Score Zero for Blades in the Dark - Playing through character and crew creation

About a month ago I reported a specialized Blades in the Dark one-shot I ran, "Whose Score Is It Anyway?". It was an attempt to streamline the game to the minimal amount necessary to engage with its famous heist mechanic, the score. It went pretty well, but it felt a bit sparse without the connection to the whole cycle of the game - information gathering, engagement roll, score, consequences, downtime, back to information gathering - and how that feeds into the longer term character and crew incentives, as well as the developing relationships between the players` crew and other factions in Doskvol, the compressed, haunted industrial city in which the game is set.

For the session I ran this past weekend, I decided to start a more conventional game of Blades, including fully creating characters, choosing and customizing their crew, situating them in Doskvol, hopefully playing at least one score, and then using this setup for a sandbox open table with potentially rotating membership. It went pretty much as the book suggests, until we got to a significant step of crew creation: establishing hunting grounds. The premise is that Doskvol is lousy with gangs, and nowhere is entirely open for a new power to start out - so the crew is already stepping on somebody else's turf. This means that they have to decide what their relationship with the other crew will be, which mechanically translates to hostility if they pay nothing, neutrality if they pay half their starting fungible resources (Coin), and friendship if they pay in full, to show respect. Even once they've decided which faction in the chosen district would provide them with their initial hunting grounds, the players couldn't agree what they wanted the starting relationship to be. And then we realized that we could play through it. We could make all of the other decisions, and then just use the player and crew contacts to gather some information, and start a small score to establish the bad relationship with this faction, while hopefully having something over them.

That went well - neatly fitting within the timeframe remaining after the prolonged preparation phase - and it got me thinking. In the previous post, I complained about the difficulty of randomizing character creation in Blades, due to the awkward playbook and customization option counts. But maybe I had been looking at it wrong. Instead of randomizing these choices, maybe they can come out through play, just like the hunting grounds in our initial session zero? What if we had started the game with the aim of playing the story of the formation of the group? Each player would choose a character playbook, without filling out any of the mechanically significant details, or maybe even any of the details other than a name and alias. Similarly, they would choose a crew playbook, without specifying any of the details. Then, they would play through an establishment score or two. The gaps would be filled either by applying the usual progression rules, or through opportunistic decisions in play, much like the choice of flashbacks or specific items from loads in normal score play. Eventually, something approximating the orthodox starting crew would be formed, or rather, discovered.

This would be similar to the Dungeon Crawl Classics "funnel". In that old school Dungeons & Dragons-like game, each player generates three or four  zero-level characters - that is, what would in the original games would be extremely fragile non-player characters - and the group runs them all through a dungeon adventure or two, from which only a few of them are expected to come out alive. The idea is to maintain a sense of tension and lethality, while allowing players to continue play even when the ever-present potential for death and dismemberment becomes manifest. The players then choose the characters that have survived, and that they've liked the most, to gain their first level, and become viable player characters for future adventures.

Blades doesn't need the same immediate lethality of DCC, but the basic idea of discovering a character through play, having play suggest - or even dictate - character design options, and forming the group around a sense of camaraderie generated by overcoming challenges together, seems like it might lower the barrier to starting play, which I think is a problem with Blades and games similar to it.

This idea isn't entirely original, even in Blades: if you watch the very engaging actual play series, "Oxventure Presents: Blades in the Dark", you will see that their first session is closer to an establishment score as I've been suggesting, than what you would expect going strictly by the book. However, each of the players in the Oxventure cast has put much more energy into pre-game characterization than what I'm thinking of, and mechanically they clearly have full playbooks.

This vague sketch for a Score Zero, or series of establishment scores, needs more substance - it's easy to slip into more linear adventure design when thinking of how to make them happen, especially since Blades doesn't have the more freewheeling dungeon structure to fall back on - but I hope I'll get to try it out some day. Do let me know if you've managed to accomplish something similar in your game, or if this post inspires you to do so.

Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan - a review

Greg Costikyan's name came up often in Jon Peterson's The Elusive Shift. He was a prominent figure in the zine scene that formed around Dungeons & Dragons and the fledgling tabletop role-playing game community in the 1970s. A typical contribution of his to the discourse back then was Lord of the Dice, a satire on the role of randomness and rules in TTRPGs.

