First off, the finished Blades In The Dark is an incredible thing.

First off, the finished Blades In The Dark is an incredible thing.

First off, the finished Blades In The Dark is an incredible thing. Unlimited appreciation, respect, and gratitude to John Harper!

Second off, a question about progress clocks. How do you GMs present them to the players? All public knowledge? Some kept secret as a gauge of how things are going? In my demo games I have them public to teach how the system works. I’m just interested to see how people use them in their own games.

Third off, I’ll be running Blades for Games On Demand at PAX East this weekend. If anyone wants to get a game in, stop by.

11 thoughts on “First off, the finished Blades In The Dark is an incredible thing.”

  1. I like to tell people about the clocks, but make sure they also have have in game effects. For instance “I’m going to start an Alert clock and put a tick on it. The sentry stands up from his post, stretches and squints into the distance. She lights a cigarette and keeps her ears perked.”

  2. I do very much the same. I don’t hide clocks, but sometimes a clock is not 100% explained because it’s a looming “something” that the characters don’t fully know or understand yet other than the fact that something’s gonna happen.

    I’m probably just lucky in that my group of players jumps in headfirst and engages with the shorter-term mechanical clocks like Sean’s guard example, and happily hits the others. Something unknown lurking? Sure, we’d love a tick on that clock, go!

  3. Clocks are a fun way to telegraph upcoming difficulties to players. I’ve had clocks with labels like “It All Goes Wrong” and “The Thing Is Loosed” and that kind of ambiguous threat. I keep all the clocks out where the players can see them.

    For long term project and downtime clocks and so forth, you can have “Lampblacks Figure It Out” or “Bluecoats Are Done With You” and you can have heists or down time actions that add or subtract segments from those clocks. Maybe even “The Faceless Threat Arrives” to get them edgy (and you may or may not know what the Faceless Threat is before it gets here.)

    Any suspense you lose by making them visible instead of secret is more than balanced out by the way they can drive the action. If there are 5 segments on the “Iruvians Get a Stranglehold” on the docks, then the players are likely to figure out a way to run a heist to loosen the grip.

  5. On a related note, another advantage of making the clocks visible to all is you can offer segments of clocks filling in as a cost for a devil’s bargain.

    “Sure, you can get +1 to get through that locked door, but that will cost you 1 segment on the ‘Ghosts Get Your Scent’ clock. And it’s already at 3.”

  6. In the session I ran yesterday, I used several clocks and kept them open. I found it helpful in keeping myself and the players on the same page about what the risks of the situation were. That way, when I said “you smash open the vault door, but it’s really loud and now the ‘Guards Check Downstairs’ clock is full”, everyone just nodded and was like “yeah, of course that makes sense”. It didn’t feel like I was just throwing bullshit at them without context. Likewise, at the end of the session, when one player asked “did the whole building burn down” I was able to point at the “Fire Engulfs the Building Clock”, which was only half full, and say “no, it was mostly just cosmetic damage.”

  10. Good luck at games on demand. I offered Blades and DW at PAX East last year and never got to run Blades. Hopefully it has more name recognition this year.

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