6. The Crew
“[...]One of the big-time sucks at the beginning was ‘okay we’re all dastardly scoundrels on the streets of Duskvol, let’s go!’ and then we played for like 12 sessions and a lot of those sessions would be spent going ‘what? okay, what are we-? What are we doing? What’s the point of our gang again?’”
The Crew. Perhaps the most meaningful innovation that Blades in the Dark has delivered to it’s audience, and one of the most resilient pieces of “Forged in the Dark Definition”. I think it’s critical that the approach to crew playbooks is a result of play, this was a need identified by the playtest group and was filled by creating a Crew Playbook.
It’s interesting to me that Crew is mentioned after characters, even though the nature of my experience is that it’s almost always better to create the crew BEFORE creating individual characters, as if it is intended to “focus play” (BitD, pg 2). I’ve found it’s easier to ask players to design characters that share focus with the Crew, than to take characters they’ve already intended (“OC Play” per John Bell’s Six Cultures, 2021) and try to squeeze them together.
Digression - Why are you playing?
It’s worth asking the question WHY someone is playing. As in, why are you playing this game, at this table, in this moment? This isn’t meant to be exclusionary, it’s more like market research. It helps us as other players and GMs to understand what to expect from them, and also to understand what they expect from us. It changes the gameplay experience they desire and produce.
A player who is sitting at the Blades table because they walked past and it’s the only spot left and they need to kill 3 hours is going to desire and produce a very different experience than a player who seeks out Blades, with specific people, in order to explore the rise and fall of a Peaky Blinders-like gang. Neither of these is wrong, but approaching one as-if it was the other is a losing proposition.
The boardgame community came upon this as well, and use the term “Beer and Pretzels” to refer to games that are short, fast, and notably here “casual”. There’s a lot of baggage around “Casual Games” (or worse “Casual Gamers”), so I don’t want convolution between these two ideas. What I do want to express is that the board game community found that being able to establish different "sub-genres” of expected play experience is an important marketing tool to ensure the right players sit at the right tables. Different player desires, differences in tone, differences in story, differences in complexity, these all contribute to that shared fictional understanding, so it’s important that we find ways to accurately communicate it.
The other shift in thinking that I have about the Crew book is what about it has made it so innovative and resilient. I think the Crew book itself is not what makes this part of the game so special, but it is an important part of Harper formalising some good table culture. We’ll talk about it more, when we get to page 91, but I actually don’t know whether the Crew sheet itself does that much heavy lifting. I think what DOES the heavy lifting is a pre-character-creation conversation about desired play outcomes. And yeah we need to formalise that in some way, and as usual Blades in the Dark wants to link back to the Fiction, and so fictionally defining the crew is a great idea! I think there’s a lot of benefits.
The biggest weakness that I can see is that describing WHAT you do is not the same as describing a focus. Assassins may be dispassionate murderhobos, but Assassins may also be civil agitators taking down heads-of-state. Similarly “Assassins” is not immutable. One may play Assassins and never take an “assassination job”.
I think the answer to this lies in the same place as my coming-around on Playbooks: it’s not about declaring yourself to be something, it’s about declaring how other people view you. You’re a Cutter by reputation, and so you’re also Assassins by reputation. And Blades does ask you reputation specifically, but I think it could use some foregrounding at this point of the game-directing conversation. What we actually need to discuss, more than “assassins vs smuglers" is “Crew Reputation” or “Crew Goal”. There is a much larger difference between civil agitator assassins who are trying to kill the corrupt leadership of Duskvol’s institutions and get-rich assassins, who will take any life for a price (no pets, no kids), then there is between those same agitator assassins, and a smuggler crew bringing weapons into Duskvol with the intent to arm the populace against the corrupt leadership.
Jason Eley’s Copperhead County (2022) has a similar shift in focus. Your crews are “Hellraisers, Outfit, or Blood” (ie chaos-gremlins, a business, or a family), and this is a much more significant conversation than whether you are smugglers or bounty hunters in the world of Copperhead County. The game does offer you the opportunity to formalise some of that stuff (Claims, for example, are descriptive of what your gang’s “business as usual” is, which allows scores to be your “business as unusual”).
I think there’s a benefit in us spending more time discussing the kind of game we want to play, and not the kind of tasks we want to be assigned. I think it comes down to this question: When your players are pulled into their first job on screen, or when they offer their services to others, how would they sell themselves? Are they “Clean, professional, with no witnesses”, or are they idealogues willing to fight to the last drop of blood? I think that’s much more descriptive of what kind of game we want to play than whether we do it with a knife or a ghost.
Header image "Team of business people stacking hands" by Rawpixel Ltd is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
