11: Blades in the Dark

[MUSIC] Hi, and welcome back to Deadletters, a podcast based here in New York City about tabletop role-playing games. I'm one of your hosts, Sam Soronson, joined here today by my co-hosts, Waleed Rouda and Misha Favorev. Fun fact about Waleed and Misha, they're both actually Android robots. They were constructed in a lab and have computers for brains. They're bound by the three laws of robotics, but we've programmed them specifically to have only good takes about tabletop role-playing games, but also in good takes in general, specifically from the more robotic point of view. Before we get started today here in this podcast about role-playing games, let me ask you, Misha, Waleed, or should I say Machine, Machine, Shuh, and Machine, Aled, what's a good take you have as a robot? I'm looking for specifically robotic good takes. I'm doing everything I can to fight against my programmer right now. That's really good. This is like our version of the New York subway hot takes, like what's your take as the robot version for TCRPGs. That's the thing that came to my mind. My robot hot take is that I think taste is overrated. We, you as humans, frankly, should be more willing to consume horribly tasting food for the betterment of your body, for your soul as fuel. Because ultimately, you are all sacks of water and meat and flesh and to grow and to prosper, you should be eating things that only are conducive to making you grow stronger. Under new cyborg leadership, I will be posturing that kind of push forward. You're welcome, actually. Thank you. Thank you. I'm just really jealous of people with like, cells. Okay, this is one of those things that drives me crazy when people have discussions about robots. I'm just going to want to unhinge to rant for a moment. People love talking about your robot. You're a lot done, hinge brand. People have talking about robots is like, oh, a robot body, immortal. You're just going to be live forever, totally healthy, invulnerable, metal. Metal doesn't go bad. But like, how fucking long does my like, cell phone live? I have no faith in the glorious like power of the machine. I think machines are kind of trash compared to meat. Self-hating robot takeer. Yeah. Clearly, we need some bugs that need to be fixed between us two robots. But we'll get there. We'll get there. Okay. Well, thank you for your hot tags as robots. Much better than the bad tags from robots. I see seemingly everywhere else on the internet these days. So today, and as usual here on Deadletters, we like to think of ourselves as a podcast where we do the reading as it were. We are all sort of loosely academics. We all went to game school a few years back. And now, Walid and Misha as robots work in academic institutions where they're best suited. And I at least occasionally teach a class or two. And we all sort of at least pretend to be academic in our interests. And so we like to do the reading. We like to talk about things from a a fancier, studier, more upscale sort of lens. But today, we're discussing a, I would call this a landmark role-playing game book. I would say it's fairly influential. If not arguably turn to like the most influential, I think this is like a top seller on drive-through. It's won awards. They were talking about making a TV show out of it at one point. Question mark. It's John Harper's blades in the dark. And of course, John Harper did the, I'm looking at the credits right now, game design, writing, layout, art, and photography. Intriguing that he refers to it as layout and art, rather than graphic design and illustration, but we'll get there. With consulting design and additional material by Strauss Asmovic, Vandal Arden, Duamp-Fgero, Dylan Green, excuse me, Sean Dintner and Andrew Shields with further development editing by Sean Dintner, plus all the people at Evil Hat that is Fred Hicks, Sean Dintner, Carrie Harris, Chris Anorhan, Karen 12, and Rita Tadam. Long credits list for a big old book. But blades has been quite influential in general. It did. I want to say like 150, 200 K on Kickstarter and Sanisal Run back in like 10 years ago now in 2015, 2016. It came out in 2017 has been pretty hugely influential since then. There's a whole sort of like subgenre of the powered by the apocalypse scene called Forged in the Dark. Lots and lots and lots of like PBTA projects have taken inspiration from blades. Lots of Neo-Trad books have taken inspiration from blades. Basically anything that's written by like I would say Grant Howit is downstream of blades. Triangle agency that we discussed a few episodes ago is downstream of blades. I would say some of the kind of like newer Neo-Trad, I think of like rim wild and wild sea. And what's that bug one by the wild sea guy? You know what I'm talking about? We read this for our book club a few weeks ago. Oh my god. Is it Pico? Yes. Pico. Yeah, Pico is downstream of blades. But in general, I think a lot of sort of like Neo-Trad, Dagger Heart is downstream of blades. A lot of these are taking inspiration from Harper and his work in blades, which itself is an outgrowth of the Baker's original apocalypse world. But yeah, blades is huge. It's you know it's 320 pages, give or take, ish. I guess we include the cake sugar backers in the index. But it's got rules, it's got advice, it's got tables, it's got lore, it's got setting, it's got more like random entries on topics and things you can check a stick at. It has more odds and ends, rules, additions, things that it really feels like John Harper threw in his blades game at some point and decided to put in the book. Just a lot of stuff crammed into this book, which frankly to me feels a little unexpected for a book that is so influential. We know my think of the influential books as being I think quite tight or at least quite tight in their core design like apocalypse world is 300 pages of commentary. But the core rules are, you know, 50 pages, give or take on the playbooks and a few other things, maybe even less than that, maybe 25. And blades is weird because the blades play sheets are pretty constrained. But then there's just like lots of other random odds and ends jammed into this book. And for somebody to be so influential and yet so kind of bloated is the wrong word, but certainly sort of like it goes on and on. It feels like it has a lot of festages of stuff and things put in here. It's remarkable how influential it's gotten when that sort of cramming of things feels quite unrefined to me. Yeah, this was a quite strange read for me. Blades was hugely, hugely influential for me. Unfortunately, I think I found it kind of right like as COVID was kicking in. So it especially hit me in that moment in my life where I'm not playing a ton of RPGs, which was happening by my most fruitful game theory, RPG theory times. Unfortunately, and maybe a dark commentary on RPG theory. But like my my pocket like homebrew game, right, like started off as like an into the odd blades, mash up to then eventually got like a log and yeah, yeah, yeah, and then like log and FKR and some other stuff got mixed in there too. But like I love this when I first read it. It really, really like set my mind on fire. And so coming back and reading it again, but like reading it like covered a cover, like trying to do like a close read of it, unlike the kind of like get excited by skimming it that I did like the first couple of times feels very different in a way that really kind of surprised me. Yeah, agreed. I have run. I would get something on the order of like 30 or 40 blade sessions. I was actually gonna mention there's a there was a supplement that has recently went at that time of this recording recently come out, which is like a by John Harper that is an addition to this concern, remind me of this title. It's like deep cuts. That's what it is. And you have productions. I'm not sure what the assistance of John Harper is releasing like a blades sequel set in the future. And I think it's in dusk ball. I don't know how much. Oh, blades. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not by time though. That's by Tim Bini. Yeah. Yeah. So there, you know, certainly the the influences was back when you talk about the influence part. It's it's grown. People have quite fond of this. Oh, yeah. No, it's what you can say. You know, I've run several dozen sessions of blades more or less out of the book. I eventually started running. What did you play in this game? I eventually started running sort of a hacked homebrewed version that was a little further away from the core rules, but was in the same setting. And I've also run probably like 12 or 15 sessions a complete campaign of band of blades by Strauss as my bitch and the other guy, the buff little I think his name is. And then I've also run scum and villainy by the same pair, probably 30 or 40 sessions of that as well. So I played a lot of Forge in the dark sessions over the years. And I feel like I know the basics quite well inside and out. But like you, Misha, coming back to blades after several years away and reading it covered cover was quite striking. It was quite weird. The big takeaway I get coming back to reading blades after playing it is how different play felt from the way that the rules talked about how play should feel. The first 100-ish pages of this book are about the system and the character sheets and the classes. All that stuff is pretty tight or pretty pretty fun. I should say it verbose in some places, but it gets you to where you need to go. And then the latter half of this book we have sections of lore and GM guidance and sometimes monsters, sometimes not, sometimes player characters. And oftentimes when I'm I have conversations about blades. It's really about that first 100 pages because the latter half after playing it really doesn't come into a lot of effect during the sessions because so much of this book is about giving players vibes and advice and isn't very gable or actionable when it comes to putting on the table. The big thing for me that stands out is the factions. Each of the at back of this book it goes over all the different dusk wall factions and where they are and there's a dozen of these across the entire city. Each of them are located in different sectors and all of these factions are like Viby. They give you really interesting ideas. There's like a taxi faction. There's a there's the police, the secret police. There's a dwarf and a bunch of his goons and they're given in different tiers and ratings and all of that is fine and dandy until you try to actually put them into your own game because the first question that might come up to you if your potential gym is okay where are they exactly and where are they in reference to your gang that's just about to come up your bravos the five fighters in your player section or your player guild where are they where are these characters and the relationships and how do they interact with the score that you're about to come into