Blades in the Dark: Is it good: Position/Effect

actions in Blades in the Dark are basically analogous to attacks and skill checks in d&d... a player has action ratings associated with their character, if you have two pips in Finesse it means you roll two d6 when you make a Finesse action roll, and if you succeed you get to do the Finesse thing, whatever that is. To succeed, you need to roll a 6, and to crit, you need to roll two 6's. Otherwise you keep the best number you rolled.

so actions are different from skills, mechanically, chiefly because the game master has these two degrees of freedom for determining... what kind of action it is. For each action the GM chooses a position (controlled, risky, or desperate) and an effect (limited, standard, great)... which gives us some grist to work with... but whats it all mean?

so in the reference document it has this....

Controlled—You act on your terms. You exploit a dominant advantage.

Critical: You do it with increased effect.
6: You do it.
4/5: You hesitate. Withdraw and try a different approach, or else do it with a minor consequence: a minor complication occurs, you have reduced effect, you suffer lesser harm, you end up in a risky position.
1-3: You falter. Press on by seizing a risky opportunity, or withdraw and try a different approach.

Risky—You go head to head. You act under fire. You take a chance.

Critical: You do it with increased effect.
6: You do it.
4/5: You do it, but there’s a consequence: you suffer harm, a complication occurs, you have reduced effect, you end up in a desperate position.
1-3: Things go badly. You suffer harm, a complication occurs, you end up in a desperate position, you lose this opportunity.

Desperate—You overreach your capabilities. You’re in serious trouble.

Critical: You do it with increased effect.
6: You do it.
4/5: You do it, but there’s a consequence: you suffer severe harm, a serious complication occurs, you have reduced effect
1-3: It’s the worst outcome. You suffer severe harm, a serious complication occurs, you lose this opportunity for action.

So its tempting, looking at this, to go, no, this is too much, to break it down into something that more easily fits into your head. You can sort of think of Position as how risky is this roll, and Effect as what the reward will be. which gives you Risk/Reward instead of Position/Effect which is easier to remember and easier to reason about. And generally they can be the same: controlled position generally means reduced effect and risky position generally means great effect, and thats basically in keeping with what the game intends. So instead of having a sort of alignment chart of different rolls you basically have about two kinds: low risk/low reward and high risk/high reward. and you can use the same dice outcomes for both because really only the size of the Effect or Complication is different.

At which point you can basically do away with this too complicated rule, and entirely do away with 'position' as a separate thing from 'effect'. BUT you wouldnt exactly get whats happening in this complex matrix of outcomes, because youd lose:

the more complicated Position stuff

From a Controlled position, if  you don't roll a 6, you can Withdraw, or alternatively, succeed with a minor bad thing happening. so Withdraw is an option that's only offered from a Controlled position. whereas from a Risky or Desperate position, you can sometimes Lose the Opportunity, which is worse I guess. So if you keep to a controlled position you can be relatively sure that you can Withdraw and thereby avoid all other consequences, and you don't Lose the Opportunity. the sad truth is that withdraw and lose the opportunity do the same thing in the system: youre allowed to roll again but choosing a different Action Rating. But if they were different, I think its easy to make them different, it creates a more interesting choice.

Position tends to cascade from controlled to risky to desperate. the game wants to push you into more risky positions, so it always offers a worse position as one of the outcomes, if it can. So it creates this sort of minor arc of -you were in a controlled position, but now youre in a risky position, and maybe you'll end up in a desperate position! look out!

When you make a roll from a Desperate position, the game gives you XP for it. Its a worse kind of XP than the other kind and its slow to get, but I think the quickest way to increase your Action Ratings (skill ranks) is to make lots of Desperate rolls. Whether this is good XP or not is beside the point I guess, the game wants you to do desperate rolls. It thinks that they are better. It only really gives you the option to do controlled rolls so that it can push you to do a desperate roll.

And the last thing is worse outcomes for worse positions: worse harm (which is injuries and stuff), worse complications. Along with the sort-of implied better Effect if you do succeed. So like, worse positions are more, bigger, than controlled ones.

so in summary if you try to keep position pure, as written, you should get:
- the somewhat dubious tactical distinction between Withdraw and Lose the Opportunity
- positions that cascade from Controlled to Risky to Desperate over time
- an XP trigger that encourages the player to do Desperate stuff
- a range of outcomes that scale from a controlled position/small outcomes to desperate positions/large outcomes

that said, I'm not totally convinced that you can't just get all this stuff without having to look it up.

Having A Range of Effects

If you're of a dungeons and dragons mindset I think you can pretty safely think of effect as the damage that actions do. Blades doesnt really have hit points or attacks but it has something analogous: clocks that you can attack with your actions, the effect is the damage the action does. If you think about it this way, a 4-clock is a health bar that can be killed by one action with great effect (generally a desperate action, that does 3 damage to the clock) and one safer action. Player actions have effects in the range 1-3 and you can be sure of this. If you assign an effect of 2 to an action it might instead do 1 or 3 ticks on the clock. Once you know this thing it's pretty easy to reason about.

The game does support actions that have a desperate position but reduced effect, or a controlled position with great effect. I'm not sure if this is good. It's something.