Grade the Forged in the Dark System

[Ruin Explorer]

The idea that everything in Blades starts in media res is simplifying things too much.

I know, but when we played it, not only is it what the rulebook seems to strongly suggest, at that time (not that long after release - a couple of months at most) - all the online guidance the DM (not me, I was a player) could find very strongly suggested exactly that, to the point of basically saying "you're a bad BitD DM if you don't start them in media res in the middle of a heist! Don't even let them start planning!".

Later advice was much more inline with what you're saying (though actually more pro-planning) and honestly - the abilities the characters have and so on actually do support the "pre-plan and prepare a bit" approach. So you could say the rules imply it (though that is open to interpretation). We just took them too much at their word, I think as a result of having played PtbA games where if you didn't take them at their word for the most part, the game didn't work (that said, as a DM I'd already rejected the use of Fronts in Dungeon World because they were just... not a good tool for the stated job - I later found out this was extremely common - but also I wasn't DMing BitD).

I should note that while I criticize little things in BitD, my response on the poll was it’s pretty good.

Yeah mine was that it's alright. I can't say it's a bad system, because it meets its own stated goals, something many systems fail to do! (Including some PtbA games). I do feel like it's been promoted as things it isn't (see the heist vs crime difference pointed out by @Grendel_Khan), but that's not entirely on the people who created it, but rather people who've promoted the system. Also it's not even a top offender there.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

@Ruin Explorer I agree, some of how Harper presents the "don't plan, just go" innovation (it really was kind of an innovation, especially at the time) seems to overseer, and it isn't until you see, as you said, playbook abilities as well as listed downtime actions that are clearly about some sort of pre-score planning that you realize the balance it's striking. I actually had some weirdly tense interactions with a friend who was running Blades as his first non-trad game, when he kept trying to stop us from gathering info (as the game presents mechanics and reasons for), or even talking about a score before doing it, even when we had specific Crew abilities that helped with acquiring assets ahead of time. But he, like a lot of folks, was skimming it, including seeing all the random tables for generating scores and assuming those were the default way to run the game. I think reading the whole thing, and especially considering how abilities and downtime actions work, can solve a lot of those problems.

Still, all of this is why I agree with people who think Scum and Villainy does a better job of presenting how you actually play and run FitD. I don't think SaV is a better game (I mean, I hate its forgettable setting, and swapped it out for Star Wars when I ran it) but in some of the writing it feels like a second, clearer draft of FitD's procedures.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

(it really was kind of an innovation, especially at the time)

It really was - the closest I'd seen previously was an adventure in Dungeon #200 (2012), for 4E, called Blood Money, by Logan Bonner, which was a heist adventure and the players got like, tokens for doing certain kinds of preparation (but notably, not from elaborately pre-planning the heist, which I believe the adventure discouraged), and could then trade those in, in the actual heist so they could automatically have the right piece of equipment (even though it wasn't on their equipment list), automatically pass a stealth check, and so on, and generally "assert fiction" in a way that, at the time was basically unheard-of outside of spells in D&D.

And because it was such an innovation that contributed to the oversteer, because people didn't know how to contextualize it. We definitely had some similar "No, now it is crime time" stuff with the DM (my brother) to what you describe, and I did argue with it a bit but he pointed me to a discussion of how to run it (possibly on that defunct Google social network - it was quite a good one, but I forget its name), which 100% supported the "stop them planning, make them crime" approach.

 

[FrogReaver]

@Ruin Explorer I agree, some of how Harper presents the "don't plan, just go" innovation (it really was kind of an innovation, especially at the time) seems to overseer, and it isn't until you see, as you said, playbook abilities as well as listed downtime actions that are clearly about some sort of pre-score planning that you realize the balance it's striking. I actually had some weirdly tense interactions with a friend who was running Blades as his first non-trad game, when he kept trying to stop us from gathering info (as the game presents mechanics and reasons for), or even talking about a score before doing it, even when we had specific Crew abilities that helped with acquiring assets ahead of time. But he, like a lot of folks, was skimming it, including seeing all the random tables for generating scores and assuming those were the default way to run the game. I think reading the whole thing, and especially considering how abilities and downtime actions work, can solve a lot of those problems.

Still, all of this is why I agree with people who think Scum and Villainy does a better job of presenting how you actually play and run FitD. I don't think SaV is a better game (I mean, I hate its forgettable setting, and swapped it out for Star Wars when I ran it) but in some of the writing it feels like a second, clearer draft of FitD's procedures.

You keep saying it’s due to skimming the book. I don’t think thats it. The book is 100% clear about jumping to the action. What players can do in downtime is get strategic info so they can choose which score they want to do. But once they’ve picked the score you are supposed to jump them into it.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

You keep saying it’s due to skimming the book. I don’t think thats it. The book is 100% clear about jumping to the action. What players can do in downtime is get strategic info so they can choose which score they want to do. But once they’ve picked the score you are supposed to jump them into it.

I honestly don't really want to engage with you on this, since you seem to drop into FitD-related threads just to dump on the system and sealion anyone who responds, but some important bits from Blades, and that'll be it between us here (at least on my end).

