Compared to FATE Core or the cypher system (the systems I’m most familiar with) how crunchy (rules dense) is blades in the dark for the gm?
Compared to FATE Core or the cypher system (the systems I’m most familiar with) how crunchy (rules dense) is blades…
Compared to FATE Core or the cypher system (the systems I’m most familiar with) how crunchy (rules dense) is blades…
It’s very light. Character creation and your first adventure in five hours. The GM needs a very intimate knowledge of the rules.
I agree, but I’d qualify that Blades can be run with only the very basic rules (positions, actions, and consequences) which can be learned in an hour or two. The advanced stuff improves the game but not knowing/fully understanding it won’t ruin anything. The basics provide a complete game experience and you can expand on them as everyone learns more about the system.
Blades is more crunchy than Fate. Fate needs you to know how to roll dice and how to invoke, and know difficulty numbers, and that’s pretty much it. Blades wants you to know how position works, effect works, how to take into account potency/scale/quality, expects you to be able to juggle clocks, to handle combat where enemies don’t have stats, to remember how Action rolls work including devil’s bargains, to remember how Resistance rolls work, and to convey all this to the players.
None of this is brain-breakingly difficult mind you, but it’s also not easy peasy, and it is definitely crunchier than Fate, as per your question.
… and it’s very cool to explore the rules along with the setting with your players. As a GM you don’t have to be the godlike-know-it-all
Blades isn’t lighter than FATE. It is a narrative system, so things like combat are abstracted, but there are a lot of moving parts and it is not easy on the GM initially.
As suggested earlier, it’s far better to focus on the basic mechanics for the first couple of sessions, and then introduce additional game mechanics in future sessions.
Also, watching some AP videos on YouTube is highly recommended. Preferably one of the Playlists where John Harper (the game creator) is GMing.
Interesting.
I’ve run both Cypher and Fate, and I find BitD much easier to run. The hardest part is thinking creatively for consequences and such – the clocks play as consequences and having abstracted opponents means less crunch for GMs deciding what happens next.
That said I ran Dresden Files Fate (which I understand is a very crunchy version) and my Cypher experience was a short (5 session) adventure series. Both I found much heavier from a GM perspective. And with BitD, after the first night the players had a very solid foundation in the rules – whereas with Cypher they were still asking how things worked at the end of those five sessions.
The GM needs to understand the basics and be able to consistently do positioning – the players need know only that they can push, ask for teamwork or solicit devil’s bargains – all simple concepts.
I stand by my assessment.
Fate 3 — Dresden Files — probably is worse than Blades, but Fate 3 is out of date. Blades is clunkier than the current Fate Core, which the OP mentioned by name.
Yeah, my FATE experience is purely FATE Core and FAE. I own some of the earlier versions, but have never run or played them. FC & FAE are very rules light (especially FAE), but ultimately not really our cup of tea.
Unfortunately I only realised that it wasn’t a good fit for me or my groups after I bought like a zillion sets of FATE dice…
I can’t comment on Cypher, as I’ve never read / run / played it.
Neither BitD or post-Core Fate really compares straightforwardly to things I think of as crunchy–DnD being an excellent canonical example. There’s no Gauntlet of +2 Grappling here. Both games can be run relatively light but don’t really take on their appropriate textures and pacing until you learn to use a few of their more involved concepts. I’d call both medium weight systems. But they’re both very different systems, too!
If we’re talking about reading the book and sorting out what’s needed? Blades in the Dark is about as dense as Fate Core, maybe a bit more dense. In terms of running basic resolution? Blades in the Dark feels more like itself with simpler tools in use. If you’re more comfortable with dense procedure than with idiosyncratic abstraction, Blades is going to be easier to dive into over time … but if you’re the other way around, Fate might even end up feeling like a lightweight system to you because so much of its density comes from understanding and manipulating Aspects and the Fractal.
I think it would b easier to answer this question another way: how did you feel running Cypher and Fate Core? What worked, what didn’t? What was easy to learn, what was hard to learn? From there, people can no doubt give you a better answer.
Firndeloth Dinsule I very much enjoyed running both games. I’m an improvisational GM and I like that these games are so rules lite so that I can get on with the narrative
Hmm. Well, Blades in the Dark is written in such a way that it’s rules provide you many ways to move the story forward in interesting ways rather than forcing you to follow specific guidelines in order to get through, say, a round of combat. Honestly, the more I thought about it the more directly analogous mechanics I could find.
Unlike Fate Core, there’s no separate “conflict” mode, but like Fate Core you have Action/skill ratings, Stress/Stress, and Harm/Consequences. Unlike Fate Core there’s only really 1 “Action” and while there’s helpful guidance in the book about what the different action ratings are good for, you don’t really have to worry about what can Attack, Defend or what-have-you. Like Fate Core, Stress is a limited tool for improving your effectiveness or buying your way out of consequence and Harm is a way of codifying fiction-first struggles your character faces of escalating severity. When you build your character, you give them flavorful descriptive Traits related to their heritage, background, Vice, etc; except for Vice these don’t have the explicitly mechanical relationship that Character Aspects do in Fate but they serve a similar fictional purpose.
Put otherwise, a BitD character sheet isn’t going to look very strange to you as a Fate player, even if the tone and details are different. The core mechanics are another story.
