System Review: Blades in the Dark

Blades in the Dark was my introduction to non-D&D systems, as I GM'ed an open table campaign over the course of 10 months. Likewise, all of my players were also new to the RPG experiences outside of Dungeon delving and Dragon slaying, so there was a learning curve for all of us. And Blades may have been exactly the system we needed.

I Like My Games Like My Coffee: Gritty

John Harper knew exactly what kind of experience he wanted to evoke for players of Blades in the Dark. You're not good people. You're not saving anyone. You're just finding a way to get by in this post-apocalyptic bastion of humanity. Well, bastion of humans, at least.

From day one, it was clear to my players that they were scoundrels. The playbooks and crew sheet, which are the primary mechanical choices made by players, all support the fiction of a criminal gang. The descriptions of Doskvol are bleak, but with enough steampunk and Victorian trappings to ground your characters in the world without making them miserable.

Of course, this theme isn't for everyone. I had a couple players who bounced off the system after one or two sessions, because they weren't jazzed about playing as bad guys. And this is where Blades' commitment is also its inflexibility. There was no way for me to accommodate players looking for a more virtuous motivation. It's the inverse of the classic "chaotic evil rogue PC" trope, with one player diametrically opposed to the goals of the group.

The rulebook does try to account for this, demonstrating a "Vigilantes" crew sheet to frame your team as freedom fighters striking back at an oppressive regime. But it's also not the responsibility of the system to accommodate every potential need, it's up to the players at the table to align on what we want our experience to be. At a table with a set number of players, we could have been more flexible and accommodating, but at an open table where the players aren't a known quantity, I had to accept it couldn't be all things for all people.

Breaking Legs and Rolling Bones

The Blades in the Dark ruleset, rolling a pool of d6s hoping for sixes and settling for fours and fives, stands on the shoulders of giants. Following the Powered by the Apocalypse concept of mechanically differentiating "Success" from "Success, but...", the dice divest the GM of the responsibility for inflicting consequences on the players. In a binary pass/fail system, the GM is often encouraged to let the players "fail forward" if they don't succeed on a roll, but what that means is largely left to the GM to determine. Blades, on the other hand, lists out the consequences for a failed or partially successful roll, so any angst from the players can be directed squarely at the rulebook.

Dice pools as a resolution method are fantastic. Every additional die the player gains feels impactful, and the tactile experience of shaking a handful of dice is hard to beat. The complete removal of math for any additives or modifiers also lets everyone share the excitement of a success, instead of the staggered reactions as they piece together the total.

The part that started to grate for me was Position and Effect. Essentially, for each roll, the GM sets the Position (or how badly things will go if the roll fails) and the Effect (or how well things will go if the roll succeeds). This is a great habit to develop, since it helps the player and the GM align on the stakes of a situation. However, the player is able to "exchange" Position and Effect by playing it safe for a lesser impact or taking risks for a greater result. This back-and-forth stretches out the conversation every time a roll is called for, on top of other decision points like assistance, pushing yourself, Devil's Bargains, items, and abilities. It's possible for this discussion to be part of the narrative, the player describing how they change their approach or how they use a tool to their advantage. In our case, that's not how my players engage with the game, so it brought the narrative to a halt to start talking about mechanics.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

So, when a player inevitably beefs a roll, what happens? In the spirit of the Powered by the Apocalypse lineage, characters don't have health points. Instead, they have several levels of Harm they can take, each conferring a debuff of some sort. More commonly, though, you'll be starting a Clock.

Clocks are great. They can (and usually should) be adapted to any system. As players fail their rolls, they contribute to a shared tracker leading up to a Bad Thing happening. There are two major benefits here: telegraphing consequences and sharing responsibility. By labelling a clock and making it known to the players, we turn up the tension as they have a concrete idea of what will happen if they fail. And by filling up the clock regardless of which player makes the roll, no one needs to bear the brunt of the guilt for making the situation worse for the team.

The Player Experience

Now that we know how Blades in the Dark works, how does it feel to play? Admittedly, it took a couple months to break my players' habits of rolling to investigate, or looking for the key they thought I had prepared for a given obstacle. Once they got into the swing of putting the fiction first and trusting the narrative, we hit our stride.

Players have a comprehensive toolkit of actions at their disposal. Besides the usual action rolls for overcoming immediate obstacles, Blades in the Dark brings flashbacks to the fore as a tool for players to shape the narrative and make their characters seem like criminal masterminds. Add in a handful of options for teamwork actions, an inventory system that gives the character the exact item they need for the task at hand, and each class' special abilities, and your players will be executing heists on par with Ocean's Eleven.