From the procedures for picking your score:

THE DETAIL
When you choose a plan, you provide a missing detail, like the point of attack, social connection, etc. If you don’t know the detail, you can gather information in some way to discover it. See page 36.

From the list of downtime actions:

ACQUIRE ASSET
Gain temporary use of an asset:

One special item or set of common items (enough for a gang of your Tier scale).
A cohort (an expert or gang).
A vehicle.
A service. Transport from a smuggler or driver, use of a warehouse for temporary storage, legal representation, etc.

“Temporary use” constitutes one significant period of usage that makes sense for the asset—typically the duration of one score.

From the section on picking your crew's Hunting Grounds:

When you prepare to execute an operation of your preferred type on your hunting grounds, you get +1d to any gather information rolls and a free additional downtime activity to contribute to that operation. This can help you discover an opportunity, acquire an asset you might need for the job, find an appropriate client, etc.

It's all in the book, but only if you read it. Best of luck.

 

[FrogReaver]

since you seem to drop into FitD-related threads just to dump on the system and sealion anyone who responds

Please stop the personal attacks.

 

[niklinna]

Calling it a "complexity issue" feels like a real cop-out to me.

Plenty of games are as or more complex than BitD/FitD, but they're explained just fine. I think it's more of an attitudinal issue from the writers that stems from the not-very-good writing/explanations in the original BitD creating a sort of "funnel" effect where only people who were able to parse that and get a game they liked out of it* actually created FitD games, and continue the tradition of not writing about their own games very well/clearly. I also straight-up don't buy the "don't want you to feel restricted" angle - BitD was extremely prescriptive in its writing (far more so than most games), and most FitD games are pretty prescriptive too in my experience. Being prescriptive is fine, but you need to explain your game and intended gameplay well if you're going to be like that, imho.

Also "good at one narrow thing and doesn't work well outside that" is a perfect description for every FitD game I've seen, especially BitD, so I'm not sure that's a point of difference from PtbA at all. Indeed I'd say it's a point of similarity. To be fair it's true for most RPGs of all systems.

* = Seemingly usually by ignoring the RAW and apparent RAI and coming up with their own, divergent, rules interpretations and systems.

I agree with much of this. I remember when reading Blades in the Dark that things were well explained in that all the details were there (somewhere), but the book was very poorly organized. It was easy to forget the details because they weren't presented in a coherent fashion, and if you needed to look something up, it was rather often pretty hard to find! Even with an index. And the things you needed to look up were the little details you'd forgotten because they were nestled away somewhere unexpected. When you apply all the rules as written in the book, the game does hum pretty well. But it's so easy to forget a few of those little bits, and as folks have said, while the game has a lot of cool interacting subsystems, they are quite susceptible to locking up if a single cotter pin goes missing.

 

[Umbran]

The problem as I see it is - the purpose of lumping together hp and generic clocks in this instance is to try to imply hypocrisy on the part of someone that is fine with hp but not generic clocks.

Mod Note:
So, you figure that someone else is trying to imply hypocrisy, and you deal with that by implying bad faith right back at them? Not exactly keeping the moral high ground there...

And if you are wrong in the first place, if, instead, they actually just see strong similarities between clocks and Hit Points, what then? Then, you've really made a jerk move, and made it all public, so there's red text involved. Quite the mess.

The better move for you, at the moment you felt someone else was behaving poorly, might have been to disengage, before you said something you were going to regret. And maybe next time, you'll do that. But now, here we are.

Don't really care what your motives were. We need the resulting behavior to be better. So, you know, be better. Thanks.

 

[MarkB]

I agree with much of this. I remember when reading Blades in the Dark that things were well explained in that all the details were there (somewhere), but the book was very poorly organized. It was easy to forget the details because they weren't presented in a coherent fashion, and if you needed to look something up, it was rather often pretty hard to find! Even with an index. And the things you needed to look up were the little details you'd forgotten because they were nestled away somewhere unexpected. When you apply all the rules as written in the book, the game does hum pretty well. But it's so easy to forget a few of those little bits, and as folks have said, while the game has a lot of cool interacting subsystems, they are quite susceptible to locking up if a single cotter pin goes missing.

Yeah, for anything aside from the between-scores background stuff with factions, things like the downloadable player kit actually do a better job of presenting and summarising the rules, even the more GM-facing stuff. And that's one great strength of the system - that you really only need one copy of the rulebook, as literally everything the players need to know about the system is in the free downloadable supplement.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not opposed to that description. My point wasn't to disparage clocks. It was only to note that they can feel a bit arbitrary to some people. They did to me and it's much for the reason that they 'enable the GM to decide to tick them'.

I feel like there's a bit more context that can be important here. If you simply drop clocks into trad play, where there's lots of hidden factors and the GM is driving plot structure, then it's just some GM-side tracking mechanism that's perhaps calculated to make the players nervous whenever it ticks.

But transpose this into a game where there's high transparency and the GM is bound fairly strictly to operate in specific ways, and there's a lot less arbitrariness there. I mean, in FitD the GM may still have some judgement they must do to decide exactly what the fiction looks like in a given case, but overall things are still pretty tight.