47. Tier - Top Guns, Advantages, and Winning the Merge

I cut my teeth designing games for fighter pilots. I think I’ve mentioned that before. Depending on atmospheric conditions, the speed of sound is around 600 nautical miles per hour. A nautical mile is about 1.15 miles or 1.85 kilometres. A fighter jet flies (again, depending on conditions) about that fast into a fight. Get high, go fast. They call it “Energy”, and Energy is like mana. You have to spend it to do all your coolest moves. Want to shoot a missile even further? You need Energy. Want to evade an enemy shot? You need to trade Energy. Want to get outside of targeting volume, change height, and rake your guns over the baddie? It’s going to cost you some Energy. Mana is Energy, and potions are the fuel you have on board. My point is, you want to be FAST.

Take two fighter jets, slap some missiles on the wings, and point them at each other. Now get them as fast as you can. Combined, the closing rate between these jets will be about twice the speed of sound. Using statute miles, that’s roughly 1400 miles per hour—23 miles per minute. If you forgive me some rounding, every two seconds, those aircraft will be a mile closer than they were beforehand. So, put those two aircraft, say, 30 or 40 miles apart. You have a minute before their noses are touching. And, if you want your pilots to win, you want to get FASTER. That’s how you fight an air war.

So, cutting my teeth designing tactics for these sub-one-minute engagements, you’re not trying to solve all the possible problems of the dynamic air environment. You’re not trying to optimise, you’re trying to win. It’s not about being perfect, it’s about having a tool you can call on that will generally get you in the right direction.

Why, yes, I did spend my entire air combat career laughing at the term “loose deuce”
Fighter Combat Tactics and Maneuvering (Robert L. Shaw, 1985)

Tier III Game Design

This is where Tier comes in. I adore Tier. I adore this single number that covers size, quality, and wealth in one hit. It’s a stunningly effective heuristic for quick use during those 700-mile-an-hour nose-to-nose decision-making moments. When our Cutter steps up to the Silver Nails’ thug and says, “Are we going to have to make something of it?”, we as a table will want to answer several questions (not the least of which will be “What is my position and effect?”). How many offsiders does the Silver Nail bring with him? How big are the Silver Nails? What kind of weapons are they carrying? Do they have Bluecoats contacts? What’s the chance of me getting out of here alive? In State-Based games like D&D, this is a Restrictive[1] design problem. But Blades offers us the Permissive[2] tools necessary to make it satisfying and functional at the table.

[1] Restrictive = You can only do things that are explicitly legal. Things only interact when expressly approved. Eg D&D’s fire spells will explicitly say whether it does or doesn’t set something on fire, because setting things on fire is a restrictive rule.
[2] Permissive = You can do anything that isn’t expressly illegal. Things will interact unless explicitly denied.
Eg Dungeon World’s GM moves invite you to set the environment on fire when there’s fire magic, and will say explicitly when things or people are fireproof.

Tier is this permissive tool. Each faction has a single Stat, which is called “Everything”; if you ever need to know anything about them, check their Stat. How big are the Silver Nails? They’re Tier III, Large (20 people). How good is their equipment? It’s Tier III. Do they have Bluecoats contacts? Let’s do a Fortune Roll using their Tier. The game can respond to almost any Trinary question (thanks to Blades’ triplet of outcomes) with that Fortune Roll, and with Tier setting the number of dice rolled, it still feels weighted: it still feels like it reinforces the fiction.

From Abstraction vs. Details, BitD, page 169 (Harper, 2017)

The weighting is significant because Blades’ first mandate is to follow the fiction. Position and Effect need to feel tangible and informed. Players must understand why going toe-to-toe with a Silver Nail differs from going head-to-head with a Lampblack, even though both are single people. Tier offers us this shared language, a shared Tactic, to express how and why people are dangerous to you (or you to them). By including Tier, we can assess these factions on a single, knowable axis.

Tier’s Weak Hold

Here’s the thing about air combat, though: It’s not all heuristic and tactic. There’s a lot of maths involved as well. The maths provides clarity and reason, backs up the heuristics, and is preferred when you’re not in the cockpit travelling at the speed of sound. Blades, though… isn't clear enough about its maths.