The playbooks for each character archetype offer plenty of fun options, and go a long way towards helping players shape a character that feels unique. Even after playing dozens of sessions, triggering a special ability still felt like a climactic moment in the score. The crew sheet, which lists unique upgrades and triggers for gaining experience points, will have everyone at the table leaning into a specific type of gang activity and helps the team stay consistent.

The trickiest part for the players was coming up with new heists every session. This ties back to running the game as an open table, so there was less focus on the Free Play phase. As a result, there wasn't as much space for the player characters to organically discover the world and find opportunities for scores. Most of my players preferred the planning and execution of heists, so this wasn't a major issue, but it did make the style of play a bit lopsided.

Phased Out

As alluded to, Blades has three Phases of play: Free Play, Scores, and Downtime. In Free Play, players are focused on roleplay and character development; there aren't many rolls happening here. Once we enter the Score Phase, we have the stereotypical Blades in the Dark experience of rolling dice and filling clocks. Finally there's an opportunity to recuperate in Downtime, working on side projects and restoring the players' resources.

I have mixed feelings on systems that separate play into 'Phases'. Functionally, it can be compared with D&D's combat and resource management; Scores are essentially Blades' version of combat, with the Engagement Roll equating to rolling initiative. Then we have Downtime as our version of short or long rests, to recover health and resources. And everything else is Free Play, where we can largely set mechanics to the side to focus on lower-stakes narrative. I don't mean to be reductive with this comparison, it's just a framing that helped me realize where I was feeling friction.

As a GM, I found myself restricted by this structure. The Downtime economy is static, so a Score is expected to strain enough resources to make interesting decisions when spending Downtime activities to recover those same resources. I wasn't able to find a way to make a short and snappy Score the same way I try to make D&D combat brief with high stakes.

To be fair, this is where the Phase structure plays to the advantage of an open table. By taking a "heist of the week" approach, we can make a self-contained session that hits each Phase once, and resets to the start for whoever makes it to the table next week. If I were to run Blades in the Dark for a set player group, I would start tweaking these systems to provide more flexibility in Score length, but for an open table it fits the bill.

Think On Your Feet

My improvisational skills were put to the test with this system. I was still used to having some prep ready to lean on, but now I was going into a session without even knowing what score the crew would be undertaking. Coming up with a series of obstacles on the fly was great practice, even if it left my brain fried after a few hours.

The rulebook does what it can to prepare you for this. There are examples of play sprinkled through each section of the book to illustrate how to practically apply different rules. The GM Principles are pretty standard for games of this ilk, but they do their job to indicate how you should approach a session.

My biggest piece of advice to run a dramatic score: Go big with your complications. Instead of "alert the guards", start a fire. Someone dies nearby and alerts the Spirit Wardens. A ghost possesses a dormant Hull and goes berserk. Throw a big wrench in the works immediately, and all the following obstacles will make themselves apparent.

What Good Are The Rules If I Can't Find Them?

A well-formatted book is important. Especially for the first few sessions, there will be rules referenced while everyone's at the table and the ruling will have immediate consequences. So those rules should be easy to find, right?

The Blades in the Dark rulebook is not intuitive. For example, most types of rolls are explained at the start of the book. Except the teamwork options like setup and group actions, which are explained halfway through the book on page 134, being referenced multiple times before reaching the definition.

The rules for taking Trauma are so poorly worded, myself and two of my players (who had also thoroughly read the rulebook) misinterpreted how it worked. It wasn't until the Deep Cuts supplement was released with clarifications around Trauma that we were corrected, so apparently this is a common problem amongst other tables. For reference, 'You’re “left for dead” or otherwise dropped out of the current conflict' doesn't mean you're out of the score, just... whatever the "current conflict" is supposed to be.

I worked around this by making my own pamphlet summarizing the core rules, and only cracking open the book for the less common systems like crafting or rituals. The Forged in the Dark SRD (available here) is also more concise, and makes for a good reference tool once you've internalized the additional information presented in the book.

Final Thoughts

Let's be clear: my players and I had a great time playing with this system and in this world. We had memorable characters with unique motivations, a fun series of plot threads that branched out from the players' choices, and plenty of exciting dice rolls that had everyone watching with bated breath. The shift in playstyle also pulled us firmly out of our comfort zones, giving us a taste for what TTRPGs could be.

I'm still not sure if I'll be coming back to Doskvol. I was wrapping up the campaign just as Deep Cuts was released, so it may be worth circling back to see if those rules change the experience in a meaningful way. However, the success and innovation of Blades in the Dark has spawned an entire ecosystem of similar systems since its release in 2017.

Right now, I'd sooner get its contemporaries like The Wildsea or Grimwild to the table. I need a break from the oppressive streets of Doskvol, and some of the newer systems seem to eschew the Phases that were causing me grief. If you're on the lookout for something a bit grittier, and need an entrypoint for trying a new system, Blades in the Dark can certainly scratch that itch.