#bitd*

[jackfuckingtwist]

— Look, the metal monstrosity that towers before you is not the product of a healthy mind.

[prokopetz]

I broadly disagree with the criticism that Blades in the Dark's resource economy is busted, but I recognise that it's assuming a very particular relationship between players and player characters. While it's not quite on par with the OSR "funnel" model where the vast majority of player characters won't survive their first session, it's very consciously aimed at producing campaigns where, if you insist on playing as the same character in every heist, that character is going to have an average lifespan of three or four heists before they max out their trauma or eat lethal harm. This is intentional: the text points out that you might want to let your character sit an adventure out now and then if you want them to have any sort of life expectancy, and some of the fallout results between scores explicitly take your character out of play for a session and tell you to play as somebody else in the meantime. There's a reason that character creation choices are so minimal, and advancement ("levelling up") so strikingly rapid.

Where the trouble arises is that I see a lot of Blades in the Dark hacks that don't have this assumption, and position themselves as games where you're expected to play as the same character for the full length of a long-running campaign, but they keep the base game's resource loop more or less intact. Like, that's not necessarily a mistake if your explicit intention is for two thirds of the initial cast to be dead by the end of the first arc, but it's my experience that this is not often the case. I feel like a lot of people are just not doing the math – then other people are coming along and playing these hacks, correctly identifying that the resource loop of the game they are playing is not congruent with how that game's text claims its campaign play is supposed to work, and concluding that Blades in the Dark is a bad system.

[spearxwind]

FINALLY SOME GOOD FUCKING ADS

[woahcoolbear]

npcs from my blades in the dark campaign (that i never stop thinking about)

[dailyadventureprompts]

So lately I've been running games that give players a lot of power when it comes to world building, encouraging them to make up facts about the world or npcs whole cloth as a regular part of play. Thing is, I play with a good number of people who don't consider themselves storytellers and tend to be quite intimidated by the idea of improv.

Some people (like myself and a few others I know) are endless fonts of ideas, eager to scribble in the margins of someone else's work, but for other folks it can be a real challenge to come up with things on the spot or work up the confidence required to be that kind of collaberator. As such, I've been working on techniques to help my more reticent players get accustomed to their own creative agency:

Give them a Scaffold: Often it's as simple as giving players an emotion they can tap into along with the prompt to make something up, whether it be funny or nostalgic or gross. I can say " This person who you need to get past to talk to your contact is annoying and doesn't want to let you through. What's pissing you off about them?" or " we open the sarcophagus looking for the amulet and we find something awful inside, what is it?" and the player will add the requisite detail with something they find relevant or horrifying. BOOM, instant engagement. Other times I'll have them describe something from their own past or a work of fiction they like, which most people can recall details about just fine when they'd struggle with making something "new".

Give them Homework: Making up stuff on the spot is HARD, so give them time to work on it ahead of time. Say I was prepping an adventure that happened at a mall, I might ask my players to make up 5 stores or NPCs each and give them a little ingame reward for posting them in the groupchat. Things like this can especially help if you're prepping an adventure in a region/town that's more focused on exploration and so requires more material than average.

[valtharr]

In the last few days, I've now had two run-ins with people on this site regarding the idea of a TTRPG's mechanics and rules impacting the roleplay aspect of said game. And from what I can tell, these people - and people like them - have the whole concept backwards.

I think people who only ever played D&D and games like it, people who never played a Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark system, or any other system with narratively-minded mechanics, are under one false impression:

Mechanics exist to restrict.

Seeing how these people argue, what exactly they say, how they reason why "mechanics shouldn't get in the way of roleplaying," that seems to be their core idea: Rules and mechanics are necessary evils that exist solely to "balance" the game by restricting the things both players and GMs can do. The only reasons why someone would want to use mechanics in their RPG is to keep it from devolving into

"I shot you, you're dead!" "No, I'm wearing bulletproof armor!" "I didn't shoot bullets, I shot a laser!" "Well, the armor's also laserproof!" "Nuh-uh, my lasers are so hot that they melt any armor!" "My armor's a material that can't melt!" And so on. Because we have rules, the players can't just say "we beat this challenge", and neither can the GM say "you haven't beaten this challenge." Because the rules are clear, the rules are obvious, the rules tell you what you can and can't do, and that's it.

So obviously, when the idea of mechanics directly interacting with the roleplay - generally seen as the most free and creative part of a TTRPG - seems at best counterintuitive, at worst absolutely wrong. Hearing this idea, people might be inclined to think of a player saying "I'm gonna do X", just for the evil, restrictive mechanics to come in and say "no, you can't just do X! you first have to roll a Do X check! But you also did Y earlier, so you have to roll the Did Y Penalty Die, and if that one comes up higher than your Do X die, you have to look at this table and roll for your Doing X If You Previously Did Y Penalty! But, if you roll double on that roll..."

But like... that's not how it works. Roleplay-oriented mechanics don't exist to restrict people from roleplaying, they're there to encourage people to roleplay!

Let's go with a really good example for this: The flashback mechanic from Blades in the Dark (and games based on Blades in the Dark).

In BitD, you can declare a flashback to an earlier point in time. Could be five minutes ago, could be fifty years ago, doesn't matter. You declare a flashback, you describe the scene, you take some stress (the equivalent of damage) and now you have some kind of edge in the present, justified by what happened in the flashback. For example, in the Steeplechase campaign of the Adventure Zone podcast, there was a scene where the PCs confronted a character who ended up making a scandalous confession. One of the players declared a flashback, establishing that, just before they walked in, his character had pressed the record button on a portable recording device hidden in his inner coat pocket. Boom, now they have a recording of the confession.

