So my little brothers saw my shiny special edition book and I’m not the deceptive sort so I told them exactly what…

So my little brothers saw my shiny special edition book and I’m not the deceptive sort so I told them exactly what…

So my little brothers saw my shiny special edition book and I’m not the deceptive sort so I told them exactly what it is, they want to play Blades some time in the future. So I need help with figuring out how to play it with 7 year olds that still don’t have a complete grasp on language and one of them has been kind of yelly when we have previously played role playing games. I’m not sure I can explain the various parts of the game well enought, any suggestions?

9 thoughts on “So my little brothers saw my shiny special edition book and I’m not the deceptive sort so I told them exactly what…”

  1. My recommendation is to describe the fiction, ask “What do you do?” Then listen to their response and say “It sounds like you are Consorting.”

    Encourage others to Help. Keep things mostly to Risky position and Standard effect. Don’t worry about what is on their character sheet; Guide them by prompting for Resistance. Explain that spending all of your stress is dangerous but not a bad thing.

    All said, focus on the fiction, help identify the mechanics that they can engage.

  2. Do a mash up so they play as kids, the same age. In fact make its them converted to the setting. Take any real life skills or interests and convert. This will help ground them. Run small easy to grasp stories, that would be of interest to them. Lots of npcs around them with lots of plots.

    Dont worry about being faithfull to the setting, just have fun. Fudge the mechanics and down play the criminal activity, feed that stuff in later once they are hooked. Give them a interesting background that links them together, like living in the same apartment building with a host of shady other residence and plots, its contained.

    The kid bully rival gang, a adult super villian, little missions like getting food, finding missing things. Kids movies are full of this.

  4. I don’t think it’s a great starter game for kids honestly. Maybe use something simpler like Dungeon World with the City Thief playbook and reskin it?

  5. I used Fate Accelerated Edition to play with kids and changed approaches to something more simple: Strong, quick, clever, sneaky, brave, dexterous. Easy to grasp so you do not have to lead all the time when rules get complicated. I played The Last Airbender and How to Tame your Dragon. (If you haven’t looked into Fate Accelerated, here is a download to the free PDF. It’s only a few pages : evilhat.com – http://www.evilhat.com/home/wp-content/uploads/FAE.zip

    That’s how I would do Blades:

    Give every character a concept (like Lurk, Leech,..), dilemma (vice) and a special crew aspect that bonds them together. Then one stunt (special ability). Done. Now go to the channels of Duskwall.

    I would only do Freeplay and Scores and only use two regular antagonist (bluecoat and rival crew).

    It’s more Oceans 11 in a Victorian setting than the dark and gritty world from Blades in the dark, but that is exactly what I recommend for that age 😉.

  6. If you figure it out please post the hack. Ive been figuring out how to gm it for my kids without givjnv them nightmares. (Although the groups I’ve gmed my say that has more to do with me than the system.)

  7. They watched Pirates of the Caribbean without having nightmares, and I carry a spark of Sir Pratchett in y heart so I could present the setting in kid friendly way. Having looked at your advise I think I’m going to use Klaus’s World of Blades as a starting point.

    I think that another issue is that the game’s vocabulary is to difficult for them. So I think I’d try to replace various terms with less thematic but more elementary diction. Make Controlled and Desperate into Safe and Scary. Insight becomes Smarts or Brains, so on and so forth. But doing so may make transition into the full game a difficult process.

    And certain things will still be changed like drugs will be replaced with something else, I wanna say candy but that seems almost insulting, and some of the special abilities would most likely be changed to support a less mean playstyle. Like Trustworthy.

    I could also draw illustrations of each of the items they can get so that they can easily visualise them.

    I also need either to find some more kid friendly touchstones, or change the theme from criminal scoundrels to something else. Anyone have any ideas for such touchstones? My first thought is Discworld but I think none of those stories fit the blades structure, something Sherlock holmes related could work, Batman could be used to convey dark-cityness and the item system. As for different themes, they could be spies, pirates or detectives as something that comes into my head at the moment.

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