I know the “Fiction First” principle and I think (hope) I understand it.
Still, it’s just a principle: then there is a whole book around it, full of specific rules and suggestions. If that principle was enough to answer all questions, we’d not need Blades in the Dark at all, and I’d just play Primetime Adventures or any other simpler game
Some of your points seems like an oversimplification to me:
<< Think about LTPs like this: LTPs require a Clock, yes? Well what is the Crew XP Track if nothing more than a 10 Segment Clock filled in via fictional actions? The same applies to LTPs >>
That’s obviously correct, both are “clock-like mechanisms”, but what really makes a difference is how fast a they fill.
The Crew XP Track fills at most 4 steps per each Score (let’s say “about 3 per score on average”)
A LTP Clock, on the other hand, will fill up to 5 steps for each DTA, let’s say “about 3 per DTA on average”. We have 3 players, even if they don’t go overboard with paying coins for extra DTAs, they can easily use 1 DTA each, every time, for a LTP that matters to them. That means “about 9 steps per score” on average. If they really put their mind to it, they can do double that, perhaps even triple.
Therefore, it seems to me that LTP Clocks and Crew XP Tracks are on a different “scale”.
In addition, it doesn’t make Crew Advancement any less worthwhile.
To get all those extra Downtime Actions, you need Coin and/or Rep and that means you need to run Jobs and that means you’ll inevitably advance your Crew anyway.
Again, that’s an oversimplification since 1 DTA and 1 Score are on a different scale, even more so than 1 LTP Clock and 1 Crew XP track.
Each DTA cost only 1 Coin or 1 Rep, while a single Score will provide on average about 9 Coins/Reps (6 Coins is defined as the “average” score, and 3 rep is just 1 more than the “base” rep award for a score). So a single Score can “create” almost TEN extra DTAs.
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IMHO Blades in the Dark is not one of those purely story games where “everything costs the same” and “everything gives +1” and it’s misleading to treat it as such.
I fully agree that, in principle, there is nothing wrong with a LTP clock creating a Crew Upgrade. I guess the question becomes: shouldn’t it be a GROTESQUELY HUGE Clock then?
I don’t want to tell my players
“Sure, you can recruit a gang as a LTP, you’ll just need to fill this huge Clock with 72 segments”, that would sound like an oblique way or saying “No”.
But I feel that if I allow them to acquire a Cohort with just an “ordinary” LTP, this will make Crew Advancement immensely less meaningful.