I start a Blades in the Dark campaign today as a player. Although I normally blog my GM-ing experiences here, I have a good reason to share. In our Session 0, we will discuss what mechanics to include in our campaign from John Harper’s supplement Deep Cuts. I’ll share my thoughts about the new mechanics with you in this post, specifically from a GM’s perspective. Are we still playing to find out what happens? Come talk Blades with me on Mastodon: @[email protected]

The GM’s Role in Blades

I love Blades because it is a player-driven game. Blades GMs can focus a greater share of their attention on making the world come alive for the players because they don’t need to craft a large arc–that’s left to the players. GMs make the world of Blades come alive in two ways: they enforce the ever-present danger that the scoundrel life entails, and they manage the city’s response to the actions of the players.

The mechanics in Blades–things like harm, stress, heat, and tier–give weight and substance to a player-driven narrative. They ground the stories we tell by enforcing tone. Of course, any mention of tone begs the question, what tone of story are you telling?

The GM solicits input from players at the beginning of a campaign to decide a mutually agreed upon tone. Tone informs what mechanics we include. Therefore, let’s look at the new mechanics with an eye to how they will impact the tone of our game.

My Ideal Tone

My ideal tone for Blades may not be yours. Before considering trying a rule change, take a moment to conceptualize the tone you aim for in Blades. Here’s the tone I’m trying to hit in a game of Blades in the Dark:

In my conception of Blades, we’re telling the story of a crew whose reach exceeds their grasp. The crew members must wear themselves down to push the crew ahead. Old members retire and are replaced by new. If the crew’s rise is inevitable, individual members are disposable.

Harm

Ongoing effects of Harm in original Blades could range from negligible to debilitating depending on GM enforcement. On the negligible side, Harm is just another box to fill on the character sheet to keep a score going. On the debilitating side, even level one Harm can seriously frustrate a player by reducing effect on practically every roll. Enforcement was left a bit vague in the original rules.

Frankly, I like the new Harm rules. They add more rules to the game–something I don’t normally like. However, those rules function to clarify how the GM can use Harm to create complications for players and how players can spend stress to ignore Harm.

I like the GM awarding XP in exchange for invoking a Harm. I like how it offers advancement in exchange for playing through difficulty, much like players receiving XP for incorporating their characters’ vices and traumas. Harm in the original rules is wholly negative. Players now have an incentive for bringing Harm into the fiction.

I do not think the new Harm rules have much impact on tone, they simply improve clarity and quality of life.

Trauma

In contrast to the new rules for Harm, the new rules for Trauma in Deep Cuts blunts the mechanic and alters the tone of the game. If Trauma can be undone through a long-term project, characters can stick around forever. This goes against my ideal tone for Blades and I don’t plan on including it.

Trauma is the only mechanic in the book that ends a player character’s career. It represents the scoundrel’s life catching up with a character.

Conversely, if characters can hang around indefinitely and accrue advancements, they become mechanically unstoppable. If player characters roll 4 dice regularly, their odds of failure are about the same as rolling a 1 on a d20. Their odds of getting at least one six are over fifty percent. At that point the game is well and truly broken. Trauma cycles out player characters which lets the game be something besides a crit show.

Load

The new Load rules simplify light, medium, and heavy into the more narratively useful discreet and conspicuous. This simplification elides having to read what light, medium, and heavy mean. I like the simplification because it brings the mechanics closer to the narrative.

The second part of Load, about adding to Load during a score makes sense but seems too fiddly. My attention during play is limited and I don’t want to spare a thought for encumbrance. I’ll let the narrative determine what the new encumbrance rules are modeling.

I don’t see these new Load rules affecting tone much, if any.

Advancement Clocks

This one is tricky to judge without playing it. I’m keen to try it just to see how it works. Essentially, the normal XP tracker is replaced by an XP clock. Raising an ability from zero to one pip requires filling the XP clock once. Raising that ability from one pip to two requires filling the XP clock twice, and so on.

This mechanical change slows advancement, or rather, it makes it more likely players broaden their characters’ skills.

I complained in a previous section about how the game breaks when players roll more than three dice. I think this rule change supports the tone I aim for in a game of Blades.

Diceless Downtime

I want to run Downtime at the end of a session. After downtime I want my players to decide their next heist and then we begin the next session with that heist. The remake of downtime requires too much prep for me to tack it on easily. On the player side, downtime already gives players decision paralysis. Making it diceless–that is, knowable–will cause even more decision paralysis in a player who is drawn to optimizing.

I do not like how indulging vice essentially becomes a free downtime activity. I like having to balance between my character’s needs and the crew’s needs. This preference comes back to tone. I want to wear characters out and replace them.

My final quibble on this is that I like rolling dice. I like being inspired to tell a story based on a die result. If my character went to recruit members of another faction and I rolled poorly, what does that mean about my character’s reputation among members of that faction?

As a GM I frankly need the random rolls for downtime to both inspire my portrayal of the world and to ease my cognitive burden.

I will not switch to diceless downtime.

Action Roll/Threat Roll

I might be missing something, but the new way to make action rolls seems like a step sideways. In original Blades, consequences of failure are presented before a roll. I like Blades for quick mechanical resolution. These new rolling rules seem to have extra steps that will slow play. I also think they’ve chucked out resistance rolls (insight, prowess, resolve) unnecessarily.

However, I need to try these rules to make an informed opinion.

I appreciate the tables for escalating consequences, costs, and threats. These are tools that help keep my game moving even if I don’t use the new action roll rules.

In just about two hours I’m going to talk with four other people about which of the above rules we want to include in our game. I think I’m going to push for all of them–even the ones I didn’t like at first blush–just for the experience. It goes without saying that John Harper is no slouch when it comes to crafting mechanics that support narrative. Do you have a different take on Deep Cuts? Message me over on Mastodon: @[email protected]

Cutting Deeper