16. Resistance
There’s this quote that I think about every time I do creative work, by a guy called Seth Godin: “Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum. The second person to install a urinal wasn't an artist, he was a plumber.”
It always reminds me that the difference between an artist, a pioneer, a revolutionary even, and a nobody is not whether you could have done something, but about whether you did. Art is about originality, sure, but it’s also about making things happen. And that’s how I feel when I read this section on Resistance: Of course, anyone could have written a mechanic that uses the support of trad structures to emphasise and gamify (affectionate) player consent.
But John Harper did it. And did it well. And that execution and application will be (we can only hope) revolutionary.
“Resistance rolls always succeed—you diminish or deflect the bad result—but the better your roll, the less stress it costs to reduce or avoid the danger”
Resistance performs three amazing functions in Blades in the Dark, and I don’t think all three get considered in the same space:
Resistance is a tonal tool for the kind of “Scoundrel” story that Blades is trying to tell. Whether it’s the Last Second Action That Saves The Day, or the Flashback that show that while everything looked like it was going to collapse around me and I was caught in place? All Part Of My Plan. In each case, they’re spot-on tonal matches for the genre.
Resistance provides a 100% certain get-out-of-jail-free card to the players, so they feel more emboldened to be greedy and try for more results with more dire consequences (breaks the fear barrier that can keep players static), and finally,
Resistance is a diegetic safety mechanic that turns using the X-Card into part of the game. And let no one ever say that isn’t the coolest shit on the table.
I stole Diegetic Safety Mechanics from Jenn Martin who (along with Andy Munich and Yoshi Creelman) wrote the amazing Descended From the Queen game Reunion (linked above. Year unknown, I think 2019? I first played it in 2019, at least). In Reunion, players are a collection of old friends returning to meet after some time apart. Instead of just having the John Stav classic of an X-Card (Stavropulous, 2013), Reunion also has a card that says “we don’t talk about that”, which ends the conversation, but is framed as “yes, that happened, what you said is true, but I don’t want to go into any more detail about this”.
Retrieved from Reunion’s Itch.io (Creelman, Munich, Martin, 2019?)
I then took the idea and applied to Decaying Orbit, the storytelling game about a space station remembering a calamity, which I’ll speak to now because it’s the one with which I’m more familiar.
Diegetic safety tools from Decaying Orbit (Icarus, 2023)
X-Cards are sharp. That’s not a criticism, it’s a fact. Stopping the game, tapping an “out of game” tool and saying “I would like to remove something from the game” is a big event. As much as we don’t want it to be. As Jamie Fristrom said in a 2019 Blog, playing the card can be an unpleasant experience, even if we don’t want it to be.
“ But [The X-Card] sucks for a variety of reasons:
1. By the time I play the X card the problematic content is out there. I can stop things from getting any worse but I’ve already been triggered at least to some extent.
2. When I play the X card I’m revealing my vulnerability. I’m perpetuating my victim story. This can be less pleasant for some people than just gritting their teeth through the unpleasantness (and then maybe never playing with that particular group again) though I prefer to play the card.
3. When I play the X card it is just the slightest bit annoying for everyone else, even though they will deny it and be glad to respect my wishes. I feel like a wet blanket and that they’d have a better time playing without me.
4. Playing the X card often invites conversations I might rather not have, but that are probably necessary. “Oh, no guns? Are crossbows ok? What about lasers?””
And Fristrom is right! Despite our better angels, despite the fact that we want and invite and specifically encourage the use of the X-Card, it is a shutting down of experience. It closes the door. It is such a big thing (from the way it’s introduced, to the ritualised application, to the effect of engaging with it, and of course with all of the language that we have around triggers and psychological safety) that engaging with the X-Card has to be a wet-blanket affair.
And I don’t say that to deride the X-Card. In the same way a parachute really kills the fun of freefalling from 20,000ft, I’d much rather it be there than have the situations it is designed to prevent. However, in acknowledging it’s such a big thing, it opens up the door for a little thing. An X/2 Card. A safety tool that isn’t designed around stopping play, but redirecting it in a fun and interesting way.
This is the purpose of Corrupted Memories. It helps to support the game’s tone of mystery and incongruity by cutting someone’s sentence in half: “The stranger steps through the airlock. Their breathing is hard and drawn out. The airlock pressurises. Our infrared security camera sees the body heat through the suit against the cold backdrop of space. Oxygen floods the chamber. The stranger places their hands on the release catch for their helmet and-”
”THAT MEMORY IS CORRUPTED!”
And the response? The table laughs. They groan with good nature. It’s acknowledged that the choice took away a truth that people desired, but they desire the mystery more. The best Decaying Orbit tables are the ones that throw Corrupted Memories back and forth at JUUUUUST the right time. It’s gorgeous.
And Reunion is the same, with a slight tonal shift. In Reunion we’re talking about identity and the changes people undergo after years away from each other. We played the last 4 employees of a Blockbuster Video or Pizza Hut (or combination Blockbuster Video and Pizza Hut. But we don’t talk about that). Of course any discussion about bored teens in summer jobs is gonna lead to some romance or will-they/wont-they. And in our case, of course: “Wasn’t there something between you two?” “Well…We Don’t Talk About That.” Truly my favourite mechanic of the 2020s design-space.
One of the reasons these outperfom the X-Card at managing content that is not specifically a trauma trigger is that it is not a wet-blanket: It’s FUN to tell someone we don’t talk about that. It’s a joy to have your memory corrupted. It’s an invitation on both sides, and so players engage with it earlier, easier, and with more honesty. It’s also not exclusively for trauma triggers, which makes the conversation around its use require a lower threshold to engage. All of these make it a perfect companion to bigger game-changers like the X-Card, Safe Words, etc etc.
To preempt one criticism, about the idea that players need to spend a currency to engage with a safety tool, I’m all for it. I don’t think the criticism stands. For one thing, it’s a great signal that if a player is constantly consuming stress through resistance that the tone of the game may need to be adjusted (always great to have a numerical sign that you’re not aligning). For another, the use of game structures empowers the player to feel like they’re still being “fair to the game” or still performing the appropriate role of a good player by engaging with the resist, because they still have to spend the currency. This is in contrast to Fristrom’s point #2 above: A player who is resisting is not playing a victim. They are seizing an opportunity. They are an active player in their own character’s struggles.
We’ll discuss it more when we get to Resistances proper (Page 32), because I do have some best practices that I want to add. But for now, it’s enough to say this:
If there is one legacy that I wish for Blades in the Dark and John Harper, if there is but one sweeping cultural change that impacts the play of RPGs generally, let it be RESISTANCE. When all the players who saw Blades on a youtube list of top 10 non-D&Ds or whatever, when all of those players have played Blades and return to their trad environments, please let one of the things they take with them be the idea that players can say “no” and that saying “no” can be a joy for everyone involved.
For more on Reunion (Creelman, Munich, Martin, 2019?) see the itch.io here,
if you’re into stories about crime and chaos, I also recommend Martin’s 2019 Goose of Grillner Grove
For more on Decaying Orbit (Icarus 2023), see my publisher’s page here,
For more on Safety Tools in games see TTRPG Safety Toolkit (Shaw & Bryant-Monk, ongoing) here.
