14. Actions
One of my first questions when analysing any game, especially one I’m planning to run, is “what is the first question it asks of a player”. I want to understand where the resolution system branches. And in a lot of cases, the Actions/Skills/Equipment/State/Attribute lists are great for this. A game that asks for Body, Cool, Intelligence, Reflexes is asking you to define your character’s capacity under duress. A game that asks for Strength, Wisdom, Intelligence, Charisma is asking players to define how their character is. How they existing within the world. A game that asks about Might, Perception, and Resolve is asking more about “how” you do it rather than “what” you are.
A classic example is the difference between Fate Core (which uses skills) and Fate Accelerated (which uses approaches). Fate Core asks you “What do you do”, Fate Accelerated asks you “How do you do it”. Again, remember the long digressions about Baker-Boss Principles, your system is how you resolve “what happens”, and therefore the questions your system gives you tools to ask drives the conversation that you have during the play.
Blades, importantly, is really unclear on what it’s asking. These are verbs, certainly, but they’re not approaches. Blades says “do you Tinker, or do you Sway”, and tells me it’s about what you do, but it’s not, really, it’s about what you’re trying to achieve.
“You choose which action to perform to overcome an obstacle, by describing what your character does”
“For example, when you roll Tinker, it’s because you tinker with something. When you roll Sway, it’s because you sway someone’s opinion. If your crafty Leech shows off a cool gadget they made in order to sway a potential client, then the Leech is Swaying them. They’re not “using Tinker” to impress the person. That’s not how actions work.”
This is a disagreement in terms, what do I do vs what am I trying to achieve, and the difference here is narrow but important, because it shows how much Blades is playing off assumptions of play that players may have already brought with them. Would the game have such a problem if the Leech didn’t “show off a cool gadget” but instead “made a cool gadget” or “played with a cool gadget”? Would John say that’s still a weasel? Is the issue here only immediacy?
My suspicion is that John’s intent here is to avoid the Player always angle-shooting for their best dots, at the expense of engaging with the game in an intellectually honest way. That said, I think this kind of “weasel” tends to lead to really dynamic character expression. You sway by showing them a cool gadget, I sway by being a smooth talker. It feels like the extension of “Maybe your character is good at Command because they have a scary stillness to them, while another character barks orders and intimidates people with their military bearing.” (BitD p10).
I think John’s unspoken assertion that Actions are both what you do and what you want to achieve is because they’re trying to define the fictional situation across two axes. Remember that this is leading into the GM setting Position and Effect, which means the GM needs to know two things from this choice: a) what the desired effect is, and b) what the considered risk is. For this reason, the game seems torn between your action rating being what you do (fictional positioning, what is at stake) and action rating being what outcome you desire (effect).
One of the best design innovations of D&D 5th edition is the Attribute (Skill) system, and specifically resolving the conflict around Intimidation. Where Intimidation is, by the 5th edition book, based on Charisma, but the game explicitly calls out how Strength can assist.
“In some situations, though, your proficiency might reasonably apply to a different kind of check. In such cases, the DM might ask for a check using an unusual combination of ability and skill, or you might ask your DM if you can apply a proficiency to a different check. [...]
Similarly, when your half-orc barbarian uses a display of raw strength to intimidate an enemy, your DM might ask for a Strength (Intimidation) check, even though Intimidation is normally associated with Charisma.”
And this is something Blades doesn’t really have a way of resolving in text. If we imagine there are three levers to any particular roll - Position, Effect, Dice. Or, as we could call them: Positive Outcome, Negative Outcome, and Probability of Which One(s) Could Happen.
Selecting an Action Rating is meant to establish the fictional situation to define all 3 - Because you do Action X, we know the positive outcomes are A, the negative outcomes are B, and the chance between them is C. Eg. Because you Skirmish, we know the positive outcome is that you kill both of these dudes (standard effect), the negative outcome is that you get hurt, and they look MEAN (desperate position), and the chance between them is weighted toward you because as a cutter you have three dice in this. Really, this is all the selection of Action is trying to do.
