My Love-Hate Relationship with Blades in the Dark

For the last few months, I've been running a Blades in the Dark campaign for a couple of my friends from back home. We play probably every two or three weeks, so it's by far the most consistent game I've ever run (most of the games I've run didn't make it past the second session, and even my high school D&D campaign played, like, twice a year). It's also the first time I've run a game that ISN'T 5e (not counting one session of GURPS in 2017 and another GURPS mini-campaign that I ran in the last few weeks). 

So, I'm definitely still learning Blades and the way it runs best, but safe to say I already have Thoughts^TM. 

In case you haven't read or played it, crash course: Blades in the Dark is an RPG where the PCs are a crew of criminals pulling scores (whether those be robberies, assassinations, smugglings, or basically any other kind of illicit activity) and progressing through the ranks of the various factions in the city of Duskwall, a dirty whalepunk city where it's never quite daylight. If you've played the video game Dishonored, it's very much in that vein. The players each have their own characters (based on playbooks of different character archetypes: one's the muscle, one's the sneaky, one's the person who talks to people, etc.) but they also have a sort of shared character in the form of the crew, which has its own playbook, XP, and features.

In many ways, I worship this game. 

First off, I love the setting: the city where it's always dark, crawling with crime, powered by lightning distilled from whale blood. Fuck yeah, dude. This sort of pre-modern-urban-decay-with-magic is an aesthetic I've been drawn to for a long time (I'm reminded of a setting I made for a 5e one-shot in high school, based on turn-of-the-century New York: absolutely filthy, corrupt as all get-out, full of canals. Much like Duskwall!) It's also a gorgeous book in the way it discusses and introduces that setting. When we were getting warmed up for our first session, I was reading through the rulebook and texting my players every five minutes about cool shit that was in there (for example, every hour between dusk and dawn is given a name: the Hour of Honor, the Hour of Shadows, the Hour of Bells. That RULES.) My players have also really taken to the setting and often open up the rulebook of their own accord to read the descriptions and pick out cool neighborhoods or landmarks where they want to do crime (I've also incorporated my players into session planning in a way that's new for me: more on that later).

I'm also a big fan of the playbooks and a lot of that customizable player-facing stuff: the fact that you can choose where to put your XP after a job in order to level up one of your abilities or advance towards gaining new special abilities is great. Hey, speaking of which, the special abilities! These are so much more punchy and effective than having, say, a spell-casting system: every class feels like it can do equally cool game-changing shit, and you get to pick which abilities you have. As I understand it this is a cue taken from PBTA, and it's a great one: playbooks>classes, and I'm not ashamed to say it. 

There's also things I really love in the score mechanics: the flashback mechanic is thematically perfect and really, really fun at the table. By letting the players post-hoc say they already prepared for something, it gives my players a chance to decide things about the story and setting and, in that way, puts them on equal footing with me as the GM.  I also love the way this game handles "load": basically, before a score you decide how much stuff you're bringing in terms of total volume, but not what those things are. You get to decide and declare which specific things you brought as issues come up on the mission. It's fantastic. The load and flashback mechanics together contribute to the feeling that you're playing a highly competent character, and that's just satisfying.

One last thing I'm a big fan of: I think this is mostly a benefit of playing a game that ISN'T D&D, but I love how little it takes in this game to make my players go "Oh, shit." In D&D, if they're robbing a house or exploring a ruin and I say "it sounds like there's somebody here," that's barely even an issue. But in Blades, it's an immediate "fuck fuck we need to replan." And this isn't accomplished by making the characters super squishy: there's no HP, and I wouldn't say that Blades PCs are any easier to kill than D&D ones (although, considering it's a narrative vs. numerical comparison, it's kind of apples and oranges). I think Blades just creates this kind of investment through strong mechanics that serve to build an atmosphere. 

So that's what I like about Blades: the setting, the character building, and a lot of the core mechanics. But there's also something I find really grating.

