Blood Sworn

[The Undying]

It's Valentine's Day! Love is in the air, and as we all know, love is the most potent magic there is. Given the holiday, seemed like a great time to ask about the Blood Sworn Oath.

Players: Ever tried to angle for a Blood Sworn Oath for your character? Did the GM bite? If so, how'd things turn out?

GMs: Ever use Blood Sworn Oath as a feature in a scenario or campaign? If so, how'd things turn out? Separately, ever allow a player character to enter a Blood Sworn Oath? If so, how'd things turn out, and did you do anything interesting with it for a scenario or campaign?

[Aside: Yeah, Blood Sworn Oath doesn't REQUIRE a romantic relationship, but it fits exceptionally well there]

[Lys]

It seems to me that the requirement that the two parties to the Oath must demonstrate three years of loyalty to each other makes it very difficulty for players to become Blood Sworn. At least in my experience, games tend to be pretty condensed time-wise. Like, of all the role-playing games i've played, the one that's ran the longest in-character was still less than a year. (Out-character the longest was two years.) So i wouldn't be surprised to find that there are very few stories of player characters becoming Blood Sworn.

[The Undying]

We'll have to see what others have to say. Some things to keep in mind, though:

1) Player characters SHOULD have backgrounds, and those backgrounds SHOULD include NPC relationships. They don't have to, but it adds a huge amount of depth and gives the GM options if s/he wants to do something interesting for that character. It's entirely possible that one of those relationships is a long-term companion, which means that three year time can become a moot point.

2) Game timeline is going to vary a lot table to table. If players start from Circle 1, good chance they are doing A LOT of over-land travel from one place to another just to save on cost, and that eats up A LOT of time. In my current game, players just rolled past Circle 5 (and that's with very little off-advancement LP spending), and it's been just over one year in-game; I'd say a huge chunk of that time was spent walking.

3) Of the various systems I've played, Earthdawn does the most to encourage downtime activities, all of which can take significant time. Many systems, like D&D, have timelines on the order of nearly years for non-Level advancement. In Earthdawn, skills take weeks at the lower Ranks, and advancing multiple skills can take up 1-2 month bursts. Some tables aren't skill heavy, for any number of reasons, but I think tables that do start pulling in skills likely have much longer in-game timelines than those that don't.

[Lys]

While player's should have backgrounds, it's very difficult to be loyal and devoted to someone you're not adventuring with. Like, you could become Blood Sword to your childhood friend, but it's not very in keeping with the Oath if you're hanging out with your adventuring buddies and only see him when you go back home to visit. Now if one of the other player characters is your childhood friend, or your boyfriend, or whatever, then that could work.

It's true that game timeline is going to vary a lot by table, that's why i specified that i was speaking of my experience. Similar to you my group is 5th Circle and has been so for several sessions, but we have only gone through about three months of in-character time. It helps that we haven't left Cara Fahd since the game started, so what little travelling we've done has been short distances. There was also that Kaer dive we did at 2nd Circle, which lasted five or six days in character, but took about two sessions to get through each day. We got enough LP from that to shoot straight to 5th Circle on our return to civilization.

This might be particular to my play experience, but i've never had a GM who would strictly enforce training times in any game i have played. Usually they do start out enforcing at least some of them, but as time goes on they tend to become less strict. For example when we started out playing Earthdawn the GM kept to all the training and meditation requirements to raise the various traits, except for the skill wait times which he discarded. Fast forward to last session and several players just bought several talent ranks without any meditation period, while the Elementalist's player spent 2100 LP to raise his Willpower by 2 in one go. Across multiple groups and games, it seems that people eventually get bored of training times and just hand wave them away.

[The Undying]

This might be particular to my play experience, but i've never had a GM who would strictly enforce training times in any game i have played. Usually they do start out enforcing at least some of them, but as time goes on they tend to become less strict. For example when we started out playing Earthdawn the GM kept to all the training and meditation requirements to raise the various traits, except for the skill wait times which he discarded. Fast forward to last session and several players just bought several talent ranks without any meditation period, while the Elementalist's player spent 2100 LP to raise his Willpower by 2 in one go. Across multiple groups and games, it seems that people eventually get bored of training times and just hand wave them away.

Definitely a per-table thing. If something doesn't work for a particular group - ESPECIALLY if it is actively prohibiting fun - it should be discarded, AS LONG AS it does not adversely effect other elements of the system.

For me, I see no problem with the timeline required for training - it helps it create a distinction from Talents, it provides a money sink (both to trainer and living expenses), and it can provide an opportunity to some PC-NPC interactions (PCs are gonna be stuck in town for a while, might as well get to KNOW some of the locals). On that latter part, though, if there's no interest in exploring the locale in downtime, I also see no reason to just eliminate the time & cost: pay your X silver, timeline advances Y weeks/months, we've spent one minute at the table doing book keeping on money and calendar, on to the next scenario. The between-training cool down, though, isn't really worth tracking until someone is getting to like Rank 4 - as long as they go on an adventure after training, cool down is finished (but, again, my table WALKS ... A LONG DISTANCE ... to their next "mission"). Talent improvement, likewise, I really don't care if they improve a Talent 8 times at once, as long as they do it as part of downtime (i.e., camping/resting).

A good chunk of it, though, is where players derive some of their character worth. Increasing a Talent, given that it's instantaneous and just happens, isn't particularly REWARDING to me. However, knowing that I've put in months and months of training to increase my Skill in X, every successful use of that feels impressive, and feeling like I'm JUST ONE RANK shy is all the more salivating because I know I have to wait for it, and it's going to cost. But, that's just me.