Blades in the Dark Advice Please?

[doctorbadwolf]

For more defined powers and roles, particularly in a (grim and gritty) fantasy setting, I believe Band of Blades (https://evilhat.com/product/band-of-blades/) is quite a good shout. I will admit I browsed the rules and decided not to bother because it's a bit more defined than I like for this system. There's a free supplement, Blades of the Jhereg, which is available on the main website (https://bladesinthedark.com/), and a D&D style hack called Blades Against Darkness as well.

The magical girl hack is called Girl by Moonlight and was crowdfunded last year (https://evilhat.com/project_status/girl-by-moonlight/). Not my thing, but more power to you if it's yours.

I don’t think I’d want to play Girl By Moonlight straight, I’d want soemthing less allegorical and I would want soemthing with more player driven narrative control than “play to find out” really involves IME especially for telling magical girl stories, but a lot of that looks extremely cool.

I bet if I had players that dont intentionally make bad decisions because it’s faithful to the character and narrative, I’d feel differently, tho.

I wonder how much work it would take to do a Kids on Brooms style tailor made hack. Like, figure out what themes and aesthetics the players want, and build the playbooks and playsets to suite that. So like if they want lunar themes for the whole group, you’d have types of moons as playbooks that also fit certain archetypes, like the Harvest Moon is the deadly lancer with red themes and can evolve to The Blood Moon where you personify wrath and violence (with a risk of this breaking very bad if you aren’t careful)

 

[Umbran]

Is it just me??

I'm not perpetually annoyed. I sometimes find one of them corny or forced, or the like.

It’s like naming the attribute for how well you can get along with people Vibe or something.

I dunno, that one sounds like a perfectly cromulent name for a social stat in the right game.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'm not perpetually annoyed. I sometimes find one of them corny or forced, or the like.



I dunno, that one sounds like a perfectly cromulent name for a social stat in the right game.

Ugh. Even the ones that “make sense” are just like a 45 year old dad doing finger guns and using slang that’s too new to be retro and too old to be relevant.

I’ll be totally honest, the naming conventions were the single biggest hurdle for me to even give any of these games a chance.

I’m playing a roleplaying game, not having a witty conversation about a genre of film in a movie directed by Joss Whedon.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Is anyone else perpetually annoyed by the naming of a lot of these games and pbta games?

Stitch? Why not call the Speaker a “Talk”?

Is it just me??

It’s like naming the attribute for how well you can get along with people Vibe or something.

Stitch isn't a hall of fame playbook name, but, like, it's fine. It really doesn't matter. I ran Scum and Villainy for about a year, and it's not like Muscle or Stitch are in-setting terms that you use. The term Stitch just doesn't come up after character creation.

But also, to say this endemic to FitD/PbtA? C'mon dude. RPGs of all kinds are filled with class names that some folks will see as corny, or even just lazily offensive. Barbarian, Shaman, etc. The generalization you're shooting for here isn't working.

 

[pemerton]

RPGs of all kinds are filled with class names that some folks will see as corny, or even just lazily offensive.

Also inconsistent in their semantics.

I mean, in classic D&D "fighter" is presumably used in the sense of one who fights (as opposed to boxer); and then the one who uses magic is called a "magic-user". So why is the one who prays not called a "pray-er"? Or "prayer user"? Rather than the weirdly culturally/historically specific "cleric"?

 

[Starfox]

OP here again. I was going ro reply to posts here with thanks, but its been too many, so I'm just giving you likes. Thanks a bunch, now I have a lot of things to look at!

 

[Umbran]

Ugh. Even the ones that “make sense” are just like a 45 year old dad doing finger guns and using slang that’s too new to be retro and too old to be relevant.

I can manage to summon enough energy to roll my eyes at some of them, but not enough to care beyond that.

 

[hawkeyefan]

OP here again. I was going ro reply to posts here with thanks, but its been too many, so I'm just giving you likes. Thanks a bunch, now I have a lot of things to look at!

Good luck! If you have any more questions, drop them here... there are plenty of folks who are familiar with Blades and would be happy to help you out if needed.

 

[niklinna]

Stitch isn't a hall of fame playbook name, but, like, it's fine. It really doesn't matter. I ran Scum and Villainy for about a year, and it's not like Muscle or Stitch are in-setting terms that you use. The term Stitch just doesn't come up after character creation.

But also, to say this endemic to FitD/PbtA? C'mon dude. RPGs of all kinds are filled with class names that some folks will see as corny, or even just lazily offensive. Barbarian, Shaman, etc. The generalization you're shooting for here isn't working.

Stitch seems no worse than Sawbones—a real-world, if dated, slang term for medical doctor—and perhaps more apt to the setting (I haven't read Scum & Villainy). All those playbook names seem fine to me. But I've definitely seen some I've done double-takes on, in many games.

Anyhow! As for the OP, another thing you might try, even if you don't think it would be a good fit, is to go ahead and add more special abilities that are narrowly defined, and see how it works! Or ask your players to draft their own scoundrel playbooks, since they seem to have some idea what sort of thing they want, and then iterate together a bit till you all have something that hums in play. Who knows? You might end up with your own banger of a Forged in the Dark game!

 

[Starfox]

What I'm looking at atm is Princess World - Frontier Kingdoms. I must admit the low price tag made it an attractive entry point. And I like what I see! In particular I like that each princess has an individual and unique title and power descriptor. A possible issue is the breath vs tight focus of these, but that is a matter of negotiation.

...go ahead and add more special abilities that are narrowly defined, and see how it works!

The homebrew I've been playing with for a decade or two is based on Feng Shui with its schticks, which is quite easy to port into this structure. But I am at over a thousand schticks for that, so some culling will need to be done. It uses a verb - noun structure similar to Ars Magica. The verbs are simply the 9 skills of the game. The nouns are descriptors, like Fire or Mind. I'm considering having just a single power for each verb - noun combination, but that is still too much I fear, especially if I allow PCs to add nouns.