Let's start with some background. The basic session-scale game loop of Blades in the Dark goes as follows: you start with Free Play, which is loosely structured, allowing your player characters to explore the city of Doskvol, talk to non-player characters, gather information, and, ideally, focus the goals of the party into a heist.
Once a heist seems to be forming, you get into a very structured process for preparing for the Score. You choose a target and a plan, and you choose a level of Load for each of the characters. Then you sum up the various factors that are relevant to a heist, including your crew's power differential with the target, whether they're using any special connections or information about it, how daring their approach is, etc. You roll the Engagement Roll, and use the result of that to determine the starting situation of the Score.
During the Score itself there is a rapid back-and-forth between the player characters and the game world, with intense confrontations that can sometimes be resolved directly through acting, sometimes through retroactively deciding that a character had a piece of equipment relevant to the situation (the number of times this can happen depends on the Load of each character), and sometimes through Flashbacks, which are a more extensive retroactive change of circumstances.
When the Score is settled, one way or another, there is Downtime. Here the consequences of the Score, both direct and indirect, are accounted for: how much Coin the crew and characters get; how their Reputation improves, vital for gaining access to better resources and having an easier time targeting more lucrative targets; how much Heat they've generated from the authorities; resulting Entanglements that might lead to additional trouble, the imprisonment of a character, or some good old-fashioned bribery to stay out of trouble; and Downtime Activities, long-term actions that include crafting new equipment, acquiring temporary tools, training to gain XP, indulging in a character's Vice to reduce Stress (or potentially get into more trouble as well), reducing Heat on the crew, and long-term projects.
Once Downtime is concluded, you are expected to go back to Free Play and start anew. The gamemaster is also expected to provide for actions by the other factions, although this isn't codified as clearly.
Since my last post on the subject, I ran three additional sessions in the same open table campaign. In what was initially a temporary adjustment to the fact that we had played a truncated score the previous time, we've come to start each subsequent session with Downtime Activities. Unlike the very cooperative Score framework, or the potentially sociable Free Play, or even the earlier, more mechanized and collectivized steps of Downtime, Downtime Activities are very individual. Each character chooses how they will spend the span of days or weeks of relative safety. However, they do also allow for a multi-character buildup. Aside from being able to assist another as normal, long-term projects involve the player deciding on what they want to do, the gamemaster determining how big of a clock is necessary for its conclusion, or maybe breaking it down to connected clocks, and then the player performing some downtime action to advance this clock. Other players can then perform their own relevant actions to also contribute to the same clock.
If at least one of the players can be coaxed into focusing on an idea for a heist, this iterative, serial process can allow for the slow building of a setup for some very good heists. In practice, I've found that in two out of these three sessions, there were enough people with some focus to use Downtime Activities to essentially skip over Free Play entirely. Unfortunately, if none of the players has this initiative, or they are all too new to the game, it might end up simply being a time-waster, after which Free Play must start as normal.
One interesting aspect of this structure is how it mirrors the session zero of a campaign. While there is a shared premise to start with, for the most part the players are siloed out as they build their characters. Then, in BitD itself, there is the common creation of the crew, but even in games that do not contain this aspect, there is some kind of inciting action that puts the group together, possibly a first scene or adventures.
One final caveat: I have not managed to mix this structure well with actual character creation for new players. If you are setting up an open table like me, be sure to prepare pregenerated characters for newbies, or possibly help them build their own before the session starts.
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