Would Blades in the Dark make for a good high fantasy game?

Would Blades in the Dark make for a good high fantasy game?

Would Blades in the Dark make for a good high fantasy game?

I’ve seen a few posts on here asking about a fantasy hack for BitD, but I thought I’d ask more theoretically what people thought about the idea, design-wise. Gonna go ahead and guess this is gonna be a novella-length post, because I’m incapable of being concise, so, here we go, and thanks to anyone who reads this… >_>

Forged in the Dark has been my latest system crush– in a word, I think it’s neat! ^^

Similarly, I bounce all over the place in terms of what genres are my current major jam, and recently I’ve been feeling classic high fantasy, Forgotten Realms, LotR, etc. vibes. So, naturally, my instinct is to think, man, it’d be totally rad if there were a high fantasy hack for Blades in the Dark!

While that may very well be true, the more I thought about it, the more I thought I should step back and really consider if the system would serve the setting well. While I think it’s a great system, and it’s obviously a massively popular genre, the two don’t always match up. Games trying to provide an experience that their mechanics don’t actually reinforce usually lead to frustration and disappointment (lookin’ at you, D&D… -.- ).

The baseline method for determining if a system is functioning in this way that I fall back on now, after hearing it from Dungeon World’s Adam Koebel (who I believe took them from another designer, but I forget who), is asking these 3 questions:

1. What is your game about?

2. How does the game do this?

3. How does your game reward/encourage this?

Trying to answer these questions for our theoretical high fantasy blades hack, without yet altering any rules (or let’s say, changing the answer to 1, but answering 2 and 3 as you would for vanilla BitD):

1. Playing daring fantasy heroes who work together in epic struggles to overcome great odds and defeat larger than life foes (or however you’d describe your typical high fantasy adventure)

2. The players work as a crew, taking jobs from powerful factions to improve their wealth and standing. (This could describe a sort of high fantasy experience, but isn’t quite right, I think.)

3. The game rewards players for playing true to the nature of their individual characters and crews, and making desperate rolls.

So you can answer these questions in ways that sort of vaguely check out, and it doesn’t seem like an immediate deal breaker. Still, there’s a number of mechanics that, on further inspection, don’t necessarily fit the genre. Some that come to mind are:

1. Stress and Trauma. Appropriate for low or dark fantasy (as seen in Blades Against Darkness), but not necessarily a staple of high fantasy. However, pushing yourself up against the limit of your resources is a common experience in many fantasy RPGs. I think lots of people will have had some sort of dungeon crawl where they’re about to head in and face the final boss on like half health with no potions and a single spell slot. Could stress and trauma be framed differently for this genre? Is stress now mana/stamina– still a limited resource to be spent on special actions? Does trauma exist at all? Is there some other consequence for maxing this resource out (or draining it, if inverted)?

2. Similarly, characters retiring/the idea that The Crew itself is the only lasting character. Typically, fantasy characters are in the story for the long haul. You don’t start reading about Aragorn, but then he bites it or gives up halfway through and gets replaced by some new dude, who finishes the job of saving the world for him.

3. Crews. Again, not necessarily a common part of the fantasy genre. You have the typical “Adventuring Party,” but you’re rarely an “organization,” and more like a buncha friends who get together and kill stuff. Or, more dramatically, a collection of heroes thrown together by fate and circumstance to overcome some great danger.

The distinction here that seems like it’s off is that you’re often individuals who work together more than you are members of a larger organization. I can see some ways around this, though. The first example that comes to mind is Pillars of Eternity, where you own and upgrade a castle. The idea being, give the players some central thing that ties them together and that upgrades go into. I think the major thing here is not “can you frame the characters as being members of some sort of organization” so much as, what would varied and interesting types of “crews” be in this setting? Is “going places and killing things for loot and the good of society” a baseline for play, or only one type of crew’s style?

