Blades in the Dark Special Armor Resistance?

[Starfox]

In Blades in the Dark, when you use special armor to resist a consequence, do you announce you use the special armor before or after making the resistance roll? If you do it after, when you know how much stress resisting costs, the ability is a lot better.

This is my first time starting a poll, bear with my formatting mistakes.

 

[zakael19]

Spending armor (special or otherwise) happens first. It generally bumps things down one tier, so if you were going to take L2 harm you take L1 after and could resist that in turn.

 

[Starfox]

Page 32 outlines resistance and notes how different GMs and campaigns can play this with various degrees of effect, depending on how much heroism you want. I generally drop a consequence two steps IMC as my game is relatively light in mood.

Page 54 Special Armor
Some special abilities refer to your special armor. Each character sheet has a
set of three boxes to track usage of armor (standard, heavy, and special). If you
have any abilities that uses your special armor, tick its box when you activate
one of them. If you don't have any special abilities that use special armor, then
you can't use that armor box at all.

This to me implies you activate to resist (and thus before you roll resistance), just as you say zakael19. Why didn't I think of looking this up?

 

[Joshua Randall]

I like the game but its rules are not as clear as they could be. Especially special armor.

Also the character sheet is way, way, too busy. 75% of my/players’ questions about the game relate to that sheet’s poor design.

 

[loverdrive]

Special armor itself is just a counter, it does nothing on its own. Abilities that let you use your special armor to resist allow you to, well, use your special armor instead of a resistance roll (and thus not get any stress).

I'm reasonably sure you can use any uhh sources of resistance simultaneously, but I don't see why the order matters.

 

[Fenris-77]

I don't see why you couldn't use both in some cases.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Yeah, using Special Armor allows you to resist a consequence without having to make a roll. So there’s no stress accumulation. Special Armor means you resist without a roll, the same as how Armor works for Harm.

You can use Special Armor and also resist with a roll on the same consequence if needed and desired. And also spend Armor if the consequence is Harm.

So let’s say your Cutter takes level 3 Harm as a consequence from a failed roll. He can use the Battleborn ability to mark Special Armor and automatically reduce the Harm to Level 2. Then he can use Armor to reduce it to Level 1, again without having to make a roll. Then he can make a standard Resistance Roll, taking Stress equal to 6-highest roll, and that would reduce the Harm to Level 0.

 

[Starfox]

Also the character sheet is way, way, too busy. 75% of my/players’ questions about the game relate to that sheet’s poor design.

Amen, brother! One of my players almost left due to the character sheets.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Amen, brother! One of my players almost left due to the character sheets.

If AW taught us anything it is that good character sheets matter A LOT.