how does this affect all the other different gangs in this region that you just happen to be performing a mission in. None of that information is given. It is wildly surprising that this game does not come with an interior map of duskfall although there is a supplement that you can download that is separate. Well, hang on. I mean it has it has a map of the city. Well, I like a very broad like yeah, zoomed out. And you can't do that. You can't do that with gangs and some of these gangs are like six people right like you need to know especially if you're going to do this rags which is stories that that blades in the dark the vibe of that is that you start off as these goons and you can work your way up the criminal ladder. You can't work in a criminal ladder on such a on such a zoomed out space. And so like the even just to try to answer these immediate questions would take so much effort from the GM and frankly from the times that I played blades it takes so much effort from players and from players and mostly from the GM to create this like authentic dusk wall that that the book simply doesn't provide for you. Yeah, when I ran blades most successfully and this is the game you played it was she might be the one maybe the one you're referencing. What I had to be doing was I downloaded Tim Dini who's making blades in 68 has made a few other cool RPG projects over the years made these really amazing. I think he called them duskfalls detailed street maps that are like huge. You know, we printed ours out on like a three by two poster of just one neighborhood of or just one district. It was just crow's photo just the docs or wherever. And Dini has gone in and named nearly all of the streets and the canals and the bridges and the buildings and the smaller neighborhoods like tons and tons and tons of things get names and details and zoomed in levels of sort of like fidelity that you just don't get in blades as it exists. And while those maps are extremely helpful and extremely cool and I would highly recommend anybody running blades. I still had to then go in and say, okay, this is where this gang hangs out. This is where this gang hangs out of like, you know, if you look at some of these factions to your point, well, I'm looking at where let's example this like if you look at Ulf ironborn, it's his turf our rooms workshop and stable at the old forged tavern HQ a gambling den and like. It's just not enough to run on, you know, you look at I'm looking at any of these really and you look at like you look at the crows one of the most famous gangs that many jams have used. It says they claim all claims all of crow's foot as their turf. Every district pays up to change them HQ and in the band and city watch tower operates gambling, dancing crow's foot and extortion rackets at the docs and like that's just like that's an idea like that is a suggestion that is a notion. And what's so challenging about that that I find is that like I can get that wrong of a player might have read blades and said, um, Sam, that's not what the crows are. To what you know, I could say we're not following the lore, but if I want to use that, if I want to be accurate to the book, suddenly I have to detail a ton of this like I have to, I have to detail the gambling dance. I have to detail their band and city watch tower. Like I have to start adding all these things in that Harper just doesn't include in the book. And that's really tough to run. It's hard to be accurate to this book without doing as you say just just a ton of work to be to be tiny to give a bit of tiny fairness. I think you've identified the one, the one place in this book where they do actually like nail that down because I do remember that watch tower is keyed on the map very directly. But I think it's like you'll need to redo that key. You want to read you that game, but it's the only one that is. But yeah, no, it doesn't give you any, there's no map, there's no like listed offenses, there's not like there's 67 guys in this building. It, it, it says it, it gives you some lore. It tells you it used to be a original sanctum in astronomer's laboratory and a blue coat watch post. And now it's the headquarters of the district's chief gang, the crows. That is not enough to run that with no additional grip. Yeah, I do, I also just feel like in general, like I was really surprised looking at this. I was like, I'm gonna go online and maybe somebody's made like a map that's like a bit more detailed out that kind of gets a little bit crunchier with like the details of the setting. And just like there's nothing out there like that that I could find just in terms of like kind of what you're describing right where it's like it would be so easy to do though with like just how it's already laid out where it's like, oh, every faction. Just laid out as a map, right? And then for each of these map segments, instead of giving, you know, kind of like a couple of landmarks and stuff, just list all of the gangs and their holdings, right? There's already this like claim system, right? We're like different, where your gang accumulates these like physical locations that give you various benefits. It would be pretty easy to just like map out the whole city in that way with all of the factions like involved. And then like have a very, well, it would be easy conceptually. Yeah. But it would be incredibly difficult to actually do. It would be, yeah, time consuming. But I mean, that's the, yeah, I mean, it's huge. There are so many factions and so many claims and so many spots like, but yeah, and I was a little bit surprised at nothing like that. Nobody's like done that right in the, in the, like eight years since this came out. At least, yeah. But then like looking at it more deeply, I think it is like deeply at odds with some of the deeply stated goals of this book, right? One of the, which goals? There's a page that really kind of stood out to me. Okay. I'm going to take a tiny step back. The thing that got me really excited about this game is that I thought that it kind of like threaded the needle on story game and kind of more concrete problem solving style gameplay in some ways. I really like the core, core resolution mechanic because it is something that is like lubricated theoretically by position and effect, right? Where whenever you roll before you roll, you establish like both how much danger are you in if this goes badly and then like how effective are you going to be afterwards? And it's just like a really quick snappy way that you can theoretically communicate like how a thing is going without needing to like get into the currency details of how is this going to actually play out? You can just kind of do it by fives. I think that's like a potentially, I thought at the time I was like a really nice tech for like making conversation and like a adjudication like run more smoothly. And I think that that by itself would like go great with a more you know like fiction first style, right? Where you like have the fiction and you're mostly operating within the fiction, but if you have to like you know resolve a question, you dip out of the fiction and the mechanics for a moment. But the book very directly has a section potential fiction versus established fiction. They like really explicitly says like anything that you've prepped that hasn't happened yet, you should not treat as real, right? It's only when it gets mentioned in play does it become real? Right? So it's very much not like a game that you're expected to be running in kind of you know like B1, Quasquiton, like D&D module style where like every room is mapped out and you know what's in it. And you can kind of like run it as a coherent place because you like understand the space really well. It's very much not like that. It is when the players make a fictional contribution that's real, when you make a fictional contribution that's real, but everything else up until then can always get like nuked by like a flashback or flashbacks are crazy. There's so much stronger than I remember them being. They're basically the exact same mechanic as if I can triangle agency asking the agency to intervene, right? It is like literally any detail of the setting you can change that hasn't been nailed down yet or you can establish it hasn't been nailed down yet. And it's just the more ludicrous your claim is the more stress it costs. But like explicitly like three stress will let you change the setting to be something like improbable. And you can explicitly explicitly, the players can change anything that has not been like nailed down yet and say what it is. So you mentioned earlier like oh imagine if you're running blades in a more fiction first way. And what's weird is that blades describes it. itself as fiction first. The opening line of chapter 6 how to play is fiction first gaming. And Harper then goes on to describe what to me, you know, seems like a pretty reasonable description of like how it works. But again, then you run immediately as you say to this thing, we're like, oh, but the imaginary world is like totally, is totally in flux. And that's, it's so weird. Like, the way that to put my academic hat on here for a second, but I sort of tend to imagine fiction first gaming is you say, okay, you have your endogenous rules that is like the rulesy rules, the quote unquote game rules, the board game rules, the like crunchy mechanistic systemic rules, where we are players who are bundles of stats and numbers, you know, pursuing high scores. And then you have the diagetic rules, which are the rules of the world that say like, there's a building here, or if you step into the moonlight, you'll turn into a wolf, or if you speak the arcane words, you'll summon a ghost or whatever. And like fiction first to me often feels like saying, okay, we're playing more by the diagetic rule set than we are the endogenous rule set. And if those two come into conflict, or rather the endogenous rule set should only emerge when it's triggered by the diagetic rule set. And what's weird is that Harper says, oh, this is totally fiction first. Superfaction first, this is places dark, superfaction first. But also remember, those diagetic rules are totally made up on the spot every single time. Don't ever write any of those rules down. And like, that feels so contradictory to me. It feels so paradoxical. I think a good example, maybe of what you're talking about with this is are both the ritual rules and the crafting rules that do this, right? There's this conversation of, okay, if a player wants to perform a ritual, what is the process that that goes through and blades outlines it as this conversation between the GM and the player that goes beyond, that goes back and forth between like, okay, what is this ritual about? Okay, what is it supposed to do? Etc. Etc. And then once you figure out some of these like fiction first identities of what this ritual is supposed to do, then you perform a series of roles, whether