The thing is this system is SO PERFECT for Weaseling! It’s almost built for it. Anyone who has played with a bold Whisper knows that this is the best part of them focusing on Attune: They’re desperate to involve it. Here’s the player journey:
Whisper - Okay, I track the guy through the streets.
GM - Are you rolling hunt?
Whisper - zero dice. I’d rather not. What if I attune instead. I’m going to summon up a pair of ghostly trackers and send them out to hunt him down for me. That way I get to use my three dice in attune.
GM - Yes. You do. Buuuuuut you don’t have a particular way to summon a “tracker ghost”, do you? And ghosts are kind of fucked to begin with. So let’s start you at Desperate, Limited, and build from there.
Whisper - Okay, I’ll interact with a bunch of systems to get my position better, play the game in a different way, and earn XP for a desperate roll. What’s the problem here?
GM - Nothing. No problem. I love a bunch of ghosts on the scene. Eventually you might want to do stuff that doesn’t involve ghosts and that’s okay with me, but until then I’m just ticking consequences.
The position/effect conversation is what “defends” against weaseling. There’s no need for the discussion to be any more complicated than that. “I convince the guard I’m cool by whipping out a lil gadget, I’m rolling Tinker”. Okay, cool, well position is controlled and effect is none. This guard doesn’t care about little gadgets. Do you want to engage with the systems to change that (flashback, push, etc) or do you want to change your action choice?
By creating extra axes, Blades opened up the conversation in the same way “(Strength) Intimidation” or “(Dexterity) Animal Handling” does. Where D&D needs to be resistant to this nonsense (“He’s a famous fighter, so can I use Strength to remember the stories about him) because it only has one lever (effect) and that lever is poorly prescribed. Instead, Blades should revel in this cloudy attempt for players to jam weird actions into weird places. So long as the actions imply a degree of consequence.
See, this is where some actions are better than others in this discussion - because some actions suggest an interesting raising of stakes (Attune, as discussed) and some suggest simply a reduction of effect (which, while fine, is the less interesting version of this)*. Swaying with Tinker doesn’t open up a new and interesting consequence, it positions the GM describing a bored guard who doesn’t understand the intricate nature of Leechcrafting. Or the fiction is more generous, and picking an action rating is all just window-dressing.
And this is where I bring in the *, the culture of play discussion. There’s no real reason that Blades needs to player to define an action rating, and the GM to stay silent. Bad Habits (p 197) specifically calls this out as the first example, but I’m going to talk about it anyway. Telling the players what the Action is:
“This lets you skip a tedious “convincing” phase where everyone has to debate about which action is the single right one to use. Don’t have that debate. Just ask the player which action their character is performing, then set the position and effect.
“I want to get this guy to hand over the keys.”
“How do you do that?”
“I... like, Finesse him?”
“Okay. What’s your character doing? What do we see ‘on screen’?”
“Oh, right... it’s like, I sidle up to him, run my finger along his arm, down to
his hand, look him in the eye... you know, kind of get all seductive about it.”
“Ah, okay, I get it. I think that’s risky, limited effect. If you actually Sway him,
instead, I’d think that would be standard effect.” ”
This example is really good at showing that Action Ratings are not the important thing for players to express. It’s the fiction! The action rating is a weird mechanisation of that fiction that doesn’t wholly define it. We could run a Blades Game that doesn’t have Action Ratings, and it would still work, because the real negotiation is in the fiction, and the position and effect. The number of dice are simply “how complicated is this approach”, with things more likely to produce favourable outcomes having larger numbers of dice.
Or we could run a game that asks both questions - How do you do it, and what are you trying to achieve. CBR+PNK (Melo, 2023?) has approaches and skills (pictured below) and uses the combination to establish the framework for Position and Effect conversations. And I think this is what we’ll see more and more of: Games that use design to create the desired discussion that Blades hopes that players will have.
CBR+PNK (Melo, 2023)
The header image is "Alaska Weasel" by Cecil Sanders is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
