Apocalypse City at A Weekend with Good Friends

This weekend (starting Thursday night my time) was the usually biannual A Weekend with Good Friends, an online convention on the Good Friends of Jackson Elias Discord. I've played in a few of these before, and now, for the first time, I ran my own game. It was the second run of my Apocalypse City concept, and it was also very enjoyable for me, as well as for the players. They found the concept compelling, even though they wished they could play more of the playbooks.

One thing I noticed happening this time is that I was able to use an interstitial break to work on fleshing out some threats based on NPCs coming from one of the players' resources. This made some dynamics a lot easier to work with, and is closer to Vincent Baker's suggestion of breaking the game down into three sub-sessions, although I wasn't able to get there. I also had to have an actual conversation about the Special Moves, explaining what I think they are meant to do, and why to me it felt like it's better to not dwell on them for a convention game. I tried allowing for enough experience points to provide opportunities for advancement, but that didn't pan out.

In terms of prep, I decided to let the players decide whether and what kind of gang or group they were, and as for the pre-existing threats, I took a bit of inspiration from my trip to Van Cortlandt and other urban parks, as well as some folk horror when characterizing the denizens of what I called Rural Experience Park.

Like the first time I ran this, it all ended in total war between the group of PCs and another gang, which they were able to eliminate. This time they were even able to make another gang join them up without killing them all, which was nice. But the park was set on fire, and would probably in the fiction be completely ruined at this point. I don't know why exactly that is. Did I make the starting situation too violent? Did I make the opposition too easily suppressed through combat? Did I not go hard enough to make non-violent alternatives more appealing? Or maybe I should run this with more playbooks that add NPCs tied to the players, or play those much more seriously when they do come up?

It could also be that, as I said in the previous post, a lot of the potential for the game is lost when it's run as a con game. Maybe it just needs the investment from the players to actually have a whole session creating characters, playing "a day in the life" for them, and then letting the MC build a compelling threat map at leisure.

Nevertheless, the affirmation that this is a premise whose appeal I can communicate to others through play made me very happy. Even if I don't go farther into this retro-futuristic 80s urban apocalypse, I hope this gave me the confidence to put more of my setting ideas out there as games for people to enjoy.

2021 in review - role-playing games

We're getting towards the end of 2021, so it's a good time for me to look back on this year, also the first full year of my blog. Since role-playing games have always been my focus, this post is dedicated to them. I only intend to mention games I have played - reading is all well and good, actual plays can be useful, but the play's the thing.

After winding down my own first role-playing campaign, I decided that I will no longer run Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Instead, I've continued to learn and play other games, although remain a player in a 5E campaign with my existing local group.

After attempting to playtest it a bit last year, this year is when I had the most experience in Blades in the Dark. You can find an index to the posts I wrote about my experience here. To summarize: very interesting, intense experience, but lacking in constraints in places, and would require me to do a bit of thinking and some constraining of my own before I ran it again. Mostly good as my first real attempt to run a modern fiction-first game. I should try and see how it runs as a player, too. Maybe next year.

I also ran a Sorcerer one-shot. I still struggle to summarize the experience - I think at this point I just feel that it was premature as it stood - but thinking about it, combined with the seasonal connection to my main inspiration for the scenario, A Night in the Lonesome October, led me to my most prolific project of this year, constituting the majority of my posts: Through Sorcerer's Eyes. In some ways it connects to my speculation about system as theory, except applied to literature rather than role-playing.

In terms of games played, this year was a success. I'm surprised that I didn't write a post about Session Zero Online, a convention centered in Manila, the Philippines. In my defense, it was very intense, and came along just as I was starting a new job. I played three games there: a playtest for Basheer Ghouse's upcoming Ahadi, a narrative role-playing wargame focusing on high-ranking officers in the Mughal Empire, which I am really looking forward to seeing in a more complete stage, as even this early draft was delightful; Rajit Kalita's Ramayana Run (now published as Ramayana Tales: Search for the Sanjivni), a 5E adventure and supplement set in the world of the Indian epic, the Ramayana - fascinating, but the experience clarified to me just how much 5E's character sheet game overshadows any attempts at doing something different with the system; and Curious Chimeras` Mere Gods, a contemplative narrative game inspired by traditional Southeast Asian cultures, about people returning to their home-town after a long absence, which I also thoroughly enjoyed.

