#gm: blades in the dark

[dreaminthescreen]

local 14 year old runaway catboy knows nothing of the world’s terrors only songs about dick and balls

[iamthegm]

Why I Love XP in RPGs

Most anyone who has engaged with a tabletop RPG is familiar with the concept of earning experience points (XP) in order to mechanically improve your characters. Over time, I have really come to appreciate RPGs that use their XP system as a vehicle to encourage playing to the genre or kind of media that the RPG is trying to emulate. Conversely I’ve also grown frustrated with games that say they are about one thing, but only give XP for doing another. For instance, dndbeyond.com says that “In Dungeons & Dragons, the players form an adventuring party who explore fantasy worlds together, embark on epic quests, and level up.” However, in 5e Rules-As-Written you earn XP for “completing combat challenges” according to the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide. Do you see the dissonance there between what the game says it is about and what the players are actually rewarded for doing? Let me give you an example of a game that I think does XP well as a counterexample.  

For instance, the tabletop RPG Blades in the Dark advertises itself as being “A tabletop role-playing game about a crew of daring scoundrels seeking their fortunes on the haunted streets of an industrial-fantasy city. There are heists, chases, occult mysteries, dangerous bargains, bloody skirmishes, and above all, riches to be had– if you’re bold enough to seize them.” When we check out the XP system for the game, we see that type of play supported. In Blades you earn XP as a character for doing a couple different things:

You get to mark XP if you expressed your beliefs, drives, heritage, or background: So we know you earn XP for playing your character in a way that shows these things off- so Blades is a game about roleplaying characters who display these four characteristics regularly.

You get to mark XP if you struggled with issues from your vice or trauma: So, now we know that if your character’s personality flaws (which are mechanical things in Blades) cause them trouble, they get to mark XP. That seems right for a crew of scoundrels!

Additionally in Blades, you get XP for a character specific XP trigger. For instance the Cutter, a character class focused on being a dangerous and intimidating fighter:

You earn XP when you address a challenge with violence or coercion: I think that pretty immediately tells you how the Cutter is supposed to be played! You are playing a character that is about using violence and coercion to get what they want.

In Blades, your crew also earns XP for doing things like contending with other gangs that eclipse their own, bolstering your crew’s reputation, or for displaying the inner nature or conflict inherent to your crew. All things we would want to see in a game about playing criminals!

By the same token as my frustration with systems that say they are about one thing and then mechanically reward another, I think milestone XP or XP for showing up is a missed opportunity. Milestone XP rewards you generally for completing significant narrative goals the GM has set out for you. Now this does provide an incentive, but, in my opinion, not a significantly clarified one. Instead of players knowing exactly how they ought to be playing and what actions they can take to earn XP, they instead are told that they will earn XP at the GM’s discretion, and if they comply with the narrative the GM has for them. Their only directive is to guess what the GM wants them to do. In the same way, getting XP for showing up provides a behavioral incentive, but it's rewarded at the beginning of a session rather than the end. By showing up for a session, a player has fulfilled what they needed to do to earn XP, and are left unclear of what they ought to actually be doing in session.

So, certain RPGs use XP to enhance the themes and narratives of the game at the table. Using milestone XP is a missed opportunity. How can I better implement an XP system at my own table? How can I decide what XP system to use in my game? I’ll give an example of my own thought process below.

For Example:

I am currently running a game of 2nd edition Stars Without Number, an old school renaissance (OSR) sci-fi hex crawl sandbox RPG designed to hearken back to the design principles of basic and advanced Dungeons and Dragons. This means that characters tend to be vulnerable even at high levels, that it is often better to find a way to make a combat encounter lopsided in your favor rather than fight fairly, and that the ruleset is more streamlined than later editions of D&D.

Generally, when I am beginning to run a game I think about the themes I want my players to engage with before I start creating the world (at least in a game where it is expected that the GM will do most, if not all of, the world building). I settled pretty early on wanting to engage with the ways in which empires use capitalism, monetary gain, and comfort to keep people compliant with their regime.

