Blades in the Dark Surprise Drop! Reviewing 'Deep Cuts' Expansion!

[@abdulpadela4738]

"Let's take a little look" and the video is one and a half hours lol. Never change Derik

[@KnightsofLastCall]

@@abdulpadela4738 guilty

[@SilviuIM]

Abubakar Salim, Josephine McAdam and Ross Bryant were players in a BitD game run by Jared Logan on Glass Cannon. Good stuff!

[@TeemuSa]

10:58 You say: "I didn't like that trauma took you out of the scene.. or erm, the score" The "scene" was correct and John Harper even lists this in the designer notes of Deep Cuts, that Trauma was not supposed to take a PC out of the score - just from the present situation.

[@damienwilliams2947]

The ultimate Derik turns a Live Stream into a BItD stream.

[@gagrin1565]

omg I love tying rep directly to heat 😍

[@leefellows8770]

Bought the PDF yesterday. Hope you do a full stream on this at some point

[@beowulf.reborn]

Looking forward to hearing more of thoughts on this, once you've had time to digest it a bit more.

[@maryclarence6429]

The new action system is reminiscent of the core mechanic of John Harper's Ghost/Echo. Very interesting.

[@maryclarence6429]

First, thanks for covering this! A great break from election coverage. Excited about most of these changes, training was broken, not sure about the new vice rules, looking forward to trying things out.

[@ichifish]

Made too many comments on the Livestream video, so I came here to make more. So, so, happy with all of these updates. Curious why Harper didn't do a 2.0 version, but hopeful that it's in the pipeline and he's waiting to incorporate feedback from Deep Cuts ( internal chuckle at the name). Harm: Much better -like my house rules Training: Better -I've had those train-train-trainers. BUT I've also had players who didn't like thinking outside of heists, and training gave them an easy out, even if it's boring. Leveling: Much better -several campaigns got weird because of the power spike. BUT I've had DnD players who really wanted the feeling of leveling up, which Blades doesn't give. Actions: I trust Harper and it seems like excellent changes, but it took me a long time to figure out how to make the old action rules sing, so I'm a leery of making changes. I don't get how it will speed things up, either. Resisting Consequences: Better, but resisting consequences always seems clunky because the event has already happened (GM: "So Bracken and Jun watch helplessly as you tilt back on the ledge, pinwheeling your arms. The ledge cracks and you fall three stories to the pavement. You take 3 harm." Player: "I'm going to resist that.") Edge: No thanks. the bonus die isn't narrative, and lots of players forget bonuses like that. "6-6-Crit!" is fun to say, too. But when they get higher level it's just too common. Threat of Failure: No thanks. 4-6 is success, 1-3 is failure. The player makes the push gamble before the roll. That's what makes the dice sweaty. Keep it simple. Cut back on the negotiating. I'm sure that works with the Tier 5 players Harper's got access to, but not my crew. Effects & Consequences table: AWESOME. It's hard to internalize Blades rules, and this kind of framework helps. Players want stuff like this, too. Costs: Somehow I've always imposed costs upfront. I guess I thought it was in the rules. Gather information: Good improvement. Better to roll it into the score because it often ends up score-like anyway, with threats and risks. Group rolls: I've always done group rolls ad hoc: a group climb is different than a fight, which is different than sneak, coupled with their importance in the fiction. No one rule covers them all. The big problem with the action rules is that it's hard to know how they work before your do it, but trying to figure out how to do it while you're playing sucks. This doesn't happen in most non-PbtA/FitD games because it's pretty obvious what happens: hit/don't hit, etc. (unless it's grapple, lol). But in Blades you don't really know what's going to happen until it's actually happening.

[@greystorm9974]

I dont get this 46:30 Because thats why you have resists

[@KnightsofLastCall]

@@greystorm9974 I actually agree with you... The Threat roll is the one area of the rules I'm not sold on.

[@FilCieplak]

I'd really love to hear your thoughts later once you've have time to let this all sink in, haha. Cheers!

[@Keyce0013]

I'm 50/50 on the new vice changes. What I liked about the original system was that your vice was supposed to be unreliable. You had no way to know if today was going to be the day you go overboard with your vice. That said, I didn't like the limited consequences for the old system and how they were basically "up to the player/DM" to decide on the punishment. It could allow for a DM to cut off a character from their vice purveyor every time they overindulge if they were feeling particularly nasty, or if a player got to decide then they just might pick the +1 heat if they know their crew's heat levels are in manageable levels. That said, I like this new dice chart that helps to randomize the consequences for overindulging. My only criticism is that cutting off a character from their vice purveyor shouldn't be on that list. One bad die roll means you get immediately cut off before any other option gets taken. I'd personally replace that option for something else (or simply make it DM's choice) and instead start a 6 or 8 clock the first time a character overindulges at that vice purveyor, and when the clock finally reaches full they get cut off and have to find some other source.