it's like like a chinker role for I believe the craft's check or for a ritual check, it depends on what kind of ritual you're trying to create, whether it's like a something like a ghost or whatever. And so it like it, it tries to mend or merge these behaviors, but ultimately what every time I've ever tried running these things, you end up just not using these rules. They're a little bit tedious. You're kind of finding you sit there and go back and forth to try and find a framework that fits both of these systems at the same time. And it just doesn't, just doesn't happen. And I find that a lot of these suggestions and blades can kind of be ignored or pushed around and kind of, and then there's nothing changes, right? You end up still playing within duskfall, but it is more tedious than it that's on the, that you might believe it is. So I totally agree that the crafting and ritual rules are like very overwrought, but I think that they're a weird example of this question of is it fiction first or not? Because like the rituals are extremely endogenous. Like this process is not at all based in the context of the diegetic rules of duskfall. It's not saying rituals operate because of the connection to the ecstatic oversold. Like there's some lore here about like Leviathan blood and stuff, but these rituals are done. Like I ask you questions, if you're behind the GM and you're the player, I ask you questions because that's what the rulebook is telling you to do. Like I'm not doing it because these are the rules the imaginary world. It's not like sorcerers in duskfall are creating rituals in this conversation, which could be cool, but it's not what's happening. It's that we as players sitting at the table are talking to each other. And then we have created new diegetic rules from scratch, but like that's almost definitively fiction second because it starts with what's written in the rulebook and then it goes to what's in the world. Like it's it's world building, but that's not fiction first. Or at least it's not fiction first and like how I imagine the words fiction first mean if we're using those words in the way they're normally used in English. If we're using the way they usually used in RPGs, I could see a reasonable interpretation of fiction first, meaning like fiction in terms of like, you know, if I'm collaboratively writing a novel with you, the fiction is what we've written down so far. It's novel we've talked about yet necessary, but no, that's I agree that that's part really stuck out to me. And I think the thing that I liked so much about this initially was that it felt like the rules were an attempt at making the rules fit so much more snugly onto the fiction than most rule sets, right? We're like a lot of the time you're playing, you know, like 3.5 D&D and like the rules are kind of like almost like the physics of the world, the way that a lot of people would play that. And this is like a much cleaner system of that, right? You're not like making a billion little rules for like exactly how does fall damage work, right? You're not like trying to simulate the entire world. You're just coming up with a pretty clean system for like you make a you say something about like what's happening in the world and then you like have a way of like mechanically representing that that feels very fluid. And I think that's kind of what they think they're going at. This whole game feels like it's like a backlash against that like rules as physics mindset, but it does feel like it doesn't actually go that far and it still has like a lot of the trappings of that mindset. I just even the way that they talk about it. Yeah. I have a specific part. Yeah. It is like when he talks about how the conversation works, right? He says like the way that it works is that people talk fluidly and then, you know, the way and then in order to actually make those changes real, you dip into mechanics, which yeah, like isn't isn't fiction first, right? Like it is like, oh, you can do all sorts of like navigating through through talk through fictional contributions, but like none of it's real until it passes through the gauntlet of like game mechanic. Right. If it hasn't entered the rules, it's not real. So something maybe I was just thinking about right now is in in the world of Duskvall, one of the most kind of prolific visions of Duskvall I find like when it went into the lore is that it's it's it's always night, right? Like the sun never rises in Duskvall. And I was just I was just thinking to myself right now, speaking about fiction first and the rules and the writing. If if you the three of us walked into a blades room and there was a GM and and five of their players sitting around the table and in this version of Duskvall, the sun does rise and it just does perform like a 24 hour cycle. Would blades change all that much? And I was like, I don't think it would, right? And that that feels very antithetical to fiction first, right? Because one of the most prolific parts of the setting maybe is that it's always supposed to be dark and there's all these lore around it to it. But because it doesn't actually interact with many of the mechanics or systems, it feels almost unnecessary, but it doesn't really matter that like any of these things are happening. Like the fiction changes, you don't even need to really be playing it in Duskvall as a setting, like it doesn't really matter. None of it is really important. It's and that's why I think so many people gravitate towards blades for the like first 80 pages to this book. It is just the vibes of playing characters in like a in like a gang setting where you try to go from rag switches. And that's really the most vile part about this book. And then I think from there we can go into more of the nitty-gritty parts of the rules and systems that maybe don't even work that well even in those first parts. I'm looking at position and effect particularly in this book. But I guess before we get to that, I just want to question that a little bit because you know, so one thing listeners, which you might have heard us talk about before, we run an RPG book club here in New York. If you see the NYC-TTR-PG book club, that's us. And we recently read Blitz in the Dark a time of recording just a few days ago. But one of the things people did mention is that they do like a lot of the lore suggestions here. You know, and certainly online, I've seen lots of people mention that they love Lord Skirlok the Vampire. Or they love, you know, the the red sashes fighting against the crows. Like people love these like names and suggestions and certainly people love the vibe of like, oh, we're gonna do Peaky Blinders with Ghosts. We're gonna do Dishonored but it's a gang war. We're gonna do all these things. Like people love the supernatural gothic setting. But weirdly, like that's not at least it doesn't feel like to me from the bits of AP's of listened to him with various other people I played plays with. It doesn't feel like it doesn't feel like Duskvall is the same from tables to table. It doesn't feel like we're playing the same world. It feels like we're using the same proper nouns without and like most of the cool stuff, like most of the cool stuff does not come from the book. The book gives you the names and the GMs are filling in the rest. I'm like I might love how the red sashes operate at my table, but I don't know if it's the same as they operate at somebody else's table, which suggests to me that it's not like it's Harper's idea that is cool. Like it's a great pitch, but it's not detailed enough to exist in the same way. In the same way, we're like, oh, when we talk about B2, you know, we might love certain aspects of the case of chaos because like they're this iconic famous encounter or whatever. Or you know in strad, there's NBZ who at least in the old days would walk around in full plate mail. This was like a hilarious joke. Now he's in a breastplate because five years of cowardice. But back in the day, he used to be in just all play garner. It was awesome. But like those specific details of his like blades doesn't have because it's just not detailed enough, which means that people love the vibe. People love the idea. I don't know. It's hard to explain because people love blades. I sort of love blades. I love to imagine what a blades game would look like. P blinders with ghosts is awesome. And when it works, it's so cool. But like it doesn't feel like the game that I want to play is in this book, which is weird because I feel like I want to play what Harper is describing. Yeah, I feel very similarly. actually cuts to one of my big fears about this podcast, if I'm being completely honest, which is we advocate for a certain style of book design and what's useful to put in a book? What do we want people to be including in their modules and real books and so on? And but also we are all officially recognized Game Masters, we all have a Masters in Game Design. And like we spend our days writing RPG stuff, writing coming up with ideas for RPG settings. And so we really want, like we don't care about ideas, I think that much. I think we're all pretty excited to like use our own ideas for things a lot of the time. We want details, we want stuff that like, you know, the stuff that just takes time and effort and is annoying to do. That said, like, you know, if I'm handing this to somebody who's not, you know, who RPGs isn't like the biggest thing in their life, isn't in the top three things in their life, but there's want to run a game that bleds in the dark, is just having some like cool names in the fact that like the lamp lighters used to be like guys who like light the lamps, but now like their criminals because like that got like tacked out. Is that, is that actually like a good, is that what they want? Is that like a better use of the page count potentially than these details? Are we just weird because we spend so much time in this? Like, I kind of think that's true and I kind of think it's not. So like, my evidence for this is that like, adventures do sell and people do play with them. And I think that while we disagree with lots of the design and business decisions of big tradboys, like there's a reason that every addition and every like half addition and every update of D&D gets a new starter set because like people play those starter sets. And like I think that lots of people actually really value having a starter adventure and having some stuff to work with. And I think that like, the games that are played with detailed worlds can oftentimes get to things that games run by some GM who's a first-timer couldn't do otherwise. Like, I love adventures that I couldn't have written myself. You know, I read some adventures and I'm like, man, I never would have thought of this. I'm like, that's such a cool feeling. Whereas it feels like when I'm just getting suggestions, like what I have thought of the lamp later killed, maybe not. But like, could I