So then, I started to think about the kinds of situations I wanted to put my players in so that they would engage those themes. I knew I wanted to put the pressure on right away for them to start earning money and get them in the loop of taking jobs without really asking a ton of questions. I also knew, after talking to my players, that they were interested in playing freelancers, folks who own a ship and operate in a sort of gray area legally, taking on jobs on both sides of the law. Additionally, I wanted players to come to a point where they realized resisting those in powers is hard. I had a pretty good inkling that at some point my players would eventually want to be Big Damn Heroes, and overthrow the empire that would be aggressively expanding in universe. My goal, when it comes to that decision, is to say “Sure, you can run a resistance, but, uh, where’s the money coming in from?” I wanted them to engage with the concerns that come from opting out of the most prominent economic model. I wanted the crew to have to decide between their morals, and their own prosperity and growth.

This already gave me a ton to work with, and so I started thinking about our XP system, and how to encourage players to play folks who were caught up in needing to make cash quickly, and didn’t have the luxury to ask too many questions about the ethics of what they were doing. It is here I decided to lean on an OSR standby, using currency as XP. Using currency as XP means that roughly each unit of currency (gold in DND terms) is equivalent to one XP. In my Stars Without Number game, the book suggests that for a player to reach level 2 they would need to earn 5,000 credits, and then double it to 10,000 to reach level 3, and so one and so forth. I also really turned the screws by having them owe a monthly debt to the manufacturer of their ship, that if they do not pay there will be consequences.

I believe, by using currency as XP, I have incentivized my players to a certain mode of play, and it has borne results! Time and again, the crew of our little freelancer ship has decided to do unethical job after unethical job to earn credits quickly, either because a bill was breathing down their back or because they thought they might finally earn a little savings towards their next level. They’ve taken a big contract from the empire faction because they have learned it is the easiest way to make money. They’re just now starting to contend with the idea that they want to start a resistance to the empire faction, and they will really wrestle with how they will continue to survive without the guarantee of an imperial contract. I think this gets at my goal to show that compliance with unethical systems of power is often easier than resistance.

Conclusion:

XP is best used as a carrot to encourage certain modes of play. Making it clear to your players what they will earn XP for doing will help them understand what kind of game they are playing. You can use XP to underscore the themes of your game in a way that ties the narrative and mechanics more tightly together, producing a more well-designed experience.

Some questions to think about:

What kind of game is the current XP system I am using encouraging?

How can mechanics encourage narrative?

How can I begin to read games to see if they are designed to do the things they advertise themselves doing?

[amp-phrog]

I would like to make it my mission to GM table top games that are explicitly *not* dnd. No hate to dnd but I wanna be the guy that pulls my friends into uncharted waters like some f*cked up table top siren

[localghostgorl]

I recently compiled all the RPGs that I have on my computer into a google drive. If anyone wants to peruse, here's the link! I have a bunch of the D&D 5e stuff, as well as a few other systems (including but not limited to Blades in the Dark, 13th Age, and Vampire: The Masquarade 5e). Go forth and have fun :)

[bellshazes]

could i ask the reasoning behind your dungeons and dragons dislike? is it with the format of the game, the general playerbase, the material, or something else? i dont play and i always think im missing context when i read your posts, but appreciate them nonetheless

haha so for specific context it's probably important to disclosed my first ever job was teaching board games & i did that for ten summers from age 14-24ish. so i have a particular exposure to/long-running beef with certain parts/aspects of the games industries which are both serious & well informed but also kind of inside jokes to some degree with my fellow GMing friends.

