Personal and art blog for Rosa the gentle. She/her, 28, queer and loving. Addicted to the tabletop lifestyle.
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When people talk about Blades in the Dark they usually bring up a few big headline mechanics (flashbacks, clocks, load, position/effect etc) and they should because they are really good mechanics. But there are a lot of little things in blades that I think are really important for creating the whole experience and in some cases not all though) are unusual in ttrpgs. SO I thought I’d list some them.
You can’t leave:
The ‘standard’ (but not universal) mode for ttrpgs is 'the adventure’ where you travel from place to place seeing new stuff, meeting different people, looting new ruins, solving new problems etc. There might be a hub that you often return to but generally roving about is a core element. And its obvious why this is appealing! But it has two downsides: 1) the players can very easily run away from the consequences of their actions and 2) and the players are constantly being faced with new stuff that they don’t really have the hooks to latch onto yet.
In contrast Doskvol is a pressure cooker. Want to leave? Tough! the whole world out there is dead and will kill you. Everything you do will create more characters and plot hooks and conflicts all ready to be pulled into the narrative at any point. If you piss off another faction you can’t just skip town, you have to face up to the consequences of your actions. And as you play the players will become more and more immersed in the city and develop a deep understanding of what it going on there.
2. You’re a gang of criminals:
A common (again, not universal) base assumption of many games is that you are good guys doing fundamentally heroic things. And this tends to encourage a somewhat reactionary style of play where you are presented with a bad thing that is happening and then attempt to resolve it. In contrast being criminals is a much more proactive endeavor. There isn’t a clear threat that needs to be overcome. There’s just a situation and its up to you to get what you want out of it.
The scope of play available when you are playing as scoundrels rather than heros is also so much wider. Note you aren’t evil, which is equally restrictive. You will do good things and bad things, and struggle so much more with the question of when you can afford to be good and just how bad you are willing to be. You don’t just always step up to save the world but instead pursue the things that actually matter to your character, because being a criminal allows your character to be selfish in a way a hero can’t be and that massively helps in creating a player driven game.
But you aren’t just criminals, you’re a gang of criminals, with shared goals and resources and a character sheet to go with it. This really forges a group identity that transcends what is possible in the traditional party (which is essentially just a group of individuals who happen to be in the same place). The crew gives everyone at the table a clear basic goal: build your crew; expand your crime empire. And this is a fundamentally player driven goal! Normally systems reserve this sort of 'domain level’ play for high level characters (ie the ones most people never play) but blades puts you there right from the off.
3. Experience:
At the end of each session you go round the table and discuss instances of when each player 'addressed a challenge with [core activities of their playbook]’, 'expressed their beliefs, drives, heritage, or background’, or 'You struggled with issues from their vice or traumas during the session’. This is incredibly lightweight but also very effective.
Firstly it means everyone at the table is always going to be thinking about and making space for expression of their character and creating problems which is something that can easily be sidelined in favor of optimally addressing the challenges you are facing when there isn’t this codified incentive.
And secondly the fact that it is at the end of the session creates this great debrief situation where you go over the highlights of the session and maybe dig a little deeper into why your character acted in the ways they did, which just brings the whole table into having a deeper understanding of each others characters. Again, notice 'drives’ as a potential XP trigger. The game rewards (and therefore encourages) motivated characters.
In addition of personal XP you also have crew XP with a similar set of triggers (goals and drives come up again), which really supports building a crew identity, encouraging the crew to be proactive, and centering it as 'the main character’ of the game.
4. Rivals:
The concept of rivals only gets a few words in the Blades rules. It appears on each playbook with a list of potential rivals (Just a name and a couple of words of description each) and then again it appears on when you are setting up a scenario in a sentence saying 'Are any enemies or rivals interfering in the operation?’ That’s barely enough to call it a mechanic. But its incredibly effective! You automatically get a small cast of revolving antagonists, each with some personal connection to a player character, who just keep popping up and causing problems. And 'oh shit, not this guy again! I hate this guy!’ is a really great way to tie things together and get players invested in what’s going on.
5. Just enough world building:
Blades gives you quite a lot of material to work with on the world of Doskvol. Certainly enough to build out the broad picture. But it is also absolutely chock full of (deliberate) gaps. What this leaves is for you to fill in the gaps to create your version of Doskvol (And it can be quite fun to compare notes with other groups playing blades). The book tells you there is a conspiracy in a faction but it won’t tell you who’s behind it. The book tells you people are gathering ancient artifacts, but it won’t tell you where they come from or what exactly they do. And this means that you can easily set the answer to be whatever would be appropriate for your game. Or even discover the answer through playing!
The book being full of prompts but largely devoid of answers is a very useful tool for the somewhat free form, improvisational style of the game because there will always be things to inspire you but you never need to worry and pausing the game to check what the official stance on something is.
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In general I think the sort of thing I have been talking about is something blades excels at: really lightweight elements that end up having significant impact. A final example of that is the trauma system, which is essentially two sentences long:
If you get too much stress you get a trauma ( one of: cold, haunted, obsessed, paranoid, reckless, soft, unstable, viscous). If you struggled with issues from your trauma this session, gain an xp.
And from that very simple mechanic flows characterisation, character development, and the players deliberately creating more problems for themselves!
Anyway, that’s what comes to mind at the moment. I’ll add more stuff if I think of it.
You should play Blades in the Dark, its very good.
I’ve seen some drawings of them in drag and I wanted to draw my own version Absolutely in love with how this came out 🤩 so fab And banana guns because why not😝
Görkem Şen is a Turkish musician who wanted to create the sounds of electronic music acoustically. His invention, the yaybahar, is a string instrument connected to drums via metal coils that creates a wide variety of otherworldly music.
