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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9311311" data-attributes="member: 82106">Anything you do in free time is going to fall into one of these categories, LTP if nothing else. At no time in any play of BitD that I have done has there been some sort of an open-ended activity where I could just do whatever I want, free as a bird, without paying. There's no intention for such to exist! I mean, yes, I agree, and I said so, there is going to be some grey area potentially, but if you are allowing your players to run their crew and do any arbitrary stuff without any costs associated, YOU ARE NOT FOLLOWING THE RULES OF BITD!!!!As for info gathering, you are GATHERING INFO, not executing a score. If the actions being taken do not constitute gathering information, then they are either A) somehow incidental, like when Takeo killed the Red Sashes in the park because they were assaulting someone. If a player is having their PC do something else, then it is one of the things that are listed in DT activities, not Free Play. You don't get to pretend you can skip the costs for DT activities simply by claiming you are doing Free Play instead. As the rules state clearly, these phases are not super hard and fast where the game is absolutely in DT or FP, if a player suddenly decides his character needs to acquire an asset and people are out gathering info, he's still got to treat that as a DT activity! This was VERY VERY CLEAR in all the play I did.But if you do any activity that is colorable as a DT activity, and that's a WIDE range of things, then you are playing downtime, not free play and you need to follow those rules. Again, GMs shouldn't and probably usually don't try to be 'game mode police' but what you were suggesting, endless free play without ever initiating a score in which the PCs do all the DT and Score type actions but avoid abiding by the rules, is not kosher AT ALL and the GM should be stepping on that, hard. You are clearly not playing BitD if you allow this kind of thing.Every one of the activities your players were engaging in were either one of the DT activities, or part of a score. At the point where they tried to start executing a score without doing the things that are required in order for a score to happen, the GM needs to be stopping the action and implementing the rules of the game! And here's the thing, if the participants in a game don't want to play it by the rules of BitD, that's great! I am not the rules police! However, don't then come and tell me how BitD sucks and is unworkable because you played some other game and it worked differently! If I say my 5e game where we decided combats by coin toss doesn't work, what is your response going to be?! That is my response here.Oh, sure they are! You think the Doskvol mail system is a free-for-all that is unmonitored? I'm going to inform you that you KNOW people have tried this kind of thing before, and it went badly for them. Now, the PCs can dig, and try to find out exactly what sorts of measures the mail takes. Do they employ Leeches? Some sort of magitech? Can these things be defeated? What sort of explosive do you have to concoct in order to get it to go through? How difficult are the ingredients to find? Who will start asking questions when this bomb goes off, and will they realize YOU were in possession of the materials required to do it? I assure you, I can come up with an entire score's worth of stuff to throw at the PCs! It won't be your typical action adventure style breaking into somewhere and stealing stuff or whatever, but heck, even that might be an element! No problem making this a score.No, nothing is 'confused', read the rules! Page 36 very specifically talks about gathering information and what it is, but also some things about what it isn't! So, sure, the PCs can play house and saunter about town etc. They can learn basically limitless common knowledge, and generally any amount of very basic stuff where there's 'no obstacle to learning it'. Even in the later case a fortune roll is required, so its possible there are negative consequences/costs accruing. Anything beyond that requires starting an LTP, which is a limited resource in that you need to use DT activities to advance that clock.In that case, no. As I said, it was a grey area, and as soon as he returned to the Orphanage (our base) some sort of entanglements with the Red Sashes immediately ensued. I don't recall all the details, and it involved activities by other PCs as well. However, if the players were attempting some sort of hokey "we're pretending we don't do scores" thing, then the GM MOST CERTAINLY could have, and maybe (ask [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER], he was the GM) would have turned it into a score. I'd note that we actually DID have a score later on where bad guys ASSAULTED OUR BASE and that WAS a score! Honestly, if I recall correctly, it was sort of a precipitating element. Like the attack both gave us info AND established the parameters of our reprisal. As page 8 says, the modes of play are not a straightjacket, but they do organize play.So, on the whole, I would treat the actions you listed as examples as either DT activities that have to be paid for, or things that initiate scores. If players are refusing to name a plan or do other things that are part of their obligation then some kind of discussion needs to happen at the table about whether you actually want to play BitD.</blockquote>

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