26. Roll the Dice
It is worth talking about how Blades uses dice, because honestly, I don’t know anyone in the indie design scene that has more experience playing with the capabilities of single D6s than John Harper. John’s movement across dice mechanics tells me two things about Blades’ dice mechanic:
How Blades in the Dark approaches dice is intentional, and thus worth assessing, and
It’s probably a good idea.
And I really do mean #2. I rarely defer out when I do RPG analysis, I rarely just say “well, they probably know better than I do”, but when it comes to dice mechanics and how the interact with the player sphere there are few people more qualified than John Harper. That means that I approach any analysis of the dice mechanic from the assumption that it’s doing exactly what John wants, as opposed to my previous work where I’m more exploratory.
I want to express just how GOOD John’s dice mechanic is here. It’s a pool, so it feels granular and representative, but it requires only a single interpretation which puts it leagues ahead of other dice pool mechanics that can create very slow resolution. Even my own experience with The Burning Wheel (Crane, 2002) found the explosion mechanic, while effective in its goal to create tension and surprise victories, often just slowed down the way we interacted with dice. Again, going back to the Fiction-First premise, John wants only the tiniest amount of time to spent interpreting the bones and their symbols, and much more time interpreting the fiction.
Aside: A wander through John’s history of D6s
Ghost/Echo (2009) - 2d6 (one for goal, one for danger). Both using a 1-2 worst case, 3-4 Partial, 5-6 Best case split.
Lady Blackbird (2011) - Built on The Shadow of Yesterday (Nixon, 2004), uses larger d6 dice pools to create. 4+ is a success. Meet number of successes to succeed. Notably, players can inflate their die pools from a stash of pool dice.
Lasers and Feeling (2013) - 1-3 d6 pools. Roll under/over with (realistically) a three tiered result of 0 success = worst case, 1 success = partial, 2 success = best case. There’s a 3 success for crit/extra.
Ghost Lines (2013) (+ many PbtA projects. World of Dungeons, Turbo:Breakers, The Regiment, et al) - 2d6 PbtA core - 6- is bad, 7-9 is some of what you want, 10+ is most of what you want (12+ is all of what you want)
And this doesn’t include a bunch of games that experiment with different resolution systems (does anyone remember The Mustang (2009)?!).
Let this be a lesson for those of us in design spaces and in creative fields: Everything contributes to your body of work, to your learning. Also it’s not like if you don’t do your idea good enough the first time, you’re not allowed to do it again. Look at Ghost Lines and Ghost/Echo. John has been making Blades for almost 15 years. You can keep pursing your ideas and building on them. Let this be the context that empowers you to continue chasing ideas you love.
There’s a concept in novel-writing, that junior writers will often try to “save” their best idea until they’re “good enough”. The idea that if you write it poorly the first time, you can never go back and rewrite, and release. John’s publication history is an excellent demonstration of what it means to build and iterate through releases.
