Let's talk about "plot", "story", and "play to find out."

[FrogReaver]

Hmm. Well I think your immersionst take is clear, but in this case it doesn't carry any water. There's nothing meta about clocks - they track ongoing change in the setting, it's entirely in-setting. The characters are perfectly aware, for example, of the longer-term project of a successful heist and can make in-character decisions that may or may not support that goal. Let's not deploy immersion and meta as distractors here. The clock is an abstraction of that longer-term goal, but that doesn't make it meta.

I struggle to reconcile that take on clocks. The effects of filled clocks are fiction facing, but going from 2 to 3 ticks on a 6 tick clock… what’s that tick mean in setting?

 

[Fenris-77]

I struggle to reconcile that take on clocks. The effects of filled clocks are fiction facing, but going from 2 to 3 ticks on a 6 tick clock… what’s that tick mean in setting?

Nothing, other than progress generally. It's just a timing mechansm. Sometimes the fill is very specific, other times it's more general. As I've said several times, player action declarations should never be overtly about filling clocks anyway. Those clocks, player facing or not, are just useful shorthand so that everyone at the table has a similar idea of what the heck is going on beyond the current situation.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Nothing, other than progress generally. It's just a timing mechansm. Sometimes the fill is very specific, other times it's more general. As I've said several times, player action declarations should never be overtly about filling clocks anyway. Those clocks, player facing or not, are just useful shorthand so that everyone at the table has a similar idea of what the heck is going on beyond the current situation.

But, where would they get that idea in the actual fiction? If the clock is supposed to be representing a real thing in setting, how does the setting justify the PCs knowing what point on the clock is mapping to it?

 

[Lanefan]

Hmm. I think the idea of 'want your character to succeed' is an idea that contains an awful lot of individual differences from game to game. Especially when RPGs usually lack a specific win condition overall, at which point the notion of success gets a lot fuzzier.

Depends on scale, too.

In any moment of play it's fairly safe to assume I (and, I'd expect, nearly all players nearly all of the time) want my character to succeed in whatever it happens to be doing in that moment, otherwise I wouldn't have the character doing it.

From there, the scale broadens:
--- short-term success on a given mission, heist, or adventure;
--- medium-term success in accumulating wealth, reputation, levels, or other ongoing reward(s);
--- long-term success in achieving whatever in-fiction life goals (if any) the character might have.

Achieving the latter of those, at or near the end of a campaign, might well be seen as an overall win condition. Different tables, and even different players at the same table, put more or less emphasis on each of those scales of success, though, thus the "individual differences" to which you refer.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Ahh. well my bad. What were you talking about then?

Just meta decisions in general, someone mentioned them earlier. Certainly advocating which skill should apply is fully meta for example. And in Blades a lot some stuff like stress, special armour whilst not quite fully meta are so abstracted that the link to the character decision making becomes rather strained. And of course there is the fact that a lot of stuff just happens in certain way due the mechanics, and that should not be knowable to the characters, but the players still need to plan around it. I think Blades is rather hard game to play directly from IC POV. (Similar happens in D&D combat, where players make decisions with the knowledge of the turn order and other mechanical contrivances but the characters obviously wouldn't.)

 

[Fenris-77]

But, where would they get that idea in the actual fiction? If the clock is supposed to be representing a real thing in setting, how does the setting justify the PCs knowing what point on the clock is mapping to it?

You've been reading this thread, right?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

But, where would they get that idea in the actual fiction? If the clock is supposed to be representing a real thing in setting, how does the setting justify the PCs knowing what point on the clock is mapping to it?

Ideally this should be telegraphed somehow, but I don't think it in practice often is, and I am not sure that the rules demand it.

 

[Fenris-77]

Ideally this should be telegraphed somehow, but I don't think it in practice often is, and I am not sure that the rules demand it.

Everything about consequences should be telegraphed, ideally. When I GM Blades I'm always up front about possible implications both in terms of the action at hand and also the heist more generally (as those two are parts of the same thing, really).

 

[zakael19]

Everything about consequences should be telegraphed, ideally. When I GM Blades I'm always up front about possible implications both in terms of the action at hand and also the heist more generally (as those two are parts of the same thing, really).

Yeah....

Its always weird to read comments on the internet (often by people who clearly have no interest in playing something but are quite happy to latch onto side comments or specific meanings and extrapolate them into something totally different) and just be like "huh, that's literally not an issue in play that makes an effort to understand the design and mechanics of this" over and over and over.

FWIW, the core GM Actions that drive like 90% of play are:

• Ask Questions
• Provide Opportunities & Follow Their [players] Lead
• Telegraph Trouble Before It Strikes (most of the rest of the stuff is dealing with the outcome of telegraphing trouble)

 

[Crimson Longinus]

And regarding telegraphing of clocks, this is another reason why I think for the most stuff the PCs are expected to respond, a soft move before hard a move is better than a clock. Like you can pretty easily telegraph, say, the guards reacting to some noise and becoming more alert and cautious before they actually spot the characters, but how the hell you telegraph every step on six point "the guards spot you" clock so that it is clear at which point we're at? Not saying that it is impossible, but it is definitely a lot harder!