4. Scores. The obvious analogue here is quests, but only up to a point. You might all work together to get paid, but there’s usually a point in most high fantasy campaigns/stories where things move up to the sort of epic level of scale where your lives become about something more than doing quests for money. At that point, the cycle of play around Score – Downtime – Free Play – Score, might not always hold up. Sure, you can stay in a town and spend each session taking on manageable tasks, but how does this system represent that epic, continent-spanning quest you’ve undertaken? How does it represent Frodo taking The One Ring to Mt. Doom? Massive tasks that you aren’t going to regularly be taking breaks from or checking back in with an employer on?

Some things I like that already work quite well:

1. The major one: Factions. Not necessarily part of high fantasy, but I actually think this checks out pretty well, and is one of my favorite things in Blades anyway. Which kingdom does your party become allied with, if any? Do you support this guild or that, etc. I think factions are a great way to spice up just about any genre. They represent the important ideologies, motivations, and drives of a world, and give the players a tangible way to consider, and then align themselves with the ones they value.

2. The reward structure. You get xp for roleplaying, not per enemy killed or whatever. It’s great for characterization, it works in just about any genre, it’s great.

3. The bare bones of the system: I think positioning and effect are really cool ways of framing the action narratively. I like skill ratings instead of attributes, dice pools, partial successes, all that really baseline mechanical stuff. I think the big thing to look out for here is that high fantasy (at least in the D&D tradition) is so tied into really granular, incremental power curves. Can a system that’s as fluid and interpretative as BitD handle the curve from being low level and equally matched with goblins, and then going up to high levels where you’re taking down ancient dragons and demigods and junk? Blades characters seem to generally improve “wide,” not “tall,” and there’s obviously very little explicit growth in anything like the damage they do, the health and armor they have, etc. I don’t think this is a dealbreaker, but it’s worth careful consideration.

Maybe the answer is to not try to recreate that curve at all. Embrace how epic and heroic the characters are from the beginning. These are the types of people who kill dragons, now, already. If they were the schlubs whose jobs it was to go clear goblins out of caves, they wouldn’t be the heroes of our story. Start the characters larger than life, and frame challenges appropriately.

Soooo in conclusion, this is still something I’d really be interested in seeing, and I don’t think BitD and high fantasy are outright incompatible. But, I do think some major adjustments would have to be made, maybe on both ends– changing the system to better reflect the high fantasy adventure experience, but maybe also being open to thinking of how the experience and arch of a fantasy campaign plays out differently when done in this system– seeing what cool, unique spin the Blades system ends up putting on fantasy, rather than trying to completely recreate what you already think a fantasy setting looks like, 1-to-1, in the Blades system. I think that could be really interesting ^_^

21 thoughts on “Would Blades in the Dark make for a good high fantasy game?”

  4. Brock McCord sorry- I skimmed on my phone and missed that line. One idea I played with was changing crew to ethos. The party is bound by an ethos that gives them different abilities and advantages as the improve.

  7. One big thing I noticed is that most high fantasy games like D&D use a lot of numbers and mechanics to make the game come to life, while BitD focuses more on narrative. I think you can make high fantasy work if your willing to drop all the numbers for narrative. Stress and Trauma are fine I think personally since stress represents the inner resources of the, in this case, adventurer to keep pushing on, whether this is martial skill or just pushing your magic to its limits. Trauma? Perfect for when you fall giving your all, especially if you take a condition based on what or why you finally dropped. Playing a tough warrior who lives by the sword and dies by it? If you get dropped in the middle of a heated battle, you just stared death in the face and came out lucky. Many a warrior would potentially go soft after understanding the fear of death that so many of their previous foes went through.

    Retirement? Even in basic blades there are plenty of ways to ward it off, but the main thing to remember is this: the power of a long term project! Take that time to work through that adventurers issues to get rid of some trauma (this would probably take multiple clocks though). And adventurers part ways and rejoin fairly regularly, so letting an adventurer get lost in their vice only to rejoin later isn’t too far fetched.

