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Blades in the Dark

Silva

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Jul 17, 2005
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Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2080350433/blades-in-the-dark/description

Game looks awesome. Playing Dishonored / Thief -inspired scoundrels on a industrial fantasy city with specific rules for crew creation, development and ascension in the underworld ladder. All this from the guy behind Lady Blackbird, Agon and Ghost Lines.

Anyone pledged ? Anyone playing or reading it ?
 
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Silva

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My Duskwall will surely look like this:


bloodborne-screen-03-ps4-us-10jun14.jpg
 
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Melan

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Civitas Quinque Ecclesiae, Hungary
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So we played this over the weekend, and it is rock solid. The setup is significantly more complicated than you could expect from an indie game, but the details fall into their places as you go through character generation. The characters are based on class-like templates, which you customise as you fill out the character sheet, leaving you with a fairly straightforward dice pool system when you are done.

Gameplay is mostly based on individual heists connected by strategic interludes where you manage your guild. The bane of infiltration missions, overlong planning is reduced in very efficient ways; the characters are assumed to have discussed the risks and prepared for contingencies, and they can bring these up retroactively during play.

Interestingly, it is a game where only the players roll, and there doesn't seem to be traditional NPC stats - it is the successful or failed actions of the party which affect the severity of the opposition and the complications that get introduced into your heist schemes. Say, a character rolling badly while staking out a target would attract the attentions of the locals, making it necessary to either deal with the new risk or accept its impact on the way the story goes. The GM can also offer up "devil's bargains" to improve your success levels for tradeoffs like "okay, you can kill him, but it will raise a lot of noise, making a team of neighbours arrive within 15 minutes". Nonetheless, while this is a game heavy on collective narration, the GM still runs the scenario with a mixture of prepared elements, details emerging through play, and player input. Also, characters quickly build up stress, which eventually leads to traumatic consequences (this is the system's equivalent of a dual Hp system - and you can take off the edge of stress by indulging in your vices).

What makes the play experience particularly interesting is setting up actions and determining the oucomes - there are a lot of ways to accomplish mission goals from subterfuge to naked violence; either individually or through a robust collective action mechanic (which feels a lot like the criminals' assault of the office complex in Fritz Lang's M). Things also flow rather differently depending on the current threat level - "controlled" actions go smoothly, "risky" actions tend to end up with a lot of "you succeeded, but..." outcomes, and acting under "desperate" circumstances will mostly get you into deep shit. If you keep failing, you can attempt to do things in more risky ways, but in the end, it may end up costing you. It is a surprisingly tight simulation of Thief and Dishonored's play dynamic.

We did not dip too deeply into the downtime rules, but you can build up your own thieves' guild (or other organisation in the final game), increase your hold over territory, add special features to your hideout, improve or ruin your relations with other factions, and gain or reduce heat with the law. This is mostly tracked on a collective character sheet, and doesn't take away too much time from the heists.

All in all, BitD is somewhere halfway between traditional RPGs and storygames, and plays very well if you don't mind this kind of thing. If the GM knows the rules (and he has to), a four-hour session is enough for character generation and two medium-length heists. It is very easy to play it as a one-shot, but seems to lend itself well to campaign play as well.
 
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udm

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So I've been reading the rules in preparation for a one-shot game that I'll be running this Sunday. Very interesting. It takes the best parts of PbtA games (which I'll admit I'm not too fond of) and Cortex. No surprise there since John Harper's a pretty big fan of Leverage RPG.

What I think is most fascinating is how it's actually two games in one. The score (which is the actual RP session itself) is an RPG; downtime (which is the phase in-between scores) is more akin to a board game. Adding on to what Melan described, you expand your gang, grab turf, plan projects, gather info and basically look after your community. All of these confer bonuses or equipment during the next score, so it becomes a cycle.

As for the rules during the score itself, they're quite clear and fast-paced. I keep getting the feeling that it will run like a stealth-based action game rather than a tactics one. One nice rule I like is the progress clock. You draw an arbitrary clock to track how close you are to your objective, or how close you are to getting fucked by security, or how much time you have left, or how the distraction you just made is going, etc. You can still provide maps like Garrett's, maps that are crudely drawn sketches, but the game doesn't really care and just assumes your PCs would know where to go eventually. It just depends on how fucked they are when they get to their destination.

Thematically the supernatural feel is closer to Thief 1 (ie more grounded in dark mythology) but the time period is closer to Dishonored or even Thief 2, with a more Victorian look.

If anyone gives a shit, I'll report back after the session with a more thorough review.
 

Silva

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We played around 8 sessions of it. One of the most fun times we had with a game. The rules are a breeze to learn, the built-in stress management is fun to play, and the "boardgame" layer meshes really well with the premise.

The only part that didn't gel for me is the missions "planning" and info gathering, which felt too abstract. But then it may be my Shadowrunning years talking.
 

udm

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Alright just ran my first ever session. Two scores, and half a downtime (we didn't really get around to playing with the crew/base mechanics, just doing stuff during downtime).

What I really like is that the game, while bringing the focus to the narrative, still gets quite tactical, with positioning playing an important role. It avoids the things I hate about PbtA games, like an over-abstraction of stats, while taking the bits that I like from other narrative and crunch-light games. The players had a good time too, aside from one Captain Butthurt who kept whining about how I was railroading them (I wasn't) and lashing out at another player.

The progress clocks mechanic is a bit tricky though. I think I threw in too many progress clocks, and lost count of them. Might need to tone down the number of clocks in the next game.

Overall, a very fine game, and I can see this as a staple for one-shots and convention games :salute:
 

Silva

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Jul 17, 2005
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Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
udm , you should really try the downtime part. It's kickass.

About the supposed railroading, the best way to come up with an adventure in Blades is simply ask the group what they wanna do. Generally it will be taking claims for the crew, acting against some hostile faction, looking for scores, etc. If you approach it as your tipical game where the GM brings it's adventure of the week to spoon feed the group, I think you will be missing the point of the game. I'm not saying you did this, just a point worth noting. ;)
 

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