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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 9591982" data-attributes="member: 6696971">You've already got several responses (some from people I've GMed Blades games for) regarding the above which you've interacted with, so I don't know I can do much more work here to elaborate on the points expressed.  Here is what I'll say regarding what I've bolded of your text above.  These game engine levers, procedures, principles, and agenda pieces work in concert to basically ensure very round characters whose animating dramatic needs are diverse and generating an evolution and arc to PCs in Blades:* GM Goal: Play to find out what happens. Don’t steer the game toward certain outcomesor events. Be curious!This tells the GM to be curious about the characters, about the situations they're in, about the collisions of characters and conflicting elements, and about the cascading forward momentum.* GM Actions: (i) Ask establishing and provocative questions of the characters through their players and the game's engine. (ii) Provide opportunities & follow the player’s lead.These procedures ensure that "where the action lies" or "what the nexus of play is" is constantly a collaborative affair and constantly updated to ensure "same-pagedness."  This isn't just a freeform procedure.  The game engine's archetecture, mechanical levers, and advancement scheme works in concert to facilitate it.* GM Principles & Best Practices: (i) Be a fan of the PCs:  Be interested in the characters and excited about their victories.(ii) Let everything flow from the fiction: Respect the cascading situation-state.  Do not generate pre-fabricated story which subverts that emergent cascade.  Respect it and follow the characters as they emerge, evolve, unravel, resolve.These two things above follow directly from and to (iii) GM Best Practices of Lead an Interesting Conversation (prompt players and be prompted by them), (iv) Don't Block (there is always a way to entertain goals and action declarations...find it...negotiate it...resolve it via system), (v) Keep the Metachannel Open, (vi) Play (Crew & PC) Goal-Forward (again, centering PC motivations as the nexus of play which generates each moment and, ultimately, trajectory).* Player Best Practices: (i) Go into Danger & Fall in Love With Trouble + Don't Talk Yourself Out of Fun: The system makes your character extremely robust and resilient so ATTACK, DAMNIT.  There is no reason to turtle.  It sucks and you don't need to.(ii) Take Responsibility: You want interesting things to happen?  You want compelling characters?  Say interesting things and use the system's beefy means to shape play. (iii) Build Your Character Through Play: Be a curious explorer of your character.  Do not bring an unmalleable, already resolved conception of character into play with an intent for the fiction to hew to that.  Follow the character generation process.  Use it to bring dramatic needs, anchoring relations, and an interesting, primordial sketch of a character.  Use this, an interesting conversation, and system to animate play with propulsive elements, allowing discovery of "who this person is" in the course of play.* Mechanical Levers and Advancement: You've got a gang of individual gears & levers + incentives & tradeoffs around various currencies + an interlocking mechanical architecture which all work in concert to (i) inform your goals, (ii) to generate worthy/interesting adversaries and opportunities, (iii) to fill out play and pressurize it with compelling decision-points around micro-goals/macro-goals/individual relationships/social networks, (iv) to animate spiraling conflicts which is that essential "spinning plates" feel and cascading situation-state that is a rigorous game of Blades in the Dark.</blockquote>

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