A draft for doing super powers with the Blades in the Dark engine.

9 thoughts on “A draft for doing super powers with the Blades in the Dark engine.”

1. Nice start. I’d be intrigued to try it.

   What is the “Blades of Doskvol alternative Resilience method” regarding stress?

2. I’ve floated it by the community here to intensely negative reactions before, so it’s fine to use the RAW vice/stress system. I made that note for me, how I would do this.

   Basically, the idea is you have Resilience 4 and lose 1 every time you take Trauma. Instead of Trauma going up, your Resilience goes down. Successful de-stressing during down time gets you 1 stress back per Resilience rating, so more unsullied characters bounce back quicker than scarred veterans.

   So instead of retiring at Trauma 4 for no clear fictional reason (why 4 not 3, or 5?), when you run out of Resilience you retire because it’s hard to clear off stress, requiring extreme measures; that’s a good indication it’s time to quit.

   Vice is then repurposed as a secondary way to get stress cleared off faster, but with some trade-offs. A faster, darker way to power and release, instead of the only possible method.

   IT IS FINE FOR PEOPLE TO DISLIKE THIS SYSTEM AND I DO NOT NEED TO HEAR ABOUT IT.

3. .

4. Ah, so this is you cracking the code behind the magnitude calculations and trying to expand them (At least, for those in the know). Interesting.

   I get the difference between “self” and “touch”, but the example you posed with super strength doesn’t make sense to me. By the logic there, couldn’t anything (even a Charge Hands with Electricity power) be considered “self” (and the likely effects, like electrocuting someone else, just extensions of that)? I think super strength should be minimum 2 range (touch) if you hope to “touch” someone with it. That way, even a lightning power like I describe follows the same rules. Besides: throwing big things with super strength 30 feet vs 100 feet should be different magnitudes. Thought: Maybe scale should be accounted for?

   My biggest reservation about trying this out for superhero fiction is that I wish the equation was simpler for Drain. I mean.. the thresholds of 3-7, 8-12, 13-17, 18-22 etc arent bad or anything, but you might just state them as ranges instead to be clearer. And ideally, you are working to get the figures to be given in stress – but I guess I can see why that isn’t possible (at least, not without losing a lot of the granularity you are baking in). In general I wish it was simpler though.

5. Mark Cleveland Massengale So for super strength, maybe it does end up being level 2, but potency controls how strong it is. The question is about projection beyond yourself. If you are as strong as a truck, then you can project things quite far beyond yourself. And if you put super strength at touch range, that implies you could transfer it.

   My first thought was to have 1 cost every 5 full points, so up to 4 is free. If complication was a problem, that’s an easy way to go.

   And you’ll never get superpower rules that are both open and simple. It’s not possible. These are simpler because they’re fiction first. For me, once you reach a certain level of hand-waving, superpower rules are unusable. Mileage may vary, of course.

6. Oh, yea I see now.

   Is there any Mage influence? I am getting that kind of vibe now that I have re-examined it.

   That would be 0-4: free. 5-9: 1 drain. 10-14: 2 drain, etc right? if so that’s a big improvement, but I could find a better way to word it. Good fix if you ask me

7. Mark Cleveland Massengale I believe the focus in Mage is that you have control over types of magic, and you can combine them in cool ways to get effects.

   What I’m aiming for here is to provide anchor points for “fiction first” powers. So, you can describe the power, but pinning it down with these very broad categorical benchmarks allows for a level of shared assumptions about scope and scale.

   Maybe that’s similar. I never actually ran (or played) Mage.

   Anyway, yes, you could adjust the cost to be as you reflected. Every full 5 is a point. You end up in the same place, just offset 2 numbers.

8. Oh, yea man: Mage already does something very similar. Mage has a whole subsystem for improvised magic with similar goals (the more you stretch the world as we know it, the more the magical weight). In this way, they are very much super powery 

   Also, the way it lets you change your powers are similar too. Range, for example, had the levels split something like: self – touch – short range – long range – via sympathy. The advanced spellcasting system is most used for spells that are not established yet, and stretching one’s assumed magical capabilities (rated in dots for each purview of reality-shaping). The way you stretch is usually in terms of target, range, and duration (could also push for more effect, but the baseline in that game is set by the rating in dots for that purview of reality). It also had neat ideas on how to combine super powers to get complex effects. Probably worth a look if you aren’t worried it will infect your vision

9. I really like this. However, I think if you named the Drain you purchased with points which lowers Drain something different from the Drain which is the cost of using the powers. I realize its the same thing, you put points in Drain so you have less, just like you put points in Range to have more, but I think it would read better if it was one concept with two names. I can’t think of what a good name for the benefit one would be though. Drain seems to be a great name for the cost, but what do you call something that lessens that cost?

   Anyway, that’s just my two cents. Like i said this seems like a great way of doing this, and I kinda want to see if I can try it for a one-shot.

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