With all these hacks on the horizon, I’m curious people’s opinion on the point at which Blades ends and a different game begins. Which mechanics are integral to the game in your opinion?
On a tangentially-related note, Blades has a degree of system mastery to it. Do you see that as characteristic of the core of Blades? Do you think more systemic depth or even strategy would spoil it?
Blades shares a lot of DNA with PBtA, so it has at it’s core that rolls always change the game state and that you hit your players hard (among some other stuff). However there are now lots of games like that.
Other things that I like, but aren’t unique to blades are the crew sheet, faction status, and separating downtime out.
There are two things that make Blades special for me, and I think no hack should remove. Nonlinear time and the ability to resist generic consequences with stress. Nonlinear time includes a bunch of mechanics, such as load, planning and flashbacks that I think are all essential to the feeling of super competent PCs and getting right to the fun. Resistance rolls give near absolute power to the PCs to say what consequences they’re okay with, and which they’d rather ignore. This gives players a mechanic to communicate to the GM what they find interesting and fun.
The things I most associate with Blades, and that have got me thinking about other games in different ways, are:
1) Clocks! Countdown clocks as abstract measures of distance to a challenge being resolved. Big clocks, small clocks. Long-term clocks and one-scene clocks. Filling in wedges as a complication; filling in wedges just to light a fire under the players. Erasing wedges! Multiple clocks on the same table – which one do you deal with first?
2) “Difficulty” being abstracted to three steps: Controlled, Risky, and Desperate (or whatever they’re called now). All of the math that more complex RPGs spread out across multiple baskets – your attack bonus plus your weapon’s damage vs. their defense score and their damage soak – is now collapsed into three rungs with a lot of room between them. I love it. It lets the GM wave her hands without feeling handwavey. Seducing the duchess? Risky. Seducing the duchess in front of her husband? Desperate. Seducing the duchess by sneaking into her private bedchamber late at night, whispering the poem that she was reading in a shady bower earlier that day? Controlled.
Those aren’t the only things that make Blades “Blades” – downtime, crews, zero prep – but those are the elements that feel the most distinct to me.
📌
Blades without crews would be weird. Pretty sure all the hacks I’ve seen do account for players being part of a group, either a crew like Blades or an actual ship crew for example. At the very least, a firm or corporation or party. The game tells the story of the group as much as it does the individual characters.
Do you think the separation between Downtime and Score is integral to Blades?
I ran Blades twice at Connecticon this past weekend, after running it twice at Dexcon the previous week. One thing I did was drop the Crew creation, and while that did shave off about half an hour of setup, I found myself missing the bits that having a crew sheet provides, such as the fact that Thieves start with a Hidden lair, having an extra place to store Coin, Heat and Rep, etc.
Dylan Durrant I think it’s necessary to break the game into discreet sections to allow for the reduction of stress, and I think breaking down the game into scores allows time for planning and load that happened off screen. I think it’s possible this could be accomplished a different way than score + downtime, but I don’t know what that way is off the top of my head.
For me, the most distinct element to the Blades brand is the crew side of the game. Blades is a game about teamwork and the PCs managing an enterprise together. That can take many forms (a thieves’ guild, a spaceship), but as Adam Schwaninger said, the core element across all Blades hacks is the group. The unique thing about Blades is that it crystallizes the PC group into its own shared character, and makes that the main character of the game.
Now there are also many great mechanical things about Blades, which I also dearly love. But I think you could take the idea of actions and flashbacks and etc and apply them to a game that isn’t about a cooperative PC enterprise, and at that point it would feel like a different game than “Blades in the Dark.”
One thing I like is how Blades surfaces information, particularly things like Rep, Heat, faction status, Tier, etc. In hindsight this seems like an obvious thing to do, but I’ve played in Blades-like campaigns before (as both player and GM) which handled these things “informally” and it wasn’t as good. It was too easy for the players and GM to not be on the same page and get surprised by certain developments and outcomes.
I’d say, for a game to be Blades-like, it needs to quantify relevant state of the world, and use that mechanically somehow. It’s almost as if the setting itself is an additional NPC. (This seems to be a genre convention in fantasy and sci-fi; any sufficiently interesting setting takes on a life of its own, changing over time and interacting with the characters.)
If you want to watch a video where this question is answered (among other things), check these links out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLS2JwPhesg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OROtnNYISzE
Sidenote – I’m not sure this distinction (this is Blades, this is Not) is super fruitful. There’s a lot of pieces to Blades, but a better question is when your hack/game is done. If that means using some things and not others – cool. However looking at the spirit of your question: For me, Blades (like many games) has onion layers of what you take and what you can change.
The core of Blades (imo) is the idea that the same roll can have different outcomes based on the fiction (Risky, Controlled, Desparate). You can do this with 2d6 or you can do it with StatD6 but this is what keeps me playing and bothering to plan.
The next up layer of the onion is Stat/Attributes, the Die curve and Resistances/Retcons (saying ‘NOPE!’ to the GM is integral, and being able to use flashbacks liberally).
Then a layer up is the idea of a crew. You’re not just four+ people, you have a shared stat. In most games (say D&D) the core character unit is the Character of each player. But in Blades you can go on a bender, and play someone else for a while and it’s ok. Blades can retire. The core unit is the Crew. Group actions and shared consequences also fall into this.
At this point we’re leaving Blades as a system, and really starting to look at Blades as a system integrated into a setting.
After that we talk about scores vs downtime, stress as a hit point mechanic, and different factions and favor with them as a driver for encounters and instances and so on.
Hope this helps!
Stras Acimovic Thanks for the detailed breakdown Stras! Stream of consciousness here: I’ve been having a lot of thoughts lately about a game I’ve been working on and whether it suits Blades’ system. It’s the third layer. Everything you said there and more, it is about your group and its persistence, goals, advancement and objective. The individuals PCs are merely tools of the “crew”. For that, it seems like Blades is perfect. On the other hand, the other layers strike me as only “suitable” for where I’m going with the game; they would definitely work, but do they really serve the theme? That’s what I’m trying to work out.
One thing that I’ve learned working on the hacks – you can’t work in a vacuum with abstractions. Namely a Cutter isn’t a generic fighter – they’re closely tied to the world. A Cutter is specific to Blades. So give us some deets and maybe we can help hash it out.
Stras Acimovic I don’t think it’s something that can be explicitly described in a sentence, but I think my best one is: “A pilgrimage of saints seeks to end the apocalypse.”
So, it’s about going on a holy, traditional journey. The PCs are a group of “saints” or more accurately, they are individuals that the people have Faith in. The world hasn’t ended, it’s still ending and it will keep doing so until someone makes it stop; namely, the PCs.
The genre is…science fantasy faithpunk intra-apocalypse. Ahem. Sorry, something stuck in my throat.
At its most fundamental level, the game centres around the idea that the PCs are constantly being observed by the people of the world and that their actions either build or diminish their Faith in them. Some actions that build faith might be overcoming challenges. But they can also be building interpersonal relationships and exposing the depths of their character. Essentially, it’s a reality show where the fate of the world hangs in the balance. There’s the layer of the Player, the Player Character and the Character they play for the People who observe them. Even if you don’t love Albert, wouldn’t a Romance hymn increase the people’s Faith in the both of you?
Anyway, yeah. That’s some deetz!
Stras Acimovic I can affirm: this is so fucking true I can’t breathe.