Category / RPG Design

by sunkenlibrary

Blades in the Dark – So edgy we put knives in the title

Old man yells at cloud time. Except the clouds are missing and everything’s dead and the last cities are protected by lightning barriers fueled by the blood of demonic whales. And you’re a gang of cutthroats looking to get as much coin as you can at the end of the world. You’ll probably wind up dead along the way, but hey that’s what happens when your life is

Blades in the Dark

Sounds pretty metal, right? Because of the blades? See what I did there? Unfortunately, Blades in the Dark is a brilliant RPG mired in a few (sadly fatal) flaws.

First the good: Blades is a study in focused design. It isn’t everything to everyone. No. It’s one very specific thing and if you don’t like that thing it will cut you. It’s peaky blinders in a mashup of Fallen London and Dishonored.

The setting is a rich tapestry of horrible people all being horrible to each other. It’s a pressure cooker of opposing factions. It’s rife with potential for drama, conflict, and adventure. Sorry, did I say adventure? Crime. I meant crime.

This focus is most of it’s brilliance. Every page of the rules feeds into telling this exact story. Do you want to play cutthroats in a dark enchanted London at the end of the world? This is the perfect game for that. However, it’s the perfect game ONLY for that. If you’re not looking to tell a bleak, ugly, and gritty tale about the slow decline of a gang of thugs as they try to better themselves through crime, you’re not looking to play Blades in the dark.

It is also, sadly, mired by one of the worst resolution mechanics I’ve seen in an RPG. Let’s break it down:

  • Dice pool – Cool, I’m with you.
  • Succeed on a 4, 5, or 6, but a 6 is a big success – Fine by me
  • You only ever need 1 success – Hey, this sounds pretty easy to read at the table!
  • Now let’s talk about your position and effect – My what now?
  • Are you in a Safe, Risky, or Desperate position? Please see literally every chapter of the rulebook for how this gets modified by like a dozen interconnected systems – Umm…
  • And your effect, is it limited, standard, or greater? Here’s an index of all the rules which can impact that. – Now, hold on…
  • Oh and are you taking a Devil’s Bargain! They’re a great rule where you get an extra die by screwing yourself over. Not a success, mind you, just a die. – Are we doing this with every roll?

Every action feels like taking a law exam. I loathe it. There’s too many knobs to turn. How big is your dice pool (there’s rules for that) and what’s your position (there’s rules for that), and your effect (check these other rules for how that gets impacted)…. Every. bloody. action. needs to be adjudicated like we’re negotiating a lease.

These mechanics slow the game to an absolute crawl as you try to adjudicate all the different elements of the dice pool and the potential outcomes. You don’t roll as often in Blades as you might in another RPG, but somehow it feels like half the game is taken up by these negotiations.

I think Harper (the game’s designer) backed himself into a corner on this. Harper wanted to simplify the resolution mechanic (an admirable goal!) but accidentally turned it into a convoluted mess as he added more and more factors which could impact dice pool size, Position, and Effect.

But hey, it’s all D6’s and the target number never changes!

The result is a massive tome (308 PAGES of rules and lore) that has magically gained a reputation as a “simple” RPG. Blades is an incredibly clean RPG, but it’s not a simple one. All the rules feed into each other, the subsystems all click, and that tickles the brains of a certain category of RPG fan. They conflate that synergy with simplicity. They might call it “elegant”. I wouldn’t, but I get where they’re coming from.

At the end of the day, the thing that ultimately turned me away from Blades in the Dark is the story it wants to tell. Blades isn’t a hopeful game. It’s not a game about beating the odds or carving out some kindness from an uncaring world. It’s a game where you “drive your character like a stolen car”. The goal is to get into a spectacular wreck so you can watch the flames.

Some folks find that fun. Me? I prefer a bit more escapism in my games. “Try all you want, the system is going to grind you down” is a bit too real for my tastes.

by sunkenlibrary

What turns me away from a new RPG?

A few things:

  • Generic setting or no setting – I already have enough game engines. I don’t need another “universal” ruleset that isn’t really universal, and I don’ t need another directionless “Fantasy” setting with no real hook to it.
  • AI Art/Text – Nope. I’m not paying you to write prompts for a theft engine.
  • Not escapist enough – I have immense respect for various PbtA flavors (Masks, Monsterhearts, etc.) that want to examine deep relationships… I’m also tired from a long day at work and want to blow something up or punch a fascist in the nose. The moral dilemmas I want from a Superhero game are how to avoid collateral damage, not whether or not Sempai will ever notice me.
  • Our 5E is different! – If I want to play superheroic high fantasy skirmish, I’ll play 5E. If you want to sell me on generic fantasy settings/systems, you need to get far enough away from 5E to actually be doing your own thing.
  • Too much crunch – Sorry, but that ship has sailed. I already have too much DnD floating around my skull. You’ve got to build something simpler and cleaner if you want my attention. I’m too busy to memorize 100+ pages of new rules.
  • High Fatality – Both highly-fatal OSR games, and anything remotely “call-of-X”. I like some danger in my games, but PCs dropping like flies isn’t fun for me.
  • Overly opinionated design – “We have found the Only Correct Way To Play RPGs and will now save you from all the things you’ve been doing wrong!” Yeeeah, no. I’m looking at you, Dungeon World. You and your friend Blades in the Dark can go find another table.
  • Grimdark – “This is a world where only the STRONG and VICIOUS survive.” Cool. Glad that’s fun for you. Me? I’ve got zero interest in sociopathy simulators.

So what constitutes a good game then, since I seem to hate so much stuff?

  • An interesting setting or premise – Settings like Spelljammer, Numenera, UVG, or Vaults of Vaarn are very much my jam. Often I have to swap out the ruleset to get something playable though.
  • Good play-at-the-table support – Can I picture actually USING your content? Hot Springs Island, Trilemma Adventures, Gardens of Ynn.
  • Clean (or at least interesting) rules – A bunch of PbtA stuff, Knave, Crown and Skull, big swaths of the OSR (tempered heavily by my gripes above).