Blades in the Dark: What is It?

 its been long enough since we played blades in the dark that i cant really remember any of it so

it seems about time to construct a batshit retroclone of blades of the dark in the style of this style of blogging which i can also barely remember.

so the main problem with blades of the dark is it doesnt fit all in your head, which blades solves by having sheets where you write lots of numbers on like THE GUTTER BOYS: -2

blades in the dark is represented by bits of paper at the table by

1 a map
2 a list of kinds of guys you like or dont like
3 a bunch of apocalypse world style classes/character sheets on one page each
4 a page that describes your gang, and all the stuff they have

so thats already at least 3 pages plus one page for each player, lets try to do it on fewer pages?

mind you i played blades in the dark as a player so the other thing that blades in the dark is this series of acturial tables that tells you when to move a number on these pages up or down by one, and a TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCE for each one of these adjustments, but i didnt play as the darkkeeper so i cannot tell you what exactly it is on those tables but its like... adjust the thing by one and something bad happens

but its more than this, its a setting and a vibe and whatever. the vibe is like STRETCHY but DARKBAD with GHOST stuff

its always night time in blades of the dark but this DOENST MATTER REALLY

i think it doesnt have enough knife fights in it but thats actually my review of Knives Out, blades in the dark you can put as many knife fights in it as you want. but you wont, because
-the knife fighting rules are thin on the ground
-while the game wants you to do risky stuff, every dice roll is a crapshoot so you avoid dice rolls and become risk averse
-the healing is too much paperwork

so you can ignore these rules and fight knives all the time but that would be against the thesis of EVIL BABBONS, where we use all the mechanics we are given, to a fault, and pretend to be bamboozled by all the parts of a rpg that arent represented exacly as mechanics

so in this new blades in the dark retroclone there needs to be RULE 1: EXHAUSTIVE KNIFE FIGHTING RULE (TBD, INSERT YOUR FAV KNIFE FIGHTING RULE HERE)

i wont spell this one out here but i should specify: i think the game should have five or fewer rules so the knife fighting is probably the way that most conflicts are resolved, its the core mechanic, which replaces the action roll system in old-school blades. if you need a lockpicking or a whatever we'll call that a special case of knife fighting

okay so that covers blades, what about the dark?

i have tried to understand and care about the cover/vision/concealment system in d&d 5e and i cannot. there are three levels of darkness and five levels of cover and im so bored already. darkvision lets you see halfdarkness as though it were lightness and actual darkness as though it were halfdarkness (ie with disadvantage on active checks and -5 to your passive check) but only within a radius, outside that radius you can see nothing. but darkvision is the default so i should write that backwards. if you have badvision you cannot see with disadvantage like normal, instead you cannot see at all. thats what the rule actually says but nobody use this rule, instead they ignore the whole system... lets not get into stealth and surprise in 5e but lets agree that noone uses that as written either

so for the blades clone were writing we should try at first to do no harm. some darkness system is essential because the game is IN THE DARK, but the darkmaster should be allowed to forget this and not break anything. so let the basic rule be for in the dark and lets have BEING IN THE LIGHT be a exceptional case.

there needs to be a stealth system here, this will be an advantage over traditional blades in the dark which if i recall correclt does not have a stealth system

ok so lets do the stealth system using clocks. blades in the dark is clocks for everything. lets say each player has a clock that represents how lit up they are, and check it every time they do something loud or whatever, an when the clock fills up SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS.... if you dont like this what rule do you like for this area of the game. like/comment/subscribe me about it

so thats the second rule. we are quickly running out of rules so we have to cover all the other shit you can do in blades before we get to the fifth rule which will end the retroclone and seal this oath.

because its blades in the dark we need to have a rule for HEISTS, a rule for ghosts GEISTS, and a rule for STRETCHING CREDULITY BY GOING BACK IN TIME AND CHANGING SHIT and thats it weve run out. those are all of the things that there are.

if we make a rule for each of these case we will have made blades actually better and we will have made some good houserules that can make your blades game better but might also stand alone as a new better game because blades in the dark is actually not much more than this and doesnt really spell any of this shit out even though its core to its identity, this is what makes it feel all stretchy because it doesnt not telly you what it means by shit, so we can make a better blades in the dark by making these rules, only, this i posit

i will endure and try to come back and follow up this post with the completed retroclone but meanwhile you think about it

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.