After this, I helped playtest Bounty Hunter TTRPG, which I had backed on Kickstarter. It was my first experience with a diceless TTRPG - this, in turn, led me to the Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game-focused community, with which I participated in TirCon 2021. There I played two games using ADRPG itself, as well as the award winning Alice Is Missing, which is unfortunately not for me, and an ADRPG-Everway concoction called Amberway, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Other games I played were Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition, RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, Troika!, MÖRK BORG, and Ultraviolet Grasslands (now situated as part of the Vastlands).

Aside from the platforms provided by the conventions I mentioned, I want to thank the CoC-focused Pinkerton One-Shots Agency Discord, especially for allowing me to run my Blades and Sorcerer games, as well as The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, a blog and podcast that I support on Patreon, which is also focused on CoC, but discusses horror and general gaming, and in whose Discord I have played and expect to play many games.

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.

Offsetting the Blades clock - starting with downtime activities

Let's start with some background. The basic session-scale game loop of Blades in the Dark goes as follows: you start with Free Play, which is loosely structured, allowing your player characters to explore the city of Doskvol, talk to non-player characters, gather information, and, ideally, focus the goals of the party into a heist.

Once a heist seems to be forming, you get into a very structured process for preparing for the Score. You choose a target and a plan, and you choose a level of Load for each of the characters. Then you sum up the various factors that are relevant to a heist, including your crew's power differential with the target, whether they're using any special connections or information about it, how daring their approach is, etc. You roll the Engagement Roll, and use the result of that to determine the starting situation of the Score.

During the Score itself there is a rapid back-and-forth between the player characters and the game world, with intense confrontations that can sometimes be resolved directly through acting, sometimes through retroactively deciding that a character had a piece of equipment relevant to the situation (the number of times this can happen depends on the Load of each character), and sometimes through Flashbacks, which are a more extensive retroactive change of circumstances.

When the Score is settled, one way or another, there is Downtime. Here the consequences of the Score, both direct and indirect, are accounted for: how much Coin the crew and characters get; how their Reputation improves, vital for gaining access to better resources and having an easier time targeting more lucrative targets; how much Heat they've generated from the authorities; resulting Entanglements that might lead to additional trouble, the imprisonment of a character, or some good old-fashioned bribery to stay out of trouble; and Downtime Activities, long-term actions that include crafting new equipment, acquiring temporary tools, training to gain XP, indulging in a character's Vice to reduce Stress (or potentially get into more trouble as well), reducing Heat on the crew, and long-term projects.

Once Downtime is concluded, you are expected to go back to Free Play and start anew. The gamemaster is also expected to provide for actions by the other factions, although this isn't codified as clearly.

Since my last post on the subject, I ran three additional sessions in the same open table campaign. In what was initially a temporary adjustment to the fact that we had played a truncated score the previous time, we've come to start each subsequent session with Downtime Activities. Unlike the very cooperative Score framework, or the potentially sociable Free Play, or even the earlier, more mechanized and collectivized steps of Downtime, Downtime Activities are very individual. Each character chooses how they will spend the span of days or weeks of relative safety. However, they do also allow for a multi-character buildup. Aside from being able to assist another as normal, long-term projects involve the player deciding on what they want to do, the gamemaster determining how big of a clock is necessary for its conclusion, or maybe breaking it down to connected clocks, and then the player performing some downtime action to advance this clock. Other players can then perform their own relevant actions to also contribute to the same clock.

