John LeBoeuf-Little#introduction I'm a gamer, a game designer, a programmer, a nerd. I co-wrote Scum & Villainy, and Band of Blades. I'm a Twitter refugee (but aren't we all.) Hit me up if I should be following you; I only dimly remember how Mastodon works.
Storn@worldnamer I was in a Band of Blades game. I really appreciate the amount of work that went into the world. It wasn't, however, a raging success. It felt very railroady to me the way we played it. Like, I came up with ideas on how to slow the horde down, how to navigate the woods, how to send out scouting parties and all of that was met with... nothing....the only way we moved forward was to roll dice and deal with the consequences. Love the idea though. I am so glad I played it.
@StornC I'm really glad you enjoyed your time with the game, even for the parts of the system that weren't working for you.
As for being met with nothing, I'm not sure how you mean that. Do you mean you did long-term projects and they weren't able to reduce the clocks of the people chasing you, even for a time? One of the hardest things to convey in the text was about letting the fiction take priority over the dice.
@worldnamer yes... kinda..... I think that was a big issue. Like because the Horde was revealed to having a flying corp, I took the forest route, to prevent/limit aerial recon and to slow an undead army that had no idea what the forest was (also revealed in the fiction). And that came out to naught. It didn't do anything mechanically and we were going to run into the Horde outlier forces no matter what we planned or did.
@StornC I do see that the choice of route you take might feel less relevant - however, there are some longer and some shorter. Your idea of having forest cover in case, for example, during a mission, you can say "hey, we have this forest canopy, maybe we can use that to hide from the undead" sounds totally reasonable. Do you mean that it didn't matter with regards to the clocks for running out of time to get to Skydagger?
@worldnamer And then the final battle was anti-climactic as we just exploded with good luck. I don't think we lost a single named character. That I cannot blame on the system or gm, sometimes a run of luck happens. But I felt that it was a bit cheap in the end. Pics done by me of my Commander and Lt. characters.
@StornC Love the art!
How many sessions was your game? Ours was usually in the mid-teens range. I think we budgeted at least one per map node visited, and then one or two more after that for when you wanted to run special missions in the same spot.
@worldnamer We went 15? I think.
@StornC Oh my! That sounds not such a short campaign though?
You know, one thing we'd never really considered was someone wanting to spend more time at, say, Skydagger. I think in some sense, the idea of spending extra time there (at the cost of clock ticks!) to work on projects or whatever would totally be a workable option. Of course, it sounds like you managed to do well despite the odds - a daring approach, but maybe not the most reliable. :3