Author: Ferrell Riley

Kristen D this prob is up your alley!

http://d-infinity.net/interview/wheelhouse-workshop-turns-tabletop-gaming-social-development#.Va50Kd7gNek.twitter

Blades In The Dark Session 2: Skillageddon

Session 2 of Blades in the Dark Included the following:  Boat Stealing for a pile of Concertinas, Guards chasing a peregrine falcon, and lots of terrible jersey accents.  Fun as all hell.

I’m enjoying the teamwork mechanic, and the ability to setup people for greater success by risking yourself and narrating how your actions assist others.  Being able to have others setup help to give you greater chances for success is damn helpful, especially when the other option is being surrounded by angry men with guns and swords.

I think the only item I’m having problems with is the skill rolls.  For Blades in the Dark, you have 4 primary Stats (Guile/Intrigue/Vigor/Resolve), but then each of those has 4 skills underneath them.  Quite often, at least in our game, we would need to pause play in order to hash out what skill was the “correct” one to roll or call upon, which was especially troubling as for some actions such as bartering with a merchant, there was no explicit skill called.  I feel that the skills are a bit much, at least from having played multiple other PBTA games, and would hope to see future revisions return to the more simplistic method of having the 4 Primary Stats assigned a numeric value to roll for dice, and change the current skill lists to something such as “Talents” or make them moves such as the basic/starting moves on the play-sheet.  I feel that each of the Primary Stats has enough flexibility to allow for a crew to naturally feel out what would be appropriate to roll at the table.  I’d be curious to see how the others at the table felt.

Props to Russell Benner for running us and dealing with the interesting methods we’ve been using to keep our sheets from flying away.

Having gone through our first session of Blades in the Dark, I have to say, I’m loving the creation process.  It brought back the only thing I’d been missing, which is that collaborative “who are we and what are we doing here” emotion.  Listening to everyone else come up with characters, and especially since we were down a person, having to decide what skill set we would be “without”, made me really enjoy coming up with both the character and the gang, as well as deciding what kind of jobs we were going to pull.  

I think that might be something that I used to get from Shadowrun, or World of Darkness style books.  Apocalypse World & Monster Hearts set players against each other to create fiction from friction, and Dungeon World/Dungeon Planet/Monster Of The Week create a “team” but one where everyone still feels like an individual.  Blade in the Dark though made me really want to know “what can I do for the team?” and I look forward to our vices interfering with our plans, and the downfall that comes when you get everything you ever wanted.