Problems with Blades in the Dark

I've written quite a few play-fueled posts about Blades in the Dark, indexed here. I enjoyed the experience of running a one-shot, followed by an open table campaign lasting several weeks, but also felt extremely worn out after each session, and found myself dreading the next. At first I thought it was just down to general nerves, but this segment from a video of a conversation with Ron Edwards (of The Forge fame/infamy), titled "Constraints for consequential play" (link should start at 7:49), diagnosed a shortcoming of the system that really corresponded with my experience. I don't necessarily agree with the entirety of his views or characterization, but the main thrust feels right.

A good metaphor to extract from the video is an imagined situation where you are playing a ballgame, like soccer or basketball, and are thrown the ball, only to have it immediately empty out, so you have to fill it up again before you can continue. A lot is made of the explicit negotiation process whenever players want their characters to do anything challenging in Blades, but even once Position and Effect have been agreed upon, and an Action Rating roll is made, I've felt the same thing that Pawel bring up in the video, that I have to exercise my mind to improvise something that will implement the expected outcomes, both good and bad. Even if I have enough to work with from what has already been established, there is such a variety, from Heat, going through starting clocks, ending clocks, to actual Harm, that the game doesn't really force you to contend with what's happening now in a way that just flows into the next step without a lot of work by the gamemaster. And that's before you bring in Resistance rolls, which can downright eliminate Consequences, or mitigate them significantly.

One way I can see to fix this could be to agree in advance on certain constraints on the possible Consequences. For example, require that adversarial clocks are all introduced on Score start, and then the Consequences have to include Harm when using physical Action Ratings, in addition to potential contributions to clocks. There's discussion in the Blades book about the level of lethality that results from this kind of status quo establishing itself naturally through play, but I think setting it up in advance is a better way to address this issue. This is especially true in the context of an open table, where there isn't a consistent group to crystalize into any particular style. Contrast this with other aspects of the game which don't require this - the out-of-Score state of the PCs, Crew, NPCs, Factions, and relations between them in the world is easy to represent mechanically, as well as reassess at start of play, even with no consistent game group.

Moving beyond the context Edwards brought up, while keeping his metaphor, as I noted in my previous Blades post, another place where I felt a lack of constraints or structure is Free Play. The game book suggests that it should naturally lead towards a Score plan and an engagement roll, but in my experience, again, it requires that type of reinflation of the ball. It might be better to insist that if the players do not come up with a Score for their characters, hostile factions will act against them and they will have to react to this. Which to me suggests that a structure missing from the game is the reverse Score, namely, having the PCs have to deal with NPCs coming to cause them trouble, steal things from them, or what have you, with an appropriate adjustment to the subsequent Downtime phase.

Finally, the overabundance of variety also shows itself in the setting of Doskvol and the Shattered Isles, that the game mechanics are strongly tied to. For me, at least, it's too busy. Post-apocalypse, ghosts, crime, corruption, cults, all tied to action ratings. I understand that the fact that killing is such a big, supernatural, immediate deal (because each death is signaled by a gong, resulting in a crow coming to the scene of the crime with scary Spirit Wardens in tow) is important for forcing certain constraints on character actions, a vital counterweight to the baseline almost super-powerful things they can pull off in the fiction, but the way it's done is just too contrived for me. This is an aspect I'm not sure can be fixed without hacking things significantly, or starting from a different Forged in the Dark game entirely.

None of this is insurmountable - but I have so many other, different systems to learn, and my own adventure ideas to develop, that I will probably not be pursuing this further in the near future. Do get in touch if you have come up with solutions to these problems, or if you're inspired to test something I've suggested.

Impressions from TirCon 2021

Tir-na Nog'th Con 2021 took place over the last weekend, and I had quite a bit of fun attending a few game sessions and the closing ceremony - virtually, of course. It was my first opportunity to engage with this Amber Diceless-focused community in play. I had just finished reading through the system's core book, and have read the source material, Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, several times, though it has been a while.

I'll provide my initial impressions of the games. Only two of them were using the ADRPG system itself - of the other two, one used a unique system, while the other used an adaptation of Everway called Amberway.

While I'm going to be a bit critical of some games on a systemic level, I want to reiterate that it was a very enjoyable experience, and I do recommend trying all of these yourselves, if you have the chance. While I own copies of both of the non-ADRPG games I played, I have not had a chance to read them. I might do a more thorough review of them afterwards.

