This last Friday marked the 16th session of our
f2f Blades in the Dark campaign. I
checked in and everyone seemed on board to continue. I’ll check in again in
another six sessions. We have a big table for this: six players, and over all
the sessions we’ve only had a single player missing twice. Blades doesn’t feel
designed for a table of six, but it works and we’ve seen characters (and the
gang) evolve over arcs. In April, I begin an online Blades campaign using the
Iruvia setting (and Johnstone Metzger’s new playbooks). I set that up for a
dozen sessions through The Gauntlet Hangouts.
I dig Blades in the
Dark but even sixteen sessions in I learn new things about the play. At its
core Blades has a simple and flexible
resolution mechanic. The rules offer extensive advice and examples. Notably the
rules embrace that different GMs run differently, even with the same core
system. BitD talks about rulings and how they affect play. A GM tunes and shades
their Doskvol through choices and interpretations. I’ll repeat this phrase
throughout: that can take some getting used to.
Blades has deep
structures built on those simple rules. Designer John Harper has keenly crafted
and developed those. Each playbook suggests new things about the setting.
Mechanics like downtime and post-score resolution enrich choices. I’ve found Blades easy to learn, but challenging to
master. This post covers some lessons I’ve learned and things I’ve noted. YRMV
but I want to point GMs (and players) to some considerations.
If you’re interested in Blades, I recommend checking out
Kyle Thompson’s extensive and unconfusing video series walking through the
rules. If you already dig Blades, consider checking out Hack the Planet, a Kickstarter by Fraser Simons which takes BitD into solarpunk territory.
MY STUFF
Each character has “possible” equipment in their playbook.
On a job each player selects their loadout LEVEL, trading number of items for
raising suspicion. On the actual job they can use that many items, selected on
the fly. Blades bakes that in by making each playbook’s choices unique. What
they can have speaks volumes about their archetype and the setting.
However in play we often forget equipment. When I GM I don’t
have those lists in front of me. The players forget because I move things fast
and they focus on stress and special abilities. I need to get better about
that. On the other hand, the book doesn’t spend much time on how exactly you
can use items. In the past I defaulted to an extra die if applicable. But a
recent discussion pointed out to me that it could also encompass fictional
justifications for actions, changes in scale of success, negation of some
stress cost, or pre-requisites for massively challenging tasks.
SUCCESS
I’ve thought recently about where and how systems define
results/ success/ consequences. For example, in standard PbtA games your roll
lets you or the GM define those. Costs include GM Moves or the player picking
from stuff. PbtA also has a “tell them the consequences and ask” principle, but
that’s a situational thing. Mutant: Year
Zero follows PbtA’s pattern. Players say their intent and roll. If they
roll one success they do it; they can spend extra successes to do more or
better. If they fail, then something bad always happens. In combat missing
serves as a cost; outside of combat the GM picks.
Systems with modifiers figure out challenges and apply them
to the roll. Sometimes straight failure means nothing happens, sometimes it
triggers an obvious consequence. Cypher
has a twist on this—additional costs can come from particularly bad rolls. The
GM can also perform an “Intrusion” at any time to complicate things. While the
rules discuss what bad stuff and intrusions look like in relation to different tasks
and roles, the system doesn’t require that failure generate anything other than
failure.
On the other hand 7th
Sea takes a different approach. When a player needs to do something, they
make a Risk. When they take an action, they 1) say what they want to
accomplish, 2) define their skills & trait, and 3) get bonus dice and roll.
The GM says how many raises they need to do what they want. But the GM must also establish what Consequences
are on the table: getting hurt, losing something, an NPC’s safety, taking too
long, looking bad, expendable resources, a bad future position. Essentially the
GM has to state their move. EVERY RISK
has a Consequence (sometimes more). If it doesn’t have a consequence, then the
player shouldn’t roll. This frontloads thinking about fallout and
circumstances.
Blades in the Dark,
as I read it, mixes these approaches. A standard control has two axes: position
and effect. Position defines the severity of consequences or problems. The situation
may make that obvious or it may remain abstract. Sometimes I describe the
moment in more detail to put everyone on same page. The player rolls and from
the result level we determine any consequences (mixed or failure).
But we also have situations players walk or fall
into—intrusions of a kind. They’re attacked by a master duelist, the demon pops
up, the building collapses—and there’s a consequence on the table. It’s not
necessarily the fallout from an action, it’s events in the fiction. Now players
act to avoid the consequence and rolls to see how much stress they take in the
evasion. Here we have sometime close to 7th Sea with frontloading
and choice. In play we flip back and forth between those two, with one
potentially rolling into the other. Eventually it flows, but at the start it
requires a new approach to seeing what’s happening on the table. (See also this post).
TEACHING AND LOOKUP
I love how Blades in
the Dark teaches the rules. It slowly and carefully layers information,
backing up to repeat and emphasize as it introduces new systems. I have a
strong memory of it slowly clicking into place. That organization and structure
has a cost. I have a hard time finding things when I have to look things up at
the table. Years of baked-in assumptions of where you find bits in a rulebook
made that worse. But even with tabs attached to pages, when I have to reference
something it will invariably elude me. Every freaking game it takes me two
minutes to find the session end experience mechanics.
