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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 8793970" data-attributes="member: 16586">Blades in the Dark has some sneaky social realism built in. When you start out you have nothing except obligations to the factions who back you and threats from other factions seeking to step on your necks. Entanglements almost always feels the world  put you under it's bootheel. You get rewarded for punching up. Your crew is pretty much just you. Anything that threatens you like threatens the player characters directly.Then something kind of weird happens as you reach the middle game (Tier 2-3). You have some money and probably some trauma. You're not doing this crime thing to survive anymore. You have taken things from other factions. Made enemies, but those enemies might weaker now and you are stronger. You either let conflicts linger, let your enemies nip at your heels or you step on their necks. Now that your crew is larger often times entanglements don't hit you directly, but someone who works for you. You might have to discipline people who work for you, maybe even let them go to jail for the Crew. It also becomes harder to punch up. Now you have to give out after the really big players. Take them down. Deal with smaller Crews trying to take a piece of what you own. Maybe deal with some of their powerful friends. The game really builds in the cycle of how in fighting your way to the top you end up in a position where you might be the ones holding down smaller gangs just trying to make it.In our current game the Wraiths, a gang of thieves who had it out for us at the start of play for taking our secret lair location away from them, threatened the financial interests of my character's noble friend. So we set to start threatening their financial interests. We took over their cover business by organizing a strike against one of their allies to show the Wraiths couldn't protect them. This has led them losing Tier while ours has grown. Now where once we were punching up now we are punching down on them, still caught up in gang warfare which is hurting our business interests (revenue generating claims only produce half of what they normally do when you are at war). Now to extricate ourselves from this situation we have to either punch them all the way down or do something for them that raises our rep.</blockquote>

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