4. The Players
Originally, I wanted to merge this section in with another. However, the one from yesterday (Setting) and tomorrow’s (Characters and Crew) are too big on their own to handle the addition. So I took a bit of time to focus on something fundamental in Blades, and it turns out there’s a LOT going on here.
“Each player strives to bring their character to life as an interesting, daring scoundrel who reaches boldly beyond their current safety and means.
This is the players’ core responsibility: they engage with the premise of the game, seeking out interesting opportunities for crime in the haunted city—taking big risks against powerful foes and sending their characters into danger.”
This is a repeat of the very clear structure that we can expect from Harper throughout this book: Set it up, knock it down. Tell us what we’ll do, then explain why that’s important. In this case, tell the players that they are to bring life to “daring scoundrels”, and then tell them that it’s because daring characters are necessary for this kind of game. It is a game about taking risk.
I’m not sure it’s clear though how much this section deviates from the expected norms of the game that Blades was (historically, at least) expected to be.
A deviation on History:
Forge-Era RPG theory, and specifically Ron Edward’s Sorcerer, describes “Kickers and Bangs”, the idea that a GM should have a “bandoleer” of dramatic decisions that force player action, and for a lot of mid-2000s onwards, this was a central position of most Story Games and Neo-trad styles. The GM is a source of antagonism, and that antagonism should be proactive in order to best support players in being reactive:
5e D&D adventures start with antagonists making action or demands against the PCs - Storm King’s Thunder begins with the PCs being met, wherever they are, with a floating castle that demands their assistance
Apocalypse World’s moves function as Bangs, with the Lifestyle move speifically as a Kicker
Night’s Black Agents (Hite/Pelgrane, 2012) refers to it as “the hook: The event, problem, or opportunity that attracts the agents.” (p185)
Fiasco is nothing but tense Kickers and Bangs
This is a gift to players. Present them a Call to Adventure, and have them engage with it. Offer an adventure worthy of those characters and the players that control them.
“This first stage of the mythological journey—which we have
designated the “call to adventure”—signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown.”
Blades in the Dark tends much more toward the Proactive Player Character structure of play, in a way that surprises me. The Bang, the Kicker, the…raison d’etre is “because you are protagonists and you have ambitions” which is something I’ve seen work more and more when I play in OSR spaces.
A deviation within a deviation - On formalism and taxonomy:
About whether Blades in the Dark is OSR (or PbtA or literally any other taxonomy)…I don’t really care. It meets as many criteria as it misses on, and some of this misses would be considered fundamental Games luminary Ian Bogost (2009) has written my second favourite line on the subject of these kinds of discussions: “By pitting one kind of formalism against another, the result became a foregone conclusion: formalism wins. Really, it doesn’t even matter which one, since the underlying assumptions are so similar.”
My favourite line is by Sensemaking theorist Dave Snowden (2011), that “Taxonomy not only rhymes with taxidermy but […] produces the same effect” (in some talks he clarifies: Both produce dead lifeless structures that are misrepresentative of what they are said to describe).
So I am not here to argue the realities of whether Blades is OSR, or whether the fact that it isn’t OSR means that it isn’t valuable to approach Blades with an OSR lens. Instead I say this only to say that it explicitly asks players (and, we’ll see later I’m sure, the GM) to approach the marco game in this OSR/trad approaches. I think comments trying to resolve this (Blades is TOTALLY not OSR because…) will be similarly foregone.
For those unfamiliar with the play structures of “The OSR” (though, if ever there was not a monolith on play structures, it is this loose community), I recommend the Principa Apocrypha (Milton, et al. Year unknown) - from which the social image for this page is drawn.
This part of the OSR play culture tends toward that Puzzle Room design that we spoke about yesterday: A setting with many interactive pieces, all of which have their own uses and designs, none of which are cinematically spotlit. Per Milton et al (2009) in the Principa Apocrypha - “Establish situations with several actors or factions pursuing their own ends. Let the players' actions affect this environment, and let the consequences affect the players in turn. Show the situations worsening if the players don't address them.”
In the same way the West Marches Structure became popular in Trad D&D Spaces, there’s nothing "uniquely” OSR-y about the Puzzle Room Setup (again, see The Daily Blade 3. The Setting for more on this), but it does remove the Kickers and Bangs.
A world that is established to be dispassionate about the players’ characters demands that players engage in a way other than what Matt Colville (2017) called a “much more passive style of play”: Players expecting character-spotlighting “content” personalised for them (or worse, written bespoke) by the GM. The OSR approach refutes that. Instead, your characters are the same decaying organic matter as everything else (Palahniuk, 1996).
So it’s lovely to see Blades centre that, here, in the early pages: You have a responsibility as a player to want, and to move toward that want. The game will not design you into wanting to play the kind of story it tells. It’ll help, but that first step has to come from you, the player. A request I’m more and more supportive of games demanding.