If at least one of the players can be coaxed into focusing on an idea for a heist, this iterative, serial process can allow for the slow building of a setup for some very good heists. In practice, I've found that in two out of these three sessions, there were enough people with some focus to use Downtime Activities to essentially skip over Free Play entirely. Unfortunately, if none of the players has this initiative, or they are all too new to the game, it might end up simply being a time-waster, after which Free Play must start as normal.

One interesting aspect of this structure is how it mirrors the session zero of a campaign. While there is a shared premise to start with, for the most part the players are siloed out as they build their characters. Then, in BitD itself, there is the common creation of the crew, but even in games that do not contain this aspect, there is some kind of inciting action that puts the group together, possibly a first scene or adventures.

One final caveat: I have not managed to mix this structure well with actual character creation for new players. If you are setting up an open table like me, be sure to prepare pregenerated characters for newbies, or possibly help them build their own before the session starts.

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.

Whose Score Is It Anyway - Blades in the Dark's heist structure in focus

Introduction

My last post was essentially a short series of complaints about Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, in light of a campaign I ran with it. As I promised in the prior post that lead to it, I intend to write a longer discussion of D&D 5E's character sheet game. But to do it justice, I want to compare it to at least two other systems that I am not only familiar with, but that I have at least played.

Thankfully, the creator of the Discord server where I helped playtest Bounty Hunter TTRPG, Pinkerton One-Shots Agency, hosts a variety of one-shots by several GMs, and is open to new people (like me!) setting up their own games. After having played the BHTTRPG playtest, and an unrelated Call of Cthulhu session, I pitched a one-shot, titled "Whose Score Is It Anyway?"

Premise

The idea was simple: since one of the most influential elements of Blades in the Dark is the heist structure, or the score, I would try to run a session with as little preliminary work as possible before getting to the starting point of this structure: the engagement roll. This would go the farthest into simulating the heist genre, putting the players and their characters in media res, and hopefully we could learn and gain experience with the rest of the necessary rules as we went along.

Normally, there would be some discussion of the crew sheet, choice of lair and starting district, and free-form in-character play and information gathering, before the score was settled upon. However, that is where my previous attempt at running BitD got stuck, so I decided to dispense with it. I would use the crew only as a starting point for choosing the specific score. I also ignored the score's district, treating Doskvol as a unit.

The written pitch was "zero prep", but I did have to make some preparation, if nothing else to build the pregenerated characters, as well as to refresh my memory of some of the mechanics, as it has been a while since I've finished reading the book, and a while longer since I've last attempted to run the game.

Session

After the players chose their characters from a list of pregens, in line with the idea of spending as little time as possible on thinking or making decisions before the score, I rolled a random crew type, and then I rolled randomly on the table for relevant scores, and asked the players to choose which of the three choices they liked the most. The crew rolled was Hawkers, purveyors of vice, and the chosen score involved dealing with a competing product on the market, which led us to conclude that the vice was illicit drugs.

Then I had them use the contacts in their character sheets (which I also generated randomly) to provide detail for the approach. One of the characters, a Slide, had a small-time drug dealer as an ally, and the player proactively claimed that they used to be supplied by the crew, but hasn't bought anything in some time, while nevertheless continuing to sell, suggesting they would make a good contact with the rival crew. Another player, a Hound, suggested that they could follow this contact on their next supply run. They decided that this is how they will sneak into the rivals` lair. That took care of the plan (stealth) and detail (point of entry).

Next I explained how the load-out system worked, and emphasized that specific items are chosen only during the score, rather than being predetermined. The characterization and details of the plan were enough to suggest how heavily they would be equipped for action, so this didn't take long.

Finally, we went over the engagement roll. One die for luck, and another die for using a weak spot of the target (a handoff point for the drugs). The roll went well, so I established that their Hound was well situated to watch over the contact entering what turned out to be the rival crew's manufacturing facility.

As for the rest of the session itself, suffice it to say that it started off sneaky enough, with slowly escalating levels of alarm, culminating in a gun fight and a blockbuster of an explosion, wrecking the warehouse and its surroundings. The characters came out wounded but alive, while their rivals were only able to keep half of their equipment and supplies. I then got some feedback from the players, and bid them farewell.

