But you couldn't flashback to set up a bulletproof vest with red dye in under their suit so when the bullet hits the vest and they stumble and fall back off the boat, they swim safely down and away instead of not having the vest on and dying?
Sure you could, but that's the other character, so it might be a separate flashback if you're doing both. It really depends on the events leading up to the scene, as the GM's first point of adjudication in Blades is always to respect the established fiction and it's consequences, so the nuance of the actual game we're spit-balling here would have a significant impact on the decision making process. If that other character had been searched, for example, you couldn't retcon in a vest that would have certainly been found, for example. Or if the gun had been given to you by someone else you couldn't just retcon in blanks, you'd also have to make some kind of slight of hand move to to swap the ammo. Am I making the difference clear there?
You aren't making the differences clear because there are no differences (which in general, not with you in particular, is a recurring theme today) that's how I figured the game works, it uses the unestablished elements of the fiction as a resource to establish things that happened in the past.
You just told me that it would be allowed, provided contradictory fiction wasn't already established.
That one example, within those listed constraints, yeah. But you floated a bunch of ideas upstream about what flashbacks were for that aren't really examples of how it works.
I did not, we're discussing (in the abstract) the "Rodney and Joey Fake Rodney shooting Joey" example, the only distinction between that and your clarification is if the flashback specifically had to be established before the gun was fired. There weren't really any other examples at work.
Not at all, as there I'm watching someone else's story and as long as it's entertaining they can tell it any old way they like.
In-character realism, largely.
