NPCs, gangs, and monsters in Blades in the Dark

[CarpeGuitarrem]

My general approach rests on two points when I run Blades.

First one is that gamemastering for Blades is more of an art than a science; there's a lot of levers you can fiddle with to communicate not just how difficult a task is, but other dimensions of how the task functions. Consequences, position, effect, and clocks are all useful tools, a mechanical vocabulary that the GM uses to talk about what the crew is up against. This also means there's no one right way to do things--underscoring this, Blades often asks you to consider alternate approaches you might take to represent a given situation. What winds up happening is a sort of fuzzy consistency that gets arrived at over time, you'll generally have particular ways that you handle a given situation, but it's not cut-and-dry rigidly defined. The section that starts on p 161 goes into this philosophy more.

Second one is that "encounter design" isn't really a focus here, it's more about creating a snowball of cascading narrative. You just handle combat like noncombat stuff: challenges, consequences, and twists. It's centered on the actions the PCs are trying to take in the world, and you use the threat levels of enemies to inform what interactions are possible and plausible. For example, if a PC is pinned down by a gang, you use the tools at your disposal to figure out how to communicate to that. In the fiction, in the game, they're cornered by a bunch of enemies--that means if you try and Skirmish your way out, most GMs will set those rolls as Desperate/Limited or something like that. You make the call that makes sense in the moment--and quality, scale, and potency are ways to crystallize those judgment calls.

There's a good bit on p 27 about the ethos behind this: "The reason we assess effect is to set expectations and make the fictional situation more clear, so everyone is on the same page." Once you say "oh, this is limited effect", people get what the stakes/consequences are now.

A couple specific rules questions that came up here.

RE: setting zero or extreme effect, on page 25

When considering factors, effect level might be reduced below limited, resulting in zero effect--or increased beyond great, resulting in an extreme effect.

So yeah you can set no effect or extreme effect initially. I've done that in some situations.

I can't find the reference for the Tier question at the moment, but yeah, Tier is a rough guideline for how well-protected a faction's stuff is. Not every lock for the Bluecoats will be a Tier 3 lock, but many will.

EDIT: oh, quick note about how supernatural entities have a Magnitude, that's basically a substitute for Tier for the purposes of making Fortune Rolls, which are sorta a go-to if you don't have a clear answer to a question you have about a situation, like "how badly does this demon wreck the city?"