I had the dumbest idea for a Blades in the Dark hack yesterday so I figured I would share it with you all, because sometimes dumb things are funny things. The basic idea is to take the subtext that John Harper keeps putting in about how Blades in the Dark is a genre crime show of our own making, and making it the text.
I present: Shows in the Dark.
A game about playing actors playing characters on a tv-genre show. Touchstones are Star Trek, Xena: Warrior Princess, Power Rangers, Beastmaster, the New Adventures of Robin Hood, etc etc.
The crews are replaced by types of show, such as Sci-Fi, Space Opera, Fantasy, and instead of criminals you have actor types, such as the Thespian and the Heartthrob presented below, and the Hollywood Action Guy, the Comedy Relief and the Wrinkly Forehead Alien Man.
As factions you’ve got the gamut of the Producer, the Props Department, Costume Design, Hair and Make Up, the Food Cart, etc etc. As well as rival shows trying to get ahead and claim that prime time slot.
Instead of turf when it comes to claims, you have Sets, so maybe you need to set a couple of episodes on a jungle planet to keep Frownar the Warrior Bearbarian from claiming the jungle set. As well as valuable things like New Uniforms for Sci Fi Shows, and Extra Extras.
Reputation becomes Ratings, and Heat becomes Budget. The more you go over budget the more likely you are to be sent out on the con circuit to make money for your show. Of course rising in tier gives you a better chance at snagging that set from that pesky Bearbarian show as well as a host of other benefits as per usual.
Of course you can do things like make Bottle Episodes to keep budget down and make the Producer happy, or do a big sword fight and ruin all the prop department’s lovely work making them very sad.
Flashbacks become cuts, resistance rolls become reshoots. I’m struggling a fair bit with what the various actions would translate to, but I made some headway.
I’m toying with the idea of replacing the regular trauma with things like cocaine addiction and nervous breakdowns, and of course your character gets written out of the show when their trauma gets too much for the showrunners to handle.
And of course between shoots, you can relieve your stress, try to acquire a celebrity for a guest appearance, that kind of a thing.
I really have no idea what to do about items and load. Props of some kind I guess? Maybe they’re just not that important.
Obviously, you know. I’ve done about three hours of work on this and it shows in how really awful the playbooks are that I shamelessly copied, and brutally savaged.
Clever, I’d have almost thought of Turf as time slot so you are battling for the best show times.
Sounds weird, but not dumb. 🙂
I like it! The meta-level play of actors playing characters works well in other pbta games like Worldwide Wrestling and Action Movie World. This reminds me of the film Hail, Caesar!
Gear and Load could be trope-y on-screen gimmicks that make the episode do what is expected of it, like “shocking reveal”, “memorable one-liner” “fan service”, “distracting special effects”, “Last-minute improv”, “pop culture homage”, “new look”, “new romance interest” “plot twist” “deus ex machina (predictable coincidence)”. Of course, some gimmicks would be general, while each playbook type would have custom gimmicks.
I was expecting certain audience demographics as a category of factions, i.e. “diehard fandom”, “social media influencers”, “conservative/religious commentary” “academic/esoteric commentary” “Red Carpet Elite”
For actions to make sense, you need to decide what rolling during a score/episode shoot is meant to signify.
Is the main uncertain conflict/dramatic question of play about how successfully PCs can produce an episode (i.e. pleasing the audience within budget). Or is the main dramatic uncertainty about PCs stealing spotlight from or supporting each other, or making a better show than competing shows? Or is it about how the characters manage to pull off a decent show with substandard skill/resources?
The easiest way is probably to just use Insight, Prowess, Resolve without subdividing actions. Maybe use Worldwide Wrestling’s stats instead: Look (persona appeal, uniqueness, conventional beauty, flair), Real (relationships and competence at off screen tasks, be decent, networking, bootlicking), Work (memory, delivery, comfort, adaptability, organization, taking direction), Power/Spirit (passion, acting technique, nuance, potential, persistence, screen presence, actual athleticism or believable stunts)
You could also borrow the WWWrestling idea of optimizing and leveraging heat between PCs as a key currency for making a great show.
If you want actions though:
If the main conflict is about production, then you could do production actions (acting skills, patience, stubbornness, decency, adaptability, taking direction, nuance, passion, authenticity, sex appeal?).
If the main conflict is instead about how well the characters do things on screen, then actions would be whatever the genre demands. I’d consider using more generic approaches like in Fate Accelerated (Quick, Flashy, Forceful, Careful, Clever, etc.)
Oh, I didn’t see that you already had actions in the mock-up sheets, like study, stunt work, monologue, seduce, etc. Those seem to work well enough. I’d maybe have Drama (or Dramatic Tension) instead of Monologue, and maybe Comedy/Levity/Charm instead of Sway. Technobabble seems like the delivery of Study, so maybe could make room for something broader about the industry and the factions.
You had me at Shows in the Dark.
Then I read your Touchstones..! At first, I thought this game was a mess already because I could apparently play in any time period, with any tone.
Luckily I read on and realized your Touchstones are just talking to the wrong audience (an imagined one, the characters). For best results, use this section to show the read an example containing a similar cast of characters. Those aren’t shows about the drama behind the scenes, or actors, or even any of the 4th wall breaking you seem to have in store for players. Better examples of what this looks like to me are.. 30 Rock or Murphy Brown perhaps (well.. actually It’s Gary Shandling’s Show is probably the closest Touchstone I can think of, but its probably too old for half of those who might read it).