Wizards of the Coast have so many problems i don't know where to start, but the recent licensing changes suck for all the poor folk who have cared enough to try and fix their crappy system, a lot of the lore is racist, and I'm friends with MTG fans but not qualified to start explaining what the fuck is up with all that. but even disergarding that, D&D itself has gone through so many evolutions thru its editions that even hardcore fans will disupte which ones are good and which ones are total shit. (the intersection of "catholic priests who are intense about church canon" and "3.5E diehards" is really funny for instance, in my overly specific experience.)

but honestly my beef is that in the wake of the truly absurd and evil fearmongering of the stanic panic, generations of nerds have clung to D&D as the end all be all of TTRPGs to the point that total newbies are told it's a good entry point for the medium which ???? it's not ????

the only reason D&D is a good "first ttrpg" is because it's the most likely be something people you know already know how to play. it is a self-sustaining monster that gobbles up impressionable people curious about this weird, kind of cool hobby. and watching people homebrew D&D to be the game they wish they were playing in total opposition to the core, fundamental design principles of the system because they have been told it can be anything they imagine.... even when the mechanics hinder that. D&D was a dungeon crawler that took over the world, it's a combat game, it can be PLAYED narratively-focused but if that's what you want, you can do so much better i prommy. i think modding games (video or ttrpg) can be its own joy, but D&D isn't even particularly friendly to it without turning it into a different thing! & at that point, you're better served tweaking something else!

it is no individual person's fault. but please for the love of god play ltierally any other game: you can give your money to a passionate indie creator instead of WOTC, it will cost you less, you can work much less hard to get the gameplay you crave, there's something for everyone, there are less complex-to-start/explain systems, etc. noooooooo don't play d&d your so sexy lol <3 and here's beau @beeelderly's RPG training wheels doc for ideas on where to start!

[bloombeard]

The Bloom

I've been running a plague storyline in Blades in the Dark. 'The Bloom' manifests as flower petals growing out from around your neck, between your fingers and toes, armpits, between your legs etc. The petals multiply and multiply until you finally just... blow away. No body, no ghost, you just fall apart. Petals in the wind.

You know you're close to fully 'blooming' when the floral scent that's been all you can smell for that last few weeks changes to smelling like rotting meat.

Attune to the bloom and you might brush against a strange kind of consciousness. It's not so much a mind as it is a psychosis in isolation. A kind of memory-vacuum. If the player received consequences from their attune roll, they get this information at the cost of a trivial piece of their memory (like where they live, or their father's first name).

The Bloom eats memories.

[victorluvsalice]

AU Thursday: Valicer In The Dark -- Duskwall Slang

Since we did a VITD lookbook yesterday, I figured we might as well keep the train going today and talk a little bit about some of the worldbuilding I've done for the Valicer In The Dark version of Duskwall (the main setting of Blades In The Dark). Specifically, I've decided to share the short list of slang that I've come up with for people to use! Because that's always fun, right? :) The first entry on this list is taken from the book itself (page 42, specifically) and adapted a little bit, but all the rest are purely my own invention:

-->“Flashing a/their/your Coin” and variants – making an ostentatious display of wealth, to the disgust of everyone around them (the term "Coin" itself is in fact slang for a large sum of money, taken from the days when the Imperial treasury would actually mint large solid gold coins intended to cover major transactions; most people these days rely on small silver pieces called "slugs"). Example: “You spent all that money on THAT outfit? Really flashing your Coin, huh?”

-->“Moving to Six Towers” – indicates that the person said to be moving was previously rich and important, but has fallen on extremely hard times and is on the verge of ruin (referencing the fact that Six Towers USED to be one of the richest neighborhoods in the city, but has turned into a bit of a slum with most of the nobility previously living there moving into Brightstone). Example: “The Everglots’ leviathan ship hasn’t had a good haul in six months. Think they’ll be moving to Six Towers soon.”

-->“Scavenging in the Lost District” – indicates that the person said to be scavenging is taking an INCREDIBLE risk in the hopes of getting a high reward (due to the Lost District being an abandoned neighborhood outside the lightning barrier keeping the city safe and guarded by the Spirit Wardens...but also having many lost riches within its bounds). Example: “You want to rob Lord Mayor Powerwallet? Talk about scavenging in the Lost District!”

