In the first of my actual actual play reviews, I'm going to tackle Blades in the Dark. Designed by John Harper, Blades is a stylish game with a grand reputation. Does it hold up? Well, I've run it for several months with my usual group, and overall we've had a lot of fun, but I have some quibbles.
As I wrote in my previous post, the idea here isn't to offer a product review, or entertainment. I'm just giving my honest impression, based on my own experience of actually playing the game.
Dishonored Was Pretty Good
First, the good. Blades has an incredibly strong premise: you play as a gang of criminals in a moody fantasy city that has strong echoes of Victorian London, China Mieville's Bas-Lag novels, or videogames like Thief and Dishonored. The game is structured around capers called 'scores', and it does a lot to encourage players to take risks and get straight into the action via various mechanics, like 'flashbacks' that let you insert a bit of convenient backstory when it's needed ('it might seem that I'm cornered, but actually I bribed the cook to leave a gun and set of lockpicks behind this loose brick for exactly this eventuality'). Equipment works the same way, meaning that your character's inventory is a currency to be spent rather than a list of possessions. So long as you have free inventory slots, there's nothing to stop you from declaring that you are, in fact, carrying a gun and some lockpicks in your coat.
The atmosphere of the setting and the fun and novelty of the flashback mechanic are great hooks, and pretty much everyone I've introduced to the game has instantly seen the appeal. Getting into a game with a bunch of inspired and enthusiastic players is half the battle, and Blades makes it easy. The backdrop is also generally vague enough that you feel you can improvise as needed, while being evocative in a way that makes it easy to ad-lib details. A bunch of random tables make it pretty easy to roll up some interesting situational content if you're feeling stumped.
Trying to Resolve Things
The game's dice system works pretty well, in isolation. Smallish pools of d6s with fixed target numbers mean that you get diminishing returns as you increase your pool, but not so much that it's not worth increasing your skills or finding some situational advantage in order to grab more dice. Skills have a lot of randomness at low skill levels, but do tend to become fairly (maybe too) reliable once you build them up in the later parts of a campaign.
My criticisms of the resolution system aren't aimed at the dice themselves, but at the system as a whole. To start with, each roll has a declared 'position' (how risky it is) and 'effect' (how effective the action will be). Having to work this stuff out before every roll adds a little bit of extra friction that may or may not be worth the effort. Personally, I've found setting position to be pretty intuitive and useful once I got the hang of it, while I don't change effect from 'standard' very often, possibly because I'm not using countdown clocks as often as the game intends.
There is a bit of finickiness, though. Let me lay out the way the resolution system works as a whole, as best I understand it:
- Player describes what they are doing.
- GM calls for a roll.
- Player describes (or clarifies) the goal of their roll.
- Player chooses the skill they will use (i.e. how many dice they roll). If this doesn't reflect their fictional action, they can change that action.
- GM sets position, effect, and bonus dice.
- Player rolls.
- GM narrates outcome.
- Player (optionally) resists the outcome.
As you can probably see, there's a lot of possible back-and-forth about what exactly is happening. Take step 4, for example. Blades is unusual among games with a traditional 'GM plus one player per PC' structure in that players, not GMs, decide which skill they are rolling. When we started playing, what tended to happen was that a player would describe their goal and then look to me to declare which skill to use, which either led to some dithering, or to me outright suggesting a skill. This got better with experience, but it's always been a bit awkward.
My least favourite part of resolution system is the resistance roll, which allows a player to 'resist' the negative consequences of a roll, removing or reducing them, in exchange for risking some 'stress' (which I'll get to soon). My players were quick to resist any particularly severe consequence, and I would probably do the same. I'm wary of making too decisive a statement here, since I've only played the game as a GM, not as a player, but resistance rolls feel like a bit of a cop-out. They deflate the drama of a bad roll and tend to funnel every score towards a successful outcome.
These little negotiations and retcons slow down an otherwise good resolution system. It's not always a problem, and it's not a deal-breaker, but it is a nuisance. This might be partly a matter of taste (I prefer speed and decisiveness in most gaming rules), but I don't think it's unreasonable to want action resolution rules that decisively resolve things. Rolling the dice should be about drama, and tension! The last thing I want in that situation is a committee meeting.
Criminal Accountancy 101
This might seem unnecessarily critical on my part, and maybe it is, but it leads into my biggest complaint, which is that sometimes Blades just... Doesn't feel like it wants anything decisive to happen. The game is good at helping you create interesting situations, with lots of colour, dynamic characters and interesting conflicts... And then they just sort of sit there.
This is clearest in the post-score downtime phase. During scores, PCs build up stress and trauma (for example, by resisting negative consequences or using flashbacks), gain 'heat' (which measures how much the powers-that-be are annoyed with them), and possibly even sustain injuries. Downtime lets you deal with these various problems, and maybe also make progress on a project or stash some of your filthy lucre for your retirement. Mostly, it's a little bit of accounting that sets the stage for the next score, with some colour and opportunities for drama woven in.
The problem here is that, while scores rarely go to plan, resistance rolls, flashbacks, and the high competence of the PCs usually mean that the gang gets its way in the end. Maybe I'm not being cruel enough as a GM, but my experience is that gangs rarely struggle to complete scores unless the target is out of their league or the obstacles especially contrived. Which means that the pressure of a difficult score gets offloaded onto the downtime phase when the gang needs to deal with stress and heat, instead of immediate and dramatic consequences in the moment. In a sense, the real mechanical crux of the game, across a campaign, is the downtime accounting, with gangs looking for easier scores when things are tough, and tougher ones when they're feeling greedy.
There's nothing wrong with this, exactly, and a lot is going to depend on the people at the table, but it does mean the game often feels it's trying to move back toward equilibrium. Several months into a campaign, I think everyone in my group is ready to wrap things up, not because we're not having fun, but because, narratively, it feels like we should be heading toward the end. The problem is, a dramatic ending requires a crisis where everything comes to a head, and the game keeps offering us tools to prevent a really nasty crisis from happening. Ultimately, this is our fault, and maybe it says more about us as players than the Blades in the Dark as a game, but I wish the rules would stop offering us easy ways out.
There's one really good thing about downtime, though, and I think it's indicative of Blades' ambivalent attitude towards consequences. After each score, you make an 'entanglement roll' against a table of potential fallout, like a rival gang coming for revenge, or the police grabbing one of your friends off the street. Entanglement rolls are great when you roll something novel and play the consequences to the hilt (like a 'hard move' in Apocalypse World), but tend to fall flat when they become repetitive or you let the players use one of the recommended currency spends to 'buy off' the consequences. This is a problem, because entanglements feel like the real engine of interesting drama in long-term play. These days, I rarely give the option for buying off the consequences, and am seriously considering rewriting the results tables to expand their variety and give the higher-level ones really sharp teeth.
Conclusions
If this review reads as negative, it's because I've enjoyed my time with Blades enough to feel frustrated by its flaws. At the table, it's been rich with atmosphere, interesting characters, and memorable hijinks. I just wish it were a little leaner, sharper, and more decisive. If I run it again, I'm going to seriously consider how we deal with things like resistance and entanglements, so that that it can really shine.
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