I was, therefore, very excited when @laurenmakegames on Twitter posted some books she was giving away, and I spotted Costikyan's name on one of them, Uncertainty in Games. I hadn't heard of this book before, but considering the name and the topic, which is dear to my heart - see my discussion of the Monty Hall problem, or the post where I formulated constructive alienation - asking for it was a no-brainer. Lauren was kind enough to send it to me, and it did make for great reading.

The book mostly focuses on video and board games, which he called "closed systems" in his early theoretical work. When tabletop role-playing games are mentioned, it's just Dungeons & Dragons, and only as an early example of potentially limitless games, and as an inspiration for massively multiplayer online games, like World of Warcraft. However, I think the framework he provides can be useful for TTRPGs, although that will have to wait for a future post.

His main argument, some caveats aside, is that the goal of games in culture is to be a safe space for confronting uncertainty, in a world where we usually attempt to reduce it as much as possible. What draws us to continue playing games is the existence of this uncertainty, and our ability to get better at addressing it. Once we accept this framework, a big question in the analysis and design of games is where their uncertainty comes from.

He goes on to analyze several games through their uncertainty, among them Super Mario Bros., The Curse of Monkey Island, Rock/Paper/Scissors, Chess, Poker, CityVille, and Civilization V. Using these games, he comes up with a list of sources of uncertainty, of which every game he cites makes use of one or two, sometimes more. I will try and formulate each as a question:

1. Performative uncertainty - can you use the controller to have Mario make that jump?
2. Solver's uncertainty - have you gathered enough witty retorts to defeat the sword master?
3. Player unpredictability - will this player put up scissors next after having done paper twice?
4. Randomness - will my phalanx defeat the enemy's chariot?
5. Analytic complexity - what is a good way to respond to the Queens' Gambit opening?
6. Hidden information - what hand did the player on my left draw?
7. Narrative anticipation - what is going to happen in the Governor's mansion?
8. Development anticipation - what new features are going to come in the next update?
9. Schedule uncertainty - can I return to the game in time to harvest my crops?
10. Uncertainty of perception - can I notice the hammer coming at me quickly enough to react?
11. Semiotic contingency - what meaning will the game have when I conclude this segment?

I think some of these are a bit of a stretch. "Narrative anticipation" seems more like a study of what kind of prior information the player has before some hidden information about the rest of the game is revealed, or maybe the results of resolving uncertainty from other sources, in the context of furthering a story. I'm also not sure that performative and perception uncertainty are really significantly separate. Semiotic contingency, which Costikyan gets from work by Thomas Malaby, doesn't really feature in any of the prior long-form analyses presented in this book, perhaps because of how few examples there are of games that actually make use of it.

The book ends with an insightful piece of advice: one way of creating a new game, or improving an existing one, is by focus on its sources of uncertainty: tuning the ones you have, adding or removing some, until the mix works for the experience or audience you're aiming for.

But I would like to jump back to an even more insightful comment made before the bulk of the book: that you should be careful using lessons from interface design in game design, and vice versa. The problem is that there are opposing goals at play: with interfaces to word processors, web browsers, spreadsheets, and other products, you want users to be certain of what happens, not uncertain. This constrains how well you can "gamify" productivity. It also goes in the opposite direction, in constraining how usable game interfaces can be made, without affecting the very uncertainty that you expect would draw people into your game and retain their interest.

An example from my experience is the existence of automaps in dungeon crawlers. Last year I spent a few months streaming playthroughs of the first two Eye of the Beholder games, first person dungeon crawlers based on the ruleset of AD&D 2nd Edition. I started by attempting to do so without automapping, as they were originally designed to be played, before getting extremely frustrated at a certain confusing point. I then restarted my gameplay using All-Seeing Eye, an extension which provides a few quality of life and outright game-editing capabilities, including automapping, which is all I used.

This did, in fact, make things easier, and I was able to beat both games. However, several of the puzzles in these games, and indeed, in the genre generally, hinge on the player's need to map by themselves, and on the uncertainty that comes from only being able to see what's right around the party of characters when making any individual decision. They become trivial to someone who can simply look at what's going on in the map and where the party is at all times. In retrospect, I'm certain that I've missed out on a lot of the experience, although on the other hand, perhaps I would have just given up due to this uncertainty and the difficulty involved in overcoming it, and never gotten any exposure to much of the content.

In total, I would recommend having a look at this short monograph, as uncertainty is a very interesting lens through which to analyze games. It's definitely staying on my shelf.