“Arlyn is picking the lock to a safehouse run by the Circle of Flame. Her crew is Tier I and she has fine lockpicks—so she’s effectively Tier II. The Circle are Tier III. Arlyn is outclassed in quality, so her effect will be limited on the lock.”

Play example from Quality/Tier (page 24), Blades in the Dark (Harper, 2017)

I’ve written in a recent d4iday about the joys of maximalism, and how having things operate on different axes provides identity. In the newsletter, I commented that Mechabellum uses five or six binary selections to create an engaging network between its units. I’d love to see Blades have the same idea of factional identity. The blog’s favourite Red Sashes are Tier II in everything, but Tier III in a fight. The Sparkwrights are Tier III because of their wealth, influence, and equipment, but if you get one alone in a corner, they fold like paper. Without this maximalism (or movement away from minimalism), it’s harder to lean into the part of Blades suggested in the Engagement Roll: Does the approach hit them where they’re weakest? Tier is just too abstract to carry so much weight in Blades. It must be improved, especially before we use it to describe the player characters’ gang, too!

Improving Tier

I caution readers to avoid writing out “stats” for each Faction. The oft-referenced Stars Without Number (Crawford, 2017 [Revised edition]) equips factions with Force, Wealth, and Cunning (along with FacCreds, Hit Points, and tags) and it turns factions into prepped experiences, removing the beautiful dogfight-worthy heuristic of Tier. It also solidifies too much too quickly, removing the ability for GMs to explore their world alongside players. In my experience, the best solution for this would be a “one up, one down” approach, where factions have a particular tier, and then have tags or explicit fiction that identifies what they’re good at (or well-equipped with) and what they’re lacking. Scarcities and Abundances. Assets and Threats. Needs and Haves. Advantages and Disadvantages [3]. Quick Assessments like this also take us back to our air combat tactics from earlier: There are only three states with which you can enter a fight—Winning, Losing, or Equal. You can’t be SUPER WINNING, and any time you spend assessing is wasted miles. Go with your gut and doctrine: Are you ahead or behind, or can you not tell?

[3] The success of advantage and disadvantage in being selected for Fifth Edition D&D, their success as mechanics for the D&D audience, and their adoption across other role-playing games comes down to a simple assessment. We (as GMs, as players) know in our gut whether something puts us in a better or worse position, and we know in our gut whether it is a significant enough impact to change dice rolls.

Take two Factions: Ironhook Prison and the Spirit Wardens. Both are Tier IV. But if we’re not deeply familiar with their Fiction, as Tier IV Factions, they don’t mechanically drift. Blades’ informed fiction-first approach is excellent when the information is dense. Still, heuristics are more usable in these information-sparse environments (without pre-established fiction). If we want to summon a stream of our target Faction’s previous victims as ghosts and use them for spooky cover, they’re both Tier IV in an information-sparse environment. By adding an “Advantage and Disadvantage” system [4] the quick assessment is easy: When calculating position andEffectt, treat Spirit Wardens as Tier V, and either treat Ironhook as their default IV, or if the text hinted toward maybe superstitions among the jailors (or you wanted to fictionally focus on how Ironhook’s violence frays as the very Threshold between life and death!) we could assess it such that the Faction is reduced to Tier III. The Heuristic has allowed for quick identification and expression of Faction identity, while also setting up Ironhook for some fresh new Fiction about how they feel regarding ghosts.

[4] I’m torn on whether to call it Advantage or Disadvantage. I’m unsure how useful the direct reference to a similar-but-not-the-same mechanic is. But Blades is already so process-heavy that I’m unwilling to invent a new one.

In all cases, the goal of Tier as an abstraction of Faction performance is retained, and its usefulness as a comparative tool in establishing Position, Effect, and outcomes has been strengthened. I have been using this in my recent hacks, and I recommend you also try it. As with all Blades modularities, I invite you to take it if it works for you, and leave it behind if it does not. But, for me, it bumps my GMing up a Tier.

Mark Experience,
Sidney Icarus

The cover photo, "orange pyramid" by Dominique Godbout, is licensed under CC BY 2.0.