Category: Blades in the Dark: Discussion

“WHY CON?

Because Cons are the best.”

I’m absolutely loving the Grifters! Serious kudos to Rob Donoghue — roleplaying cons is a really tough space to design for, but Blades makes it possible, and IMHO Rob makes it practical. Really enjoyed the supplement — informative, well-thought-out and sometimes wonderfully laid-back. I’m sure it’ll be even better in future updates.

There are three things I’d love to see in the final version.

1. I think this could really use a long-form example. Figuring out where you start, how “complications” look and how you get over them, etc. etc., is a lot of what’ll be tough here. An example that goes through an entire score would be a huge help.

2. I’d really love some attention to when a score doesn’t succeed. I’ve had trouble before with Stealth missions, where sometimes failures seem to have no middle ground between “no consequence whatsoever” and “you’ve been discovered and the whole mission is blown to hell.” For Grifters, the same is true, and possibly even much more so — a Grifter whose face is on posters all over Duskvol is going to have serious trouble making a score ever again. And at the same time, making failures and complications meaningful but balancing that with “ACTUALLY that was the plan all along” is pretty hard.

(BTW the answer to at least half of this is probably “clocks.”)

3. I’d really like to be able to fit cons into Blades’ framework for defining a score — where you pick a few salient details, depending on the type. “Grifters” makes a lot of gestures in this direction, discussing where you actually start out in defining a con score. But narrowing it down to a few details, like we have for other type scores, would be incredibly helpful. Even if it’s more like “pick three elements from this list of ten, and define those,” that’d still be awesome (and feel more Blade-y to me 🙂 )

Again — fantastic work. I’ve been waiting for this since the original Kickstarter, and I’m absolutely delighted. Thank you to all of you!