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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8987925" data-attributes="member: 70468">The Information Gathering phase in Blades in the Dark seems to do what you’re saying here. If one does it well, you’re using it to establish facts about the score that you can exploit to your advantage.In our last one in [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]’s game, we were hired to assassinate the former head of the watch. During the course of our information gathering, we established the target was hiding at his mansion in one of two safe rooms. We had schematics for one way into the place, and we also learned he had a carriage he used to travel. We considered sending a bomb up the dumbwaiter revealed by the plans, but we decided instead to pull strings with Cabbies (a +3 ally) to have the carriage called in for service. Since there’s a threat on the former head’s life, we were able to leverage our relationship with the Blue Coats (another +3 ally) to set up checkpoints where I could rig it up with a small (tier 7) bomb after it had been inspected but before the driver was done dealing with the guards.This put us in a very strong position for the attempt on our target because: it created a distraction for the frontal assault team, it took out a chunk of the target’s high-tier defenses (a tier 5 squad), and it gave the other team easy access to the back of the compound (since it was literally blown wide open). The actual assault wasn’t easy (though I somehow came out of it with very little stress and harm), but I think it would have considerably more dangerous if we hadn’t pushed our strengths and advantages like we did. We had a lot of allies, and those relationships proved very valuable.I know you’ve said before that you don’t consider Blades as much of a game because you can’t say you’ve gotten better at it (e.g., <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/of-mooks-plot-armor-and-ttrpgs.696233/post-8963117" target="_blank">here</a>), but I’ve played with another group who didn’t push the system like we did in the game we just finished. This group that just finished only had one failed score out of 70 or so, and [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] definitely didn’t go easy on us. If we had played like that other group, we definitely would have done worse, especially when we punched up at some pretty nasty targets (like when we killed Lord Scurlock or took out a higher tier cult we discovered out in the Deathlands).To bring things back around to D&D, I think a more robust information gathering procedure could fill in the knowledge gaps. That would allow a skilled group to find out about the opposition and plan an effective strategy against it. Traditionally, D&D does already provide for gathering information, but it seems like that information is typically oriented towards providing the PCs with clues and hooks to advance the adventure rather than for providing details you can leverage into an advantage. I think you’d need to make sure the kind of information that can really be exploited is obtainable (even if it requires some work) and not hidden away behind difficult or impossible DCs.</blockquote>

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