17. Stress
We’re going to use three words here that are not interchangable, but are routinely used interchangably, so it’s important that I clean them up first:
Resource - A countable game mechanic that is used to change a character’s effectiveness (Edwards), qualities (Baker) or capacity.
Currency - A resource that is earned and spent (as reward and punishment per Schell (3rd Edition, 2020))
Economy - The flow of a currency between parties, including concepts like equivalence or exchange rate.
And one extra term that is used in concert with these:
4. Meta- - A prefix indicating that the spending, gaining, or transfer of a resource, currency, or economy occurs at the Player-to-Player level, rather than the character level.
A spell slot is a resource. A gold piece is currency. Kill a ghoul, get 100 gold pieces, buy a longsword is an economy.
A Battlemaster’s superiority die are a meta-resource. Inspiration is a meta-currency. Gaining 100xp for killing a ghoul and using that to unlock a 4th superiority die is a meta-economy.
Stress fundamentally breaks Blades in the Dark’s promise of “fiction first”. This is where players break the rules.
“Player characters in Blades in the Dark have a special reserve of fortitude and
luck called stress. When they suffer a consequence that they don’t want to accept, they can take stress instead. The result of the resistance roll (see page 32) determines how much stress it costs to avoid a bad outcome.”
Stress is the resource that limits players violating The Conversation. Where page 6 says “How dangerous and how effective is a given action in this circumstance? How risky is this? Can this person be swayed very little or a whole lot? The GM has final say” (Judgment Calls p6), Stress lets the player say that no, their effectiveness is actually greater than the GM’s final say.
Where the game says “Which consequences are inflicted to manifest the dangers in a given circumstance? Does this fall from the roof break your leg? Do the Bluecoats merely become suspicious or do they already have you trapped? The GM has final say” (Judgment Calls p6), Stress lets the player say that actually no that consequence doesn’t come to bear, regardless of the GM’s final say (kiiiinda, we’ll talk about this when we hit page 32, I suh-weaaaar. It’s burning a hole in me right now and I need to deliver on it correctly).
So Stress is a resource that players spend to break the rules of the game. Cool! Barely unheard of. Great design. But wait, players? The quote block above says that Player Characters have stress, but I am talking about the player having stress? Great! This is the interesting thing to me.
Meta vs Fiction - Who Owns Stress
Here's the example from the text:
“During a knife fight, Daniel’s character, Cross, gets stabbed in the chest. Daniel rolls his Prowess rating to resist, and gets a 2. It costs 6 stress, minus 2 (the result of the resistance roll) to resist the consequences. Daniel marks off 4 stress and describes how Cross survives.”
This text is really clear that the Character own the consequence, but the Player owns the intervention. The text is clear that the conversation is between Daniel and The Consequence, not between Cross and The Consequence. The one pronoun that’s unclear here is “his Prowess rating”, which I think we can take to mean Cross because Prowess rating is a character feature. Cross does not need to own the Stress, he (Cross, the fictional character) needs only to benefit from its expenditure! As stress is a violation of the player-level (meta-) Conversation (GM has final say on consequence, Daniel overrules this by spending a resource) it is, realistically, a player-level resource.
Functionally, Blades assumes a one-player, one-character play experience (an understated assumption of the introductory sections of the book) because, when it comes to assumptions like this, Blades seeks to codify and reinforce best-practices of an existing tradition of play. If we imagine a game where a player has two characters in play, their stress pool doubles, which means their impact on the conversation doubles, and that’s a fascinating thing to me.
This is starkly different from other approaches to Forged in the Dark where stress is much more closely tied to the character’s fictional experiences, and the Eclipse phase is a fictional resource rather than a meta-resource (forgive a lack of quote, my GBM book was too heavy to ship to Canada. I’m holding out on getting it back to me). This isn’t a case of better and worse, it’s just highlighting the change of ownership.
