Blades in the Dark Advice Please?

[doctorbadwolf]

Nope. You framed Stitch as an example of some larger trend in FitD/PbtA games having super bad playbook names, and I pointed out how that generalization doesn't work. You don't have to agree with me, but don't make a lazy, sniping generalization—which also shows just how little experience you seem to have with those games—and then get ever-so-offended by pushback.

Yeah you def don’t get what I was criticizing.

I didn’t say that any of it was generic bad naming, a criticized a specific type of name that is very “genre savvy” and comes across as very much an attempt to create artificial jargon.

Trad games don’t often use names like “The Hocus” or “The Brainer”, or name stats things like Hard and Sharp and Cool.

Pbta and fits games much more commonly do.

I find these names cringey.

 

[niklinna]

Well I guess there's no arguing opinion, then. Keep on cringing!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Well I guess there's no arguing opinion, then. Keep on cringing!

I mean yeah the initial comment wasn’t exactly argument baiting lol

Just wondering if anyone else found the naming style off-putting.

 

[MarkB]

I mean yeah the initial comment wasn’t exactly argument baiting lol

Just wondering if anyone else found the naming style off-putting.

Some settings pull it off better than others. Stitch in SaV stands out among the more standard names for the other playbooks, but all the playbook names in BitD feel suitably thematic and evoke the concept of a criminal underworld with its own lingo and subculture.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I mean yeah the initial comment wasn’t exactly argument baiting lol

Just wondering if anyone else found the naming style off-putting.

Cringe comes in all sorts of flavors. Fabula Ultima classes like Darkblade and Weaponmaster are incredibly embarrassing to me. Making fun of Bards is played out, but totally deserved. And if you want to talk skills, the deadly serious and laughably specific nature of a lot of trad skills is, again, cringey in other dimensions. Plus a lot of the skill names you're griping about are often doing something you aren't granting them, which is not trying to be trad-style skills. Sometimes they're trying to be ground the character in the fiction in a non-simulationist way, or capture a range of different qualities and capabilities in one or two words. Meanwhile, a million gamers are out here still casually using "Wisdom" like it's not one of the vaguest, most useless terms in basically any context.

But here's the real issue here, and why I'm pushing back—you rappelled into the early stages of a thread that was about asking for advice, not to help in any capacity, but rather to winge about non-trad games being tryhard.

Totally useless and counterproductive activity. When you threadcrap, expect to get called out for it.

Now run along. We're talking about actual things over here.

 

[Starfox]

This is great advice. I'd also add that I originally got inspired to hack together an FitD game after reading BitD, Band of Blades, and Scum and Villainy, but then I played BitD and SaV and realized I didn't actually get the system until I had a bunch of first-hand experience with it at the table. There are a lot of moving parts and interactions that aren't necessarily clear on the page.

Also, Candela Obscura diverges from FitD in some really important ways. I wouldn't count that as really playing FitD.

Wise words. Candela Obscura has removed most if not all the campaign elements. It also has 9 abilities, instead of 12. It can give play experience, but only in the action parts. I'm happy with that now, but later I may want the background elements too. Princess Kingdoms has a version of them.

 

[Panzeh]

I really think you need to play through a Forged in the Dark game as it is before you start trying to hack it, you'll learn a lot more about the structure. When I played through a Band of Blades campaign, i learned a lot about how to do things differently next time and what i thought needed to be hacked.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Some settings pull it off better than others. Stitch in SaV stands out among the more standard names for the other playbooks, but all the playbook names in BitD feel suitably thematic and evoke the concept of a criminal underworld with its own lingo and subculture.

Stitch stands out, sure. Not just because the other names are standard, but also because the other names (mostly) describe a type of person/character in plain English. You don’t need to read the flavor text to know what a pilot is. Stitch isn’t that. It doesn’t tell you what it represents, you have to read on to find out. It gives you no clue, even. I asked several people who haven’t played scum and villainy what they thought the Stitch “Class” might be, and none guessed medic or doctor or anything like that, it was all crafter, fixer, etc.

It also stands out because the other names are just terms we all know, and Stitch comes across (to me) as trying to be something that one character might call the doctor in a show like Firefly, but it just doesn’t pull it off.

Blades has “Cutter, Hound, Leech, Lurk, Slide, Spider, Whisper” which are just as bad IMO on both points above. The only improvement is that they’re all reaching toward the same genre-savvy “cool lingo” vibe.

Someone upthread said that it doesn’t matter because these aren’t terms used in-world, but that makes them even worse names. If no one in apocalypse world is calling the healer “Angel” why isn’t the playbook just called “The Healer” so that everyone knows what they’re looking at, at a glance?

Likewise, what’s a Lurk or a Slide? What world are people actually saying these terms in? If I read a novel where people are using all these terms how they’re used in bitd, I’d roll my eyes almost as much as I did reading the Night Angel series, with its “Wetboy” profession of hired killers that doesn’t have “targets”, they have “deaders”. I managed to enjoy the series in spite of this painfully tryhard edgelord naming, but it definitely didn’t help.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Cringe comes in all sorts of flavors. Fabula Ultima classes like Darkblade and Weaponmaster are incredibly embarrassing to me. Making fun of Bards is played out, but totally deserved. And if you want to talk skills, the deadly serious and laughably specific nature of a lot of trad skills is, again, cringey in other dimensions. Plus a lot of the skill names you're griping about are often doing something you aren't granting them, which is not trying to be trad-style skills. Sometimes they're trying to be ground the character in the fiction in a non-simulationist way, or capture a range of different qualities and capabilities in one or two words. Meanwhile, a million gamers are out here still casually using "Wisdom" like it's not one of the vaguest, most useless terms in basically any context.

But here's the real issue here, and why I'm pushing back—you rappelled into the early stages of a thread that was about asking for advice, not to help in any capacity, but rather to winge about non-trad games being tryhard.

Totally useless and counterproductive activity. When you threadcrap, expect to get called out for it.

Now run along. We're talking about actual things over here.

I mean I made one off-hand comment that wouldn’t even be a big argument or anything if you hadn’t decided to blow it completely out of proportion while also being the only person replying to it who was completely off about what it was even saying.

You’re also really reaching in the overly defensive attempt to counter someone else’s opinion with those critiques of skill names and such, when you don’t even have any examples other “wisdom is vague in meaning”.

I did laugh derisively at “run along”, though. That at least was a bit entertaining.

You keep making posts that feel like you think you’ve got a mic drop moment…and you haven’t been remotely close to one at any point, you’ve just turned a comment about naming conventions into a case of you making it personal for literally no reason.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I really think you need to play through a Forged in the Dark game as it is before you start trying to hack it, you'll learn a lot more about the structure. When I played through a Band of Blades campaign, i learned a lot about how to do things differently next time and what i thought needed to be hacked.

This is great advice for any indie game. My wife ran Thirsty Sword Lesbians a couple times before getting a handle on the type of game it is and the basic structure of how it expresses challenges, etc, to a point where modifying it made sense.

Of course I am strongly a “learn to swim in the deep end of the pool” guy, and I’ve never regretted hacking a game after just reading it, especially 3.5 D&D man it was really obvious what needed fixed in that one.

But most of the time yeah, especially if it’s a type of game you haven’t played or have only played a little.