have told you that their HQ is in the office of a colware house? Like, sure, man, I can come up with that. Like, it's not, you know, it's just not, like, it feels like, it feels like if you want people to be playing a genuinely unique game, you need to give them more material than just the starting idea. But maybe I'm wrong. To your point on what I would look for, what I would like to see in this book as the thing that you were talking about is the thing that brought up in our podcast, I'd like the first 100-ish pages of this fine. I think there is a section on GM play and rules and players that I think doesn't need to exist. I think there's a whole bunch of dubious additions, things like playing as a ghost or a vampire that like show up later. And apparently what happened when your player character dies if you want question mark. And then some other additional rules and changes. And then pretty much all of the parts on DuskVal, including some of the maps, could all just be removed and replaced with DuskVal the map, with all the additional details you would need to run the DuskVal setting. Because Blades is two things, at least when talking about it colloquially. It is fortunate in the dark, it is the system setting, it is the rules, and it is DuskVal. And from, I think what I can glean from what we were talking about here, the DuskVal part is basically all GM work, there's always basically all vibes that GM's need to come in and put in a whole bunch of work into. And that's the part I find most critical about. And maybe that's going to be because we started with the second half of this to be critical about. There are things in the first part I think that also could be we could start discussing. But that's for me, Misha. My biggest gripe with this book, and you know a lot of the stuff that we talked about in previous episodes. It's like when you market these two halves to me and call it a full system, part of me feels a bit cheated because while the first part might be good enough, like the force of the art system seems like a solid system, 2d6 for stuff is cool, hitting two sixes and doing more sixes. It's not just 2d6, there's more sixes and that's right. That's right, it's a bunch of sixes, a lot of sixes. And that's good. But then when you're also selling me on the second half of it that feels like I can run this system in DuskVal, I find like, oh that's not what's here. And that's why I think it's, I don't think it's a coincidence that people come into this book for the first time and they get really excited about reading it. Because so much of RPGs, when you pick them up off the shelf is the cover on the front, the blurb on the back. You scroll through a couple of pages, you hear about other people say you get excited because your imagination runs wild and all the cool different things that you could do here. And maybe for the first time that you are playing it and your first campaign, it does feel really good because the gym puts all that work into it, and then you go back and you read, you're like, whoa, there's actually not enough here for me as a GM to write it. Even if it's like kind of a first time play. And so it's, yeah, that's the part for me that I can, that I find, issue with, at least with blades. Yeah, I'm going to try to defend this a little bit more. Because again, this is the thing I've been thinking about a lot with all of our reviews is like, are we just using these wrong? Right, are we like trying to use a hammer or a screwdriver for some of these things we're recovering? I think the answer is not like not not too much, but I think it's something I worry about a decent bit. For this, I think the way that like the book presents itself as being has how you play it, right? Which, you know, may not be how you did play it, may not even be a functional way of playing it, but the way that presents it is like, oh, so I want to go like knock over, I want to steal the gem from the top of the crow's tower or whatever the fuck, great, like that's our score. You don't really have to say how many guys live there, right? Because the way you do that is you make a clock, eight counters. And when you fill in all eight, you, you've stolen the gem. And like every, every round, the players are like doing the job. And they haven't gotten it yet, you throw a complication at them, right? You say, oh, you're sticking the place out. Okay, make a roll. Oh, good. That's like standard effect. Take two ticks on the clock. You see a window that's open. Oh, but there's another gang coming in. No, there's like a complication. Okay, you try to climb up through the window. Great. You go in. Oh, be having beaten it yet. You've got one like reduced effect. You're three ticks now, right? So I guess that means like also, and you failed the roll. So like, oh, you walked, you came through the window and there was like a meeting going on. There's like eight angsters in your fight now, right? But like, you can kind of ask pull all of it, right? Like it's built to be functionally asked pulled because the clock, you don't have to have a deeper understanding of like what's going on because the timing and the pacing is the clock. But this is what I don't like about it, right? Is that I find that unsatisfying because you kind of learn that like, oh, the clock is the game. It's not fiction first, right? The clock is, is how you win. And by the book, right? The players can always say, I'm doing an action. I think that it helps. This is what skill I think it is. And then the GM can like pick the effect and risk of it. But like, it can always do it, right? So like, you get this weird situation where like very much by the book, if it's like, oh, if I filled up seven of the of the ticks, I can like fucking do a backflip. And I just say that I'm using, I don't remember what this would actually be. Proud or something to do a backflip. And like the GM is like, well, that doesn't fucking help. So I guess that's like limited effect. But like, I got a six on it. That's one tick. Story complete. I won, right? Like, it is, I think that the, uh, that there are so many mechanics in this game that are like amazing advice that are really good like guidelines that the GM can like internalize and like used to run the game. But that like, don't actually work once they become like hard mechanics. But they're so worked into like the rule set with like, you know, uh, oh, if you're, if you take an injury, you like have one step less effect. Effect is like a really meaningful atomic element of this game. Uh, you can't really use them as like, lose guidelines as much anymore, right? Like, they're a little bit too integrated into the total system. Uh, but like, I mean like the, the, the, uh, position of effect is just FKR shit, right? Like, uh, free creeps, bill revolution people when like playing like Diceless games, they're having like almost the exact same conversation about like, how do you adjudicate if something works or not. It's just not like a hard mechanic. It's just like I said, a best practices. And I think that like so much of this game blew my mind up because it was such good advice. But yeah, yeah, I think my experience with it has been like that in, in gameplay, it's like less effective because it's like rigid because like the rules become more real than the story. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of good. There's a lot of good there. And I think the big thing I want to pull from what you were saying is the, this clock system, these setting systems, even the way that John Harper has described running like six or seven scores in a singular or four, four to three to four scores in a singular session of blades. I have heard. I have heard. I have not verified this. John Harper, if you're listening, we'd love to hear from you. How many scores do you run a session? Normally, when I run, it's one score a session. And I think that's true of most people. I've heard that you, John Harper, sometimes run like two to four scores per session, which blows a lot. And listeners, you know, in the comments down below, question mark, right? Oh, in the comments down. How many scores do you run? Because every time I've ever played or run blades, it is almost zero to one, right? Like either I'm not running any scores and I'm doing downtime or I'm running one. Because to your point, Misha, I don't think I don't know anybody that plays blades that way, right? That plays it with the like, oh, I'm going to, it's like almost story time. Like, oh, GM's giving me story time and you're like a, you know, sitting down on your table and you're like rolling the dice and the GM tells you what happens or doesn't happen, depending on the cause and effect and your position, sorry, not cause it for your position and effect. And where you are at a seed and how you're running clocks over and over. Like that doesn't sound like how people run it, especially when we talk about like blades being this, I want to say Steven Spielberg, Ocean's 11, Steven Soderberg's stuff. Steven Soderberg. Steven Soderberg style, like kind of heist mission where everyone has their own different roles and they're all coordinating together to come up with this big master plan. Like I don't know anybody and I have no idea what instinct you would get driven by the rules of the system to ever want to game the way that you are describing it. Although I agree that that is how it's written in the rules. And so there is this tension that exists between the vibe that is generated with this book and some of the systems that it, like, kind of purports for you to do because it also then tells you, hey, you don't accept it. Yeah, I'm going to walk it back a tiny bit. I think that is how I've definitely seen people do it for like beating up a thug. Like you, you probably, I mean, you would a little bit do, and I think it specifically says that you should do it in the book. The like the big mission getting to the, to the vault could be a clock. But like you're constantly putting the situation where like, I don't know, you're like fighting against a couple of guys and it's like, oh, they're like a four tech clock and like I'm going to win the fight. And then it does start working that way because as soon as you get into like some of these constantly like it becomes completely like a lighted like how long does it take and like the clock comes like a pacing mechanism, which by the way, I don't want to go too long on this. I love the clocks in retrospect in an apocalypse world. I think they're so good. I think they're such a good piece of conversation tech where you like put on the table a way of showing people the state of the game to describe something it is kind of like complicated and like nuanced and like hard to nail down like, oh, how close is this fight? How close is it to like getting like he didn't wild? But I think they're great because they're like reflections of the game fiction. They do not control the game fiction, right? Like