ON DECK
If you run BitD, I highly recommend Andrew Shields’ Blades in the Dark Heist Deck. It’s generates excellent characters,
challenges, and targets. You’ve got some of that in the random tables at the
back of the rules, but this has greater depth and detail. I’ve used them as is
and as a springboard for other concepts.
GHOST TOASTIES
I’m soft on ghosts. I’ve tried to make them seem scary and
super dangerous—the book suggests encountering one ought to damage a person’s
sanity. I’ve done that when they’ve faced spectral guards and similar
challenges. But the setting makes ghosts ubiquitous and hitting the same note
doesn’t feel quite right. I need to figure out how to make them more nuanced.
But I’ve also been soft on some of the consequences and costs
for our Whisper. Our player likes to dig herself deeper into situations, so I
don’t want to double the cost. I suspect the way I handle Whispers looks more
like a classical mage. Overall the lesson becomes think about how you want ghosts
presented at the table. If you have a Whisper player, you need to give them
fair warning and a sense of how you’re going to play this.
COGNITIVE LOAD
Doskvol challenges the GM. On the one hand, it offers an
awesome, well-realized city. I support Ryan Dunleavy’s Patreon
for new maps. I bought a poster-sized map and set it in the middle of the
table, covered with plexiglass. Doskvol’s strange layout and gothic look
provides the players a touchstone. But the GM still has to do some heavy
lifting.
Doskvol has a multitude of moving parts and events—and I’m
not just talking the factions. The many groups have complicated relationships and
unique agendas. If the GM keeps clocks for the many gangs and groups, have to
analyze and advance those consistently. They need to think about what the
factions look like—especially what territories they hold and how that impinges
on the PC gang. The GM juggles a lot there, but the game supports that with
reference lists.
Understanding and conveying the actual feel and culture of
the city poses more difficulties. In order to pull off scams and plot actions,
players need a sense of the world. As with other story games, Blades builds much of that through
collaboration and questions. But quickly the GM has to manage consistency,
especially as new details smack up against key setting concepts. Blades in the Dark has several, but I’ll
point to just one: it’s dark all the time.
There’s no sun. All the light in Doskvol comes from
firelight or ghost-powered lamps. That changes the setting massively. How do
people get food? The book mentions mushrooms and some other sources, but ghost growlights
eventually screw things up and limits scale. What other sources exist, what
kinds of plants can people eat—and then what kinds of wildlife survive? Is this
constrained food supply a pure free market or does the Empire control and dole
out some subsistence rations? That’s a classic historical formula—if so what
does that distribution look like, how much corruption exists?
Darkness is just one detail, but it has a host of implications.
What about the death of the gods and the existence of cities, what about the
massive risk in travelling between cities, what about the ubiquity of ghosts,
what about the massive Deathlands keeping everyone trapped in urban centers? Doskvol
creeps up on you. You might have grokked the feel of the place, but not have a
grip on the actual city.
Many game settings don’t have the same level of
interconnected depth. I run a ton of rpgs for The Gauntlet Hangouts; I’ve
learned how to condense and present settings. I find the key elements and put
those in front of the players: Kuro,
Unmasked, 7th Sea, Mutant City Blues. I file off corners and heavy details
to deliver verisimilitude. But Blades in
the Dark has a complicated architecture. As with the rules there’s a simple
key premise: rough urban center in perpetual darkness. But the game enriches that
deeply. If you run, you’ll find yourself returning to the book repeatedly to
help your framing.
PARITY OF ABILITY
Players will discover the potent character abilities. In my
game multiple PCs have chosen three of these. Functioning Vice (Spider)
allows the players to modify the results of their roll when indulging their
vice. In practical terms, this means they’ll never overindulge except in rare,
rare circumstances. Plus if someone shares their vice, they can bring them
along for the same effect. Calculating (Spider) allows for an
additional downtime action. If you have six players, as I do, and everyone
takes this, as they did, that’s 18 downtime actions. Training, Asset Creation,
and Heat Reduction will skyrocket. A
Little Something on the Side (Slide) gives the character +2 stash at
the end of every downtime. That will rack up and changes the resource dynamic
at the table.
None of these break the game, but GMs should know how they
can shift play.
JOB DESCRIPTIONS
Each Gang Type has a set of preferred jobs aka Hunting
Grounds. They pick one of four as favored, but the others point to the
kinds of missions the gang will typically want to handle. These don’t map
directly to the six job types mentioned in BitD’s Approach section. For example
Assassins have accident, disappearance,
murder, and ransom as choices. I can
easily imagine these operations and what they’d look like in the system. On the
other hand, our crew type, Hawkers, have sale,
supply, show of force, and socialize.
That presents greater challenge to structure as a cool job-- one where everyone
gets to show off their talents.
That means as a GM you need to look really hard at and
brainstorm those. The gangs can do jobs outside of these, but those choices
points to what the players might expect. I wish the book had further discussion
and examples for the different hunting grounds. I think that’s a rich vein to
tap for someone doing Forged in the Dark supplements. Rob Donoghue has pointed
to Leverage and cons as a rich source of job types and that helps. But I probably need to spend some prep time
thinking more about variations on these hunting grounds.
Hope that proved useful. If you’ve run or played
Blades, what have you seen?