Just the same, I like it. Got some questions though…
Assuming a score would be an episode, then the plan type might be.. the type of performance beats that actors use to get their ratings: like fight scene, stunt/fx scene, tragic scene, romantic scene, or a humorous scene. The detail for a fight scene might be where it goes down, but if the plan was humor then we’d need the delivery method. The detail we need for a tragic scene engagement roll might be the cause of suffering, while a romantic scene might require the love interest.
Figuring this out will help a lot with what the engagement roll is trying to tell us is about to happen when it’s a 1-3, and the sorts of things the characters might actually do to deal with those risks.
RE: action names. I personally would just have players write down 0, 1, and 2, assigning these numbers to three or four attributes (like Smarts, Moxie, and Presence).
PS: Command sounds sort of military, whereas Manage or Direct might fit this genre a bit better. So I took a shot at actions in the hopes they inspire some ideas..
SENSE: Improv (acting without preparation) – Notice (trouble before it happens) – Recite (historical fact, names, diatribes, lines, or other info)
FITNESS/BODY: Tussle (aggressive action) – Finesse (graceful action) – Scramble (hurried action)
LOOKS: Seduce (with suggestive comments, irresistible confidence, or by giving “the smolder”) – Strut (walking and being hawt at the same time) – Dress (to impress or shock)
MOXIE: Demand (action from others, direct personnel) – Schmooze (to gain access to friends, stuff, etc) – Emote (deliver lines to shift the emotional state of those watching, method act)
Mark Cleveland Massengale I like the inclusion of Emote and change to Direct. I also like the consideration of plan types to guide actual play decisions. A score probably isn’t an entire episode, just some key portion that is worth playing out (like an action scene, drama, love scene, etc.).
Sense/Body/Moxie are a good breakdown. I was thinking about this way too much last night, and despite not really knowing anything about acting or film, I wondered if actions could go in a different direction with actions somehow more like playing to type/flat vs being creative/original/profound.
This also reminds me of Pasion de las Pasiones, where you play actors in a latino telanovela, but you simultaneously play a certain audience role responding to what’s happening in the show.
Yep: those beats within the episode seem to be where things might go wrong.
I haven’t seen that, sounds like another great example though
Re: creative actors who write. That’s something you could do with these actions, but not something you want all PCs thinking about doing (actors are rarely good at it!). Or maybe you do, but you want it to be a specialized thing you can’t try until you have the ability. Abilities are good for things like this..
Writer: when you invent a show pitch or write a script, you get +1 result level. You begin with one script or concept already written.
Garrett Fitzgerald I was thinking of having Turf be time slots, but my thinking was that the score would be an episode, with the free play and down time around it devoted to the characters being out of character, so to speak. So it would make sense for the claims to be something you could somehow seize within the context of having an episode around it. I’m not sure how I’d manage to seize a time slot in the same way.
Adam Minnie I am entirely unfamiliar with these systems, but I will clearly have to read up on World Wide Wrestling and Action Movie World.
I feel like the central conflict is trying to make something that vaguely adheres to budget, and doesn’t make the actors unable to deal with each other too much. There’s a central conflict in Blades in that you get rewarded/experience for basically roleplaying your character’s more difficult and damaged sides through trauma and vice. This sort of self-destructive path where you have to get worse to get better is what I’m trying to patch into. Taking a trauma would, in my eyes, be the same as literally walking off set in a huff and then people just have to keep shooting and figure something out.
I really like your ideas on gear as I was utterly blanking on that beyond going “this is a prop” “this is a larger prop” without tying it specifically to one type of show.
Having audience demographics as factions is also an excellent idea. I’m definitely going with that.
Mark Cleveland Massengale My touchstones were chosen mainly for being shows that were clearly trying to do something big with essentially a shoestring budget. I feel like there was a lot of these (though it might just be my early years were spent watching bad imported television whenever I could) such as the Adventures of Sinbad, which were trying to do something big but really didn’t have the budget for what they were trying to accomplish. Plus suddenly deciding that Sinbad had a buddy who was essentially a knife throwing mute ninja sounds so very much like something out of a roleplaying game. I considered Galaxy Quest, but I felt like that might just muddy the waters.
I really like your thoughts on the planning stage. That is definitely going in.
I also like the actions you’ve proposed, but I’m leery of moving away from the 3 categories, 4 actions that Blades uses as I’m not entirely sure what that’ll do to the maths behind the dice rolls. Off the top of my head it seems like it’d make resistance rolls weaker, which might make for more stress and that maaay be a good thing? I’m not sure. I guess that’s the kind of thing playtesting is for 😀
True, but having less actions per Attribute is an easy-enough-problem to fix; just give it to them another way!
General rule: PCs have 12 boxes of stress
Another general rule: You get +1d to resist consequences from actions taken while in the same scene as another PC they trust. (Name the teammates you trust at the start of the [whatever replaces score] after marking [whatever is load]).You can force any character who trusts you to roll to protect you.
Or have the fourth die to resist come from abilities on the four “core” playbooks – whatever those are. For example:
Ya Got Moxie, Kid: You are are immune to the craze that some celebrities and contracts can inflict on sight. You get +1d to resist consequences with Moxie.
etc