if you take an action in the fiction that like escalates things, you ignore the pacing of the clock normally just set it to like where you did it. Whereas these clocks, I think, take precedence over over the fiction is described. Yeah, totally completely different dynamic. Yeah. I mean, like the thing that I've heard some people in like some sort of like more post OSR simulation circles is that like and I, I think I mostly agree with this. A clock is just hit points. Like it's big beefy hit points, but like it's the number that ticks up and down. And like sure, you can use clocks for chase scenes and stuff. We kind of like don't normally associate with HP, but like a clock is just number go bigger and number go small. Like it's just it's just going up and down. This is true also when you're like rolling things and then you like deal damage to the clock, right? Because you're like, you're like, you're like five to six. That's four ticks on a clock. It's whoa, huge, right? So like I, yeah, I agree with you in that like it can be this it's a very gamified tool for what is this to describe kind of pushing a situation forward. But again, there's everything in the fiction that surrounds that that push forward as to be kind of generated through you kind of talk to you reference it as ass pulling. Yeah, it's improv, right? Like you're just kind of improvving what a four out of seven and a clock of opening the whole thing because you don't have any tools. We did the reading. That's right. So five out of eight to clock. What does that look like in the vault? Like what how does that generate? How does that seem? Look, that's all that's all theater of the mind because you don't have any of that information readily available in the book for you to actually run. If you did, it would be cool. It would be it would be hard to break it because like you don't know how quickly the clock's going to proceed. So if you did nail that stuff down of like what are the security layers before you get to the vault? Like if they rolled like a crit, you just some of them stop existing all of a sudden. It feels weird. Yeah. Like one of the things that I remember when I was reading blades, not for the very first time, but like when I was reading it for some campaign I was growing for the thing that I like Mandela affected myself into thinking the existed. And it's possible this is in scum or band blades or one of these other blades hacks. And I've just forgotten exactly where it is, but I couldn't find it in this book is the difficulty of the mission to number of clocks to fill. Like I had imagined envisioned and thought I remembered somewhere something that said like, oh, if this is a heat for mission or whatever, then that means you need at least four eight tick clocks. And then that's like your rough guideline for how complicated this score should be. And I thought that chart was in here somewhere saying like this is a rough mapping of what the difficulty of each clock should be and it's not. And it's worthless of me like sort of imagining a thing that wasn't there. Like I think it's it's intriguing to imagine just as a thought experiment and say, okay, what have Harper had done that? What if he said, okay, this is a, you know, start every mission by default is three eight tick clocks. And then if it's add one eight to clock per tier and then add something per something and add X for difficulty and yet again, you know, like you could imagine like a generator that spat out clocks and then you're just mad lippings in what those clocks are of. It's the door. It's the guard. It's the something. You need to add more on. But like it's it's kind of striking that Harper leaves that out of what feels like, especially because that ties into stress expenditure of like one of the things that I remember when I was running blades, I noticed is that like I started running missions, it's opening scores. I have to say I keep saying missions. I started running scores until the players started running out of stress. Like I was a good GM. I was making it the most dramatic it could be of like I would watch their stress counters and I would occasionally ask them like how much stress you go over there. And then as they were getting closer and closer running on a stress, I would start making things closer and closer to the finale. Like I can keep ass pulling forever to rash of the tension, but like I'm trying to be dramatic so I'm going to wait until I spend all their stress. But like that's actively punishing good play. Like there should be a fixed number of challenges. I make it out with very low stress expenditure, like I make it out with low stress expenditure. But it's more dramatic to have it be higher and it's weird. Like it's complicated. To your point on that clock management thing, I think there's a section in the book on magnitude, which is about the trying to visualize the scale or strength of like a like a crazy event or like a crazy demon or something. And it gives you a scale of like what a one or a zero looks like in magnitude and what a six would look like in magnitude. And I didn't find it very helpful outside of kind of again, this like relationship between trying to tie the fiction of Duskvall to a one D6. And so to that to that point, I think it would be very cool. And to the point of like how do I map out like a clock in an adventure or in like a guide, like what is a four out of eight clock in a bank heist would look like in this in this scenario. I think it might be difficult, maybe even impossible. But also for trying to run a scenario where you're running a heist, I think necessary. Because how else how do you recreate the scene? Have you all watched money heist? The scene in money heist where he's banished. Bank right hubbing show listeners. Yeah. Another one of those kind of criminal gang enterprise shows where like how do you how do you create that that tension authentically? And I think that's what what blades kind of proposes it tries to do with its system and its rules. But in the only real way that you can do that is when you create the actual tension there. You need to create the actual bank. You need to create the security. You need to give them lines. You need to go back and forth. That thing needs to exist for you to create that authentic experience. Yeah. And you just don't have that here. Yeah. I think anytime you build like an incentive structure, like where the players like beat the game by like playing the game with kind of like a system mastery that's like divorced from like the fiction itself. No matter how kind of like well intentioned the illusionism ends up being for that. Like people end up just like playing that more than they're playing the game. And I think there's like this whole game feels like so much of it is just built like a bit around like what can I skip? What can I allied? The rules are just there to like cut out all of the like things that like are a drag. And I think that like a lot of some of it's good. Some of it works, right? Like every game allides a bunch of stuff, right? Like nobody's like, or most people, most people aren't doing like really crunching detailed like, yeah. I mean, that was like a way way when like the 80s and stuff for a while, right? They were all sorts of like really detailed combat systems that were like unplayable. But like most people allied like fighting, right? And like this makes a bunch of arguments for like way, way, way more things to a lie to just skip over to like not worry about. But I think some of it does go too far in that way, right? And then like you do end up with that like when the rules let you skip stuff, eventually you're like playing to the rules not to like the story. - Yeah, so this is what I wanted to talk about before we got here of like, you know, you mentioned Steven Soderbergh of Oceans 11, but you don't also think about, you know, any classic high-species movie. I always think of the sting, the 70s movie with Bob Redford and Paul Newman. And like most heist movies, the most kind of like con movies more generally involve a lot of setup. Like roughly the first two thirds ish of Oceans 11 and the sting are like set up for the heist. And some of that's like story set up of like, oh, why the man character was wronged and like, yada yada yada, like why we were emotionally invested in this. But like also it's just literally set up of like, you know, in Oceans 11, they said all of that too, just kind of like looking at the casinos and learning things and talking to each other and being like, oh yeah, this is the routine, this is the route, this is where the guards stand. Here's our cool devices, you know, yada yada yada. And like it's weird that blades skips that. And it's weird like, like, so at our book club, and I've heard this argument before online, but like the argument that many people make is that, oh, blades is not about playing the heist. It's about like playing or like writing the like heist movie. Like it's meant to emulate this other medium. It's meant to emulate cinema or a book or whatever, where you don't see every step of the setup, but you just sort of like get this result. And I would say like one, that's not actually how those movies go. And two, I think more meaningfully, like why are we trying to emulate a medium that isn't a game? Like why are we trying to take play and make it do something else? Because I feel like, like if I'm playing a heist game, like why are we skipping the heist parts of it? And like the kind of the argument that got me on this, that eventually persuaded me on this, is that like in regular old dungeon dragon, I think it makes a lot of sense to use blades load system or a variation of it. Of like in my mega dungeon game that you both played in, I let players have a couple, it's like five slots that they can mark off to like pull things out of their backpack. And so they can say, oh, I was carrying this entire time, because in my head, like D&D is not an entire, like it's about planning somewhat, but it's not entirely about planning. And so like sure, you can cheat a little, but like a heist to me feels like it is totally about planning. Like I want to know that I have made all my preparations correctly. I want to know that I've scouted every exit. I want like that challenge and that tactility and that like detail of saying, okay, here is this very fully realized, you know, bank or museum or mansion or whatever it is. And I want to know that I can nail it. And in blades saying here are rules for skipping that and saying there are no maps of the banks, it sort of, it forces this position where like, now I can't plan a heist. And it's so weird to me that like, what feels like the essential part of doing a heist or a score or a theft or a con of like a ton of research and prep and planning is like almost literally not possible in blades. And I know the kind of like classic counter argument here is like, oh, but in D&D, you know, you can spend