19. Trauma
Trauma comes in two parts: The Immediate, and the Ongoing. I will discuss both individually, before talking about “The Trauma Economy” and where I think Trauma gets caught up in its own mechanisation.
The Immediate Effects of Trauma
Trauma occurs in an interesting way, not as a result of a fictional position, not as fallout of the character’s play, but instead as a result of the Player marking the last stress box on a character sheet. This is, like all mechanically-informed completions of a clock, part of the Prescriptive parts of Blades in the Dark.
“When a PC marks their last stress box, they suffer a level of trauma. When you
take trauma, circle one of your trauma conditions like Cold, Reckless, Unstable, etc. They’re all described on the next page. When you suffer trauma, you’re taken out of action. You’re “left for dead” or otherwise dropped out of the current conflict, only to come back later, shaken and drained. When you return, you have zero stress and your vice has been satisfied for the next downtime (see Vice on page 156).”
When the mechanical act of marking the last stress box occurs, there are mechanical fallout: You circle a trauma condition, and you (as a player) depart the current conflict in an unspecified way. There’s so little clarity here, which produces a lot of confusion for new players:
“Have another question about Trauma. In my last session, the Cutter maxed out Stress in the middle of brutal combat, right at the end of the session. The people he was fighting would want to kill or at least capture him. The 2 other scoundrels in the crew are still kicking, as well as the 2 thugs they brought with them, but they may be running for it next session.
The book says when you get a Trauma mid-score, you’re out for that score, only to come back (presumably in the next Downtime?) Stress free.
But how do we make sense of that in the fiction? Why would the opposition suddenly stop trying to kill or capture him? Does getting a Trauma act like plot armour, a get out of jail free card as it were?
The other scoundrels are still in danger of dying or being seriously hurt or captured.”
The question-asker in this case is looking for an anchor for that clarity. What does it mean to be “taken out of action”? And there are two results that come from that lack of clarity. Players misunderstand the intent of the rule (“incorrect play”), and then they attempt to fill gaps with structures that they do know (“best fit”).
In Incorrect Play, we can see that the player has misunderstood the application of the rule. The game does not want the character out of the score, but instead out of the immediate conflict, “only to come back later”. The player cannot meet the unclear rule where it wants to be, because there’s no handholds for them to hold the rule and turn it over, examining its intent.
The result is Best Fit, a heuristic approach in which players apply structures that are similar from other parts of the book, or other parts of the play culture. In this case, we see the player’s inability to play “Correctly” results in them best-fitting solutions from other phases of play. Because Stress is a thing that is used during Scores, the assumption is that the character returns in the next Downtime. Because Blades otherwise wants most of its systems to be Descriptive, the player attempts to also make this a Descriptive rule - To play it Fiction First. But Trauma isn’t a fiction first rule, it’s a little mechanical twist. And, to fully unpack that twist:
Ongoing Trauma and the void
The ongoing nature of Trauma is as a fictional XP trigger, and nothing more. It is explicitly not engaged with the regular fictional cycles of play. Here’s the text:
“You can play your trauma conditions as much or as little as you like. They can totally transform your character’s persona or have only a small impact—it’s up to you. If you do play them strongly, though, allowing a trauma condition to complicate your character’s life, you earn xp for it. (See Advancement, page 48.)”
You can play your trauma conditions as much or as little as you like. It’s not a direction to the table to set tone, or discuss how this manifests, or even to talk about the way that mechanical interactions should involve Trauma (for example, can I “trigger” your trauma to give you a complication that you have to resist before acting, per page 11 or even per this page 14 in the next section (see you tomorrow!)? Per the text, the player is the only one empowered to involve Trauma as a part of the character’s personality (and, by extension, its impacts on the rest of the fiction). Per the text, if as a player you allow the condition to complicate your character’s life you can receive XP, but there’s no notion of what “complication” can or should mean here, even in the broadest sense.
This is in conflict with yesterday’s discussion on Object-Oriented rules text, where the “Trauma Class” is created, but a ton of variables are left undefined, and so the players attempt to “inherit” those traits into Trauma from other Classes (like gear or harm, or affordances from other games like Hit Points).
