I recently got to play Blades in the Dark, which uses the Forged in the Dark system, a system I’ve wanted to experience in actual play for a while. This post contains my thoughts on the experience.
I thought of numerous ways to approach this and decided it wasn’t going to be a blow-by-blow set of actual play notes. I’m doing that with a Rime of the Frost Maiden game, but I’m doing that as the sessions occur.
This is a compromise. What we have is what I liked about the game we played, what I like about the system and whether I’d run it!
Where I am coming from
I’m a big fan of fiction first games. So much so that I tend to take the core of something and the principles it’s based on and then run it in a fiction first system like Fate or Cortex Prime. Since Forged in the Dark systems are fiction first I was interested in them.
I was less interested in Blades in the Dark as an idea.
Still, Scum & Villainy exists and it places the whole set-up within the framework of Firefly, Killjoys and Star Wars. I was sold. I loved the game on reading it and I did get to play it. I enjoyed those sessions, but I wasn’t fully sold on the structure of the game. It can get a bit like the TV show iZombie where the structure overly influences the experience.
So I was looking forward to giving Blades in the Dark a go.
The Structure
The post is structured into the below sections: –
There is literally no way I can cover all of how the system works, as this isn’t a review, neither should I be telling actual play stories endlessly. It sort of assumes you’re a bit familiar with Blades in the Dark, so hopefully what I’ve chosen to focus on is interesting.
The Day Con Experience
The game was played over three days, roughly a month apart, which amounts to circa nine sessions as you tend to get three slots in each day. Despite having only three sessions each day we called each day’s worth of play a season.
The intention was for it be a one-shot affair, but the events of the first day were sufficiently interesting that we ended up playing what amounts to a full campaign for us. I suspect it didn’t help it ended on a crazy cliffhanger on day one.
Did the format impact the experience of the game? I think it did.
I’m not 100% sure the game would have been as much fun if each of the sessions was spread out at least two weeks apart. It would have resulted in some sessions feeling more light and a bit superfluous as they only worked as the build-up to the whole which worked better when that whole was experienced in one sitting. It also meant we avoided the game feeling like a series of convention one-shots which I think can also be an outcome.
It could be argued if the sessions had been two weeks apart, that in itself would have influenced what happed at the table. I get that. I still think there was something in how Blades in the Dark plays and doing multiple sessions in one day.
Fantastically playing to find out
The core idea of Blades in the Dark is the concept of playing to find out. I think we do a degree of playing to find out in any campaign we play, but since Blades in the Dark enforces it at every point in its system and structure (which we’ll come back to) it creates a sort of distilled and pure play to find out experience. If you try to do anything but a rather full-on play to find out experience you’ll be fighting the system at every turn.
In this case, it delivered a fantastic three days of gaming. A few of the reasons why are outlined below.
Preparation through experience. The game had an interesting set-up at the start in that we just created characters, went straight into a job and stuff happened that spun everything off. We had cards for all the NPC’s and the characters we were connected to as character creation establishes these. Obviously, this was an example of preparation through experience. It shows how being very familiar with the game allows you to accumulate the tools and knowledge to spin something awesome up pretty much on the spot not knowing what characters you’ll have going in. It was a brilliant example of spontaneous, improvisation and playing to find out.
One of the best decisions that was made for our Blades in the Dark game is our characters were a bit advanced at the start and already had one trauma.
Ian O’Rourke, Fandomlife.net
All about the trauma. It seemed we focused a lot on the trauma, or maybe I did. The whole story that unfolded around the character was focused on her being too soft-hearted for the world she found herself in, yet her involvement was born out of loss and a sense of revenge. Basically, I imagined it as a Fate aspect on the character sheet and I played it that way self compelling to create meaningful decision points and outcomes. I thought it turned out to be a beautiful and complex story by the time it concluded. I loved it. This is something that would be better explained in a session by session account, but it was great. It also shows how an intentional story doesn’t mean railroading.
The complex heists. While all the jobs were interesting as even the simple ones can go to desperate and exciting pretty, damned quickly there was something about the two heists we did that had multiple vectors, and stages and played with things in a funky temporal order that were just..everything.
Every die roll was exciting. Every dice roll mattered, as they should. Every roll of the dice felt exciting and consequential, or it felt safer, and then suddenly it wasn’t! The use of a Devil’s Bargain to add a die to your pool can be really cool and ratchet things up a notch. Everything is exciting once the position hits desperate and you drive it to desperate because that is where the XP is earned. In execution it was a beautiful thing.
Exciting and intense reveals. I rarely see shocking reveals in role-playing games either because people attempt them and they’re not that shocking or because I’ve got a pretty high narrative radar so I can sort of see them coming. Have to say, this game got me about three times. I’d even go as far to say I’ve never seen moments pulled off like that in any game I’ve played before, to the extent they played out in this campaign. Literally, amazing, mouth agape astounding moments. Accidently bumbling into an Imperial Intelligence operation. Encountering the person who killed my character’s husband on that same job (I’d only invented it as a thing 60-minutes before). The unseen betrayal of a friend just trying to better her life despite seeing all the pieces ahead of time but missing it. It was really good as well as being fuelled by emotion.
This probably isn’t a complete list. I’m sure I’ve missed something, but the experience was great. The fact a meaningful and deep story was woven out of nothing and reacting to things we were creating on the fly was very impressive. It does play to my firm belief that story and plot aren’t the same thing and this demonstrates how you can have the former without much of the latter being established in advance.
The glorious abstraction
As a fan of fiction first games, I adore games that work at the abstraction of the fiction. They’re not trying to simulate the real physics of the situation. Fate and Cortex Prime work as abstractions, but they are different forms of abstraction. The level of abstraction in Forged in the Dark games seems even more ‘one step removed’.
