Just ran a cold open of Blades for three players last night, using the stripped down rules from World of Blades and Sean Nittner’s Gaddoc Station score.
Fuck, what a great game! Running it just clicked for me. I let go of trying to figure out what happened next and just stuck to posing questions, throwing out prompts, roleplaying NPCs, and facilitating the fictional space. It felt like kind of a Zen mindset. By the end of the session, plenty of shot clocks were ticking on the table, but nothing went pear-shaped. The crew was careful and pretty sensible, so they worked their positioning hard and used the Aid rules liberally, which meant they burned a lot of stress for extra dice. If something had gone pear-shaped, they’d have been in real trouble, but their approach turned out to be a winning strategy last night. What really stuck for them was not having to plan everything out beforehand. That insight was like a klieg light going on, me included. I’ve run a few Blades games before, but hadn’t quite shed my old GM habits.
We’re now looking at upgrading to a game with the full rules set. Kudos to the author of World of Blades, +Duamn Figueroa, whose name doesn’t appear on the manuscript. They did a great job paring things down for a quick-start.
