Grade the Forged in the Dark System

[Grendel_Khan]

Hmm, that's a good question.

Wildsea is inspired by many Forged in the Dark games but it does a lot of things differently. For example, Harm is replaced by Tracks, which are attached to each character Trait, and so you can lose your ability to do things if you take too much Harm to a single ability. Some abilities are there just to give you extra Track boxes, while others have smaller Tracks if they are more useful.

The character concepts from Wildsea are really interesting and evocative, but I feel like there's a lot to work with from the get-go. Characters get 4 abilities at game start, and don't get much more than that for the whole course of the game. Character progression is more narrative than anything else. I think it's a pretty steep learning curve compared to many other FitD games, and when I played the game, I found it hard to juggle the disparate pieces of each character. Even though Wildsea has a unifying aspect in the Ship, I didn't feel like it gave the group as much of a cohesive goal. A lot of the time it felt like we were aimlessly drifting, which is not something I'm used to.

That's a really interesting read on Wildsea. I've only skimmed it, since the setting didn't appeal to me, but I did wonder if its mechanics and playloops maybe weren't as tight as I prefer them to be in FitD.

 

[jdrakeh]

I changed my vote. I am firmly in the "I Love It" camp now. I have seen what it can do when tailored to a specific setting and, DAMN, does it rock.

 

[Starfox]

You've got the right link!

So overall, Moth-Light is speculative science fiction, so it establishes a few truths; namely that the protagonists are on an alien planet populated by gigantic, predatory creatures called Moths. However, when you sit down for your Session 0, you choose one of the four Pacts. (Promise, Scavengers, Slayers, Jammers.)

Each Pact comes with a series of prompts that lead you to describe the setting and the goals of your characters. For example, the Promise Pact is designed for telling stories about five clans working together to find hope just as their need grows the greatest. The Slayers pact, however, is more focused on using advanced weaponry to fight the gigantic predators. I'd compare the Promise to Nausicäa or Horizon Zero Dawn, while I'd compare the Slayers to Pacific Rim or Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The Pacts also tweak the mechanics a little bit. A Promise character has action ratings like Dabble, Hunt, and Relate. A Slayers character has action ratings like Volley, Rise, and Command. The Promise tracks the campaign over a longer period of time, tracking the seasons and marking special events. Meanwhile, Slayers have access to AUGER, a special weapon, and therefore have a custom moved called Pilot, which gives the players access to a special Action Verb and also allows the players to team up against major threats.

The other two pacts are Scavengers, which is great for gritty, post-apocalyptic survival stories, and Jammers, which is meant to emulate a sports anime. What I think Dissonance is doing is giving us a setting and asking us how we want to play in it (which I think its really interesting because what I'm doing for my own game is giving people a story and asking them where/when they want to set it.)

Thanks! Does indeed sound cool.

I changed my vote. I am firmly in the "I Love It" camp now. I have seen what it can do when tailored to a specific setting and, DAMN, does it rock.

I agree BitD needs localization, and doing that right is quite tricky but can be really nice!

 

[overgeeked]

I changed my vote. I am firmly in the "I Love It" camp now. I have seen what it can do when tailored to a specific setting and, DAMN, does it rock.

Which specific version/game are you talking about?

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I changed my vote. I am firmly in the "I Love It" camp now. I have seen what it can do when tailored to a specific setting and, DAMN, does it rock.

Really want some details!

 

[TiQuinn]

I know this is just me and the probabilities aren’t terribly different from the d20 distribution but something about the success on a d6 mechanic that’s at the core of the system doesn’t sit right with me. It could be that I don’t think the GM that I played Blades with was fully comfortable with the clocks and the storytelling system but I saw the following:

1) Roll on an action; likely get a partial success. The problems with the partial successes was somehow they still felt bad(?), like the bad always outweighed the good. I know this is what helps drive the narrative forward. Maybe we were just terrible about rolling outright successes.