Alice Is Missing

Alice is Missing is a silent, text-message-based game played live. We played using a combination of Discord for the conversations and Roll20 for the more visual mechanics. The common premise to all sessions of the game is that a teenager in a small, decaying Northern California town has gone missing.  The player characters are closely associated with the missing Alice. Once they have found out about her disappearance, and as they try to find out what happened to her, the PCs are unable to meet in person, and this needs to be strictly enforced by whatever rationalizations needed until the end, to lend credence to the use of text messaging.

You, the players, get to choose from a few stock characters, with the facilitator playing as someone who's left town and is coming back for Christmas. I chose to play Dakota, Alice's best friend. Cards are drawn to decide certain initial details about Alice's disappearance, as well as prompts for the players to flesh out their PCs - this includes one secret each, that they should find a way to reveal to at least one other player by the end. There are then rounds of fleshing out relationships between the PCs and each other. Some stock non-player characters and locations are also given, and each player comes up with relations between those and the missing Alice. Having established this framework, each player is supposed to leave a voice message to Alice that would be found in her phone, based upon what's has been set up so far. Then the five location and five NPC cards, as well as other investigative cards, are shuffled and put aside.

The body of the game, which takes up 90 minutes of real time, is driven by an interesting card-based pacing mechanism. The players draw alternating cards which must be read only on the time written on them. The facilitator draws 90, and then the next player 80 and 40, the next 70 and 30, the next 60 and 20, and the last 50 and 10. Each of the cards indicates some other cards, usually a location, an NPC, or both, and a question that the player should answer, and then present to the rest of the players. Later cards will make use of the previous cards drawn, as well. The 90 minute card starts the timer ticking. Then the facilitator is supposed to start the group text, and texting, both private and public, can begin in earnest. Players are expected to talk as their PCs and describe what they are doing, and to incorporate the various clue cards that were drawn into their narrative - while making sure not to have any two PCs meet. The cards drawn determine how, and in one state, Alice is found. Finally, at the end of the 90 minutes, the voice messages are played, and the players can then talk about the game and decompress.

My experience of the game is very much like in an ongoing Vampire: the Masquerade live-action role-play I took part in for a few months, many years ago: the conversations, play-acting, and some of the narrative that evolved were pleasant enough, but I didn't really have a good sense of whether I was influencing anything that mattered. The mechanics felt both too tight - because they were on a timer and intervened significantly in the narrative - and also too loose - in that they did not to me seem to provide a good way of feeding back into the game meaningfully. I didn't feel that any of my decisions significantly affected how things were going, and Alice's end state was completely set by the cards rather than by anything we'd done.

Overall, I feel like I am far likelier to try and steal and/or adapt the pacing tool for my own purposes than to play this game again. If larping is more your style, this might be an interesting way of taking part in it without having to do so in person.

Amber Gothic

The first game I played with actual ADRPG mechanics, the premise was that I was one of several presumptive heirs to a mysterious distant cousin in a faraway land - specifically, Corwin, presumably the protagonist of the first five Amber novels, although my character wouldn't know that.

In mechanical terms, the players were expected to build characters with Human attributes, and a minor special power with a paired disadvantage. With a bit of thinking I made a pretty Lovecraftian protagonist: Elior Hayek, a Dartmouth junior studying architecture, who is running out of funds and could really use a windfall. He was able to accelerate his movement significantly for a few minutes at a time, at the expense of spending hours of real time too nauseated to move.

The game itself ran like a pretty reasonable mystery game, albeit without the usual expected skill rolls. The ancestral home was appropriately gothic and spooky, the locals and fellow players odd and interesting, with growing references to the source material. We ended on a typical Lovecraftian note, too, dying in the tentacles of an eldritch horror.

The concept was very nice, but ADRPG has a lot going against it as a medium for gothic investigative play. For starters, there's a reason that a typical campaign starts with an attribute auction in which players are encouraged to field points to position themselves at significant above-baseline-Amber rates that are strictly differentiated from each other - that's what makes adjudicating conflict both between PCs and between them and NPCs and environment challenges doable and exciting in play. Having everyone at Human level meant essentially doing freeform.

Another issue is the focus on private communications. A typical ADRPG campaign involves a lot of conflict and political jockeying between the player characters, starting with the player attribute auction, which cements some conflict, and then undergirded by the secret acquisition of advantage in secret, and conspiracies with the GM and the other players. This is death to an investigative convention game, where gathering up clues about the external mystery takes up so much effort already. I felt that even if we had wanted to play PCs who were suspicious of each other, and I think most of us did not, keeping the inter-player communications in the open would have made things much smoother.

