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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8154522" data-attributes="member: 16814">Ah, I see.  Let's look at your claim that the player can declare anything anytime as a solution and how this is missing some key parts of the puzzle.Firstly, players are bound by the same genre expectations that the GM is.  This means you can't declare that you're trying to find a ray gun in the Duke's toilet when in a typical fantasy setting.  It's a genre violation.  So, not anything can be a solution -- some violate genre.  In this case, though, Duskvol is a haunted city, so there's not much genre problems with the example.Secondly, the players are bound by the same "flow from the fiction" expectations that the GM is.  They can't just introduce things that don't align with the fiction without conflict.  Players actually have more leeway in this regard in Blades, especially with the Flashback move, but it's still a thing.  This does pertain to the situation.  If the score was in a normal, lived in manor house, declaring that a painting might be occult is much less in-tune with the fiction that one in the abandoned, haunted manor of a powerful occult family.  So, where the fiction takes place is important.How would this be reflected in the fiction?  The GM's Effect determination.  If a thing seems very unlikely or out of tune, then the GM should be setting effect to Lesser or even None.  This is a fair move by the GM because the player has ways to alter the Effect by spending resources.  So, if the player in the example did try to make a painting in a normal, unhaunted manor house an occult relic for his goals, then I, as GM, could easily say that this doesn't seem very likely, but you can try -- the effect will be Lesser.  Or, if the home is owned by someone that abhors the occult, then I could say No Effect.  The player is welcome to push or trade position to force the issue, but that's running some serious risks and will only bump up the effect by a step.Finally, let's look at the "solution" space.  Here, the task to change vices is a multi-clock effort, meaning you have multiple, complex tasks you have to accomplish that are very unlikely to be done in one go.  Here, I worked with the player, and we established what getting back into the graces of the University would look like.  The first clock -- 6 tick -- was to show that the PC could be valuable, and the second clock -- also 6 tick -- was to show that they were reliable and weren't going to slip back into their gambling habits again.  What do clocks mean, though?  They're a representation of a complex problem that can't easily be solved in one go.  The PC usually engages these clocks as Downtime Activites -- which you've read about -- and can advance them some every time, depending on the result of a roll.  The purpose of these clocks is to enact a cost (using Downtime) and a delay of gratification.  The special bit about these clocks is that they set back by two ticks every time the player would use their old vice (which he didn't have a purveyor for, but that's a simpler task).  So, at this point, the player was on the first clock, having spent 1 Downtime action to have a few ticks (I don't remember offhand, but it was not more than half-full).  This leads to the example.In the example of play, the player is trying to use an action in the Score to improve the clock.  This is neat, as it puts the score into risk, which can have it's own entertaining fallouts.  So, here we look again at the Effect space -- a normal effect success translates into 2 ticks (lesser 1, greater 3, critical 5).  So, at best, the player understood that finding this painting, constrained by the genre and fiction considerations above, would only result in some movement towards a complex goal.  This isn't a solution, it's a step in that direction, and it comes with risk.  And, in this case, that risk caught up.They kinda don't, though.  The only things you can do in a murder mystery of this type are discover what the GM has planned.  Sure, you have myraid ways to go about this, but this is like saying you can go to lots of different Chic-fil-a's  to get a chicken sandwich -- the end result is the same.</blockquote>

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