-->“Living Coin to Coin” – living paycheck to paycheck, as the average weekly wage in Duskwall is equivalent to a Coin’s worth of money. Example: “Poor old Tom – what with his sick mother and five children needing feeding, he’s living Coin to Coin.”

-->“Only good for mushrooms” – indicates that the thing being talked about is absolute shit. Example: “Don’t order the ‘special ale’ at the Withered Talon, it’s only good for mushrooms.”

-->“You want to call the crows?” – equivalent of “You want to get us killed?” in response to a risky course of action (referencing the Deathseeker crows that find corpses for the Spirit Wardens). Example: “You want to FIGHT Lord Mayor Powerwallet’s bodyguards? You want to call the crows?!”

-->“Barrowcleft approved” – indicates the item in question is homemade but of very high quality (Barrowcleft being a poor, rural neighborhood with one of the best, and fairest, markets in the city). Example – “You carved this yourself? Why, this is Barrowcleft approved work and no mistake!”

-->“Dust Day fare” – an extremely meager meal made from poor-quality ingredients, referencing the popular nickname for the fifth day of the week from Charhollow, which itself references the fact that poor people’s food stores are the thinnest on this day. Example – “Canal water soup with potato peelings. This is Dust Day fare, all right.”

-->“Crit Six/rolled a crit six” – means that something is exceedingly good, or that something that you have done has succeeded beyond your wildest dreams; references the most popular dice game in Duskwall, where rolling double sixes is an automatic win. Example – “I went to open the safe, and I rolled a crit six – the door practically came off in my hands!”

-->“Welcher” – a term for someone who hires a criminal or crew for a job, and then not only refuses to pay them, but actively tries to murder them (directly or otherwise) to avoid doing so. Only one of the highest leaders of the most well-known crews may declare someone a Welcher, and then only after receiving sufficient proof, as the term is a death sentence – the scoundrels of Duskwall do not take kindly to their clients trying to stiff them, in both senses of the word. Example: “All right, I’ve seen enough – I’m ready to declare that Lord E.A. Bethesda is a Welcher. Hope he’s prepared for every scoundrel in the city coming for his ass...”

Further updates to come if and when I think of more stuff! Which I probably will, as this is fun. :)

[whalesfall]

scratching out the loose beginnings of the game I'll be potentially be GM'ing which is excellent with no previous dnd experience (have no preconceived notions what the right way to do it is). it is also terrible (no idea what the right way to do it is).

[siili-studio]

He’s just a guy who’s super normal. No weird stuff here. Definitely not obsessed with his dead horse and maybe trying to bring her back. Just your good old buddy Carmine Stallione.

[deepspacehoney]

Added colors to my old Hound and her companion's ghost form~! Almost lost that sweet dog to cosmic horror eels in the first game QHQ

[trupowieszcz-moved]

back on my power metal bullshit

[twilightdomain]

does anyone know any GMless multiplayer ttrpgs that aren't by necessity one-session affairs? i've looked into Ironsworn a little bit but i would prefer to explore some other options and everything else i have found is just designed for a few hours of storytelling at most.

[iamthegm]

Rolling, Rolling, Rolling

Introduction:

The image of a die rolling is perhaps the most iconic aspect of tabletop games. We all live for that moment of uncertainty, right? Both players and GMs, if we didn’t we would just write books detailing our collaborative fiction. The dice roll introduces tension, it allows for us all to be surprised by what happens next. But I think we have all probably had moments where it feels like the dice roll didn’t actually matter, that the result had already been predetermined by our GM (or perhaps we were even the GM with the predetermined outcome). Maybe you’ve experienced the converse, where a dice roll mattered way more than you thought it would. Perhaps you thought the mob boss would be annoyed if you tried to haggle with him, but now there’s this failed Suasion roll and all of a sudden your character is dying from a knife in the gut. Perhaps you’ve run a game, and don’t quite feel like you have picked up when to call for a roll, maybe you feel like you’re engaging with uncertainty too much or too little. I think a near universal experience for GMs is having called for a roll, and gotten a failed check that ended in a narrative dead end. 

