#but i enjoyed it more than I enjoyed base BitD

[corvidcall]

i know this is not the primary thrust of your gist but (and i say this as an ardent Blades in the Dark enjoyer) FUUUUUUUCK are the Blades harm rules punishing and they are the first to get modified in every other FITD i've seen and i don't think John Harper realizes that Doskvol needs difficulty sliders. then again he also doesn't realize that Kickstarter backers need promised rewards so :/

I enjoy a lot of the mechanics of BitD, and I love the setting and the general vibe but its just waaaaaay to punishing for me to actually really get into. I think I've only played it twice (in two separate one shots) and it just... it Feels Bad to play, for me. There are people who enjoy failure in games, and I really am not one of them. The fact that it's so hard to succeed in BitD really makes me feel like... you know, why even bother playing? The mechanics of this game make me feel bad because I never seem able to do any of the things I feel my character ought to be able to do. Maybe instead of constantly failing, I could just... go home and take a nap instead of playing a game. At least then I wouldn't feel so embarrassed by how little I could accomplish, and I wouldn't feel like I was constantly being punished for daring to try.

And imo if your game makes me feel like that, there's something wrong! At least for me, it means it's not gonna be a game I go back to. Had a similar problem when a guy I knew tricked me into playing Mage: The Awakening. Couldn't make hide nor hair of it and it just made me feel bad and stupid every time I tried to do anything.

[thydungeongal]

Do you have any game recs for people who mostly play/run rules light systems? I mostly stick to one page games and PbtA stuff because it’s a lot more intuitive to me than crunchier systems but there are some more complex games that I want to learn. It’s not that I don’t *enjoy* crunch necessarily, it’s that there’s a much steeper learning curve and they can be intimidating. Are there any systems that are fairly crunchy but still intuitive for people coming from a "fiction first" perspective?

Coming from a PbtA background I think Blades in the Dark is a good upgrade in terms of crunch but that still has a lot of the same practices as PbtA games (owing to the fact that BitD does trace its lineage back to PbtA). The principles are the same but there are a lot more moving parts.

Ironsworn is another good one, as it's a game very heavily based on the same principles as PbtA games and has a lot of the same structure, but again has a lot more moving parts. It's also free! So that's cool.

I do feel the need to hype up The Shadow of Yesterday again. It's one of those early RPGs that came out of the indie RPG design community known as The Forge, but its design still inspires games to this day. Its text is also available for free online. In many ways it feels like a predecessor to many of the ideas that have since become normalized in indie RPG design. It's still extremely playable and still has a lot of interesting insights to offer to people playing and running games, wherever your tastes may lie.