What is so special about Blades in the Dark?
Disclaimer: I only ran BitD, so I am coming at this from the GM point of view.
What I liked:
- Clocks: I know, I know, everyone's crazy about them. But they are a quite powerful abstraction, like a crunchier version of Fate's Aspects. Fighting an NPC? clock. Solving a puzzle? clock. Impending doom? clock.
- Crew sheet: Treating the entire PC team as a separate character, pooling resources (and consequences), communal levelling. Cool stuff.
- Downtime vs Score: Everything in BitD is geared towards propelling the players into the next Score. This is similar to how D&D is pushing you towards the next Initiative roll, only more structured since downtime actions are a limited resource. Indeed one can argue that BitD is build around the downtime action economy.
What did not quite work for me:
- Factions: I understand the need for them, my players were strategizing in terms of them, I just could not make them work for myself. The whole 'web of conspiracy' thing, where every action triggers reactions from multiple factions was too much to handle consistently. Given that World of Darkness is most definitely a world of schemers and dealers, I better figure out a way to fix this...
- Doskvol: The city of Doskvol is an atmospheric place for sure. We bought the high-res maps and got them printed, and one of them is still pinned on my fridge. But the scale is simultaneously too big and too small; out of 11 districts we played essentially within a single one, Coalridge. I ended up treating it as a bunch of disparate locations, without clear sense of relative distance and position; my failure as a GM, but one that needs to be addressed. World of Darkness games also take place in constrained urban environments that players visit again and again.
- Stress: Blasphemy, I know, but hear me out; stress is great for alleviating the player's (not the PC's) fear of going into a Score unprepared. But in practice I found that it might not be enough; players still argued among themselves and kept asking for more info on the target. I eventually watched a video by Dr. Ben on Convictional Narrative Theory that clicked for me. The gist of CNT is that under conditions of radical uncertainty, people will not act until they can form a collective narrative about the planned action that resonates emotionally. It's not about potential complications, Stress will indeed take care of that, it's about consensus building (and getting psyched!)
How well do BitD mechanics fit the BitD themes?
There is a fascinating tension at the heart of BitD's system:
- At the micro level, the resolution mechanics are heavily biased towards success. The question is not so much "Will the PCs succeed?", but rather "What will it cost?".
- At the macro level, the core game loop is a treadmill. The PCs accumulate 'mechanical debt' in the form of Harm, Stress and Heat and push-back (Entanglements) from rival factions and the authorities. They need to thread the needle between dealing with the aftermath of the last Score vs preparing for the next one.
In my own BitD campaign, I found that these core mechanics were actually at odds with the emergent narrative.
- At the micro level, the rules are stacked in the PC's favour, with very high odds of success if they are willing to burn enough resources. On the other hand, within the narrative the PCs are just a low-level crew trying to gain a foothold at the expense of more powerful factions. To justify the high mechanical odds of success in the face of such opposition, the system uses Stress to bend reality in the PCs favour. The PCs are special because they are literally the Chosen ... avatars of the players!
- At the macro level, the core game loop is meant to create the feeling of 'scraping by', always one bad Score away from oblivion. In practice, between the fact that a) the Crew starts at the very bottom of Doskvol's power structure, so there is no way to go but up, and that b) the PCs and Crew advance mechanically quite fast, the emergent narrative was that of a meteoric rise, a true rags-to-riches story.
- By the end of my campaign, the Crew had completely rewritten the power structure of Coalridge and had begun to register in a meaningful way within the power structure of the entire city. The rules of BitD as written do not support continued play at this point - with a large enough dice pool in most Actions and Attributes, Success with great Effect is mechanically very likely even under Desperate conditions. The PCs are now part of the Establishment and they retire, perhaps as NPCs for the next campaign.