So, when and how do we introduce uncertainty via a roll of some kind, how do we interpret the results, and how do we minimize the chances of players reacting with “I didn’t know shit was going to go this bad!” when a roll goes sideways? Here’s what I (by way of much more intelligent game designers and GMs) think about when I call for a roll, the conversations that happen around a roll, and how we interpret the results. 

What’s in a Roll?

When do we know we’re heading towards rolling some die? I think it first starts with players declaring a goal they would like to achieve. The TTRPG Burning Wheel by Luke Crane calls this Intent. Intents are broad directions the players want their characters to move towards. They can be situation specific- something like “I want to kill the guard in front of me before his colleagues notice!” or they can be contextually broader like “We want to explore this dungeon!” The players take the fiction presented to them and decide what they want to work towards. When a GM is having trouble getting at player intent (because intent often gets confused with action) the GM might ask “What are you trying to get out of this?”

After intent is established, the next thing that needs to happen is for the GM to determine whether or not failure or danger introduced through this intent is narratively interesting. It's generally fairly obvious whether or not that is true- you think about something like “what happens if Maggie failed to kill this guard?” You might decide the guard lets out a shout and an alarm is raised, or that levies his pistol at Maggie. However, what do we do if there is nothing narratively interesting about having an obstacle in this situation? Burning Wheel gives us the phrase Say Yes, or Roll the Dice. Essentially, what Say Yes, or Roll the Dice means is that if failure is not narratively interesting, or the characters are assumed to be competent at the task, just let the players have the success. It's generally not narratively interesting for characters to fall down the stairs of the tavern. Don’t make them roll for it!

But what if failure is narratively interesting? I think we, as GMs, can fall back on my favorite question to ask players “What do you do?” Let’s look at it in context of the situation above. Matara, Maggie’s player, says “I want to kill this guard before the rest of his patrol finds out!” I, as the GM, have decided it's narratively interesting to introduce danger or a chance of failure. “Okay, you can definitely attempt that, but you hear the sounds of conversation getting closer. You think this guy's shift change is on the way. What do you want to do?”

Matara might decide that Maggie is going to sneak in with her knife and stab the guard. This is declaring what Burning Wheel calls a task. This is the other facet of what is needed to constitute a roll, alongside intent. Notice that I’m not calling for Maggie to sneak or to use her knife, Matara could have just as easily said that Maggie is running in screaming and brandishing her pistol. I’m countering what Blades in the Dark calls a bad habit which is calling for a specific action. I’m not telling Matara how Maggie needs to accomplish her intent, I’m letting her decide what Maggie’s task is. My role as the GM is to clearly illustrate to players how bad well or how bad the task could go, based on the roll, and I’m doing it before the die roll. In conversation this looks like saying “Okay, so Maggie is going to sneak up on this guard in order to kill him before his coworkers notice, right? Cool, if you succeed it's fairly simple, you’re able to kill him and stow his body away. If you fail however, you’re going to be caught by his shift change with his dead corpse cradled in your arms. Wanna go through with it?” Blades in the Dark calls this setting position and effect. I’m letting the player know what kind of complications they will run into if the roll goes poorly- the position, and what kind of success they can expect if the roll goes their way- the effect. The above quote is a good example of creating an opportunity for trouble through position, but what if I wanted instead to create a complication through effect? I might say something like “Yeah, you can definitely sneak up and stab this guy, but you can tell by the way he’s moving that this guard is wearing some pretty good armor under his uniform. You don’t think your knife is going to do it in one fell swoop. What do you want to do?”

