Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
This isn't exactly true. The city in Blades is there so that you can't just murder and the hobo away from it -- you have to deal with it. S&V appears to offer more movement freedom, but you still can't run from problems as they can easily still find and track and engage with you because your problems can move as easily as you. The faction game works the same, really.Thanks @pemerton for humoring me with that FitD question that I directed at you. I think your example of seeing the culprits driving away is a great Lost Opportunity consequence.
But if @Manbearcat and @Ovinomancer and whoever else might be a Blades/Forged in the Dark veteran can humor me further, here are some situations that came up in the test session I ran last night of Scum and Villainy in a Star Wars setting. I fully believe that I was GMing a ton of stuff wrong, given the FitD system/approach, so I'm not looking for attaboys or reinforcement.
Some quick context:
-Scum and Villainy differs from Blades in that you have a ship instead of a crew, and so you aren't generally tied to a given area. It's not a bounded sandbox, like wth Duskvol. If anything it's the opposite, making it (in theory) a good fit for Star Wars, where you have lots of interstellar mobility. This changes a lot of things, including making something like that very compelling setup that Manbearcat laid out less possible, imo. You take jobs because someone is paying you, and those could be in lots of places.
@hawkeyefan touched on this, but the "it's a trap" bit should have been explicit at the table. You find out where the target is, but also that the target is aware you're looking for him and is ready for it! That's the better move in this game's context. One thing to remember in these games is that there is no secret GM backstory -- ie, bits of fiction the GM has written that are the truth of the game but aren't known to the players. If there's a complication, it's one that's either hitting right now, so everyone knows it, or that you're immediately foreshadowing in an open way. This is what drives the snowball. If you announce the upcoming badness, and the PCs ignore it, then you just hit them with it as hard as you want.-For this test session I may have broken the premise without realizing it--my main interest was to get practice with the core mechanics, and I wound up having my solo player, who chose a new Jedi for his character, and his more experienced Jedi partner NPC assigned to hunt down a supposed terrorist. Did kicking things off unrelated to PC contacts and faction relationships make everything that following invalid or at least clumsy? Maybe so.
I'm not (I hope) doing the dreaded listen-to-my-session thing, but here are the specific moments/decisions I'm curious about:
1) Based on a roll to learn the terrorist's whereabouts from local criminals--the player rolled a success with consequence on a risky Command action to intimidate them--I figured they were now being led into a trap. So they took a boat to another area of the city where the target was supposedly staying. This being a one-shot test session, in which I very much wanted a noir-ish moment where the newbie's more experienced partner gets killed, I figured the trap would start big, with an A-Wing attacking the boat from far above--a kind of sniper situation. I said that they could hear a high-pitched keening sound during the boat trip, but my player did nothing (he's also new to playing FitD, though not reading it). When he stepped off the boat I triggered the attack.
The foreshadowing in the boat wasn't in line with the game, either, because it wasn't clear it was a threat or something to be dealt with. What happened here is that it appears you defaulted to D&D-esque play and so did your player, who was waiting for you to reveal more about the scene because that's what you do in D&D. You need to frame these things immediately and hard -- I'd have started at or near the docks, probably by announcing the A-wing coming in low and hard for a fast fly-by, with the pilot visible looking at the PCs, then roaring off and circling for what looks like an attack run -- this frames an immediate threat that has to be reacted to, and is the core ideal of how you kick things off.
I'm going to step back a moment here and ask where this sits in the context of the score? The initial scene looking for the bad guy seems like freeplay/information gathering, and so should probably be running on a fortune mechanic -- although the outcomes there align either way, a 4-5 is some good some bad news. But, after that, there should have been a score announced and an engagement roll made, which would have set up exactly how you should be looking to frame the initial ambush. I'm unclear where we are in the game structure here.
I think that S&V calls scores "jobs"? Been a hot minute.
So, in light of my discussion above about how the threat should have been more obviously framed, this part is moot. However, it needs to be noted that actions like this are not reactionary, they are intentional. Meaning for Attune to be used this way, the player needs to be declaring an action to determine this. A tense standoff, with blasters drawn, is a good moment, where a player is using Attune to tell if the other side plans to shoot first. It's not really a passive perception stand-in. Nothing in S&V has a passive score corollary, except resistance rolls if viewed through a squint.At this point I suddenly didn't know what to do, because in theory the Attune action specifically notes that you can use the Way (aka the Force) to "sense unseen danger or killing intent." But the player didn't initiate that action upon hearing the suspicious noise. So we awkwardly decided he could use Attune now to sense the attack and try to get himself and his partner off the boat in time. He rolled a critical success (two sixes) so he decided to pull the boat's driver off as well.
Yeah, I don't disagree with this. You need to put the danger/obstacle front and center and clear, and not hide what a consequence is. These things have to be table facing at all times. The only things "secret" would be any prep for possible ideas of complications or an NPC that haven't been used yet, and these need to be held lightly (ie, not things that will be used but that might be used and maybe not as originally intended -- prep is more like brainstorming so play aides in S&V/Blades than pre-story like in D&D).Everything about how I handled this seemed wrong, and in the moment we were left with the sense that if the player just kind of waits out a situation instead of taking action, maybe that's on them, because, as discussed in this thread, passive actions--especially the sort of passive Perception rolls that are almost constant in many trad games--just don't make sense in FitD. But what do you guys think? Was this just a hopelessly trad and off-base encounter from the start? And how do you handle stuff like danger sense or similar unnatural/enhanced perception in FitD, if it seems like an ambush has become part of the story?
Yeah, you should have called for a check here -- how is the PC getting to the roof? Carefully or running full tilt or using Force jumps? Anything the PCs are doing under pressure or threat needs to be a check. Remember, it's not the plan you have that drives the game, but the result of the PC's actions that drive the game.2) The player and NPC decided to get to a rooftop to deal with the A-Wing assassin, and here, again, I may have defaulted to a trad situation. I said that as they were running into a building and about to get into the stairwell, a pair of guys entered from the street and immediately pulled blasters and opened fire--evidence that the trap was bigger/worse than expected. The resolution for this was simple and fast and great. But was having these two shooters pop up (to show the escalating danger and stakes) sort of a game-breaking trad intrusion, because it wasn't based on another, post-A-Wing-attack player roll and related consequence? This was, in other words, a GM-first piece of fiction, which would miss the point of FitD, right? Or am I just in my head with this one?
Again, introducing more threats needs to be because of actions. The nature of the game will generate all the drama you need, if you trust it and let it. Putting a finger on the scales, like adding further complications that aren't from checks, needs to be heavily scrutinized and only rarely done. I'm leaving that like this because there may be a good point somewhere for doing so, but I'd be extremely hesitant to do this.3) Finally, toward the end of the scene/session, the PC and NPC realized they were stuck, with the A-Wing loitering above the roof and a large group of people running up the stairs. How this situation was resolved was, again, very cool to me, and pushed me even harder toward wanting to do lots more FitD. But as with the earlier appearance of the two shooters, this horde of dudes did not appear based on a subsequent player roll or suggestion. Does that once again break the core FitD approach, and make the game about PCs reacting to GM-determined fiction, instead of the other way around? Or am I looking at this in a way that's too zoomed in, and really the whole situation is just flowing from the player's chosen approach for how to find their target, and the consequences that followed?