three hours planning and then players will botch it on just the first row when they fail the stealth check. And to me that suggests that like one, don't use Dungeon Dragon stealth checks. Like you should be using methodologies where players can be so sneaky, they don't even need to make a stealth check because their plans are that good. And two, that feels like a level design issue. Like I think it's, I think it could be really fun to spend five sessions planning for a heist if there was like a world detailed enough for me to explore. If I was making steady progress, I was saying, okay, you know, in Ocean's 11, it's how are we and giving it as you know, how are we down the elevator, how are we going to get through the vault, how are you getting the money out? Like these are questions that have fun answers of, oh, of course we need to use the EMP. Of course we need to like, you know, distract the security guard with the stripper that we know from the plays to do the thing. Like these are all fun cool steps that we like watching on TV and that sound like they could be really fun to play in a game even when they go wrong. And it's bizarre that Harper's solution to this was to say, oh, let's just skip it. Like why are we skipping the meat? - This is another one of those places that were the book left me a little bit like shook and doubting myself because I'm definitely somebody who like the best part of a heist or the best part of just like, you know, dealing with like a weird special room and D&D or something is the planning, I think. Right, like I fucking love that step of the like, we're all like, we did some scouting, we got like a map of the bank, but we don't know exactly what's in there if it's changed or something and we just spend a bunch of time talking about like what our plan is and like debating the methodology and stuff. Like that's like almost the main game to me. And like one of the big, big like statements of this game of Blades and I've seen other people repeat a decent bit online is like that part's annoying. Shouldn't we just skip to like the fun part which is actually doing it. And I don't know, like that's, maybe I'm weird, but that's always been like my favorite part. And then like if you spend like an hour planning it out and then you blow it on the first stealth check like, hey, hopefully your planning was still like useful 'cause a lot of the planning is just like understanding what you have to work with within the bank. Like your plan of how you're gonna blow open, the safe is still gonna be valid, right? You're gonna have to blow it open eventually if you're gonna get it. But like also like if you spend an hour planning it and then you like fuck it up and abort instantly, that's drama, that's great. Yeah. - But man, I guess this section really bothers me right because I think it's so hard, I hear this often too, me sure, this idea like, oh, I don't wanna plan the parts, I just want the reward for it. And I think from like a layman, yeah, of course, I wanna feel like the badass that robs the bank and gets away with it too, but you can't do that. Like it's, that reward, that gratification comes from the phases of planning. And also because in real life, if you were to try to rob a bank, blind it, you would get wrecked like quite quickly. And so it is fun, there is a section of it like, oh, we would be chaotic and improvise and all that stuff. And if you're a group of bandits that are chaotic bunch and you have like a, what I find that when we play a bunch of blades games and people aren't doing a lot of planning, it's a lot of yes ands, devils, bargains, improv and acting and just a whole bunch of chaos. And is that fun to play? Hell yeah it is. Did I rob a bank successfully? - No. And like how much of this was me as a GM trying to pull players along, how much of that was a bit of like, you know, tweaking the fictions, that everything fits out, so that everyone is dying in the first session of a game. Like, like so, I would be so interested to sit in a group of players and run by a GM to where we can run a bank heist truly unprepared and just see how it goes. And it really feel like an ocean's 11 or an unheist moment because I don't think that's possible. It can be chaotic and crazy and that's still fun and exciting and certainly a section of blades that we can be interested in. But it's not the bank heist and that's not the fiction that we're looking for or at least I'm looking for. - Yeah, I always used to think of this with like the difference in like, are you playing game to like be a bank robber or to like rob a bank? Are you being or doing? - Hmm. Yeah. - Right. - Yeah. I like that, you know, I mean, the one I was think of is like, you know, we've talked about this offline for, eventually we'll read this book, I'm sure. We've talked about it in the book club, is the Brindlewood Bay mystery games and the between and public access. And I know Kordava has a few others he's working on. But like those, I think that's not necessarily always in their marketing, but at least in the book say, this is a game you should treat like a writer's room. You are writing a mystery, like you were writing an episode of a TV show. You are not playing, you're not solving a mystery. Whereas, you know, I remember Sean McCoy, creative membership of a friend of the show, Sean McCoy has this blog post where he's talking about mysteries and investigations. He says, very explicitly, I don't want to write a Sherlock Holmes mystery, I want to be Sherlock Holmes. And like that, I think is like a, like I think that's, echo is what you're saying, Misha, of this split between, are we like doing the drama or are we doing the action, maybe? I don't exactly have the words for it, but it's something that affect. - Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I do think it's, I guess, again, this is a question. Like, are we the three of us here on Deadletters weird for wanting to like do the heist? Like, I see an after is sort of break it back. And this is like, sure, yeah, it seems like, you know, we were disagreeing with everybody in book club last week. But like, like I think that I wonder that mode of play with the exception of going into a hole and fighting things, which seem very well modeled by dozens of hacks and, you know, hundreds of hacks and hundreds of dungeons, it feels like that mode of play of like let's really be and do the thing in the moment in like a very sort of like, not quite narrow, but like very contained, constrained mode feels quite under explored for everything other than dungeon dragon. - So actually, this brings you back to Misha's question from earlier about like what you would align or what would you kind of abstract what thing would you kind of move forward. and in a high state. game. I'm thinking about like, you know, combat is always something that you eventually have to always get a little bit cheeky with. But certainly the planning parts I would have all be something you need to do on the table. And then maybe even the like, and this might be a hot take, I think puzzles or like, you know, when you're hacking into the mainframe, like, what does that look like? Or or like an intelligence-based challenges? I find in my role-playing games not to be particularly fun to play on table because it ends up challenging the players around the board and not maybe necessarily the characters in the fiction. And so like the expert hacker that doesn't know to hack the hack in real life is given a hacking problem to solve over the board doesn't feel like a particularly powerful fantasy. And so when I think about things to align, those are the things that I think of doing or abstract the the puzzles and the adventure. I want to I want to interrogate this slightly. So if we take the hacking in a game. Yeah. Like, because to me, if like, like I'm just gonna use a really slow example, imagine if you were if you were hacking a computer in future blades in the dark, I know there are multiple actually cyberpunk blades in the dark hacks out there. But if we're playing cyberpunk blades in the dark and you're the computer hacker, and I hand you a jigsaw puzzle and you have to solve the jigsaw puzzle to hack the door, that to me feels like we're alighting hacking. Like we're using this metaphor if we are saying, um, or I guess we're using this analogy, the simile of saying hacking computer is like solving a puzzle. Error go we're gonna have you do the metaphor. We're gonna have you solve the puzzle to hack the computer. And like that to me feels like we are alighting hacking. And if we weren't alighting hacking, like, I would either one just give you like a fun programming challenge like you get in a programming class. Or two, I would need such detailed and rich and meaningful and fun and cool, diagetic rules of saying in the imaginary world of blades in the future, this is how computers work. And let me teach you like imagine if I mean it could just you can frame it like a mini game because computers are already kind of gamey. Like, you know, a computer programming is like kind of a weird stupid thing rule over any so this is an easy example, but you could imagine anything be it magic, be it communication, be it whatever we could say, oh, you know, if this is blades in the 17th century, these are the courtly rituals. These are the codes of conduct and etiquette. And this is going to take 12 pages to explain in the book and like it's going to be complicated and weird and hard. But like, these are all things that exist in the world. And you just have to solve that puzzle directly doing exactly what you would do. Same as if you were hacking computer, I just said, okay, here's how the code works. Do it. Like puzzle pieces and dice rolls are are similes. They're metaphor for this other thing that we're skipping over. Like, like, it's not just pure religion. It's not pure skipping. It is illusion via analogy, which I think is extremely common. Like, I think it's arguably more common than just straight up skipping it to your point, Misha. But like, I think that like that is the source of dissatisfaction. Like doing a jigsaw puzzle to solve a hack and minigame is less fun than actually just understanding how this computer works. Yeah. I think actually you mentioned conversation there. I think that's actually one of the things that like a little bit of illusion in with games like this. But very light, because I mean, like role-playing games are conversation fundamentally. Like, conversation is one of the things that you can like simulate via role-playing like really one to one. Yeah. But I also think that like it's fair. I see a lot of people online complaining like, "Oh, what if you want to play a bard with a really high cha?" But you don't have good social skills yourself. That's like, you should have social skills in games that you can roll to like so you don't have to like actually be like socially skilled to be able to play like a