45. Stash - Retirement
There's an ongoing discussion in the digital game space about how much of our design language comes from affordances we don’t engage with any more. The limited Lives system, for example, is a product of a defined play session driven by the economic design of quarters and arcade machines. As the economic incentives of games changed, we saw a (delayed) shift in systems design. This isn’t a criticism; it is just how systemic change happens. I call this a Hemmingway Change in Serious Games spheres: “Gradually, and then suddenly." [1]
One such design feature from games long past is High Scores, which I kind of miss. There’s something beautifully primally rewarding about Numbers Go Up that….makes me feel like I’m doing something right. I find chasing well-established numerical goals to be a compelling form of play. I love chasing a DPS meter in an MMO, I love doing that big hit on the Heart at the end of a run of Slay the Spire, I love Balatro and everything it’s doing, I cannot stop telling people at work about The Gnorp Apologue. So it’s worth talking about Blades in the Dark’s own high score system: Stash and Retirement.
Blades gives players four diegetic outcomes depending on how much Stash they have accrued during play:
“Stash 0-10: Poor soul. You end up in the gutter, awash in vice and misery.
Stash 11-20: Meager. A tiny hovel that you can call your own.
Stash 21-39: Modest. A simple home or apartment, with some small comforts.
You might operate a tavern or small business.
Stash 40: Fine. A well-appointed home or apartment, claiming a few luxuries.
You might operate a medium business.”
If you’re wondering, this is when I become semantically satiated by the word “Stash”, and I’m now doomed for the rest of this piece.
Stash as a High-Score system often leaves me unsatisfied, though[2], and it’s worth discussing why.
To me, the most engaging high-score systems interact with the game’s core loop. Slay the Spire, for example, keeps track of your successes and stumbles for each conflict throughout the game. It will give you points for what I’ll call “progression tasks”, like killing a boss. Spire also gives you points for what I’ll call “proficiency tasks”, like beating a boss without taking damage. And finally, it gives you points for “Expression tasks”, things like increasing your hp by 15 or playing 20 cards in one turn [3]. The variety of tasks means that the score “tells a story” of how the player moved through the game’s world. It asks questions of the player and responds to the player’s answers with an assessment: “Did you kill a boss? Yeah!? Have points! Did you do it without taking damage?! No. Boo. No points for that.” This is core to the agency-feedback-delight cycle, making Score feel personal and representative. My Score isn’t just a number; it’s me. It’s proxied embodiment[4] through numbers.
Stash, on the other hand, always feels forgotten. Stash isn’t particularly interactive with existing systems. Stash often feels mediocre to accrue (it’s punishing to withdraw due to a 2:1 ratio [p43]; its accrual is either at the detriment of more fun ways to spend a coin or is automatic on tier-up [crew sheets], etc.), and this less engaging way to interface with Stash makes it less conspicuous, which makes it easy to forget entirely, and thus significantly less satisfying [5]. Tracking your Stash session-by-session is one of the least pleasurable systemic interactions for a game full of interesting and astounding moving parts. Thus, I don’t identify with it.
This isn’t a piece saying that Stash is poorly designed[1][2], but I do think the flow of play undersupports the storytelling necessary for proxied embodiment. We, dear readers, can compare with how Band of Blades does its scoring system, which appears to fix everything I don’t love about Blades in the Dark’s system but also rips out some of the parts I love!
Final Score from the Band of Blades Camp Sheets (Acimovic and LeBoeuf-Little, 2019)
I’m primed to love this, right? It’s written in the format of storytelling common to dice-pool games: “For each [specific thing], gain or lose [specific result]”. This is what we love about good dice pool games: they’re question-and-answer machines. Agency - Did you get any relics on special missions (which you had to choose to go on, often sacrificing other resources)? Feedback - Then you earn 10 points! Delight - Remember that mission? And that relic?! “That was our story” (or, through Proxied Embodiment), “That was us!”.
On the other hand, though, the diegesis has vanished from the feedback. It’s wholly systemic. It’s quite literally a high score. If it’s true that I love dice pool games because they demand we ask-and-answer compelling questions, then I also love them because those questions can tie the Endogenous and the Diegetic together. I love not only that the game asks me, “Do you have a grudge against this character?” but also gives me extra chances to succeed because of that. I love that it gives me a dice system to play with and tells me that the dice system outputs into the narrative experience. This double helix of Endogeny and Diegesis (supported by Exogenic joy) is why I play roleplaying games. To lose that in the output of score is such a whiff. Especially when Band of Blades already ends with “The Last Wave” (p429), which provides the question-and-answer of your campaign in a way that produces a rewarding endo-dietetic output.[6]
Forged in the Dark games, and Blades especially, very quickly becomes a game of escalation action-reaction. I refer to this as The Chicago Play, and I honestly believe it to be one of the most compelling, agentic ways to play a game I’ve ever experienced. It represents John’s approach to letting players drive the story as a case-in-point to define Harper as (and there’s no way to say this without sounding like I’m nestled warmly between his cheeks, but…) one of our contemporary design geniuses. The problem with The Chicago Play is that it’s easy to forget the steps that got you there. It’s easy to forget who brought the knife. It’s easy to forget who went to the hospital, and at no point does Blades ensure that these things are recalled, assessed, or made meaningful in the same comparative endo-diegetic way that Score Systems offer us.
There’s a design opportunity here, and I look forward to seeing FitD designers fill it.
Mark Experience,
Sidney Icarus
Footnotes:
[1] This isn’t a value judgment on those hangover design methods. Doom (2016) was a return to form specifically because it reestablished the relationship between player/enemy interactions and Character-Construct health of the 1990s Children of Doom. This is the nature of good game design, though: It is intentional about what it evokes.
[2] Beyond, of course, the intended dissatisfaction of Stash. 11-20 is Meagre. Meagre!?! That’s so much Coin for a player to take out of play, and it offers you a tiny hovel!? This is (very obviously) an artistic choice by a person who wants to present a version of the criminal/capital tension where “crime pays”, but only in a way that continues the cycle. That’s great! The sheer volume of crime you must do to be a sort of upper-working class is one of my favourite things about the Stash system. My only complaint is that the design is elegant in the moment but not supported through play.
[3] -1 point for carrying Spirit Poop, one could say, is all three.
[4]We’ve previously discussed identification, extended identity, or proxied embodiment in this space. It’s the process of a player overlaying their sense of self onto the game piece (eg “[When you drive] the car becomes a part of you, an extension of both body and self. This is why people say, “You hit me!” rather than “His car hit me!” or “Your car hit my car!”[…] “My Guy” becomes “Me”.” (Game Feel, Steve Swink, 2009).
[5] This is, notably, the same reason that Health shifted from Doom-clones into Halo-clones (for want of a better term). Doom used an interactive damage system that used (mostly) projectiles and positioning, while Halo used hitscan and unavoidable damage. The reduced pathways for the player to interact with not losing Health meant that the game needed to change its whole approach. I would like to see similar from FitD games. What is the regenerating shield of FitD?
[6] I, obviously, wasn’t present for any design step in Band of Blades, but I’m interested in the design decision that led to these two systems operating back-to-back. I think they would serve the play experience better as one system (which would also offer the chance to have the game ask questions beyond the granularity of +/-1d).
This entry’s header image, "Piggy-Bank version 2" by cafecredit, is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
