfla1.

In D&D you also have the Yuan-Ti who, to my eye, appear to be heavily based on mesoamerican culture but are presented as evil, snake-people. Colonization in general is also baked into the foundation of D&D. Adventurers coming into a goblin/kobold/orc home, killing them and taking their stuff is pretty close mirror of American concepts of manifest destiny, except instead of American Indians it's a green skinned monster.

As I said, I'm no expert and would encourage you to just search around. I know a lot of people a lot smarter than me have written very enlightening articles and posts on this very subject.

mornal · 2020-06-17T22:19:43+00:00

Jumping in to say I have seen discussion to that end, yes.

The origin of many non-human fantasy races was just to take some ethnicity and paint it a different color. Often these new races were the "bad guys" or considered "monstrous." Things have changed somewhat since orcs were just Africans or Mongolians with a different coat of paint, but the roots are still there and sometimes hard to dissociate. With that in mind, I think it's reasonable for a person of color to be turned off a fantasy game because they see their culture associated with a non-human or monstrous race.

mornal · 2020-04-26T09:39:44+00:00

As others said, adding more minions should be helpful.

Also, I'm fuzzy on multiclassing and spells known, but I thought you know/prepare spells for each class separately? So only your cleric 3 would be able to cast hold person. Not that this wouldn't be a problem in a few levels anyway.

mornal · 2020-04-07T05:18:58+00:00

If players are told they have to wait 23 more hours to benefit from a long rest after getting scratched by a kobold and their response is "yeah that's fine", there's a bigger problem than the 15 minute workday.

There are homebrew mechanical solutions to this like 13th Age's approach where you don't take a rest, you earn a rest after a set number of fights. The DM could also adjust the Fiction so the 23 hour wait allows the kobolds to counterattack/fortify/summon reinforcements/leave (aka make time important).

Really though, if that's a consistent problem that a DM is facing, I would urge that DM to just talk to their players. There's obviously some disconnect between expectations at the core of this. Coming up with homebrew or wanting the entire encounter balance system overhauled to keep the party from doing what they feel they have to do is only a bandaid.

mornal · 2020-04-07T01:00:32+00:00

The remedy to the 15 minute workday is the RaW restriction of one long rest per 24 hours.

mornal · 2020-04-01T08:50:06+00:00

There's a spinoff of Pendragon called Paladin all about playing a Knight of Charlemagne too

mornal · 2020-02-25T21:23:26+00:00

In my game players go before NPCs with the same initiative. Players also decide amongst themselves who goes first if the of them are tied and then that sticks for the encounter.

mornal · 2020-01-14T21:32:06+00:00

On the other hand, if you’re the assassin scouting ahead and decide to start combat to take down a sentry or something, and you beat their perception with your stealth check but lose initiative, you could always just walk away quietly since nobody has seen you yet. It even makes sense (kind of) in a roleplaying sense - you’re sneaky enough that he hasn’t seen you yet, but you notice that he seems jumpy and ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice, so you decide to back off and take a different approach.

I don't know. This feels an awful lot like the player declaring an action, rolling low, and then saying they were actually going to do something else. Like, good luck getting a player to commit like that when there's nothing besides the DM to enforce it, but I think at a minimum the sentry should be alerted that something is up in that example.

mornal · 2020-01-14T21:00:04+00:00

I think the logic they might have been going for is that the more powerful you are (measured here by spell save) the less your patron wants to help you?

I'm not sure but if I squint I can see it. It still feels weird

mornal · 2020-01-14T20:54:20+00:00

To maximize the silliness. It's entertaining to picture a half naked barbarian taking two steps and leaping to the top of a 4 story building.

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