The core mechanic (it’s called the Fortune Roll and in standard play it’s an auxiliary tool for the GM): Roll a number of d6 equal to some trait relevant to the roll. This could really be anything that makes sense. If you have a major advantage or disadvantage, you either add or subtract a die accordingly. Look at the highest die. A six is good, a 4/5 is mixed and a 1-3 is bad. If you rolled 2 or more sixes, that’s a “Crit” for a great outcome. (This roll isn’t d20 simple, but it’s not more complex than Fate Core’s dice + skill – Target = Shifts, with 4 types of Shift outcome.)
The next most intricate rule is the Action Roll, the main way PCs do stuff with dice. It’s a fortune roll, but the Trait is always an Action/Skill rating, you never remove a die and you add dice for help and a Devil’s Bargain. The Devil’s Bargain is a lot like a Compel, trading complication for a bonus. Instead the Ladder or an opposed roll, we next look to Position and Effect. Effect is the practice of establishing how much you can probably do, Position is the practice of establishing how badly things can go at worst. There are three Effects that work kinda like outcome shifts–you either do it with Standard, Limited or Great effect. We pick a baseline upfront, and then maybe shift up or down according to the roll.
Three is the number of the day. The Positions are: Controlled, Risky and Desperate. Each one changes that core roll from earlier. On a Crit, we shift the Effect up a level. On a good hit, you get the established Effect. Mixed means you do it with complications proportional to your Position and Bad means you press on but things get worse, or you failed, or you face the worst consequences your Position reasonably allows, etc.
Zooming in slightly, from a Controlled position, both your Mixed and Bad result lets you choose to back down safely instead of success with complication or push on in a Risky position respectively. By deciding your Position for the roll is Controlled, we’ve agreed that your worst case scenario still has you in control unless you willfully push forward after you screw up. Instead of disadvantages merely moving the target number higher, or letting the GM tag Aspects against me as in Fate (or taking a die out of your pool as in the more basic roll from earlier), you look at the situation the character is in and decide how much control they have over what’s happening at worst.
This is the core texture of Blades in the Dark. Instead of how difficult is this task and how good are you at this task, we ask: how much of an Effect should this have, and how bad of a position could you be in? There might be a little more structure to the question, but it is a flexible narrative-first tool. The resolution system is perfect for an improvisational style.
Things get a bit more “dense” with Factions, Claims, Scores and Downtime system. The core of the pacing of Blades in the Dark is that you’re running a Crew that does criminal things … so you go on action packed Scores. These generate Heat, can make you Wanted, can change Faction relationships, lead to Entanglements, and of course give you resources. In Downtime you deal with the fallout, indulge in your Vice to deal with the Stress, bribe guards to get Heat off you, expand your Crew’s Claims. At some point you return to Free Play until you decide to do another Score.
While the rules written for all of this stuff can be a lot to remember without a rather dense cheat sheet … you can also do all of it without the provided rules. They’re good rules! They make it better. But if it’s more work to learn the book-keeping than it is to reinvent that particular wheel? You don’t need it. Much in the same way that you don’t need to use a complex magic system from the System Toolkit to enjoy a Fate game with Magic in it. All of that stuff can make playing in a particular setting even better but you don’t need it until you know the system well enough to make it sing properly anyway. 🙂
Much like Fate, you can give NPCs clear stats, fuzzy fictional tags, or just improv them; BitD has even less incentive to use PC style NPC stats because there are no opposed rolls–though you can evoke similar situations with the Fortune Roll if you feel like it.
Hope that helps.
Firndeloth Dinsule thank you! That definitely helps
Its interesting. I noticed something called out often in Blades. The level of rules detail in a game of Blades varies between each group. While having dozens of tables now, and needing to maintain many separately-consistent rules personalities, I noticed the whole game can change just by changing the starting situation. And what the players bring to the table to deal with it. Sooo much depends on this discussion layer.
Bottom line, Blades can be varying levels of crunch depending mostly on your table.
More to the point though, there is a bit more decision making here than Fate (which is not crunch persay, but can feel crunchy). Like to get the most out of a PC, you have to think like your PC and make actual decisions. Between that and the management of the downtime/stress cycle, players may feel they are crunching just a little. When I played though, all of it felt quite fun to see play out though, so I feel this offsets the added complexity of those systems (it being fun to add that layer is a nice way to ease any learning curve)
No experience with FATE myself.
But just off the back of an entire campaign in Numenera, I’m now on the 3rd session running Blades. So, here are my thoughts on the subject.
It is taking some getting used to. I would say it is definitely crunchier.
It feels like there a lot more rules to consider. There are plenty of rulings in the Cypher system, but I was never hesitant to homebrew them or forgo them entirely on a contextual basis.
But in Blades it seems this is much more difficult. The rules seem to be more integral to the system; it feels as though if i wing it rules-wise then something may collapse on the other end and it is difficult to gauge these things.
The there contrast between the two has been stark and there have been some growing pains thus far.
I have examples but elected not to include them (didn’t a wall of text :P).
I am confident that with persistence and more experience, I’ll have more of a feel of things, though.
I love the idea of the game so hopefully it will all click.
Hopefully my perspective is useful to you in some way!