2) Clocks seemed arbitrary. The GM would start clocks based on challenges and I can’t think of a time when we didn’t finish a clock. We finished clocks on partial successes with that same feeling of “you kind of succeeded and backed into what you wanted to do”. I almost wanted to purposely fail something just to see what happened because as much as we talk about games being railroads, BitD and Scum and Villany really felt like we were in a room full of plushy pillows where no PC could ever really get hurt.

I would like to try again with a GM who really knows the system well and can improvise well - I get the sense this system requires much stronger improv skills than other systems - to see if I really do like it or not, but for now I can only give it a “It’s alright I guess.”

 

[MintRabbit]

I know this is just me and the probabilities aren’t terribly different from the d20 distribution but something about the success on a d6 mechanic that’s at the core of the system doesn’t sit right with me. It could be that I don’t think the GM that I played Blades with was fully comfortable with the clocks and the storytelling system but I saw the following:

1) Roll on an action; likely get a partial success. The problems with the partial successes was somehow they still felt bad(?), like the bad always outweighed the good. I know this is what helps drive the narrative forward. Maybe we were just terrible about rolling outright successes.

2) Clocks seemed arbitrary. The GM would start clocks based on challenges and I can’t think of a time when we didn’t finish a clock. We finished clocks on partial successes with that same feeling of “you kind of succeeded and backed into what you wanted to do”. I almost wanted to purposely fail something just to see what happened because as much as we talk about games being railroads, BitD and Scum and Villany really felt like we were in a room full of plushy pillows where no PC could ever really get hurt.

I would like to try again with a GM who really knows the system well and can improvise well - I get the sense this system requires much stronger improv skills than other systems - to see if I really do like it or not, but for now I can only give it a “It’s alright I guess.”

The partial success was certainly a bit of a shock to some of my players, although I think that's partially because the tone of the game we were playing was drastically different from the tone of a different game we'd played prior. I've also GM-ed a Forged in the Dark game where a player's feedback involved surprise that he hadn't had that many bad things happen to him at all.

Core Blades is about scrambling to the top of a crab bucket in a city that at best doesn't care about you and at worst wants you dead. Your chances of increasing your dice pool are therefore very limited, so you're more likely going to get a partial success.

Other games, like Slugblaster, ECB, or Moth-Light, have ways of tweaking the game so that you have a generally higher dice pool, which means that a flat (or critical) success is more likely. This makes sense if you're playing a game about hoverboarding teenagers, powerful government agents, or hopeful pilgrims on their way to a new world.

And damn, you're right about the Clocks. Sometimes there isn't a lot of guidance into when they should be ticked and how many ticks they should get. I think that what I really like about External Containment Bureau is how it incorporates the Mystery Clock from a number of mystery games like Brindlewood Bay, because it not only makes it easier to define how many slices you fill, it also gives you prompts about how to make the situation more complicated as time runs out. That being said, it still leaves room for personal judgment, so it doesn't strictly say "always tick the clock when..."

I personally tick the clock whenever a player got a partial success and there aren't any more exciting immediate consequences to inflict on them. That way I can telegraph that danger is approaching, and give the players an idea of what kind of naughty word will hit the fan if they don't act.

 

[jdrakeh]

Really want some details!

I can't as of now. When I can, though, I'll be sure to post about it!

 

[MarkB]

I know this is just me and the probabilities aren’t terribly different from the d20 distribution but something about the success on a d6 mechanic that’s at the core of the system doesn’t sit right with me. It could be that I don’t think the GM that I played Blades with was fully comfortable with the clocks and the storytelling system but I saw the following:

1) Roll on an action; likely get a partial success. The problems with the partial successes was somehow they still felt bad(?), like the bad always outweighed the good. I know this is what helps drive the narrative forward. Maybe we were just terrible about rolling outright successes.