The playbooks. They do a fantastic job of giving an abstracted toolset to make you awesome at what you do. Whether you’re a super-spy, assassin, or a thug-like bodyguard. They also do this without telling you elements of what your character’s story should be as some playbook-based systems do. I always felt totally awesome. I really enjoyed the playbook process.
Character not player. The system always ensures the character is the super spy, elite infiltration assassin, and the bruiser bodyguard NOT the player. This is very important for the game in order to deliver an intentional story and feel like exciting fiction. The way the system works is the majority of how the characters approach things is accepted as correct, it just might have a different level of effect and the rest is down to the results of the roll. It ensures the players can deliver on their dramatic protagonists in action while focusing on how they respond to events and make decisions. This element is excellently implemented.
Player facing. The player-facing nature of the game is great. It keeps the focus on what the players are doing and playing and rolling to find out. The GM never makes a roll and you’re wondering what it is. The agency of the player in deciding to roll the dice is never removed by the GM rolling to see if something succeeds. The roll and the consequences accepted are all on the player. This just changes the nature of player for me as you’re rolling for every moment.
There are no stats. There are literally no stats for anything in the game other than the player characters. I understood this, but it’s only fully apparent what this means when you’re running it or seeing it being run. Whatever rises up to respond to player activity needs no stats pulling out of a hat. Not even in a Fate sense of a ridiculously simplified stat block. Literally nothing. All that is important is the tier of the opposition, the current position (controlled, risky or desperate), and the decided level of effect. Roll. At a system level, responding to player activity is virtually frictionless.
Everything is stress. Ignoring actual harm, the fact everything is just whether you spend stress or not is great. It’s also a ludicrous level of abstraction, but it works. You just keep on going and going until you can’t and it’s all too much and your narrative meter has blinked red. I think it’s genius in how it apportions out what you can do, spreads activities across the players and creates tension as it begins to tap out.
Load and equipment. We don’t do equipment in our games, so it goes without saying we like the loadout mechanic and the way it abstracts equipment into a this is what you might have and decide you have it when you need it but you’ve only got so much on a light, medium or heavy load basis. Simple and effective.
Physical stats. The player characters have no stats just skills. I never even noticed this until I came to write this post. I am fastly become someone who thinks character stats are superfluous. You either use approaches or you put them in a coffin and then nail it shut and don’t have them at all. You don’t even notice they don’t exist in Blades in the Dark.
The structure. I love the heist set-up. You decide your approach and you make a roll to decide whether you enter the heist on a controlled, risky or desperate situation. Then you play to find out. It fully delivers on the whole Mission: Impossible craziness. I feel less enamoured with the rest of the structure, which is splitting the time played between the job, downtime and free play. I don’t think it’s a problem, I just think if you’re not careful it can become too much of a procedural experience. It’s a delicate thing to get right and make a facet of organic play rather than taking a hammer to it.
When you look at the above it’s not hard to see why people sometimes find the system hard to grasp. It hits all the reasons people find these things challenging: –
- It’s not stat+skill with a bennie to improve rolls 90’s zeitgeist
- It’s fiction first
- It’s a structured play experience
- Even for fiction first it’s ludicrously abstracted
Forged in the Dark literally hits every way of taking a person’s general understanding or default view of how gaming should be, scrumples it into a paper ball, tosses it into the bin, and then suggests you put lighter fuel on it and set it alight.
I mean, I thought it was great, other than some issues outlined next.
Some issues…
I loved the game and I’d play it again but there are some elements that I’d be wary of if I was to run it.
Where is the story. Despite doing a fantastic job of orchestrating the how and what of play, the system does very little around the why, which is where the story is. Yes, you get experience for expressing your beliefs, drives, heritage, or background and struggling with issues from your vice or traumas. The trouble is it feels like an after the fact thing based on a foundation of generalities. I think we just found this a bit passive. It literally got to the point of us articulating our trauma like a Fate aspect and this is what drove the story. In this regard, I prefer active and explicit rules used in the session disconnected from how you earn experience. One solution might be to add some sort of ‘trait statement’ to these things to make them more actionable in game in a compel style.
The impact of the structure. The structure works, but it can very easily not work. It’s all too easy unless you’re really working it and concentrating, for the game to become a bit of an artificial, procedural experience and feel too constructed. It doesn’t have to, but it very easily can. It’d be something I’d really want to consider beforehand and put a smidgeon of effort into making the structure organic.
Constant questions. You’re playing to find out and the game asks a lot of questions of the GM. There are always consequences to think up. Players asking you for a Devil’s Bargain. In a way this isn’t that different from other campaigns we’ve ran. Fate has failure with consequences. It just feels a bit more full on with Forged in the Dark. I may find it a bit tyring.
Will I run a Forged in the Dark game? It’s hard to say. I’m not someone who runs a lot of games serially so we’ll see. I do love space opera and it would be very hard to consider any system other than Scum & Villainy for any campaign similar to Firefly, Killjoys or Star Wars.
Since I plan through structure I think there is a way around the ‘make everything up’ approach Forged in the Darks system has by using something like a Conspyramid from Nights Black Agents? You’d use missions or jobs to move through the structure? The Conspyramid even comes with the concept of tiers as well. Something in that I think.
And, Finally…
So, there you have it. I had a great experience playing Blades in the Dark. I really liked playing it in the Day Con format as I think that added lot. It does have me thinking how I’d do it, which is sometimes an indicator of a game I might run as I like that aspect of figuring out the challenge and making it my own!
For now, all that matters is we had three glorious days of gaming and we’ve already got The One Ring in the slot for the next Day Con. We’ll see how many days that runs for!