this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Blades in the Dark is a horribly shallow system that is terribly balanced in that your character is meant to fail most tasks so that 'Drama' can happen as you bargain with the DM for success at a cost, which then heavily penalizes your character with injuries or stacked odds for future rolls, making the whole thing a slip and slide into guaranteed failure.
It's bad. Like, real bad. I understand the idea of it and it could have worked, but the default success chance is simply too damn low for it to work without heavy DM fudging and that's really really bad for a game with such simple rules. And since the author seems to like Blades, I cannot value her opinion on TTRPGs
From my understand of running a single Forged in the Dark session Saturday, I would have thought that just relying on conditions and debuffs in general isn't the intention, and they want you to be creative and use clocks and have narrative or situational consequences be tied to them.
Well, the main issue stems from pure success being unlikely to attain because most rolls will not be for 'sure things'. Your combined chance to fail a roll outright or succeed at a cost is far far higher then succeeding a check, so when I played it, we entered a failure cascade pretty fast whenever we had to roll to do something.
Like, in any situation, you only succeed without issue if you roll a 6 in your die pool. Typically, that pool is between 2 and 4 dice, so your chance to roll a 6 is, at lest, okay. And if you don't get that 6, you either have to escalate the situation or suffer complications, or you just fail, if you only have 1-3s on your dice. It's just...I dunno.
edit wasn't done typing: If you had more dice, this system would probably work, but each class is only good at very few things, so as soon as you are out of your characters comfort zone, you are in such high risk of failure that it's just not very fun. When I played it (one time), it felt like a comedy of errors and not like a bunch of hardened criminals doing a heist.
Yeah, I can see where you're coming from. Only looking at some of the SRD stuff, it looks like Blades gives you 7 dots across 12 actions? The hack that I was playing (Blades of the Immortals) had 6 dots across 9 actions and spilled a lot of ink to stress that making the players feel incompetent is bad and should be avoided, partially due to the genre being more dramatic than grim and grimy.