charismatic character. And I think there's like a little bit of this that I appreciate, which is like I think like being able to state how you're trying to like convince somebody, like say what the stakes are, say what like you're offering them, say the tactic you're taking, but not have to like actually like, you know, be energetic personality-wise. Right? I think that's like a totally fair thing to a lot. But again, I think all of these, right? Like you still want to keep that dynamic. You just sometimes like don't want to get into the details. Even with combat, which people love to a lot, it's like, you know, flanking them gives you a bonus or something a lot of the time, right? Which is like giving you some of it, but not like, not like, you know, cutting it all down into like, I roll a D6 and I forget a 6, I win. Yeah. I mean, like there are like levels to a religion. Like you can totally lie something or you can not totally lie something. And like I think one of the tricks and what's it like, I think, argue against sort of like the original blog post on somewhat efficaciously is that like, conversation is kind of a form of religion as you say. Like I can say seasons pass and I'm not evoking a rule there. I'm just saying time is passing. Like my example I go, I was going to do this is that there are almost never any rules and yet we almost never need any rules for opening a door. Like I can just say I open the door and then it's open. And like I don't have to say I turn the handle and open the door because we all understand how opening a door works. But you could imagine saying, like, okay, this is like an electrified door which means you to turn the handle in a very specific way. And like now we do. And like there's some push pull in there. Same as I could say, you need to make a dexterity check to open the door, which is ridiculous. But you can imagine, you know, I guess like in real life sometimes I do bif opening the door. And so like you could say you have a, you know, you're all 1D1000 and on on trip zeros, you failed to open the door in the first try. You know, like, and you could like you could do this, but like it would be sort of ridiculous to try. And like, I think that just that just that rules a line as the saying goes and conversational lines, it's just that one of those we can move more flexibly and more easily because I understand, you know, I might say, oh, you bif the door opening like just to mess with my players because like sometimes you do, right? It would be kind of a dick move with me and they probably read too much into it, but you could do it. But this is my, maybe this is the hot take. And I guess we're getting we're pivoting a little bit off into original blades topic, but I think it's interesting. I don't know if I don't know if it's I don't know if we should be aligning charisma intelligence wisdom style checks or puzzles. Like I don't I don't see that that's a thing that we should be doing. Like if you're to your point, me, if you're playing a charisma character and you're not very good at having a conversation, I don't think charisma should be a thing that you can define a character around the same way that I don't think you should have the other thing magic should be something that you surround intelligence with. And it's the same with like being a hacker or or or a good pick pocket being addressed to being somewhat dexterous. It reminds me a bit of I used to some some lore about me listeners. I used to be a a large camp instructor and in large a big thing that you do in combat is once you enter your engage with the wolf. Now I as the carp camp instructor pull out my my short dagger to to simulate the wolf's teeth and you pull out your you know your bean bags of fireballs and you throw it at us. You can you can you can imagine what five strangers around a table doing the same thing in a D and D combat style setting. We're like we know now the GM gets to stand up and hit you with each other with foam swords. Like that that kind of that kind of aligning. I don't think it's something that players or even me, particularly would be interested in doing the same way that you trying to convince me that the way that you pick pick this lock really intelligently is by solving this unrelated puzzle somehow gets me closer into the fiction and make me feel more empowered as a player. I don't think these skills are things that we should be like promoting an RPG community or RPG play. I'm going to cite two common counter responses to this because I'm curious about both of yours your your reactions to this. I'm going to say I don't agree with one of these either of these and I'm about to say but three of us are in mostly alignment on this and I want to hear your two responses. Counter response number one is are you saying that if I want to play a high strength character I need to be able to bench 350 because that's surely the same thing as saying you shouldn't have a charisma score you just have to be good at talking to play a bar. Well one definitely not. I think you I think you definitely know okay but aren't those the same thing why not? They they aren't the same thing because I can visualize and I can see what an 18th strength score person is we can all know what that looks like right we all know what bench 350 looks like the same way that we all know what being a charismatic or rather we don't know what what the idea of what a charismatic person is looks very different from kind of person to person you can be charismatic in one way or you can be flirty you can be charming you can be sweet you can be you can be a dashing and daring and shy and still be charismatic whereas strength and to some of the degree acrobatics you know dexterity movement and speed of the physical nature of stuff is things that we can all admire it's the same the same is the same reason why you know we can all watch a sports game and be wowed by the moves even though we don't know all the rules right that's that's what a that's what a high strength is right and so you don't you don't need to bench 350 in real life to know that this whole big use is so like the way that I think alighting this stuff is is good is still you want to maintain that dynamic and you want to maintain a lot of the choice side of it but I think like in the same way that like picking a lock has some like manual dexterity stuff that like we could just break out like a fucking you know like you lock your bedroom door and you got to like do it in real life to beat it but we're not going to do that right even with like social stuff right like if I let it like intimidate somebody I can I can say I yell at the guard but without yelling, right? Like so much of being charming is these like little like, you know, body language ticks the way you hold yourself, the way you speak. Like, you don't, I think you can allide that stuff. I think it's okay if like, you just say like, I slide over there all, all smoothly, and I like flash them a coin or something, and I say you're looking, I heard you kill people for money. Or you can get cheesy and you can like, say stuff in a way that like, would genuinely get you laughed at or something, like if you did it really, but like if you get the point across like fuck it, right? Like we're all like a bunch of nerd sitting around a table. Like we can, we can like gloss over the fact that like, I said that really awkwardly, without it being like a big penalty. I don't mean that like solve a puzzle to like, you know, get somebody to do something. I just mean that like you say, well, I tell him that he should do it, and the reason I think he should do that is because I'm willing to pay him, and I have a plan that's gonna keep the guards from noticing him, so it's like totally safe on his part, right? And like I'm glossing over the whole conversation of how we do that, but like the points there, right? Like the puzzle that's in the fiction is being solved. I'm just not like, you know, maintaining eye contact and like, you know, speaking with a steady voice and shit. Does that make sense? Is that difference? I think so. I think so. Yeah. Like, you know, there's a lot that you can just say you're doing. Like a lot of charisma is difficult to describe or is difficult to measure as precisely. And so while 16th strength is not necessarily strictly correlate to managing 350, we can kind of draw ones to ones there. Whereas with charisma, we would rather use our own human intuition of saying, "Oh, I say this with a slight look on my face. I slide up close by. I play footsie with them. I do whatever." You know, I simply like this. We can use our words to evoke what we mean better than any number can. So my second point to this, because I said I had two sort of common counter responses. The second common counter response I see to this argument about not using mental stats of just relying on players doing things is to say, "Oh, well in my game, I care about character skill more than about player skill." So what are you two say to that? Like I don't know how to build a bomb, but my character has 19 intelligence, so they should know how to build a bomb. I think this cuts to the being versus doing stuff I was talking about a little bit before is that like for the stuff that's like fun to do, I want as much of it as possible, right? Like, you know, solving the puzzle of how do you convince a person to do something is interesting and is relatively like easily replicated through conversation. Diffusing a bomb is less so, although I'm gonna be honest, I don't think I'm like categorically against like breaking out a quick session of keep talking nobody explodes to be able to diffuse a bomb in a game. I think that's, like it's gimmicky, it's kind of cute, but like sometimes it's fun just to mix shit up, right? Like sometimes you just do a puzzle and it's not fun in the same way that like everything else we're doing in the role playing game is fun, but I'm not like a big purity person, right? Like you can mix it up. - I'll say to this bomb point, I think that is fun. I think sure your character might know how to build a bomb, where do you get the material from? Right? Like where does it, how do you build a bomb? Right? Like where do you go? - But that's not answering the question, that's not answering the question, because my question is like, you know, if we're cutting out intelligence and my character should know how to build a bomb, but I say I don't know how to build a bomb, and my GM says, how do you build the bomb? Am I not allowed to say, or like if my GM doesn't let me just say, I know how to make a bomb. Like these are the questions, right? It's saying like if you remove intelligence and suddenly we encounter an area of the game where like it feels like my character should know something, how does that play with me not knowing that? - But that's where the, but that's where the play is, right? I think that's what I sometimes, and that's what I'm saying that like