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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8268832" data-attributes="member: 16814">Except that this is a bad take on how flashbacks function in Blades.  Flashbacks look like a big deal in print, but once you get to playing and recognize how deeply intermeshed and costly they are with limited impacts you realize how they're a nice tool but don't really enable much.  The D&D version would be better if the cost wasn't some nebulous flashback point, but rather a daily use of another ability and 10% of your hitpoints, unrecoverable for the rest of the mission.  That might get closer to the cost of flashbacks in Blades. Of course, if you like this mechanic as presented, go for it, nothing wrong with it, but it's still very ad hoc in it's presentation, with so much left up to the GM without clear direction.  Heck, it's even says if things go pearshaped, just make something up!  Part of the real problem with the D&D flashback mechanics is the difference in how player actions are done -- there's an absolute finality to them in Blades that's much more open in D&D -- in Blades, any action I try has a chance of success, and will be assigned a risk factor and reward factor according to the fiction in play at the moment, to which the player can assign a host of additional factors.  The result is final and will determine success or failure without question, though.  In D&D, the chance of an action is entirely up to the GM, it's possibility formed first by what the GM thinks the situation is, including things not yet shared in the fiction, and then the DC is assigned by the GM, and then the outcome is determined by the GM.  At some tables, this will be in the open, but the rules of 5e do not require this (like Blades does) so success is gated heavily by what the GM thinks.  This limits the usefulness of a flashback, because now there's the discussion of how it even can work once you're there.There are more things to borrowing a mechanic from one game to another than superficially copying some of it.  Blades is a very tight ruleset -- every part of it is deeply intertwined with the other parts.  This means it's hard to just rip a mechanic from it, because a large part of how that mechanic actually functions is relegated by other parts of the game.  I dislike this rip, it fails to really grasp the concepts in Blades, and doesn't really add much, I think, to D&D, except more wily-nily-ness.</blockquote>

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