46. Lifestyle, an Underutilised Mechanic
I missed a small section on Page 43 for two years. For two years of playing (and reading) Blades in the Dark, I couldn’t have told you what Lifestyle meant or did in the game. And…I kind of want to interrogate my structuralist tendency to want every mechanic to be conspicuous.
On page 43, the same page as Stash and Retirement, where we’ve been reading, you can find a section that says the following:
“In addition, each full row of stash (10 coins) indicates the quality level of the
scoundrel’s lifestyle, from zero (street life) to four (luxury).”
The text goes on to explain:
Canter Haig is a scoundrel who cares a great deal about his sartorial swagger, and Adam, his player, often describes Canter as modeling the most stylish and outrageous fashion to impress his peers. But he’s just some street scoundrel, right? How impressive is his six-collared coat, really? The GM can call for a fortune roll using Canter’s lifestyle level as the dice pool to find out how much impact the attire has.
Cross wants some alone-time with a prospective new friend, but he can’t take them back to the hidden lair where he lives, so what to do? Ryan, Cross’s player, says he wants to rent a nice room for the evening, so the GM asks for a fortune roll using Cross’s lifestyle rating to see what quality of room Cross can manage
Lifestyle as a Medium-Term Goal
There will always be players who want to be fancy; players who want to have “sartorial swagger” or even blend in with the upper crust. But Blades intends to give the table a mechanised system to determine fictional points; a mechanically leveraged argument backs everything up. There’s evidence. For those of you familiar with the Free Kriegsspiel modes of play [1], this is an excellent example of where Indie games can and should provide mechanical reinforcement for fictional presentations. In the same way that Apocalypse World uses tags or Urban Shadows uses Debts, the mechanisation of Lifestyle gives us a form of “truth” that can be asserted in play.
A player desiring to look like a dashing rogue must uphold that and work toward their goal. It’s not given to the player, even though “it’s just flavour” [2]. If it matters to you and your game (and that is an open and honest “if”), you can determine how difficult it is to get suitable clothing just by looking at Lifestyle. At the start, you cannot (by game text) play the dashing scoundrel because your Lifestyle is zero. Sure, you might have a Leviathan Hunter’s coat, but it’s probably passed down through generations or found at a thrift store. You may sleep on it at night. It holds the tone for you. If, of course, that kind of thing matters to you.
As an author’s note, this does matter to me! There are a few upgrades on the crew sheets, like “Quarters”, that don’t get picked often (especially alongside “Hidden”, “Boat”, and “Workshop”). These things tend not to be selected but to be asserted by the players anyway. As an example, in one game I played, we had our quarters in a pub that was friendly to us (it was very Robin Hood), and we definitely had quarters, good food, and security without ever declaring those through the endogenous upgrades. This is where things like Tier and Lifestyle are exemplary mechanics for presenting this information to the players:
”You’re tier zero, Lifestyle zero. That means Street Life. Please stay in that tone while you tell me about your Tier 0 hideout.”
”I love that description of your Officer’s Sword from the war, but remember that you’re currently Tier 0, Lifestyle 0. You haven’t been able to care for it as you used to.”
It’s important to remember, for those of us designing in this space, that the reason that Blades can tell players their gear is ratty and dishevelled (and, more importantly, that they’re not allowed to have nice things) is that there’s a clear avenue of action for Characters (and their Players). The game is allowed to say, “Actually, that Officer’s coat you said you’re wearing? The brass is tarnished. There are holes in it. It looks like it’s the only thing you’ve got to wrap around you at night.” It is allowed to be so prescriptive about what the player doesn’t have because there are simple methods to resolve it: “You could get it repaired, but it’ll cost you. You’d need Lifestyle 1 for that”, or “Spend a downtime to Acquire an Asset, and you’ll have the services of a tailor to fix it up”, or “The Bluecoats probably have a newer one in their Barracks. Why not just take it?”. As always in Blades, we say no to players’ requests so that we can say yes to rewarding them for action.
Should Lifestyle Be More Conspicuous
In the better blog, D’Angelo speaks well to the Apocalypse World 2nd Edition (and, notably, only 2nd edition) move for checking Lifestyle. It’s asked at the start of every session. This version of Lifestyle is more conspicuous. A first-time AW2e player will understand that it costs them to look fancy and well-fed in a way that the first-time Blades in the Dark player may not (I say, as a many-time Blades player who has overlooked this every time). I want to take this as a teachable moment for Conspicuous Mechanics that I have found myself passing as feedback a lot lately:
“The act of Confirming a Construct should also be an offer to change it”
Imagine something that changes across a long time scale, like Tier. Tier is a Construct[3], which allows us to measure the relative power of gangs/communities. So when should the game conspicuously check tier? When should the game ask players, “Hey, what tier are you again? Just so that you remember.” If you think about it, I’m sure you’ll come to a similar conclusion as I did: About as often as players can change it. If you don’t allow players an opportunity to change the Construct between your game’s demands to assert it, players will end up responding indignantly: “I told you last time!”.
Lifestyle takes 10 Coin per player committed fully to their stash to change. Each character will accrue maybe 2-3 stash per play session, maybe, which means a “Start of Session Lifestyle Check” in Blades would be frustrating and (worse) boring. But this also means that Lifestyle is a neglected stat.
I think there’s an opportunity for FItD Designers to find a version of Lifestyle that has the same impact while being more conspicuous. Lifestyle provides a wonderful Medium-term goal for players to pursue, and I’m interested to see how and where future games can use it[4].
Mark Experience,
Sidney Icarus
Footnotes:
[1] Free Kriegsspiel has, historically, required a referee with a perceived lack of bias to make decisions not supported by mechanically established facts. Blades doesn’t have that (even the GM is not unbiased; they are explicitly not playing the OSR referee, per the game’s own GM advice). So, things like Lifestyle give us a yes/no place to point.
[2] A note for a later blog will be how different forms of play respond to “reskinning”. It’s a widespread request in Trad spaces, but I feel that Forged in the Dark might be less receptive. One to consider.
[3] As discussed in earlier pieces, constructs are the endogenous representations of diegetic things in the world. “A masterwork longsword” is a diegetic object, and “One-handed melee weapon, +1 to attack with 1d8+Strength+1 damage” is an endogenous representation, i.e. a Construct.
[4] My suspicion is that Lifestyle and Tier are probably a little bit too similar in current design, and Tier tends to be the dominant one in conversation. For all the hard work that Lifestyle does in giving us a thing to point to that says, “You’re a street rat”, I could honestly see that being assigned to Tier and having Lifestyle wholly ripped from the text with no ill effects (that’s how I’ve been playing it for years, anyway).
The header image is "For boy's clothing, visit Frear's Bazaar, the place to save money. 'Largest stock,' 'lowest prices.' Head-quarters for staple and fancy dry goods. [front]" by Boston Public Library and is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