Things that worked

The session itself went well. Starting this way did save a lot of time before the action came in. The players took to the setting and to the properties of their characters. I was lenient in allowing them to retcon a few details when there was confusion, and I happily took advantage of immediate feedback and suggestions from one player, who has had a lot more experience with the game, to pull it off.

Despite the lack of mechanical team incentives, the shared challenge created a sense of camaraderie that I've seen when running D&D in a similar in media res situation. With time, the players got a hang of the main resolution mechanic, pushing oneself and accepting a devil's bargain, helping each other, the use of load and clocks, and so forth. The trappings of Doskvol also made themselves clear through play. 

Things I would do differently

I was hoping that we could learn more of the rules as we encountered them, but feedback suggests that I should have just had a very clear explanation of the main resolution mechanic, focusing on the fact that every character is able to try anything - even if they have zero "dots" in an action rating, they have a 25% chance to succeed with at most some complication, and as long as the player is aware of the amount of stress they're in, it's not that hard to push oneself or accept a devil's bargain to get up to 50%.

Less mechanically, It seems like I need to find a happier medium between freeform roleplaying and the strict laser focus on building on the engagement roll, because it did feel a bit jarring to some to just jump in this quickly.

An important aspect of Doskvol I forgot to mention, until someone had already committed to killing someone, is the Spirit Wardens and their swift response to death. It serves an important purpose in making the game less bloody. Fortunately, one of the players, whose character was a Whisper, stepped in and provided an excusable way to mitigate it, but it is a fundamental worldbuilding element whose ramifications I didn't pay enough attention to, not to mention explain to the players.

Another comment I got in feedback that I think is very poignant is that the possibility of flashbacks really needs to be brought up for new players in a more proactive fashion. It is one of the foundations of what allows the scores to run as they do when this game is played best.

I think districts add flavor to the scores and to the city at large, so I would roll a d12 to choose one.

Insights into the game

Since this was a one shot with no crew structure and no real ties to Experience Points, some of the incentives a full game would have were absent. For example, one incentive to attempt actions in a desperate position is that it leads to immediate XP gain. Similarly, some forms of characterization are encouraged by the means by which different playbooks gain XP, as well as how different crew sheets do.

The absence of an expected downtime period also meant that the Heat implications weren't visible, nor was there a significant mechanical connection with the vice as a tool for eliminating stress.

Mechanical shortcomings

The fact that the game is 1d6-based, but there are 7 playbooks, 4 starting builds for each playbook, 6 heritages, 7 backgrounds, 7 vices, 5 clever friends, and 8 starting special abilities, made quickly creating a few pregens more difficult than it should have been, and make for longer character creation in a normal game, as well. The text contradictorily suggests assigning the extra dots to attributes based on heritage and background, while also providing this in the quick build - if the backgrounds and vices were reduced to 6 each, and if there were a table for assigning attributes based on heritage and background, that would have improved things. There are 12 districts - if there were instead 11, and if it made sense for some of them to have more scores than others, then 2d6 would have made for a good way to roll for one.

Conclusion

I and the players had a good time with this concept. Some of the adjustments I will want to make to improve my next run of this nature are entirely on me, while others may require a bit of rules hacking to get right. I do recommend giving this type of experiment a shot if you've struggled to make sense of BitD. It will force you to reckon with the game's heist structure, which is a real breath of fresh air - at the expense of missing out on a lot of very interesting further structures. However, it might also make for a good start to a fully-fledged campaign, if you are willing to do some work to retroactively apply the results of your first score to the full system.

Plane Defensive - my old indie game prototype

After finishing my PhD in physics in 2015, I decided to pivot towards video games. I went to some talks and workshops at Tech Valley Game Space in Troy, New York, near Albany, gathered up some tools, and started coming up with ideas, vetting them, and turning them into something playable.