When players are getting this kind of information and narrative feedback to what they are stating in their intent and task, they are encouraged to also negotiate their position and effect. Matara might decide that the risks aren’t worth the benefit. She might decide that Maggie is instead going to try and scale a wall to bypass the security checkpoint rather than confronting the guard directly. This gives us another opportunity to adjudicate a new intent and task with a different position and effect on the narrative. On the other hand, Maggie might decide that killing one guard isn’t enough, that instead she wants to throw caution to the wind and ambush both guards right as the shift change occurs to remove them both from play. GM and player get to negotiate position and effect based on the player’s intent and task. This conversation then gives the player the opportunity to refine their intent and task. All of this happens before the roll is made to make sure that everyone is operating on the same wavelength in regards to what is fictionally happening.

We’ve Rolled, Now What?

So, you’ve made the roll and now you need to interpret what the hell is going on. Let’s look at what we can do based on the kinds of results you can get! First though, no matter what, follow through on what you said would happen. Don’t cheap out on the players and not give them the success, or failure, that they earned. You all agreed to it while setting intent and task, position, and effect. On a success, the player gets the effect result you agreed on. Now, a common issue or trap for GMs to fall into is to keep players rolling again and again to accomplish the same task. This is really frustrating for players! Imagine, you’ve rolled a success and you expect to get the thing you want, but the GM decides that you actually only partially made it to your goal. Let’s look at this in context with the example I’ve been using. Maggie rolls to successfully sneak up on and stab the guard, but I as the GM decide that the guard isn’t actually quite dead yet and Maggie is going to have to keep stabbing him a few more times to put him down for good. That doesn’t feel quite fulfilling, right? Another helpful phrase from Burning Wheel is to Let It Ride. This means that the player’s success, or failure, carries through until the situation has changed significantly narratively. 

So, with that, let’s look at what to do on a failure. First, we follow through with what we said would happen. “Okay Maggie, you’ve stabbed the guard, but now his partner has happened upon you with the body. What do you want to do?” Failure, just like success, should move the fiction forward. Powered by the Apocalypse games generally refer to this concept as failing forward. A failure should never look like “You failed to pick the lock to the only door deeper into the dungeon.” It's narratively boring! Perhaps instead failure is “You picked the lock, but in doing so your lockpicking tools broke. What do you want to do now?” or “You’re working on picking the lock, and it's taking more time than you initially thought it would, and you can hear the steps of some horrible monster drawing closer. What do you do now?” My best piece of advice for dealing with failure is to not always make it about not giving the player/character what they want, but how to offer it up with a drawback, cost, or complication. 

Conclusion:

There is a lot of implicit conversation that happens around a die roll, that I think we’d be better served by making explicit. When we discuss how bad failure is, how good success looks like, and what a player really wants out of a situation, we end up creating a more clear fiction for everyone at the table. We bypass potentially negative surprises, and avoid outcomes that are not intentionally disappointing. 

Questions for Consideration:

How does the game I’m playing frame the conversations around a roll

How might failing forward create more fulfilling fiction?

Where am I currently not following through on what I’m telling players?

[wheelie-butch]

im going to get a good grade in player, im going to be the gm's specialist little guy of all time, he's going to love my helpful nature and knowledge of the rules and useful document outlining all my PC's related NPCs with info about them, where they are likely to be, and personality details for easy reference.

[commandercoriandersalamander]

[bloombeard]

Mystery Potion: Sorrow

A salty-sour vial of clear potion labeled only with the word "sorrow." A few minutes after drinking, you begin to cry. You can still move around and act while crying, but it gets harder every time you fail a check/suffer a consequence. While you are crying, nearby weak NPCs become supernaturally terrified, and tough NPCs are distracted. PCs must resist/roll saves or suffer from the same effects.

GMs: Don't tell your PCs what this potion does. They have to drink it to find out.