This is (notably) not a fruitful void of play, which is instead designed intentionally to generate questions and leave space for players to self-generate answers (Baker, 2020). Trauma does not pose a question (for example, does gathering trauma from the stressful/unethical/illegal lifestyle make you a better or worse scoundrel?) because the game rules call out its interactions with play as minimal, existing only in the space of “character’s persona” (p14) and not affecting “how dangerous or troublesome the action might be” (p 19) or ““how much” the action can accomplish” (p20), the two markers for all actions within the text of Blades. A section suggestion that Reckless or Vicious may change your position or effect when performing certain duties (a la Fate Consequences) would open the door for the change in character persona to be more fully anchored into the ongoing traditions of play.
Trauma allows players to interact with it minimally, and the only way it allows the game to interact back is via XP, a game abstraction rather than a fictional interaction. Trauma exists almost entirely outside of the fictional push of Blades in the Dark, a problem which could be easily resolved by more thoroughly constructing it as an “object” or “class” for the game to call on in different ways.
Trauma - Turns out it’s a problem
I understand the desire in allowing players to control their character’s personality without outside interference (as per the tradition that the player is the exclusive word of God as to what the character thinks or feels), but I think there’s a really strong case that in trying to be kind with players, Blades in the Dark extracts Trauma from what play is: A Conversation and Judgment Calls.
If Blades in the Dark is defined by the “collaborative, expressive act” of fiction being assessed against mechanical rules, then it’s not too long a bow to draw to say that Trauma is not part of Blades in the Dark. In the same way the ongoing indie wisdom of Secrets in role playing games is to have them on the table, as secrets unspoken were never really in the fiction (as they never enter the Shared Imagined Space - with some more history on the term here) no matter how much they drive the player’s embodiment or decision-making. They aren’t fact until they are collectively acknowledged and accepted, or, if you prefer hearing it a way we’ve already said it:
“The fictional events of play in a role playing game are dependent on the concensus (sic) of the players involved in order to be accepted as having occurred. All formal and informal rules, procedures, discussion, interactions and activities which form this concensus (sic) comprise the full system used in play. ”
I’m going to express two problems about this structure, one of which is actual, and one of which is my grand extension based on some wild assumptions. Let’s start with the one I can defend:
Trauma’s removal from the general structure of Blades’ conversation (both in terms of “what happens next” being led mechanically and not interacting fictionally, and in terms of “how are you changed by it”) weakens the game’s ability to communicate expected behaviours. Trauma is given an important role as a thing characters accumulate when they expend all their resources, and also as one of the major character exit points, and it leaves this role unfulfilled.
Blades doesn’t have a good mechanical “punishment” for overstressing, and while it doesn’t need to, people are looking to Trauma to fill that role. Without a clearer intent for Trauma, players are seeking to use it for more and more impactful things, so that it meets their expectations as a mechanical lynchpin of play. I think this is…defensible. You can tell me that Trauma isn’t meant to hold that role, and that Blades doesn’t want to create a “Stick” for players overspending their resources, but I think it lends itself to that usage in such a afforded way that it can’t help but seem like the intended play.
But, now the position that’s a bit harder to defend:
We do not need to be so gentle with Trauma. The text explicitly giving player’s authority to disregard any sweeping impact of Trauma does a disservice to Blades and the tone of play. Let characters be changed. Let fundamental changes happen to the player’s character, and demand they roleplay it. Remove the unanchored nature of Trauma and say to players that this is a game about characters who push too hard and become fundamentally changed for the worse for it. Then, use the structures of play to call on that Object in the same way they do every other strength and weakness of the character: via the position/effect negotiation. Let players discuss increased effect for Vicious Skirmishing, or throw Paranoid players a preemptive resist (p11) to not suspect duplicity from the person across the table. There’s a number of structures that are built to engage players/GMs in conversation and allow the table to make decisions about what matters to them and how it matters to them. The exchange of who has “last say” (p6) already makes this conversation collaborative and engaging. Why must we also be so hesitant to engage these players and introduce twists on their characters? Why has the extension to “introduce consent, work with players to make the consequences of your mechanics fun” being turned into “and you don’t actually have to deal with the consequences of the mechanics if you don’t want to”?
And it’s not…that I want it to hurt or to generate a punishment cycle in the game. It’s that I’m unsure why Blades wants trauma to be a player-side roleplay trigger, and not anything that interaction with the mechanical functions of play. Just feels weird, for a game that is otherwise so holistic.
