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<blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8172202" data-attributes="member: 6785785"><p>So I have an example that kind of touches on some of these ideas. </p><p></p><p>I ran a campaign of Blades in the Dark where investigation was a key component. It was actually a campaign using the playtest for playing the game as the Bluecoats of the Watch, the police of the setting. There are some mechanical changes to the game to facilitate this, but more importantly, the approach has to be very different.</p><p></p><p>The key difference, I think, is that a crew of scoundrels tends to be challenging the system, fighting against the powers that be to take what they want, but a crew of Bluecoats is a part of the system, and they are working toward resolving some disruption to the system.</p><p></p><p>When we decided to give this a try, an idea occurred to me to have this campaign be investigating the same players crew from our first Blades Campaign. So they would be playing the task force of police that was assigned to deal with the rise of their gang from our earlier campaign. I was thinking about how to do this, and I decided against it. But then, in our session zero, the players all seemed to have that same idea....they all wanted to be taking on their earlier crew. So we decided to do it.</p><p></p><p>I was worried that it would not go well because Blades as a system kind of expects many details to not be set ahead of time, and in this case many would be.</p><p></p><p>The challenges were:</p><p></p><p>(1) how to play out an investigation when the players already know a lot of the details of the situation; how do you play to find out if everybody already pretty much knows?</p><p>(2) how to handle gap between what the players know and what the characters should know; the Bluecoat PCs would have resources at their disposal, but the criminal former PCs aren't exactly household names in the setting. They were very careful about being unknown.</p><p>(3) how to not feel like we're just working our way through things we already know like a checklist; I didn't want this to just be a kind of gimmick sightseeing tour type of game- just seeing the previous campaign's locations and characters from another perspective. That was an interesting angle, but I didn't want that to be all the game was.</p><p></p><p>How I addressed each of these was:</p><p></p><p>(1) There are always greater forces at work in Doskvol, and so I took some of the unanswered questions from our initial campaign, and made them relevant to what was actually going on. So the investigation didn't focus on "who" the criminal crew was or "how" they rose to power, because that was what our earlier campaign was about. It became more about "why".</p><p>(2) I didn't hold most of the "known" elements back; the cohorts and former PCs were mostly established on a kind of suspect board, like you'd see in a cop show. The players knew who they were, or at least had a good idea, and we quickly filled in many of the blanks to bring the PCs up to speed on the basics. This also kind of retroactively added to the histories and characterization of the former PCs, which was an interesting byproduct. We found out more about the old PCs as the new PCs investigated them. For instance, the Lurk from the original crew had been an orphan and lived in an orphanage and that's where he learned his thieving skills. That kind of thing.</p><p>(3) I think opening the investigation up to the idea of there being a larger conspiracy or situation at play as mentioned in (1) really helped in this regard. What more was going on? What was behind this crew's rise beyond their own ambition? Those became the true unknowns, even to me as the GM, and that's what let us play to find out.</p><p></p><p>I think that this campaign wound up going very well, overall. There were certainly a few rough spots as we kind of dealt with, or learned to deal with, the challenges unique to the approach we were taking. Things certainly got better as we went along and realized the challenge points and could kind of work around them or otherwise deal with them.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="hawkeyefan, post: 8172202, member: 6785785"] So I have an example that kind of touches on some of these ideas. I ran a campaign of Blades in the Dark where investigation was a key component. It was actually a campaign using the playtest for playing the game as the Bluecoats of the Watch, the police of the setting. There are some mechanical changes to the game to facilitate this, but more importantly, the approach has to be very different. The key difference, I think, is that a crew of scoundrels tends to be challenging the system, fighting against the powers that be to take what they want, but a crew of Bluecoats is a part of the system, and they are working toward resolving some disruption to the system. When we decided to give this a try, an idea occurred to me to have this campaign be investigating the same players crew from our first Blades Campaign. So they would be playing the task force of police that was assigned to deal with the rise of their gang from our earlier campaign. I was thinking about how to do this, and I decided against it. But then, in our session zero, the players all seemed to have that same idea....they all wanted to be taking on their earlier crew. So we decided to do it. I was worried that it would not go well because Blades as a system kind of expects many details to not be set ahead of time, and in this case many would be. The challenges were: (1) how to play out an investigation when the players already know a lot of the details of the situation; how do you play to find out if everybody already pretty much knows? (2) how to handle gap between what the players know and what the characters should know; the Bluecoat PCs would have resources at their disposal, but the criminal former PCs aren't exactly household names in the setting. They were very careful about being unknown. (3) how to not feel like we're just working our way through things we already know like a checklist; I didn't want this to just be a kind of gimmick sightseeing tour type of game- just seeing the previous campaign's locations and characters from another perspective. That was an interesting angle, but I didn't want that to be all the game was. How I addressed each of these was: (1) There are always greater forces at work in Doskvol, and so I took some of the unanswered questions from our initial campaign, and made them relevant to what was actually going on. So the investigation didn't focus on "who" the criminal crew was or "how" they rose to power, because that was what our earlier campaign was about. It became more about "why". (2) I didn't hold most of the "known" elements back; the cohorts and former PCs were mostly established on a kind of suspect board, like you'd see in a cop show. The players knew who they were, or at least had a good idea, and we quickly filled in many of the blanks to bring the PCs up to speed on the basics. This also kind of retroactively added to the histories and characterization of the former PCs, which was an interesting byproduct. We found out more about the old PCs as the new PCs investigated them. For instance, the Lurk from the original crew had been an orphan and lived in an orphanage and that's where he learned his thieving skills. That kind of thing. (3) I think opening the investigation up to the idea of there being a larger conspiracy or situation at play as mentioned in (1) really helped in this regard. What more was going on? What was behind this crew's rise beyond their own ambition? Those became the true unknowns, even to me as the GM, and that's what let us play to find out. I think that this campaign wound up going very well, overall. There were certainly a few rough spots as we kind of dealt with, or learned to deal with, the challenges unique to the approach we were taking. Things certainly got better as we went along and realized the challenge points and could kind of work around them or otherwise deal with them. [/QUOTE]
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