    Crews would be tough, since you would be more focusing on WHAT your charactera tend to do, like Tomb Robbers in Blades Against Darkness. Or the ships in scum and villany for that matter! So you would need to base crews off of preferred actions.

    The freeplay to downtime cycle actually does pretty good, especially since scores are going to be player generated/driven/based as the game goes on. So most of their downtime and their scores will start focusing on dealing with whatever you threw at them.

    I can see the argument with enemies and such, but I feel that the tier system helps mitigate that since its also a reflectionon the gear the characters have as well as its quality. And individuals can have their own tier, like Scurlock, if you need a big bad beastie.

    Attune would work great for magic, but this is where we get into the real problem. Yeah, you can narrate all those cool spells and magic items all you want, but you don’t get to see numbers and effects. No obviously noticable benefit like equipping and magic shield or casting Invisibility. If the players are fine with trading in hard stats for narrative freedom, and maybe hijack a few things from other hacks, a D&D style setting in BitD is quite doable I think.

  8. Leetmonkey33 Thanks for the long response! I started thinking about your last point after awhile too. I think part of the draw of D&D-style games, for players and DMs, is the huge lists of spells, magic items, and monsters, all with very explicitly defined characteristics. Like a lot of the potential changes in adapting this genre to BitD, I think you could live without these things, but it would definitely take some getting used to.

    Then again, this might be one of those places where the system just is what it is– if you want lots of numbers and stats, there’s D&D, if you’d prefer numbers-lite and narrative freedom, there’s Fantasy BitD.

  11. Eric Brunsell Can’t say I’m familiar with any of those =3

    I guess the thing is I’d expect the game to play out mechanically completely differently from D&D, because of course this system is drastically different, but was thinking of D&D more as a touchstone in terms of genre, setting, general vibe of the world. Lots of magic, elves, dwarves, grand adventure, etc.

    There’s clearly lots of room and work already done on the kind of grimmer, grungier, urban/crime, low/dark fantasy, as in Blades Against Darkness (or of course the original Blades in the Dark), but I’d be interested to see the system applied to that classic high fantasy setting.

  12. Brock McCord Well, you have me thinking. I already had sketched out special abilities for a series of 6 “mage” playbooks. For races,you can add a “racial” category to armor that works like special armor, but for specific racial attributes. Crews are a bit more challenging since they are very setting dependent. I’m thinking Judge, Hunter, Explorer, Revolutionary,

  13. Eric Brunsell I like the idea of adding something with racial abilities! I could see it working like that, or directly stealing from how Scum & Villainy does it with Xeno abilities.

    The crew types are definitely a sticking point. As you said, it can really depend. A sort of unimaginative version that came to mind is using something like the Elder Scrolls/Skyrim-style guilds, so something like Fighters, Mages, Thieves, Assassins, Monster Hunters, (Soldiers?).

    Alternatively, you might leave groups like these as factions to be worked for/aligned with, and make the crews something more abstract/interesting, but I’m not sure what those would be.

  14. I’m actually doing a high fantasy home brew that’s essentially blades systems mashed up with dungeon world concepts. I’m drastically changing stress trauma and health and increasing the power level as well as altering downtime etc. It hasn’t coalesced into anything solid just yet but I suggest playing with the mechanics a bit because Blades as is does a great job of supporting the themes of the default system, ie: you are criminals taking extreme risk, doing heists, and running from the police. Set dressing isn’t going to change that.

  16. I’m going the route of turning factions into something more like Fronts (which is essentially what they are anyway) and having the crew sheet be a sort of party work station where people can keep track of shared loot, quests, allies and enemies, etc.

    But it doesn’t look much like DnD. Inventory works very similar to in Blades against Darkness, which I hadn’t been caught up on until recently.

    It’s nowhere near complete but I may as well post the current playbooks.

    drive.google.com – RoilPlaySheets.pdf

  21. Brock McCord I’m still playing with this. I flipped heat and wanted on its head – now it is rep and glory. Entanglements have a positive feel, but with complications. It makes for a celebratory downtime instead of laying low and licking wounds.

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