10 thoughts on “Are there any good videos breaking down the rules of Blades for newbies?”

  1. This would be tough to do, but I think an actual play video with annotations calling out the rules as they are being engaged – basically a video Example of Play – would be really cool.

  2. There are two campaigns of John Harper himself on YouTube: the Bloodletters and the Last Word.

    Both are really, really good!

    The first episode of the Bloodletters campaign served also as promotion video for the Kickstarter; the rules have significantly changed since then, and episodes 1-5 were basically played with completely different and nowadays outdated rules, only with episodes 6 the rules became more or less stable. But it’s great to dive into the spirit of the game.

    https://youtu.be/PMomjYY1LUU

    To learn the rules, the Last Word campaign is better suited: it started with the pre-release version (only 1 or 2 minor changes since then, e.g. Healing); and John teaches the rules to the players on the go.

    https://youtu.be/PGsjW2yDmjM

    (Sorry that I link to the last episodes above, it would have been a lot of scrolling otherwise)

  3. Both campaigns are great but they’re not good as a quick pitch to new players. Almost all of my potential recruits want to know what they’re getting into before they play and don’t want to commit to 40+ hours of roleplay.

  4. Thomas Berton Oh man, a series with the production value of Geek and Sundry’s TableTop, with rules call-outs and fancy graphics, would be AWESOME… Though I imagine it’d would take a prohibitive amount of time to put together.

  5. Mark Cleveland Massengale Maybe you could do one video to cover scores and another to cover downtime? That way you can cover the moment-to-moment play in the first and the larger narrative interaction in the second. then maybe a 3rd just for gms?

    There are a lot of (awesome) moving parts in blades so maybe it’s not possible to cover everything, but the basics i imagine would be fairly simple if you were ruthless with cutting bits out.

  6. Fear not! I am a ruthless cutter! (pun intended) But I am also working hard to incorporate player and GM best practices into the explanation (using visual aids and the like) so the video will be helpful for both.

    I agree! There is a lot to say I think. More advanced GM guidance will have to be a follow up like you suggest.

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