“This is better than EastEnders!” [**]

“This is better than EastEnders!” [**]

The eight-week playtest game of Blades in the Dark has now finished at MK -RPG. Some final thoughts on the game and how it went.

* It was enormous fun. Everyone had fun, including me the GM. All the players are invested in their characters and are champing at the bit for me to run a sequel block. That’s a good recommendation!

* Generating scores is wonderfully easy. At the start of the last session, the PCs decided to do something at the Duskwall university. A few rolls later, they were off to grab all the Leviathan blood supplies and electroplasmic crystals from an experimental lightning tower in the bay just outside the barrier.

* Flashbacks are good and powerful, though there’s always the temptation to slip back into trying to plan things. The players did say that when they spent some time doing some Gather Information and planning, the following heist seemed to go better than ones with less planning. That could just be my style as well, with the GM slipping back into the “planning is good” mindset.

* One question was how nested flashbacks could go. This was prompted by Dash, our Lurk, finally betraying the crew in the midst of their final job, and sequences of flashback-within-flashback-within-flashback of him trying (and failing!) to get some other PCs to join him selling out the Luddites to the Crows.

* The Stress track is long and can be a difficult resource for players to manage. The biggest niggle was when players ended up with nearly-full Stress after a job and were faced with the dilemma of using all their downtime actions to reduce it, or doing something more productive knowing they’d stress out at the start of the next job. Some of them would have liked the opportunity to acquire Stress in downtime, leaving the character traumatised but effective for the next job.

* We talked a bit about XP. Each role has a different way of gaining XP, depending on their nature. With six players, and six roles, these different “solve problems this way to gain XP” drives led to the players having to balance their desire for XP against keeping the game moving and the group cohesive for the sake of the other players. We thought that, especially in larger groups, doubling up on roles would reduce that, while the different playbook abilities would keep the characters mechanically distinct.

[**] For our colonial cousins, “EastEnders” is a long-running BBC soap opera, set in London’s East End. The quote arose during the shenanigans of the Lurk trying to gain support for his betrayal.