Hey scoundrels! A friend of mine just asked me what are the major differences between Blades in the Dark and “other PBTA games.” I’ve already told him that Blades isn’t truly a PBTA game, it just draws on some of the principles (d6 dice, graduated success, playbooks, etc.).
I’m not all that familiar with PBTA as a design apparatus, so I’m wondering what else I can tell him about the differences. Anyone here who can contribute ideas?
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Resolution mechanic is different (in PbtA, you always roll 2 dice plus a modifier – 10+ is great success, 7-9 is modest success or complicated success, 6- is failure. In Blades, create dice pool and roll – look at highest # rolled.)
It’s also similar to PBTA in that for the most part, only PCs roll dice. The rest of the world just acts according to the fiction.
Oh, and clocks were born out of PBTA, though greatly expanded upon in BitD.
Blades shares a bit of DNA with PBTA games. The idea of playbooks should be immediately familiar, as should the success/success with complication/miss results, the philosophy of Fiction First (“To do it, you have to do it”), and Playing to Find Out What Happens.
However, as Arne mentioned, the core mechanic is different (variable die pool instead of 2d6), and there are explicit phases of play (Free Play, The Score, Downtime), and specific mechanics for dealing with other factions. The idea of Position may take some getting used to, as Apocalypse World has some vague notion akin to it, but doesn’t quantify it the way Blades does.
Overall though, I’d say there’d be a lot less of a surprise coming to Blades from Apocalypse World than from, say, D&D.
Out of box, there’s a lot more mechanical things for players to track in Blades than most Powered by the Apocalypse games. Blades has stress, trauma, harm, armour, stash, rep, heat, wanted, coin, status, PC XP, crew XP, Tier, hold, turf, claims, 16 actions, 3 attributes, etc. Then a long term project or three per player, plus clocks for allies, enemies and entanglements, etc. You could build a similar web of countdowns in other PbtA games, but none require you get across the same sheer volume of dials and knobs right out the gate.
The presence of a crew sheet with its slower arc of development (xp, tier and hold) and the enmities and alliances the crew develops with other factions means that play tends to focus in the long-term on the crew as a whole rather than any individual PC.
Adding to what others have said: The resolution mechanic is quite different between the two. Specifically because of the divide in narrative power, which is given quite explicitly in Blades, unlike PbtA (in their current iterations anyways). Blades abilities and PbtA moves function quite differently from one another in many ways also (the latter gives resolution outcomes, and is the core source of rules precedence).
IMHO there are actually few reasons to consider them as a set, unless considered in a historical context. Which is to say.. the creators bounced ideas off of each other, but neither work adopted the other’s position on the things mentioned above, and many other points.
This highlights the point that it is difficult to explain a game using the context of another. It may be better (but not fruitless) to explain it as a different thing, inspired by similar concepts but realized with a different ideology.
Arne Jamtgaard
Eh, l think as more generations of PbtA derivatives come out the more designers are going to experiment with the mechanical bits that still end up giving you graduated, non-binary results: i.e the PbtA game, Ironsworn (which uses a single d6 + modifiers compared against two, separate, d10s)
The actual dice or cards or whatever is used to randomly influence where on the success spectrum an action falls, is not a defining characteristic of PbtA.
So if a designer uses a dice pool to determine graduated success, then the game can still be PbtA…
Omari Brooks I guess you could see it that way, but I would disagree.
I think Ironsworn is “inspired by” PbtA the same way that BitD is. (Nowhere can I see in Ironsworn, thanks to the free download, where it says it is a PbtA game.) Unless you are saying that BitD is Powered by the Apocalypse, but I think John would disagree.
So both Blades and Ironsworn “differ from PbtA” at least in their resolution mechanic. Check out the wikipedia article for PbtA and Simple World, a ‘template’ for PbtA games. They both mention the 2d6 resolution mechanic.
Arne Jamtgaard
You’re saying that John actually cares about someone calling Blades PbtA? If calling Blades PbtA actually gets someone to try the game versus outright dismissing it, l don’t think he would mind TBH.
Maybe if there was enough functional difference that telling someone who doesn’t like the philosophical feel of popular 2d6 PbtA games that they will get a completely different feel playing Ironsworn/Blades were actually true; we could see eye to eye on the subject but they will encounter similar issues when they start gming or playing so why not make the association so they don’t waste their time?
If telling someone who is a self proclaim PbtA hater that Blades is totally not PbtA, and that gets them to play the game then great, but that doesn’t mean that non-superficial comparisons to support that claim will actually stand up under scrutiny.
Ultimately the creator of Apocalypse World did not release an official SRD or strict licensing requirements. Games that were “inspired by” exist in a state where they can be freely associated or dissociated with the collective label of PbtA as authors and end users see fit.
Omari Brooks I think the OP and his question asked about differences between PbtA games and Blades. My answer was to him, and not some hypothetical PbtA hater.
And no, I don’t think John cares. But the OP started from a position that BitD and PbtA have differences. The OP and his friend care. Telling the OP “Blades is PbtA and doesn’t differ from PbtA” is not helpful. I’m trying to answer their question. Your posts seem more like you’re trying to argue about something else.
Eli Kurtz It’s sometimes hard to suss out what differences are a matter of tone and theme, and which are purely gameplay. I came up with a few others I feel are worth mentioning though:
the role of the GM. See GMing sections in each game for specifics about what they are instructed/empowered to do. Also see the basic rules (GMs in PbtA are essentially beholden to the moves, not directed to be the final arbiters of effect and risk like they are in Blades)
the probability distribution for the core resolution mechanic, and the effect of +1 in either system. IE: Chance of success on 2d6 in PbtA is not equal to chance of success on 2d6 in BitD, nor is the difference between 2d6 and 2d6+1 in PbtA equal to the difference between 2d6 and 3d6 in Blades (or even 2d6 and 2d6 with +1 effect)
design tenets for playbooks. See moves (in PbtA, these are essentially new sets of rules) vs abilities (in Blades, these are more like rules interactions or “ways of breaking the rules”)
Thanks so much, everyone! A lot of these points helped to clarify my own understanding of the differences between these “system families,” so I hope they do the same for my friend.
Arne Jamtgaard
My first post in this thread was sparked by the statement “in PbtA, you always roll 2 dice plus a modifier”
I disagreed with the opinion. That it was an actual, staple component of PbtA that should be examined as a differentiator between Blades and PbtA (and then went on to explain my thought process so the OP and those in the conversation can consider a different viewpoint). I’m not sure if there is an issue with expressing opposing viewpoints in a discussion here now so…
Omari Brooks yeah Undying is diceless but based on PbtA.