I’m hoping to kick-start my ongoing Blades in the Dark home campaign soon, and one of the things I’m hoping to address is the fact that my players have been carefully hoarding coin for so long that when their most recent job paid out they didn’t know where to put all of it! They ended up investing in a new cryptocurrency called ectocoin, the implications of which are not entirely clear.
I’d like to kick things off with an opportunity to reward this crew for their ability to argue for better pay and lay low enough to keep their secret hideout truly secret. Fellow BitD GMs: How have you seen your crews burn through their cash? Players: What’s the most fun you’ve had with more money than sense?
Early on in my campaign, the Porcelain Dolls decided that they needed a better class of citizen to rob, so they set about gentrifying the neighborhood they lived in. They strong-armed the owners of a number of vacant lots and abandoned buildings in The Drop into selling on the cheap, then encouraged the buyers to start up construction projects to build new shops and nicer apartment buildings. Fairly soon folks from Six Towers and Charterhall were hearing about “Drop Heights”, an up-and-coming trendy new subsection of Crow’s Foot, and they started moving there in droves.
The joke was on the Dolls when they discovered that the prices at the Leaky Bucket more than tripled almost overnight.
Our GM introduced a number of “mystery” long-term projects; sealed envelopes with clocks on them. We had no idea what was inside until we completed them. They turned out to be assets, extra story/score opportunities, some were duds (almost not worth the effort, but still connected to the fiction), etc. It might give your players a way to burn through some extra coin (spending coin to increase the number of clock segments).
Isn’t tripping over coins more of a “them” problem and less of a “you” problem?
If you really want to solve it, start hitting them harder, or perhaps better. One thing I did to adress some of the minmaxing I found was to reduce consequences instead of removing them, and to give more than one consequence at a time, but generally reduced in seriousness.
Risky consequence when opening a window? The glass broke and you cut yourself on broken glass, level 1 harm. The breaking glass caused noise so tick the “Suspicious guards” clock. And ofc the blood can be used to track them magically later right? +1 heat.
How many of these do you want to resist?
In general I’ve had to get used to hitting my players harder whenever there is a consequence because they have a lot of tools to get large dice pools. I have to take advantage of the times they don’t roll sixes. I’m too nice!
Riffing on @Tubal’s theme: maybe the ward boss starts charging way more for running scores on his turf. Or maybe a second gang thinks that they’re the true ward boss, so now they have to pay two gangs to run scores, or suffer the consequences?!? That’ll soon put a hole in the ol’ bank account.
I’ve done similar to this; different crews have codes for high-level, sensitive correspondence - usually they give information such as locations of scores with added tidbits about sentries, traps, social/political ties of the target, etc, which then also furthers the fiction. I try to tie the information in to their rivals, people who are problematic for their friends, and topics they’re clearly interested in - not necessarily just crew business.
I did have a problem when one bright cookie collected a stack of Red Sash documents and then used them to learn the code, which meant he unlocked three or four of them at once and they were inundated with info. They haven’t yet figured out that since they can read they can probably write it too, if they took some time…
“A boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money”
Our crew of smugglers have spent something like ~30 coin on their two battered vessels, bankrupting the crew twice over to keep them afloat. Of course, they’re now tricked out to the gills, with an engine that runs on spirits of the dead, a rudder that can ply the ghost field and torpedo tubes, but just talking repairs alone it’s been a huge investment. They’ve really taken “like part of the family” to heart with those rusting tugs.
