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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8254989" data-attributes="member: 16814">So, what would happen in Blades would be the character makes this action declaration.  We have stakes -- they want to not be discovered -- and this is in question, so this is an action declaration and can be challenged by the GM.  If the GM doesn't challenge this (and that would be poor play), they say yes, and the player gets what they want.  If they do challenge it, then the mechanics are invoked.  Without a lot of explanation, there's an agreement as to how effective this attempt will be (Effect) and how dangerous it is (Position).  This codifies both the scope of success and the scope of failure.  The player, if they agree, then rolls their action (if they don't, they can then do something else -- the negotiation is to establish shared understanding of the fiction).  The outcome is either failure, in which case the GM establishes a consequence within the scope of the Position and the action declared and play goes from there (maybe now a chase through the streets), or success.  Success has two modes: with consequence and full success, depending on the roll.  With consequence means that the player achieves what they wanted -- they now know when a gap in the rotation occurs they can use to sneak across -- but it comes with a cost the GM imposes, again with respect to the action and the Position.  Maybe the player overhears a conversation that the guards have posted dogs inside the courtyard on the other side of the square, so now the player has to overcome this challenge, or they got the info, but realize as soon as they're moving across the square that they left some gear behind, and not have to chose to go on without it or double back at more risk.  On a straight success, they get what they want, no strings attached.Blades is very focused on generating a specific kind of experience, and so focuses on playing rogues in a haunted city.  The players have a lot of things they can do to affect rolls and alter outcomes, and access to a flashback mechanic to introduce new things on the fly that they did prior to the score. As such, Blades absolutely focuses play on Act Now, Plan Later.  The idea that you'd need to spend lots of gametime investigating targets and planning your approach is anathema to the concept of Blades.  Blades instead assumes that you're very competent at being criminals, and your characters have done this work, but you don't need to play through that, you just get to the end product.  It's system, which allows players to set success conditions, lends itself to this, and the variety of tools the players have do as well.  It's a very different mode of gaming from more traditional games, where the GM is the owner and arbitrator of all things setting.  It takes some mental adjustment, but it works very, very well.  Most of the thinking people that haven't played these games have are from the wrong mindset -- I know, I was one of them.  Trying to figure out how this works, how the GM can do a setting that's that malleable, is hard to grasp, until you, almost quite literally, realize that there is no spoon.</blockquote>

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