What’s Yours is Mine and What’s Mine is Ours - The Economic Short Stick
So, regaining stress is something that will come up in more detail when we get to Downtime (p145. Strap in, it’ll be a few mornings), but between now and then, I want to highlight that while the Player is empowered to spend stress, it is the Character who is burdened with regaining it. This is, in my personal view, a sufficient but not singular reason why Stress is not a “real” economy (which I promise has a functional point) but rather two different interactions that just so happen to use the same term.
Because it is the character who is charged with regaining Stress, and the character is limited to acting wholly within the fictional circumstances. David can assert that actually the rules don’t work that way and this time the knife doesn’t kill Cross. But Cross is limited to engaging with a vice purveyor to indulge that Stress back up. Cross doesn’t have options to break the rules and regain stress (and, I’m going to blaze past the fact that as Fictional Character Cross isn’t imbued with agency, as that “Within the fiction, Cross is not imbued with agency with regards to Stress”). The player gets to spend stress to break the rules, but the character is forced to engage with the demands of the game (up to and including punishment if the player does not elect to spend a downtime action directing the character to indulge their vice. Again, when we get to downtime).
For this reason, the Expenditure of Stress is a “Reliable Currency” (“You get what you pay for or you get what you win” - Baker, 2010), while Regaining Stress is an “Unreliable Currency” (“depends upon that critical moment of judgement” [link in original] - Baker, 2010). This isn’t an economy, it’s two separate resources that are named the same thing and equated. Spending Stress is a resource, Regaining Stress is a resource. Spent Stress and Regained Stress are a 1:1 fungible currency.
In a 2010 Blog Post on Reliable vs Unreliable Currency, Vincent Baker posits the following:
“1. A rule that relies upon that moment of judgment to go forward, instead of commodotization, creates unreliable currency. Maybe inherently and inescapably, but maybe just overwhelmingly, I don’t know. Anyway, you pays your money and you takes your chances.
So:
2. Designing rules that treat fictional causes seriously means, at a pretty significant level, abandoning fairness and equalization, and thus embracing both mechanical risk and social-aesthetic risk. Your character can get unfairly hosed, through no misstep of yours, and your friends can make systemically-binding judgment calls that you don’t like.
Designing a game that cares about characters’ immediate circumstances means bringing the gamble back into your design. Not just at the level of characters’ effectiveness, but all the way down into your game’s underlying structure.”
And so…
Stress is Table Manners - Balance, Fairness, and Social-Aesthetic Risk
Since it was posted by amazing game designer Zedeck Siew in November of 2023, this tweet has lived in my head rent free.
“When I first got into the hobby, I did get into bad experiences with stereotypical that guys.
But that stuff, ime, is fixed at the level of culture, not at the level of game design.
You cannot cook a dish so good it forces diners to have good table manners.”
Where Baker (2010) says that taking a fictional cause seriously in your resources and currencies (though Baker does not, in his writings on the topic, differentiate between the two in the way that I do here) exposes the game to Social-Aesthetic risk: The idea that as a player a judgment call might be made with which you disagree. If Baker’s point is that judgment creates unreliable currency, then the reverse of that is also true: Reliability in Currency/Resource negates (or violates, or deprioritises, delete according to your stomach for crows) judgment/assessment/the fictional positioning. This frees the player to move above or outside the fiction (hence, meta-resource) but traps the character within it.
Tagging back to the early use of Baker-Boss to express system as “how your group comes to agreement in unknown circumstances” and connecting this with Siew’s (2023) table manners metaphor, we get a really interesting assertion. Stress is a resource that allows a player to be forgiven for having poor table manners. Stress is the number of times a player can violate the social norms of play.
Now, here’s a question: The GM doesn’t have Stress, in Blades in the Dark. Does that mean:
A) the GM is never allowed to violate the social norms of the game, or
B) the GM is always allowed to violate the social norms of the game?
That’s the real tasty question.