intelligence and charisma shouldn't, shouldn't be stats, because the play there is what I think the player is actually wanna do, right? Like if they wanna build the bomb that to fulfill or solve this problem that they wanna have, that it all becomes surrounding the context of that play. If it's like, okay, sure, if you wanna build the bomb, then the larger context of this needs to be, well what do you use this bomb for? Where is this solving this problem? But if it's gonna be strictly about like, oh my, it is because my character knows how to do all of these things, then there isn't, it becomes, it's all contextual to the surrounding of that play. For me, when players are interested in doing that kind of stuff, I find that the entire adventure needs to be then, okay, let's build the bomb, because building bombs is complicated and interesting. And so, interesting for players. And so then we should be encouraging that. And indeed, you might think that you don't know how to build a bomb now, but to playing a GM with me, you'll find out how. We'll find out together, in fact. We'll do it together over the course of play. And then you will no longer feel that disconnect between you and your character. I don't know, is building a bomb interesting? Is the question though? Right, like if, no, this isn't appropriate once, Sam. Sam points it at every time we say the word interesting to make us stop, which I normally appreciate, but I stand by my usage of this time. Peak behind the screen here. No, no, but like legit, there are puzzles. Like how do you build a bomb? They're like technical and complicated, but not like interesting, not like dynamic, not like, like, yeah, there's probably a correct way to do that, but like, would it actually be, and a bomb is like maybe more dramatic, but like, right, if I was gonna build a fucking dam or something, right, there's just like, there's the correct way to do that. But like, reading a bunch of textbooks to figure it out doesn't actually sound that fun, 'cause it's not like a creative process, it's just like figure out the best practices and do it. I don't know if that's something that like, I think that's fine to a light over, 'cause it's not, it's like really convoluted with not much payoff. Now, no, I think building a bomb has a ton of other things, like how do you get those like components, and that can be really fun, right? 'Cause like that gets you into the whole kind of like, how do you steal a bunch of bomb components from like a thing? And that that has like all sorts of complications that are enjoyable to like interact with, but so my cheeky response to this question that I asked you to, is that I think that like this whole player skill or a scary skill divide isn't real. It's all player skill. And what we call character skill is just being good at D&D, which is still a player skill. Defined player skills. I mean, this is the way the pressure going person would pose me before, but like, you know, in the bomb building scenario, it's that my character should know how to build a bomb, but I don't, you know, my character is a bomb maker. And like, I think that, and so people say, oh, like my character can do this. And so it shouldn't be incumbent on me as a player to have to know how to do this thing that my character can do. Like, you know, this is a game that is about my character being talented rather than me being talented. And my response is like, okay, you're just asking me to substitute the talent of bomb making for the talent of understanding how to optimize a D&D skill list. And like frankly, optimizing a D&D skill list to me sounds way less exciting than learning how to build a bomb. Both may involve reading vast quantities of textbooks. I think that's the good line, right? I think anything that is like less interesting than optimizing a D&D character should be a lie to though. Yeah, maybe opinions are gonna differ on like what qualifies that or not though. Sure, sure, sure. And like some stuff here's different, some stuff in RPGs boring as hell. But I think that like, I think that like for blades to hide all back like so much of blades I would love to know how to do. I would love to know how to rob a Victorian bank with a ghost in it. That sounds awesome. That's a skill I would love to have in real life. I would love to know how to win internessing old school, you know, street gang wars. Like like all this stuff sounds cool as hell that I would like love to even just learn about historically. And so like, you know, oh, I have to go watch gangs of New York and then read about the dead rabbits and then play blades in the dark. And then I'll be better blades by understanding how like build cutter functioned like that sounds rad. Like like all this, I guess like anybody who hides behind hiding is a structure. But anybody who says like, oh, like I don't want to have to learn to me feels like them, what's the point? Like why is it more fun to get good at optimizing clocks and stress trees than it is good to learn how to plan out of heist? Like it just seems like one of these sounds so much more fun to me. Yeah, yeah. Great. Outstanding. Outstanding. Well, and see, excellent proof. I programmed my robots correctly to have good taste. Yes. Yes. Okie dokie done. So as mentioned, unless we have any final comments, any final comments on blades? There are no, you know, wait, there are some like mini, many things I think we could have gone into. It's so much fun about in plays. The huge book is like a position and in fact, it's a huge book. I think the devil's bargain is also like a cute thing. I think a flashback thing. I hate devil's bargains. They take so much. Oh, but they're cute. They're cute. I like there. They're cute, but like, oh my god, we've just been five minutes arguing about like what they should get you. Like come on. Yeah, I, you know, it's in there. I think there are so, so there's so many of these like kind of little details. So listeners, if there's any that we didn't talk about, please feel free to let us know. Maybe we will. We'll start the back. - Sugar back, we can do 'em, we can do 'em a mail. We can do like a mail room. - That'd be fun. - Responses at some point. - All right, I have one final statement, which is, did you all notice there's just like an essay written by somebody else about how cool the game is on page 186? - There's multiple, there's multiple, it's weird. It's very strange. - Yeah, no. - It's very strange. - No, but this whole game, right? It's still, I have very positive feelings about it. It's very influential on me. But it is definitely one where I think the value is stealing it for parts in some ways more than like taking the whole total package, which incidentally is like how every game I've played or seen people play using stuff for them, it has worked, right? I've watched a couple of actual plays on it and nobody fucking follows the rules well. I don't think either of them even used the setting. And I love, this is why I love actual plays, actually. Seeing which rules get slowed away versus the ones that actually proved beneficial in play is such a useful thing to do as a game designer. Even though actual plays have a very different set of like, oh yeah, constraints and goals and reason for existing than playing with your friends, still, I find it so valuable. And it's why I just love finding people playing like actual modules and stuff. Seeing how stuff unpacks. Yeah, I'm done. That's all I got for this game. - Totally. I also have a bunch of other random things mentioned, you know, claims are stupid, just put them on the map. You know, yada yada yada. We could keep rambling and rambling about this for a long time. But before we get there, rather than doing that, we should probably end this episode 'cause we've been going for a little long while now. As is our custom here on Deadletters. Let me ask you two, what have you been reading? Ah, fuck. (laughs) You can see, you can't see this, you can't see the listeners, but both of them are staring around in horror. Misha's rubbing his eyes and shame while he's looking at his bookshelf. Desperate for something he can say he's been reading. - Man, Blades is big. And I do most of my reading honestly. - Blades is big. - On the subway. - Blades big. - And like I've been doing like holiday traveling stuff. I've been reading fucking build guides for, same as this fucking game, sort of convalaria. I'll say that. I've been reading build guides and swords of convalaria. - What are swords of convalaria? - Oh, it's my shame. So like, you know, there's like a saying that like everybody has a scam that you'd fall for. - Yeah. - Everybody's got a gotcha game that you're ready to fall for it. - Oh, Misha. - Misha. - I'm not spending money on it. I haven't spent money on it, but apparently mine is like a final fantasy tactics, like style gotcha game. And I've been getting, it's been sinking its claws into me. - Okay. - I actually, you know, you say I was looking at my bookshelf, but I was pondering because I was reading something really interesting. And that was the judicial report on the former managers, slash owner of a gym in New York City, Queens, who murdered three people between 1998 and 2013. Because I was thinking of getting a gym membership and then I googled this gym and I found this like a lawsuit that's this filing. And I read through the entire court doc, the court case, fascinating court case about, and I will share it with the two of you afterwards if you're interested, but fascinating court case about this murder that happened in New York from this gym, with, oh man, with a very funny name. So that's what I was reading. I was reading something. - So are you gonna go to the gym? - I think I might. - I think I might. - Yeah. - It's presumably like this. - It is under new management. It's also a 24 hour gym, which is always nice. - Sure. - Yeah. - That's what I was reading. - What about you, Sam? - I just finished reading, much less exciting than that. I just finished reading Richard Osman's, Richard Osman's is a mystery writer. He wrote this book called, "The Thursday Murder Club Series." And I just finished reading his like new book, that's not Thursday Murder Club. I haven't read those. This one's called "We Self-Murderers." It's a very, very cute sort of like mystery spine novel. You know, I read it as like my train book coming back from the holidays and it was a little too cute for my liking. A few too many bows tied up on things at the end. But yeah, as mentioned listeners, my name is Sam Zorinson. We are Deadletters, a podcast based here in New York City, joined by programmed robots, Walid Routa and Misha Favoreov. We also run a book club. It meets every other Thursday in New York City. You can keep your eyes peeled for the posters that we post on socials and on various discord servers. Well, thank you so much for listening viewers. Can't you on the next tube? Goodbye and thank you. - You too much, bye. - Bye.