Let's talk about "plot", "story", and "play to find out."

[hawkeyefan]

One of many things I love about Deep Cuts is basically getting rid of Controlled as reason to roll dice. Just pay a cost at that point and move on!

Not aimed at you, but forcing the GM to clearly articulate the risk involved in teh roll is probably one of the other great things about the Threat Roll for a lot of people. If you can't articulate a risk that makes sense in the fiction, no roll! Sidesteps a lot of issues people run into I think.

Edit: also a fun thing about Clocks is they feel like "no big deal" until suddenly they're about to complete and then everybody is jumping through hoops and praying for good rolls and yelling at their dice...

I’m not a huge fan of the Threat Roll stuff from Deep Cuts, but I like that it works for some folks.

I try to always establish the risk before the roll is made. This is something I’ve adopted for pretty much any game I GM.

 

[Pedantic]

I can't parse this.

Games like blades in teh dark are very concretely goal oriented: you need to have a declared goal/objective before you can really access the varied mechanics for kicking a score off. Everything you do during play as teh scenes are framed and actions adjudicated should be driving towards that as a team of scoundrels; using the array of mechanics and fiction at hand.

The GM must state the risks and obstacles to the player's success in an open and principled manner, and adjudicate the Position and Effect of the specific methods the players suggest to get around them, and then follow through.That's why teh game gives so many tools to play around with P&E!

Set aside single action resolution. Players have a goal related to the current score; how best do they achieve it? What's the minimum number of resources they could spend to get there? Taken from that perspective, the ideal state is to offload as many consequences to score specific clocks, and then tick them just short of completion before the score is done, thus avoiding any lasting consequence to be dealt with later, or other resource expenditure.

That's what @Crimson Longinus is driving at; there is a strategic case that is at odds with the best intended experience of the game. Is there some way to avoid that, mechanically?

 

[Fenris-77]

The torch timer from Shadowdark is essentially (and somewhat obviously) just a clock mechanic. I could use Blades clocks in exactly the same to something like the same effect.

 

[Fenris-77]

Set aside single action resolution. Players have a goal related to the current score; how best do they achieve it? What's the minimum number of resources they could spend to get there? Taken from that perspective, the ideal state is to offload as many consequences to score specific clocks, and then tick them just short of completion before the score is done, thus avoiding any lasting consequence to be dealt with later, or other resource expenditure.

That might be ideal, but it simply isn't practical in terms of actual play. I can see why from a distance and mostly not informed by actual play at the table that might look like a thing one could do, but it really isn't. There might be player facing clocks that frame aspects of a job, and player actions might certainly be directed to tick those, but there are lot so other possibilities that accrue during play. For example, a muffed roll might introduce a clock for the guard's awareness which is far more immediately important than the overall heist clock(s).

That's what @Crimson Longinus is driving at; there is a strategic case that is at odds with the best intended experience of the game. Is there some way to avoid that, mechanically?

Yes, but it's an art not a science. The GM's management and framing of risk, immediate, midterm, and long term is something that develops in play and isn't entirely plannable. The GM balancing of all those spinning plates is what matters to ideas of best intended experience, IMO anyway.

 

[TwoSix]

Set aside single action resolution. Players have a goal related to the current score; how best do they achieve it? What's the minimum number of resources they could spend to get there? Taken from that perspective, the ideal state is to offload as many consequences to score specific clocks, and then tick them just short of completion before the score is done, thus avoiding any lasting consequence to be dealt with later, or other resource expenditure.

That's what @Crimson Longinus is driving at; there is a strategic case that is at odds with the best intended experience of the game. Is there some way to avoid that, mechanically?

I'm not quite sure why the mechanical play of "Set up as many clocks as possible, and finish the job just before any/all of them tick over" wouldn't produce the play you want?

Avoiding consequences with a last minute maneuver or knick-of-time save seems to me to be firmly in the "desired fiction" camp. The team gets out of the building 3 seconds before the self-destruct happens, and evades the guards by hiding in a hidden door as the guards race right by. That's avoiding clocks just before they tick over.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think that kind of play is also ignoring that, asa player, it’s not quite easy to predict when and how a clock will fill up. I think this is what @Fenris-77 is getting at.

Depending on Position and the outcome of a roll, the GM can tick anywhere from 1 to 3 ticks generally. So you can manage this a bit… but careful planning to get all clocks to nearly-but-not-all-the-way-full isn’t (or shouldn’t) really be possible.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

You're rather misusing "nothing happens." What happened is you got the objective of your Action Roll, but there was a consequence: the guards heard something and are more alert. We're representing that notional fiction with a concrete piece of tech: a tick or two on a clock, that when filled says something like "Reinforcements!" or "Alerted!" or whatever. It's a discrete way to show something that's otherwise very abstracted. Just how close are you to the Firewall locking you out of your hacking attempt? 3 ticks out of 6, and hey - if you fail this roll I'm going to tick it to full, what do you do?

The opposite of this would be "you rolled to climb the wall to get inside but failed, you fall back down." Now nothing has happened. No impact on the fiction, no forward progress towards new obstacles, no consequence.

