Tag: Blades in the Dark

Some insight into FitD Action Roll difficulty

With Blades in the Dark and the other Forged in the Dark games being so much more straightforward and conventional looking than Apocalypse World, I often forget how its entire internal logic is still very difficult from traditional and neo-trad game systems. While reading through Scum and Villainy again in preparation to finally taking it out for a campaign, one peculiar thing I realized only on the third or fourth pass is that getting circumstantial advantages, like optimal equipment for the task or great numerical superiority, can only improve your Effect for the Action Roll, but not affect the odds whether the roll will actually be a success or a failure.

Which coming from a traditional approach to RPGs just feels somehow wrong. Stacking the odds of success and failure in your own favor is the main objective in the gameplay loop of most games. But here it’s very important to understand that PbtA games are  fundamentally different in what the action resolution mechanic is supposed to accomplish in the first place.

In classic and traditional games, an adventure consists of a number of opposing NPCs and obstacles that the GM has put between the players and their goal. The regular action is one PC facing an NPC or environmental obstacle, and making a roll whose odds are based on the PCs abilities and equipment compared against the NPCs abilities and equipment, or the obstacles static difficulty. If the roll is a success, the NPC or obstacle is either removed from the player’s path, or partial progress is made towards removing it. Sometimes it takes two or three successful rolls to drain the NPCs health to zero, but it’s the same idea.

PbtA games don’t do anything like that. In FitD games, the players initiate an adventure by deciding what they want to ultimately accomplish. And instead of the players controlling their characters to remove the obstacles in the path to their goal, the players and the GM are taking turns in taking control of a story about the characters. Apocalypse World tried to make this very explicit by calling everything that a player or GM does a Move. Unfortunately, the very peculiar presentation of the game left a lot of people very confused. Blades in the Dark tried to make the text of the rules more accessible by using more conventional language, but for me personally, that makes it much easier to forget how fundamentally different the gameplay structure of the game is.

An FitD adventure starts by the GM describing the first obstacle that the PCs encounter on their way to their goal. Then one player takes control of the story by describing how one of the PCs is removing that obstacle. If the roll is a success (one 6) or critical success (two or more 6s), then the PCs removed that obstacle. If the roll is a partial success (4-5) or a failure (1-3), then the GM takes control of the story by introducing a new obstacle. Any scene in a PbtA game consists of the players removing obstacles from the scene, and the GM adding new obstacles to the scene. This loop continues until the players have removed all the obstacles. Then they move on to the next scene, and the whole process repeats again. Like a GM in a classic dungeon crawling adventure deciding on the number of rooms and floors in a dungeon, it is up to the GM in a PbtA game to decide how many scenes the players will have to go through before they reach the goal of their adventure. This is always an arbitrary judgement call by the GM, regardless of the style of game structure, based on a personal estimate of what would make a fun adventure for the players.

And this loop of removing obstacles from a scene and adding new ones to a scene, is the reason why the PCs having advantages or disadvantages in any given situation does not affect the probability whether any given Action Roll will be a success, partial success, or failure. If the players had the ability to stack up really big dice pools for any of their rolls, they would just keep getting successes and critical successes all the time, and most scenes would be resolved in just one or two action rolls. The whole point of the PbtA games is to enjoy the wild rollercoaster of things constantly escalating into more and more chaos and panic. We want scenes to go on for a good while, but we also don’t want them to drag on forever. That’s why the ways in which dies can be added or removed from the dice pool are very limited.

But players do still have other ways to stack things in their favor by establishing and setting up situational advantages for themselves. Trading Position for Effect becomes a critical mechanic here. Somehow establishing an advantage that give the PC Great Effect, or at least going from Lesser Effect to Standard Effect for the planned action is not that hard. That’s exactly what Flashbacks are for, and I think generally most GMs are quite generous when players want to have some kind of not yet mentioned environment feature that would help them. Or you can just Push Yourself to get +1 Effect for 2 Stress. (Though then you can’t push yourself to also get +1 die to the roll.) By Trading Effect for Position, players have the option to improve the position for their action to Risky or even Controlled. And in a Controlled Position, a failed action roll can’t really do any further harm. Even on a failure, you can always just accept that it didn’t work, and no new problems are added to the scene. If things are going terrible and you are getting tired and frustrated with the scene and your character is drowning in Stress and Harm, get that increased Effect and trade it for Controlled Position. Otherwise, enjoy the wild ride.

