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The GM does the framing but must do so in regard to established player character beliefs (and with the sole purpose to challenge those beliefs). This is explicit in the text. The game both establishes the GM's authority over scene framing and constrains it to addressing the enumerated belief...

In my experience most longer running characters in Blades will end up taking substantial part of their move sets from other playbooks. My first long running character was a Hound (Imperial sniper) that sort of become more of a Slide (from brokering a lot of deals) as the game went on. My other...

This might just be a result of the play priorities of the groups I have run and played with in the past, but my experience with games where characters can degrade as a result of loss conditions (Vampire - The Requiem, Legend of the Five Rings Fifth Edition, The Doomed Playbook in Masks...

My biggest concern personally is losing the spirit of the game as constituted. What I like about the game I'm seeing is that it appears to be gloriously unafraid of its players. From the unstructured nature to combat, to spells/abilities with minimal caveats and not a lot of strong rationing, to...

I mean when I use terms like scene framing, fronts, GM Moves, kickers, etc. I am not like translating my natural thoughts into jargon. That vocabulary is natural to me. My posts almost always stream of consciousness, thoughts broadcast directly onto the virtual page. Soft move as a term of art...

For part of what GMs do. Its utility as a term of art is then to enable us to have discussions about how in a given game or style of play a GM should go about setting a scene, what concerns they should have, what constraints they should have, etc. In part by breaking up "what GMs normally do"...

It's also not gaining very much competency outside of combat compared to a build that focuses on both. The vast majority of your competency outside of combat is going to come from two spends per tier (your first character trait spend and the improve two experiences spend). Every other spend (and...

Being interested and engaged when the focus is on another player character does not require professional acting skills. It requires empathy and curiosity. Sure, system design can help. I think you can address in other ways though than locking things down to explicit turn sequences. For...

The GM as Storyteller was at least prevalent enough during Second Edition's reign to support a magazine wholly devoted to the concept (White Wolf Magazine) and to get a whole category in the Six Cultures of Play. It's also a sizeable chunk of the commentary on these boards (adventure paths...

I have a fairly strong aesthetic preference for dice to be used to resolve fictional uncertainty, things being in doubt in the fictional situation - rather than a tool to resolve our personal uncertainty about the fictional situation. Dice then become a totem for helping us to feel the tension...

I really like Blades. Pitch perfect marriage between setting, thematic elements, intertwining rules, etc. Unfortunately, I have not really been able to dig into any other Forged in the Dark game besides Quietus, which has as much in common with Blades as Blades has with Apocalypse World. Most I...

You basically ignored the thesis of my post and the points underneath it to use a small snippet of the bottom of my post to engage in gaming cultural war shenanigans. I think it's poor form to use someone else's statements as a launching pad while not addressing what they were trying to talk...

The larger point is that games like Apocalypse Keys and Blades in the Dark have weight and intricacies to them that can really only be experienced through extended play. You can get a taste, but the real game only begins once you have a few sessions in and everyone internalizes how to play/run...

When it comes to games like Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, Masks, et al. I think they are extremely approachable for players, but they are not games one should run without taking their time to really dig into the specific game. Even games as similar on the surface as Apocalypse World...

Who is arguing for players to see the entire stat block or look up a monster in the monster manual? This is a little different from a preference for sharing DC numbers, a feature which is quite common in other games (whereas stat block sharing is not). Legend of the Five Rings Fifth Edition for...

@Maxperson Just for clarity - are you trying to say players should not be given numbers or that they should not try to intuit them (so is to make better decisions about which abilities to use)? Like if a player remarks "16 hits but a 14 does not" is that player in the wrong or thinking about...

You are rolling 2d12 (which averages to 13) to meet or beat the Difficulty with all doubles being critical successes (even if they would have been failures).

The obvious solution to me is to provide instructions to the GM to remind players we are following the fiction and to shift the spotlight to characters who have not yet acted if the sequence of player character actions seems unreasonable. I don't think we should have to drill it down to a locked...

I guess if you are not looking for advice or feedback why post this thread other than to publicly shame one of your players?

I will pretty much only do checks for active research in most trad games. I don't think there should be in the fiction tension over what a character does and does not know. I have similar feelings about Perception checks where I simply base it on how skilled/talented characters are unless they...