But unless that clock gets filled, nothing of consequence actually happens in the fiction because of it. Having two segments on six segment clock, which will only matter for that score is literally "nothing happens." These sort of clocks are just bad most of the time and lead to boring gameplay. Consequences that affect the fiction right now, that force the players to react and the course of the fiction to take a different course are good ones.

I guess you can get this from some detailed PBTA moves? "On a 10+ you get thing, on a 7-9, you get thing but something else happens, pick 1 from below, on a 6-, bad stuff - you and the GM pick one from the list."

I think PBTA is better in this regard. The consequences are both more concrete and immediate.

 

[TwoSix]

But unless that clock gets filled, nothing of consequence actually happens in the fiction because of it. Having two segments on six segment clock, which will only matter for that score is literally "nothing happens." These sort of clocks are just bad most of the time and lead to boring gameplay. Consequences that affect the fiction right now, that force the players to react and the course of the fiction to take a different course are good ones.

I don't think there's anything wrong with a mechanism that puts mechanical pressure on the players to ablate the pressure soon or suffer the consequences. It's not very different from hit points in that regard; you aren't suffering any specific consequence when you're at 30 HP out of 50, except for the fact you're closer to any one later check causing a serious consequence.

And, like you said earlier, constantly creating new consequences can be challenging. Outsourcing a consequence to a clock tick can you give that extra few minutes to come up with something stronger.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Not really. The ticking of a clock should correspond to something in the fiction. It can just be descriptive, but it aligns with some progression of the situation.

I mean… if the GM in a D&D game said something like “the guards perk up at the sound of your entrance, more alert now than they were before” would you describe that as nothing happens?

Also, there’s no reason a Clock needs to only be temporary. Quite the opposite, I think… having Clocks be in play continuously, requiring attention from the players, is one of the ways to keep the pressure on them. Clocks should progress during Downtime… and may require the use of Downtime Actions to address them… which then taxes that resource.

I think this is the kind of thing that is harder to perceive when first running this game. All the different systems feed into each other and should add up to a high pressure situation for the Crew, where the choice of how to spend DTAs and whether they spend coin for more all become meaningful decisions.

Of course the clock represents something in the fiction, but nothing of consequence happens in the fiction until it is filled. So then the gameplay becomes clock management. How many times we can afford to resist, what special armours we have, etc. Now there is gameplay there, but it is mechanical strategy, it is not volatile high stakes rollercoaster. And of course in many situations you can just bail out before the clock ever gets filled.

I won’t say that I’ve never had nothing happen on a roll in BitD. I’ve done it. Usually because it becomes clear that the risk was very small… let’s say a 4-5 on a Controlled/Standard roll in a scene where the situation has been otherwise resolved. It might even have been better to not even call for a roll, but there seemed to be some level of risk, even if minor.

But that should be an exception rather than the rule. Given the way the game works on a mechanical level, with the GM not rolling, player rolls are carrying a lot of weight. There should be a feeling when the dice are picked up that things won’t be the same after this roll, either for good or ill.

So a GM for BitD has that as one of their primary roles… the need to come up with interesting complications. Yeah… this can be tough. And it takes some time to get comfortable with it and then improve at it. I've gotten very comfortable with letting the fictional situation dictate what kind of consequences I bring into play. it took me some time to do that… luckily, until I got better at it, the game has some solid ones to default to. Harm and Heat are great for that. I tended to rely too much on Harm early on… but that by no means made the game terrible or anything. It was just a little less dynamic than it might have been otherwise.

Ticking a Clock is another default way to levy a consequence. Ticking a Clock shouldn’t feel like nothing happening, and if it does, I’d work to figure out why and see what I could do about it. If I found there was no way to correct this… some idiosyncratic trait shared by all the players that simply prevented them from seeing a Clock as a progressing situation… then I’d try to rely on Clocks less often.

I think heat is not great consequence either. It is not nothing, but it does not drive the action in the moment either. It is just minor annoyance for later, perhaps someone needs to spend a coin to use reduce heat. And I think clocks should not be any sort of default consequence, and offering them as such is a trap for new GMs.

 

[Fenris-77]

But unless that clock gets filled, nothing of consequence actually happens in the fiction because of it. Having two segments on six segment clock, which will only matter for that score is literally "nothing happens." These sort of clocks are just bad most of the time and lead to boring gameplay. Consequences that affect the fiction right now, that force the players to react and the course of the fiction to take a different course are good ones.

But filling clocks is never the goal of play, it's just a way to track what's happening. Actions and consequences are always far more immediate than you seem to suggest they are.

I think PBTA is better in this regard. The consequences are both more concrete and immediate.

Hmm. IDK, in some ways I like the PbtA mechanics, mostly in terms of clean outcomes, but in terms of framing and of the GM and player interpretations meeting and melding in a cool and narrative kind of way, I think Blades does it a little better because there's more nuance in the relationship between the mechanics and the conversation - more inflection points, if you will.