Forged in the Dark

Looking over my older posts, I’ve started talking about Barbarians of Lemuria some five years back, and been thinking about how to combine elements of it with aspects of Apocalypse World basically since I first learned about that game two years ago. Both are pretty rules light, and while they are both presented with quite distinctive settings, the mechanics have always struck me as having great potential for a very wide range of campaigns. They are both rules systems that have mechanics to figure out the outcome of uncertain situations when the PCs try to do something in the face of opposition from other people or the environment, which they do quick and painlessly and then are out of your hair to let you go on with the developing story. I really like this approach to what an RPG should be and do.

Some kind of hybrid of the two games has long been a vision of an ideal game for me, but since I have little personal experience with both BoL and AW, cobbling something entirely new together never seemed like a real option. And the way my groups form, getting a number of players together to play the weird homebrew system of a GM they never played with never really had any promise of success.

When I was looking into fantasy games based on the mechanics of Apocalypse World, there were really only two that have any popular presence. The first of course being Dungeon World, which I found to be very disappointing as it is an attempt to recreate the experience of D&D adventures with different dice rolling mechanics instead of doing anything with the very different approach to what a campaign can be that is promised by the Apocalypse World rules. And the other one is Blades in the Dark.

This game had been recommended to me by some people in the past and I had taken a look at it some time back. I don’t recall what I had been looking for back then when I took a peek, but I remember that I mostly looked at the setting, which is very post-apocalyptic Victorian steampunk. It’s basically Thief and Dishonored the Roleplaying Game, which really is cool, but at the time made me write it off as not being useful to whatever I was trying to do. I also remember seeing it has only three attributes, which made me go eww… Which turns out was a real shame.

Because looking at the system again from a mechanics focused perspective, it really strikes me as the closest thing I have yet encountered to that idealized blend of Barbarians of Lemuria and Apocalypse World, I had been dreaming of. It’s of course not exactly the game that I want to run for my next Kaendor campaign. There are all kinds of peripheral rules in this game about the gang of the PC’s increasing their reputation in the underworld, fighting for turf, and dealing with the police putting pressure on their activities, which really wouldn’t have any place in my campaign. But the core mechanics for making characters, character advancement, task resolution, and character durability is really solid.

While it’s not necessarily being more compact than Apocalypse World, it is much more straightforward and easy to grasp, even though at first there seem to be a lot of new mechanical concepts and principles you have to dig through. And Blades in the Dark really is quite a big book that doesn’t scream rules light. But I tried to write down the basics of character creation and action resolution as a simple introductory handout for new players, and I managed to get it all on only two and a half pages. (Excluding the rules for running a criminal empire.) That’s really quite impressive.

The Basics of the System

Characters in Blades in the Dark are really very simple. They mostly come down to 12 action ratings and 3 derived attributes. But these are not like attributes and skills like you see them in most other skill based systems, where you add your attribute scores to your skill rank to determine what dice you roll. Instead you have twelve basic actions, which in other games would be skills, or moves in Apocalypse World. Anything that PCs might do that has a chance of failure and negative consequences falls under one of these twelve actions.

  • Attune (do magic stuff)
  • Command (order people around)
  • Consort (chat with people)
  • Finesse (climbing, jumping, picking pockets, …)
  • Hunt (tracking, trapping, …)
  • Prowl (sneaking)
  • Skirmish (fighting)
  • Study (inspect or research a thing or person)
  • Survey (observe people or places)
  • Sway (convince people of things)
  • Tinker (work with machines)
  • Wreck (break stuff)

These actions are not methods or techniques, but arranged by outcomes. Skirmish is the action for the vast majority of ways that you can fight, regardless of weapons, armor, fighting style, and so on. Sway can be debating, deceiving, seducing, pleading, or whatever else you can think of to make people change their mind with your words. I can’t really think of anything to do with Prowl other than sneaking past people without being detected, and Study and Survey do overlap quite a bit, but I can’t really think of anything that might come up in a game where you need any other category of action as a player. Characters have a rating for all these actions that goes from 0 to 4.

What I really like is that there are twelve equal actions and only one of them is combat. Hunt and Wreck can also be used for violence in some situation, but that’s not their primary purpose. Treating fighting as equal to all other actions is something that really appeals to me and makes it a very inviting system for games where fighting is not the main event of adventures.

Unlike Apocalypse World, where you always roll 2d6 and add your attribute score to the result, Blades in the Dark has you roll a number of d6 that is equal to your rating, plus and minus additional dice for various circumstances. (If you end up with less than 1 die, you roll 2 dice and take the lower one.) The die with the highest number is your result for the roll, with a 6 being a success, a 4 or 5 giving you a success but also negative consequences, and 1 to 3 being only the bad consequences with no success. I’m not generally a fan of dice pools, but picking the highest number out of only up to 6 or 7 dice at the most with no additions is really quick and painless.

