8. Playing a Session
In the mid-2000s, someone told me to watch this show. It was GREAT! Of course it was a bit edgy to start with, it had a really dark tone, was populated by a diverse ensemble cast with interesting characters, examined where characters fit in society and their chosen families, the protagonist (if you can call them that) was morally ambiguous some times, and other times straight up evil. But it did always choose to treat this immoral person like a person, not a monster. I love it, even if the ending split the community more than a little bit.
This is PRESTIGE TELEVISION!
Dan: No. Our characters are bullshit, they’re bunk. This show is about life; It’s about the human condition. It’s about America-
Katie: Different people. People on different sides of the law. People that cross the socio-economic spectrum and they’re all in the same place, stuck together, and they’re learning without even realising it that although they’re very different, deep down inside they’re just the same.
Michael: Is it- Did we just make The Wire?
Soren: Ah fuck Katie: We did!
Michael: Yeah, we made The Wire
Daniel: Dammit
Michael: Well, the Wire’s a good show
Daniel: I know
Michael: I mean, there’s not- you shouldn’t be ashamed for coming up with The Wire.
Daniel: (Increasing exasperated) I know
Soren: It would be nice if we’d made it first though.
Daniel: That’s my thing.
Michael: Granted. Obviously.
-After Hours “The Only 8 Types of TV Shows That Get Made” Swaim et al, 2012
Blades in the Dark is the perfect TTRPG to capture the nature of prestige television, for both better and worse. For better, it offers a wonderful sense of protagonising and making us root for characters that lie, cheat, steal, kill, win to achieve their aims, which are usually personal wealth or betterment. These are vicious killers, or at best dispassionate people capable of killing. Beautiful anti-heroes.
But, in the same way, Blades inherits Prestige Television’s love of the PROCESS, at the expense of trajectory. Blades, like Game of Thrones, like Breaking Bad, like Dexter, like Battlestar Galactica, like True Blood, like The Walking Dead, like Lost, like House, like Scrubs (and that list was just off the dome), doesn’t want to end, or perhaps more accurately doesn’t know how to end. Instead it just wants to keep having fun.
“ A session of Blades in the Dark is like an episode of a TV show. There are one or two main events, plus maybe some side-story elements, which all fit into an ongoing series. [...] After a dozen sessions or so, you might decide to have a break in the flow of the story and start up a “season two” series—possibly with a slightly different cast of characters and a new starting situation.”
I have said before in other conversations, and I don’t know if I’m stealing this thought from someone else more well-formed, but I feel like a lot of Blades in the Dark’s strengths are it’s ability to take exisiting RPG cultural behaviours and formalise them. And here, in this section, it has formalised the meandering slow death that comes for so many TTRPG playgroups: Play until you just decide it’s done. Then it’s done.
And that’s okay! Done well, this can still work. I’ve lost count of the amount of times Burn Notice has had to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, but I’m still chewing through episode after episode of “My name is Michael Westen, and I used to be a spy.” The problem for the GM-as-Showrunner here is The Chris Carter Effect. To quote the linked Trope Page: “The Chris Carter Effect happens when a work is wholly focused on twists or not building up to a satisfactory resolution, or the plot gets so bloated that there no longer can be a satisfactory resolution. Another contributing effect could be the unsatisfactory resolution of long-running side-plots. At this point, even the most ardent fans will start to feel jerked around, or perhaps even channel flip to something else.”
And when I saw for worse here, I want you to go back to the After Hours bit: We shouldn’t be ashamed for making The Wire. We shouldn’t be mad at Harper for making a game that is so easy to get wrapped up in the FUN OF IT ALL that we don’t look at where the runaway train is headed. I have a lot of time for that, and I think it’s a time-honoured way to play games.
