Hello everyone !
What would you guys think of making a “generic” Blades in the Dark hack ?
While working on possible hacks for BitD, I realized what I was trying to get to is the “quantum of BitD”, the barest bones of what makes a BitD game, especially in regards with special abilities. It reminded me of Simple World, by Joe Mcdaldno, which can be found here : https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/little-games/simple-world It’s “a streamlined, generic hack of Apocalypse World” ; and I consider it a good toolbox for the first steps of a new hack. I think making one could help for burgeoning hackers, or to quickly design one-shot hacks.
So… Opinions ? 🙂
Not sure if this is possible. From what I’ve learned from the latest comments about hacking is that you first need to know the heart/soul of your game. Then you start to pick and change mechanics to express this essence. Seems a bit contrair to the generic approach.
Maybe this is something every hacker has to do for herself: Boiling down to “what is the essence of blades” (for me and for my setting) with the millions of aware/unaware decisions you have to make.
I definitely think it’s possible. I might look into this more as a side project now that you mention it…
Also worth noting, but the creator’s name is Avery Alder; she mentions on the page you linked that Simple World is published under a different name but it is still her!
well, I think it would be great, but at the same time I agree with Stefan Struck, but there is a SRD on their website that kind of acts like the Simple World, well to me anyways.
bladesinthedark.com – The Basics | Blades in the Dark RPG
As previously said by others, the Blades SRD sort of has this, albeit with much less in the way of step-by-step instructions to turn it into something personal. I could definitely see an effort made to boil it down a little and create a “GM’s guide to quick-hacking a Forged in the Dark game straight into your first playtest”. That could be useful for people starting out! I think you face a few challenges though.
For one, Forged in the Dark has a lot of interlocking systems that feed into each other and are fused somewhat to a setting or highly-specific genre feel (Score Payoffs/Heat feed directly into Complications which matter for driving a sense of urgency in Downtime and compelling the crew to try to land a Score that pulls them out of trouble and…). It’s a whole lot of logistical plumbing and wiring that seems like it could be hard to ‘generify’ without losing either functionality or meaning.
The 12 (or however many) Actions are also a lot more proscriptive than Apocalypse’s Stats as well. Every choice makes a big difference in what the place feels like and what the players will be doing within it. I think it’s probably a much more perilous part of the hacking exercise than coming up with the 5 or 4 stats of AW, which are very general setting-agnostic statements about a PC’s qualities.
Finally, you’ve got the PC crew (a whole extra step in campaign creation) and the faction game (which is brought in with starting relationships to the crew’s creation choices). What is most ‘generically’ necessary: for the GM to make three factions to start with? A half-dozen? Blades’s faction game is driven by clocks, which usually represent tangible goals that other factions are working toward. That implies an initial framework of competing motivations for these factions. You’ve also got PC allies/rivals, crew connections, etc. Some of that can be done on the fly I’m sure, but some of it is going to be the GM having to answer more questions about their setting up-front to give the players something to work with in the opening scenario.
So unless you boil down / do away with a bunch of major systems from Blades, you’re going to end up with many more steps and a longer document than the Simple World that you linked. All that said: I think Blades is very durable to being hacked down to it’s core (just dice mechanics and go) so it’s not impossible, just needs to be very thoughtfully done.
Charles Simon I don’t think all of those systems are necessarily inherent to a Forged in the Dark game, but I do agree that taking them away or making a guide to which mechanics might be needed and why would be much more involved than stuff for PBTA is.
Mikey Zee Yeah for sure. At the end of the day it’s more a design philosophy. But insofar as the base games of their respective design frameworks can be compared, there’s a lot more structural framework and plumbing in Blades than Apocalypse.
As John Harper says right in the rules, you don’t actually need half or more of the stuff in the Blades in the Dark rules to play Blades in the Dark, but they are there and a Forged in the Dark hack might want to use them.
Charles Simon Yeah it would have to be more a Choose Your Own Adventure than a straightforward guide unless you chose to REALLY pare the options down, which might decrease its utility for actual Forged games… it’s tough for sure.
Mikey Zee I really like the idea of a Choose Your Own Blades kind of toolbox. I think some games might not need Heat or Payoff, and I’m sure some games can do fine with a lighter faction game, so you could have “modules” that you pick and add to your hack or not. Of course, that would be “enough” for the one shot BitD-like games I have in mind.
For a little more background on why I’d like to try and work on such a toolbox, I get easily caught on hacking and can spend a lot of time working on a hack only to find out my players aren’t interested anymore. Which means I risk getting caught in a loop of trying to hack a BitD-like game while never actually running one, which also means my player will stay suspicious of BitD-inspired mechanics (“yeah we never played that after all, it’ll never happen like every time…”) etc etc. So I’d like something where I can hang with my player friends on friday, get a cool idea rolling, plan a game on sunday afternoon, work on it for a few hours on saturday, and have a working rough draft with even some time left to make some cool-looking sheets to boot. Then if we’re all hooked, I can polish it into a full hack afterwards, and if we aren’t I don’t have to throw tens of hours of reading and writing and designing in the bin.