2) Clocks seemed arbitrary. The GM would start clocks based on challenges and I can’t think of a time when we didn’t finish a clock. We finished clocks on partial successes with that same feeling of “you kind of succeeded and backed into what you wanted to do”. I almost wanted to purposely fail something just to see what happened because as much as we talk about games being railroads, BitD and Scum and Villany really felt like we were in a room full of plushy pillows where no PC could ever really get hurt.

These are both quantified to an extent based upon Position and Effect. A partial success is effectively "you succeed but the opposition also succeeds", so the consequences are the same as if you failed outright. If you're getting partial successes on a lot of Desperate rolls, the pain from them will tend to outweigh the success, unless you'd also managed to boost your Effect to Great.

Likewise, the amount by which a clock is advanced depends on the Position (or Effect if it's a beneficial clock). A failure or partial success from a Controlled position fills one segment, Risky fills two, and Desperate fills three.

I would like to try again with a GM who really knows the system well and can improvise well - I get the sense this system requires much stronger improv skills than other systems - to see if I really do like it or not, but for now I can only give it a “It’s alright I guess.”

It certainly needs a GM who can think on their feet and come up with appropriate outcomes on the fly. A lot of that is just practice, getting used to the way the system works.

 

[zakael19]

In the FitD game I've been wrapping up, one of the PCs is a spy/evangelizer for a foreign power, and fancies himself a behind-the-scenes manipulator. By having all of our faction clocks in the open—the majority of which other players ignore—the guy playing the spy has been able to use downtime actions to advance or roll back clocks for factions he's never met, and influence events in ways that are super interesting, and that have shaped the whole campaign in surprising ways. We've talked about it a lot, and we feel like it's the first time that sort of PC has felt meaningful and "right"—in most RPGs, the conniving manipulator type just talks about being that guy. Here, he gets to actually set factions against each other, align or time the group's plans with those conflicts, etc. It's great!

Almost none of that would be possible if that PC had to meet every faction before seeing their clock progress. Most FitD games have a lot of factions. You'd have to spend every mission and every downtime touring the entire setting to link up with all of them. Instead, player-facing faction clocks do something much more elegant—if a PC decides to do something about a clock, such as using a downtime action, paying a friend or contact to intervene, or planning a score/mission/etc. related to it, that means they heard about what the faction is doing. That's it. You have a limited number of downtime actions, resources, and sessions across a typical FitD campaign, so even if it seems like you're getting something for free by knowing what a faction is doing, it's the doing something about it that matters.

But you can also tweak a player-facing clock, to get some of what you're after, without hiding the clock. I usually have one or two factions whose clocks, at some point, are more like (from my last campaign) "Complete Phase 2" or (from my current one) "Perfect Transformation Matrix: 4/6" Since the players know the factions in question are scary, possibly people they expect to go up against, they can decide whether they want to read those clocks as a general progression toward something mysterious (and mounting dread/tension), or do an info gathering roll or similar to dig deeper, or just shrug and say "Not my problem."

Last thing, as far as looking into a faction to find out their goals, the fact that FitD factions usually have their goal right there in the open, as a one-sentence summary, is imo really effective. FitD isn't really about setting tourism and almost never about that sort of investigation. Every roll and resource spend should be a meaningful decision. So poking around in the dark, hoping you uncover something, and that the downtime action you used is as useful as the PC who spent theirs just training for XP, is kind of against the system's principles. You can still do something like investigation, but it's more to-the-point and often more player-directed. In the game I'm running now, there's an optional rule where you can spend a downtime action advancing a clock to gather info about something specific. But here's the cool part: You aren't working toward an answer from the GM. You're establishing a fact about the setting. Before you start the clock you tell the GM what you want to establish, and they decide how many ticks it will take, whether it might take multiple clocks, etc., based on the magnitude or whatever of the fact. So what looks, in-game, like your PC investigating something, is really a shared-authority mechanic. It's been great for us, and one of the more emergent-gameplay-pushing mechanics I've ever seen. I wish every FitD game had it!

Out of curiosity, which FITD spin are you referring to here? That's a really interesting mechanic.