The main product of this period was a game called Plane Defensive. The latest (and probably final) version can be played for free here. This was the end of a long line of prototypes that I playtested at TVGS's Interactive Showcase, which allowed members of the Troy community to try out locally-developed game. 

The premise was that the player would be controlling some kind of defensive platform, whose purpose was to deflect invaders from another dimension. To begin with, the platform would live in a two-dimensional plane and deflect invaders that came into it from the third dimension; I was thinking that some day I'd try to create a version where the platform would travel around our own space and deflect higher-dimensional foes.

Working on versions of this game taught me a lot about the differences in what you can expect from people familiar with video games, as opposed to people coming to play one for the first time. Many things that seemed obvious to me required a bit of education, like clicking and dragging objects around. I also saw first-hand how adapting a game to different platforms can be a challenge: for example, tying text to size in pixels is not great when you're developing on a low resolution laptop for high resolution test computers.

In terms of content, I went through a few separate conceptions of how to express that there is a way for the two-dimensional platform to peek into the third dimension. At first I mixed different cameras, but eventually I decided that the most convincing detector would simply point towards the projection of the high-dimensional being onto the play space - given enough directional detectors, the invaders can be triangulated and anticipated. I also played around with using stereo sounds for some of the challenges. The visuals were very "programmer art", and the sounds were simple generated effects.

You can see a full play-through of pretty much all of the versions, along with a more elaborate discussion of my process, in this video, part of a series called Devs Play, hosted by TVGS for a span of time. Enjoy!

Playtesting Blood and Bronze

Earlier this year I picked up Blood & Bronze, a role-playing game set in what it terms a mythic Mesopotamia. Like RuneQuest's Glorantha, it's set in the bronze age, but based on an historical environment. I really liked the art, which is evocative of the Assyrian rooms in your favorite Near East museum exhibits, as well as the idea of a setting that might be close to depictions in the Hebrew Bible, for which my secular Jewish schooling in Israel has given me a taste.

Reading it made me want to try it out, so I decided to gather some players and learn it by playtest. I was just getting into my systems obsession phase, so I wanted to run things by the book as much as possible. I also chose to run for fellow Israeli Jews from overseas, because of their slightly different perspective on role-playing, and because I felt that they would have a similar affinity for the Biblical-adjacent setting.

So I read the core rulebook all the way through. I made up a simple premise: the players were some assortment of guards for a trade caravan between Sippar and Dur Kurigalzu, two historical cities in Mesopotamia which are represented in the game. This path would take the players through a region that has random encounters set up for it in the back of the book. That would allow me to have an open table where each week I could run an encounter, learning the system and slowly populating a cheat sheet (in Hebrew).

Unfortunately, it was very difficult to run those encounters. While the book was readable enough as a static explanation of the system, it was not particularly well-organized for use in play. Moreover, the "rulings not rules" paradigm taken from the OSR movement lead the authors to present far too many encounters whose resolution is not supported by the rules - for example, there are no rules for pack animals, even though you are able to capture some in the desert, and even though that would be an important part of travel. Mass combat rules were also unavailable; it felt clunky to simply play through a mass combat, and one of the encounters I rolled involved the player characters intervening in a fight between two factions with 10 and 12 active members, respectively. Not having good rules for initiative when more than two sides are involved didn't help, either. Overall the rulebook had no worked examples to show how the system plays in practice - it seemed to expect familiarity with an old school game system, into which these new rules could then be dropped.

It was an interesting challenge, nevertheless, because the system has some unique features. Like in D&D, B&B has you roll for six innate abilities, but they are peculiarly different. For example, one of the abilities is Guile, and having a high score at it makes your character good at both fooling people socially and sneaking around them physically. This challenge to the mind/body separation paradigm assumed by D&D's three physical and three mental abilities is worth considering when thinking of what innate abilities mean, or rather, what they do for us when we are creating a character. Some classes you can choose allow you to reroll some abilities, or add to them, or swap them around.