I do feel like some Lovecraft-Amber mashup is possible, but it might be better to simply use a system like Call of Cthulhu, or one of the others that already incorporate investigation of the eldritch unknown, instead.

The Great Amber Bake-Off

Full disclosure: I'm almost certain that I entered this one by mistake. Due to how the conference was set up, it was decided that prospective players would vote for sessions they wanted to play in any individual slot, and then these votes will be taken into account when deciding how to allot them - and I think I voted wrong. I've never watched any of the Great British Bake-Off shows, and don't really know much about baking. However, when I found out that I'd been assigned to this game, I decided I'd give it my best.

Without giving too much away, the premise was that some of the best and unusual bakers in all of Shadow were brought together to compete in the style of the Great British Bake-Off, with a rising set of culinary challenges, some known in advance, others a surprise to all. Each player needed to come up with a character with baking as a side-attribute, rather than simply "someone good at baking". We were given a bit of an explanation of how Amberway works, and how it will be interpreted in the context of baking and cookery. Considering the red lentils I had soaking at the time, I came up with Jacob Samson, essentially a mashup of the Biblical Jacob and Samson, with Biblical verses inspiring his special cooking powers. I was especially thinking of Jacob using red lentil stew to buy off Esau's birthright, and Samson's riddle of the beehive in the lion's carcass. I rationalized that food was serious business in a Biblically-inspired Shadow, and a wise leader's culinary finesse needed would serve nicely in competing against the best bakers in all the realms. A Biblically-inspired character also meant I could make use of the one non-TV-American accent I feel comfortable using in English, the Israeli one. We ended up bonding in and out of character over the challenges we faced.

While the other players suggested existing baked goods based on their actual knowledge of the field, I either appropriated foods that wouldn't normally be served as cakes or cookies, or made things up from whole cloth. Since the rolls were based on how I approaches the situation rather than on actual cooking abilities, it went pretty well regardless - and honestly, I do want to try some of the things I imagined, they sound delicious. For this type of ultimately friendly conflict, whose purpose is to be judged better than another in front of NPCs, the Amberway system provided excellent flavor, with the playacting and not-quite-mechanically-based interactions with the NPCs serving as a wonderful substrate. I cannot recommend this game enough.

Excuse Me, Are We Related?

This game made the most use of ADRPG as a system and a setting. The premise of the core book is that the players will be playing the children of the princes and princesses of Amber, who were the main movers and shakers in the first five books. This scenario decides that these children of princes and princesses are mooching off Castle Amber and are generally underfoot, so the King sends some of them out to Shadow to find other fruits of royal indiscretion, bringing them in if they're useful, leaving them in place with some safety information if they like where they are, or possibly disposing of them if they're a threat. We were to use points to buy attributes in what was essentially a one-step auction, buy Pattern Imprint so that we could all travel Shadow, and otherwise buy most other things we would, within reason.

I chose to create Bella, daughter of Caine, with pretty even attribute points, no special items, familiars, or powers, Caine as a Family Friend, and some Good Stuff to spare. She had a bit of a love-hate relationship with her father but otherwise a cheerful demeanor to pretty much everyone.

Her cheerfulness lead her to bring the party of youngsters to their first lead to potential royal progeny, which turned out to be a dead end. I am bringing this up because this type of failure is important to provide a sense of realness and to the imaginary world. Subsequent attempts were more successful, although not without some close scrapes and even serious injuries. We got awarded points for each cousin brought back, two for whoever distinguished themselves. We put those into our attributes, but how much effect that had is not clear, due to the opacity of the ranking system.

Unlike with Amber Gothic, the measurable differences in ability among the PCs, as well as between them and the usual Shadow denizens, made every encounter interesting. How tired are we getting? Which of us is the most fitting to do this somewhat impossible thing we're attempting this time? How do we handle the limits of shape-shifting? How is a given level of Psyche combined with Pattern powers doing against this Logrus adept foe? The fact that we were spared an actual attribute auction, as well as the choice not to have secret communications, made cooperating very straightforward. An engaging, exciting and overall wholesome affair.

Conclusion

As I said, the convention was lovely, and I was extremely pleased to be able to participate in games that put some of what I'd read about diceless systems into practice. I do hope to write something more substantive about ADRPG and game design and practice without randomness, or at least actions adjudicated by dice, eventually, and I'm glad I won't only be leaning on text and theory for it.