[@cbeaird52]

The change from an Action role to a Threat role does alter the narrative focus a bit. Instead of it being about what the scoundrels are doing, instead its the GMing saying "this is the first threat" and the players going "Oh, im going to do X to solve it" and making a threat role. Thie maybe how Bitd was played already, and I'm inexperienced, but thats what my biggest takeaway was.

[@jacobwilliams9438]

Anyone have any thoughts on how to fix the Hardcase prison claim to work with the new tier advancement system? Maybe a coin reduction on crew upgrades?

[@arianwells9943]

I don't think trauma ever was supposed to take pcs out of action for the whole score....it says CURRENT conflict. Also it'd be weird for a gm to just say - tough luck, you're sitting this out... like what, why? One scene ends and the pc comes back, that's def how it was intended and I'm puzzled that so many people thought otherwise.

[@KnightsofLastCall]

@@arianwells9943 yeah Harper even mentions this common mistake at the end of the book in his design notes. It was pretty cool to see that a lot of the same experiences/rough spots he had experienced were ones that I had talked about... Still trying to fully integrate this idea of the threat roll instead of action roll :)

[@ichifish]

RAW is "When you suffer trauma, you’re taken out of action. You’re “left for dead” or otherwise dropped out of the current conflict, only to come back later, shaken and drained," so I can see how it's unclear, but I've always played it as "out of this score" and others do too (Harper does this in the actual play he gms with Sean Nittner and Adam Koebel). But then I've never had trauma take out a scoundrel so early in the score that it was a significant amount of lost time. Of the handful I remember each one was in the boss fight/boss fight equivalent. The change that I make is that pcs can still talk, rp their trauma, stuff like that, because "left for dead" doesn't make much sense if the other scoundrels are there with them.

[@arianwells9943]

@@ichifish yeah I see how it could be taken that way! I think if it makes sense fictionally and a player is ok with it, then it's ok! But if a player takes a trauma in the beginning of the score, then would that player....just sit there? Leave the session? It's not fun in my opinion. They can leave the scene in fiction and then show up a bit later, right? Thankfully now it's cleared up for everyone :) I actually had my pc left for dead but I made a decision to do so and it made sense for her to be left behind (made an emotional moment between scoundrels). Depends on the situation, on pcs etc I guess.

[@arianwells9943]

@@KnightsofLastCall no one is perfect! In the end, we all have changed something in the rules to suit our tables better or what works for us and it's great to see that it's the case for Harper as well.

[@gagrin1565]

Old resistance roll was -1 to 5 stress because it was 6 minus the best result (absolute worst you can do is roll a 1) and crits counted as 7. My players in my first game focused on attributes and had absurd luck, the number of double sixes in my first game was nuts and we had multiple instances of players recovering from the stress they spent on a mixed result action roll on the resistance roll. It was, to be frank, a bit silly.

[@greystorm9974]

I always gave Coin rewards in the high end of the list and never regretted it. And i never really could get Entanglements to work. They never jived with what were doing or what we wanted to do next.

[@lostinalbion4223]

I honestly don't get the Threat Roll as it's written. It doesn't replace an Action Roll at all. An Action Roll is "I'm going to do something" that may fail/have consequences. A Threat Roll as it's described sounds more like a reaction to a danger that the GM decides to impose on the player, regardless of the player's actions. These are not the same thing. You could interpret it as the PC taking an Action Roll - suffering consequences - but then making a Threat Roll to avoid them. But two problems with that - 1) it actually makes the Action more complicated and require more rolls, and 2) I though that Resistances were for avoiding consequences.

[@Whrait72]

Deep Cuts? More like deep hacks!

[@mrcorbak6793]

Not sure I like the new Threat thing. So if your players face of with a super competent bad guy and just say « I kill him », I say there is a threat of failure and they push / help whatever and so they just one shot him ?

[@gagrin1565]

Not if you think that's unreasonable, no. You can make a clock like before and have them have to fill it to achieve that goal. The scale of what the players want to achieve still has to align with the fiction, just like they can't just say they're going to snatch the sun from the sky. GM is still the final arbiter of scale and effect. To be honest though, if my players are having a fight to the death with a single foe, I'm happy to have that be one roll with help and just threaten a whole bunch of lethal injuries, heat, or ruined relationships. No need to give your opposition staying power as long as the scale of the consequences they threaten are severe enough. Of note here: this new paradigm allows you to threaten the entire crew at once and ask what each of them are doing to avoid their portion of the threat. The action system struggles with that a bit.

[@jexsnake]

@@gagrin1565 yeah, that is something I need to test. One thing that sometimes makes it harder in battles and something like it is that rolling many times increases that 4-5 portion that can escalate the fight so much that it can become harder for the GM to add new threats. But also, I don't like how the group actions was before when using in battles. So this new way maybe solves this problem. I'm pumped to test these new rules.

[@torinmccabe]

@@gagrin1565 Excellent point on how the threat system can be used to threaten the entire party in an easier way than the action system