How many times have you done something like this in a D&D game? How many times did your DM let you do this? I think for most players, that number is pretty low. And for two reasons:

The first, admittedly, has to do with restrictions. If you could just declare that your character actually stole the key to the door you're in front of in an off-screen moment earlier, that would be pretty bonkers. Insanely powerful. But, because BitD has specific mechanics built around flashbacks, there are restrictions to it, so it's a viable option without being overpowered.

But secondly, I think the far more prevalent reason as to why players in games without bespoke flashback mechanics don't utilize flashbacks is because they simply don't even think of them as an option. And that's another thing mechanics can do: Tell players what they (or their characters) can do!

Like, it's generally accepted that the players only control what their characters do, and the GM has power over everything else. That's a base assumption, so most players would never think of establishing facts about the larger world, the NPCs, etc. But there are games that have explicit mechanics for that!

Let's take Fabula Ultima as another example: In that game, you can get "Fabula Points" through certain means. They can then spend those points to do a variety of things. What's literally the first thing on the list of things Fabula Points let you do? "Alter the Story - Alter an existing element or add a new element." I've heard people use this to decide that one of the enemies their group was just about to fight was actually their character's relative, which allowed them to resolve the situation peacefully. I again ask: In your average D&D session, how likely is it that a player would just say "that guy is my cousin"? And if they did, how likely is it that the GM accepts that? But thanks to the Fabula Point mechanic making this an explicit option, thanks to rules explicitly saying "players are allowed to do this", it opens up so many possibilities for story developments that simply would not happen if the GM was the only one allowed to do these things.

And it's only possible because the mechanics say it is. Just how your wizard casting fireball is only possible because the mechanics say it is.

[maahriarts]

Hark! A magpie

[shamerli]

Some sketches from the last campaign on "Blades in the dark" this bunch of scum have arranged the apocalypse 🚬

[roseandmaple]

uhhhhh writing for DEH again so,,, here’s Them

[bfleuter]

Roach got a new gun.

It was originally a rivet gun meant for the outer-hull of space-stations.

[beachlifelez]

Back in the day, Barb's house was the place where the neighborhood housewives could "unwind", as it were. Her husband traveled a lot, and she had discovered a few friends who had experienced F/F relationships previously in high school or college and didn't want that piece of their lives to die.

Today, Barb emerged from her bedroom, naked. Neighbors Trudy and Ellen were in the living room, enjoying each other's company. Not naked yet, but on their way.

"Hey girls, I thought I hear someone come in while I was back there. I have an exciting announcement to make."

"What?'

"Tell us, Barb."

"Well, I'm happy to say we have a new member of our little club.”

“What?”

“Who? When did that happen?”

“Well, girls, it’s still happening, actually. Jeannie Graham is in my bedroom, sleeping off the two orgasms I just gave her."

"What?"

"Really? Jeannie? I never would have guessed."

"Yes, Trudy, I've been watching her for some weeks now, trying to assess if she was 'club material'. It turns out, she's had feelings for several girls and women over the year, but never had the opportunity to express that to them. She did today, though."

"How well did she 'express that' with you, Barb?"

"Well, Ellen, let's just say she now knows how to please a woman, and she's going to want to do it a lot more in the future."

"That's just great to know. She's such a little hottie. I can't wait."

"If you want to stick around, you might not have to wait for long. No time like the present to fully welcome her, wouldn't you say? Let me go wake her. This is going to be an afternoon for her to remember."

[wheelie-butch]

Could anyone recommend a pre written blades in the dark oneshot (like single session of a 3 ish hours) adventure maybe on itchio or something like that? I'm going to try gming for the first time possibly and I'd like to have something to work from

[barilleon]

Rockets Underground - A Pokemon Fan RPG

This is a framework for Blades in the Dark where you play Team Rocket Grunts in Goldenrod City. If you want something sillier and simpler than vanilla blades, and also Pokemon, check it out!

This is a culmination of many, many years of fanfiction, role play, game design, and just generally being a Pokemaniac for most of my life. I hope people have fun with it -- because I sure did!

Read It Here!

Rockets Underground has one of my favorite ttrpg rules I've ever written from a simulationist perspective. The Battle Roll is how you use your (weak, standard-issue) Pokemon to fight. It's a less forgiving Fortune Roll:

Playtesters either got it or they didn't. Some were like, "I want to be able to actually use my Pokemon battle!" And I was like, "That's not this game! Have you ever seen a grunt win a pokemon battle before?"

If you play it, please tell me how it went!!

[cardinailed0]

just posting more stuff i have lying around; this is a slight redesign of my old blades in the dark character and i think this looks so fucking poggers

for reference, previous designs under the cut

[dailyadventureprompts]

Have to say, some of the Deep Cuts rules adjustments for BitD are soooooo sexy because they turn multiple problems into a single solution that also reinforces the game loop.

Yeknow what everyone hates? Negative status effects that not only debuff your character but also force you to do bookkeeping about it.

Yeknow what everyone loves? Getting XP

What does BitD do? Makes it so that a player gets XP every time an injury is "invoked" to debuff their character. This pulls double duty where the player is EXCITED to keep track of their injuries (or even to acquire them) because it means a steady supply of character enriching power.

Building on this, if your character ALMOST died, you get a scar (Missing eye, shaking hands, flashbacks) which acts as an additional PERMANENT XP trigger every time it's invoked by the player. It really lends to the "drive it like you stole it" way of playing a character and teetering along the knife's edge (get it, because it's blades in the dark) the way the game intends.

[bipolyjack]

shrike