Abilities are used in two ways: actively, they are translated into d6 dice pools, with success defined as getting at least one 5-6; the total number of dice which turned up 5 or more is significant for the rate of success. Abilities can also be used passively, as a saving throw against attacks or hazards tied to the ability; in that case, you want to roll under your ability with a d20. A significant way the active roll is used is when attacking: there is a damage dice pool that is equal to the number of successes, and these dice depend on the weapon used; they explode on maximum for most weapons.

When fighting, there are a lot of choices you can make. If you're acting in melee, you can decide to force something to happen rather than cause damage; for example, you can state that you are trying to disarm your foe rather than hit them. If your attack roll has succeeded, the foe can decide whether to accept what you wanted to do, or take the damage. That is done after knowing how many successes occurred, but before rolling for damage, so there is a bit of a gamble in making such decisions.

Armor provides a saving-throw type defense. It always soaks up the damage if you choose to use it, but you have to roll under its rating or it is destroyed, a nod to the more fragile bronze equipment available in this setting. Shields simply reduce damage from hits. Ranged attacks can be mitigated or avoided using a save on another ability, Senses.

Overall, combat can potentially be very complicated, but short and deadly. Reminiscent of RuneQuest's, albeit with more elaborate dice combinations - RQ uses roll under percentile mechanics almost exclusively.

There are two magic subsystems, each corresponding to a special material, and to a class that may use it. The Mystic may use Lotus Magic, while the Seer may use Bone Sorceries. Lotus Magic is based on lotus powder, an addictive substance. All characters can take it to suffer/gain certain effects rolled on a table; the Mystic is unique in being able to avoid the effect, instead using a dose to cast one of a variety of spells. The encumbrance system is important for the effects of this substance, because addiction is treated mechanically as follows: you are always encumbered as if you're carrying as many doses as the maximum that you have ever carried. This means that you have to limit the amount of doses you take with you to cast spells while adventuring, lest you leave no room for anything else.

Bone salt, similarly, can be used by any character to generate special effects, which the Seer can ignore in favor of casting sorceries. While it isn't addictive like lotus powder, it poses its own risks: it's a highly unstable substance, so the more of it you carry, the higher the chance that it will explode and dissipate when you are incapacitated, leaving you high and dry for the rest of the adventure - and if you have too much of it on you, the spirits in the salt will take over your body until you are healed. These systems guarantee that magic is difficult, dangerous, and interesting in specific mechanical ways.

One feature that we did not get to check out while playtesting was advancement. Modern D&D gives you experience for killing monsters or for passing certain milestones. Older D&D gave experience predominantly for finding treasure. There is no rationale for this, considering that experience eventually leads to gaining levels, which improves the overall prowess of the character irrespective of how they gained the experience. B&B does have a rationale: the way you gain levels is by gathering up sufficient treasure to sacrifice to Ninlil, the Queen of No Court, who gives you her blessing, in the form of higher levels. So your money is XP in the sense that you spend it to gain levels, similar to buying training in RQ. Another way of gaining power is covenants with different entities, a subsystem that is only hinted at in the base rules, although examples exist in some of the adventure modules and on the developers` blog. Mixing covenants requires paying additional tribute to the ones you have not been faithful to, and may lead to your untimely demise. Overall, an elegant way of handling this important but often arbitrary part of the role-playing experience.

I really do like the bronze age as a technological and social level for role-playing in, and Mesopotamia as a setting. I hope to return to it soon, perhaps even with this system. If any of this sounds interesting, I would recommend picking up the free Player Compendium, which has the basic character creation rules and a description of the various classes, and should give you a better idea of what you're getting yourself into before you buy. Unfortunately, the blog has not been updated since September 2018, and I have not seen new products coming from this publisher or line since, so do not look for long-term support. However, the base rules are there, as are some adventure modules, so there is plenty to work with if you find a group in the right frame of mind. Let me know of your experiences - I am really curious to know how other people manage to run this at the table.