At the very micro level, I do not like the resolution mechanic. I like rolling pools of dice, I like the "1-3 fail 4-5 partial success 6 full success" paradigm, and I like things like devil's bargains and spending stress to push yourself. What I struggle with is the very basic system of picking a position and effect for every. single. roll. I straight up just don't use this mechanic in my game (to the extent that while writing this up I had to grab my book and check what they were called). Maybe this is because I'm coming from a more numerical system, but I want to be able to tell my player "roll to skirmish" without first deciding how effective it might be if they succeed, how much risk they're opening themselves up to, and double-checking the table to see what are the possible consequences on a 4 for a risky situation versus a desperate situation. And wait, what defines the differences in position and effect? The GM's discretion (with the player's input). That's all. 

"Well, Gil," you might say, "if you don't like this mechanic, don't use it! That's what RPGs are all about: you can pick and choose." You're right, and as a matter of fact so far I have completely excised it from my campaign, but the issue is that if you ignore this bit then a lot of stuff in the game just... straight-up doesn't do anything. A great example is the "fine shadow cloak," an inventory item that the Lurk playbook gets access to. It's supposed to "improve your effect level" while sneaking around. Which, sure, it makes you sneakier, which I've decided to interpret as just "+1d to Prowl rolls when you have it on," and I can't help but think that's a much better way to handle it. This is the sort of game that insists that it's all about Building Stories, so it has almost a phobia of giving you numerical (i.e. dice) bonuses, especially in character abilities. And in fairness, I like this most of the time: I don't need to know the exact stats and exceptions to how a potion of silence works, I just smash it and it's quiet within x feet for y minutes. 

I think I just don't like that, rules as written, every single roll means the GM has to make multiple judgment calls. Maybe this just a reflection of my skill as a GM, but I feel that when I have to make that many judgment calls per game, they're going to become arbitrary and inconsistent, and there's nothing more frustrating from a player than feeling like their choices don't consistently map to outcomes in-game. 

This game feels like it wants to be crunchier than typical PbtA (and it is, and in a lot of ways I like) but is scared of having numbers in it instead of story. But there's no reason you can't have both: keep the failure/partial success/full success thing, just get rid of position and effect. Honestly, my gripe with the resolution mechanic covers solidly MOST of my issues with the game. It's the reason engagement rolls feel janky and weird, and why a lot of the downtime actions feel unsatisfying and vague (exception: Indulging Vice is a fantastic mechanic. It's also not afraid to have the players roll some dice and do subtraction. See, sometimes math isn't scary!) I also don't really care for the clocks mechanic, because it just doesn't feel like it adds anything to the sense of urgency that I can't transmit through pure storytelling.

If they published a Blades Lite or Blades 2e or something along those lines that either pared it down or made it crunchier, I think it would be my favorite system ever. I was hoping for something like this in Scum and Villainy, but that's really just a clone of Blades (a good one, but still, one that inherits all its problems). As it stands now, Blades in the Dark is still my favorite rulebook I've ever read, because it's built for playing the kinds of sessions and stories that very few other games are geared for. And it does that with some seriously innovative mechanics in an absolutely rad setting. And hey, I've played it and had a ton of fun. At the end of the day, isn't that what matters?

One last note: I really appreciate how Blades more or less enforces an episodic structure. It means that I can just plan one cool session at a time, and I feel more able to bring in my players' input. The planning of most sessions has started with me asking them "What kind of score would you find interesting?" and they invariably come up with cool shit, and then we flesh it out together, and then I take those ideas and turn it into something. When I used to run D&D I felt like I had to have everything figured out already and then offer it to my players fully-formed, otherwise I was a bad DM and it wasn't a "real game." I'm grateful to Blades in the Dark for teaching me that the players have a lot of good ideas, and giving them a say in what goes down doesn't somehow make all the fun disappear, because at the end of the day these games aren't competitive.