While there are attributes, they are not very similar to attributes in other games. Instead the 12 action ratings are grouped into three groups of four, resulting in four Insight actions, four Prowess actions, and four Resolve actions. The attribute score is simply the number of actions for which you have a rating of 1 or higher, resulting in a score of 0 to 4, which increases over time as you put a first point into the skills of that group. Attributes are mostly used when you roll to reduce the severity of negative consequences from a failed or partially successful action roll, and for tracking which action ratings you can improve when you get XP.

Characters also start with 1 special ability selected from a long list of options, and probably gain a new one that can also be freely selected every 1 to 3 game sessions.

And that is mostly it. There are of course a lot more bells and whistles regarding items, wealth, the injury and stress mechanic, but attributes and special abilities are more or less all the character creation and character advancement for this game.

Action Resolution

Taking an action in Blades in the Dark work the following way.

  1. The player describes what his character is trying to do.
  2. The player declares which of his character’s action ratings he will use for the roll.
  3. The GM judges the positioning for the action, which is the potential severity of the consequences should the action roll fail or only be a partial success.
  4. The GM judges the effect if the roll will be a success. Based on the approach the player described, the GM decides if it should result in the ordinary outcome for such an action, or the result will be of limited or greater magnitude.
  5. The player can decide to push himself to get an extra die for the roll, and another player can decide to assist and also add an additional die.

Basically this come down to what happens in most games with a GM who isn’t a jerk. The player ask “Could it work if I…” and the GM replies “Yes, but the chance is…”. Then the player might take it and make the roll, but could also decide that he really wants a greater effect than the GM declared and change the action to something more daring that also results in a worse positioning by increasing the danger resulting from a failure. Or the other way around, the player might decide that the danger is too high and instead change the action to something with a better positioning and accepting a reduced effect.

To keep things simple, there are only three categories of position: Controlled, Risky, and Desperate. And only three categories of effect: Limited, standard, and greater. This is easy to follow without any math involved. Do you want risk high or low danger and do you want to go for high or low reward? It’s not always a simple trade-off. Sometimes things are so much in your favor that you only have the low risk of controlled positioning and the expectation of a greater effect as the outcome. Or things look extremely bleak and you can only expect a lesser effect even though the positioning is desperate.

But these things don’t come down to only luck. Players have quite a lot of room to control the damage a failed action roll leads to. At any time, a player can declare that the severity of an injury or complication resulting from a roll is reduced by one category. The GM can say “You fall from the roof and badly hurt your leg. Is it broken?” And the player can decide to reduce the damage and say “No, fortunately it just seems sprained.” You can always do this, but it comes at the expanse of added stress. And when a character reaches 10 stress during an adventure, the character has some kind of mental breakdown that takes him out of the adventure and leaves a permanent mark on his mind. You also gain stress when pushing yourself or assisting another character to add additional dice to an action roll. Stress can also result from exposure to the supernatural, just like it does in Darkest Dungeon. Injuries will heal, but damage to the mind sticks around. So you might not always want to reduce the severity of your injuries or complications.

Forged in the Dark

The really neat thing that I found out today is that there is an SRD for the system that contains most of the rules that are not specific to the Duskwall setting of Blades in the Dark. It does not include the seven playbooks (character templates in PtBA games), but simply has all the special abilities put into a big single list from which GMs can put together their own lists for different character archetypes in their campaign. The SRD even has a template to make your own playbooks, and I think it has everything you need to fully recreate the ones from BitD. (Not sure what difference it makes, but there surely must be some copyright considerations behind this.) The only other thing from outside the setting chapter I’ve found to be not included are the four types of undead in Duskwall, but again the mechanics for making your own are there.

There also is of course a license to make your own stuff with the material from the SRD and using the Forged in the Dark label for it. The License is extremely generous and only requires you to include an attribution to John Harper and One Seven Design and not claim any official connection or endorsement by them. The Duskwall setting remains copyrighted, but everything in the SRD is fair game. And that’s all there is. Which I think is really cool.

Nothing set in stone yet, but right now I really want to give this a try for my next campaign. Aside from the criminal empire rules, this seems like a really well rounded system not just for fantasy but in general, and I think you could run a campaign even with just the basics. I can absolutely see myself making up some new rules for paranormal investigation, but I don’t think that’s even necessary to start a campaign. Really looking forward to trying this out.