33. Consequences and Harm - Following vs Creating Fiction
There are only 5 types of consequences. I’ve read this book a handful of times and I’ve never ever considered that.
“Reduced Effect
Complication
Lost Opportunity
Worse Position
Harm”
I really love this degree of cascading complexity. Create five categories, and then allow the fiction to mediate the details. It’s a very similar approach to the way Apocalypse World handled GM moves, but I’ve found them supportive in different ways. I’d like to look at how they’re different, and where I think those differences are more supportive vs less supportive of the type of play that Blades can generate.
I’m going to assume a degree of familiarity with Apocalypse World 2nd Edition (Baker & Baker, 2016), given the audience that I tend to find here. AW2e allows the GM (MC) to enact consequences by engaging in a series of “moves”. The nature of Apocalypse World’s MC approach is that everything the GM says is following their agenda, principles, and moves. This is best displayed in the oft-cited answer to “How to ask nicely in Dungeon World”. When you speak, you speak a move, and those moves are active verbs that move the story forward:
Separate them.
Capture someone.
Put someone in a spot.
Trade harm for harm (as established).
Announce off-screen badness.
Announce future badness.
Inflict harm (as established).
Take away their stuff.
Make them buy.
Activate their stuff’s downside.
Tell them the possible consequences and ask.
Offer an opportunity, with or without a cost.
Turn their move back on them.
Make a threat move.
After every move: “what do you do?”MC Moves - Apocalypse World 2nd Edition (Baker & Baker, 2016)
I’ve always found that active verb nature of Apocalypse World’s MC moves to be both functional and gorgeous. In the same way that players “do it” to “do it” (ie in the same way that a player cannot manipulate someone without triggering the When you Manipulate Someone move, and players cannot trigger the move without fictionally manipulating someone), there is no way to invoke an MC move without invoking fiction (ie one cannot “activate their stuff’s downsides” without fictionally showing how the stuff has a downside). In AW2e, this is phrased by the principle “Make your move, but never speak its name” (AW2e, p87, Baker & Baker, 2016). As the better blog points out:
If there is a willingness to have both the characters and world change due to this series of actions and reactions, then that story will naturally emerge without artificiality. All of the moves and principles of the MC, and all the moves available to the players, are designed to create the rhythms of that story, with highs and lows, successes and failures, and world-altering, character-changing drama.
Because the rules themselves are designed to create this kind of story through play, the only thing the players need to think about (and should think about) when they play is their character as she exists within the Fiction.40. Make Your Move, But… — The Daily Apocalypse (D’Angelo, 2017)
Consequences are not moves
Perhaps an obvious difference, to some, it’s really only dawning on me at such a close read. Consequences are mechanics, systems, Hunicke et al (2004)’s M. Where Moves are the D, the dynamics of “run-time behaviour” (Hunicke et al., 2004). So, Consequences are a tool, a toy, that mean nothing on their own but flourish only within the context of the Action (or fiction) that made them.
If we pursue D’Angelo’s “why” AW2e moves are the way they are and compare them across, I think it rests on a specific phrase: “Because the rules themselves are designed to create this kind of story through play” (D’Angelo, 2017). In Blades, they just aren’t.
PbtA moves are incredibly assertive. When they’re invoked they interrupt play. These rules define the conversation that is to follow them. Blades in the Dark’s consequences are supportive. Baker & Baker tell you not to follow your expectations, but to instead play the game (“There are a million ways to GM games; Apocalypse World calls for one way in particular. This chapter is it. Follow these as rules. The whole rest of the game is built upon this.” AW2e, p80, Baker & Baker, 2016), Harper tells you to use a framework to negotiate and then follow the expectant results of that (“The GM determines the consequences, following from the fiction and the style and tone established by the game group” BitD p30, Harper, 2017). Moves create fiction, Consequences follow fiction.
The important difference is that the consequences pages don’t grant the GM authority (in fact, in several places, they restrict that authority). The resulting difference is that a Blades in the Dark GM doesn’t or shouldn’t need to turn to page 30-31 to view a list of consequences that are available to them, instead they simply bring to bear the risk that was discussed in Position negotiations: “If the gang is able to muster covering fire while they fall back to a safe position, then things are even worse for our scoundrel (Desperate / Limited)” (p29) shows two clear consequences - Harm as a result of covering fire, and a loss of opportunity as they fall back and withdraw.
This creates a much more predictable sense of consequence, where AW2e’s can offer much more whiplash. Blades does not respond well to “offscreen badness”, because rather you should be bringing to bear the consequences of the action here-and-now (even when that consequence defers, like through the use of the clock).
I want you to imagine the player-action -> consequence loop of this AW2e example from page 129:
““I read the situation. What’s my best escape route?” She rolls+sharp and—shit—misses. “Oh no,” she says.
I can make as hard and direct a move as I like. The brutes’ threat move I like for this is make a coordinated attack with a coherent objective, so here it comes.
“You’re looking out your (barred, 4th-story) window as though it were an escape route,” I say, “and they don’t chop your door all the way down, just through the top hinge, and then they lean on it to make a 6-inch space. The door’s creaking and snapping at the bottom hinge. And they put a grenade through like this—” I hold up my fist for the grenade and slap it with my other hand, like whacking a croquet ball.
“I dive for—”
Sorry, I’m still making my hard move. This is all misdirection.
“Nope. They cooked it off and it goes off practically at your feet. Let’s see … 4-harm area messy, a grenade. You have armor?””
This is perfect for AW2e’s Ball-On-A-Hill unstable design. It begs for a push, and when given one (the failure of a relatively low-stakes move “Read a Situation”), the MC can escalate up to and including a grenade being shoved through the door of a previously safe location. Blades doesn’t allow for this in the same way.
This, again, calls to where Blades sits on the Trindie Triangle[1] or whichever framework you care to use. The rules are not as assertive of either action or fiction, and so the consequences must stay wholly within the negotiated stakes, rather than introducing new fiction to self-support. This speaks to Blade’s lineage via Otherkind dice, notably Harper’s 2009 version of Blades Ghost/Echo. Via Otherkind dice, the potential consequences are determined before rolling a die pool, and the player’s choice of which dice are assigned where determine which consequences comes to pass. This produces the same result as Blades: Narrative consistency.
AW2e is, as I said before, inherently unstable. “There are no status quos” (Baker & Baker, 2016). Every interaction with both fiction and system push the game toward greater chaos in a way supported by the notion of a safe-house having a grenade jammed through the door. Blades, at least during the consequence phase, is stable. Consequences that are brought to bear are those generated by players and their characters’ via the establishment of fiction. If you don’t want to take harm, you can just…not get into situations where harm is involved in determining position. That isn’t true of Apocalypse World. Nothing is precious, nothing is safe, everything is expendable. Blades is much more constrained.
The benefits to this are enormous. For one thing, Blades in the Dark handles being played for more than 6 sessions a lot better than Apocalypse World does, creating a longer and (often) more satisfying narrative arc.
That said, there are two cases in which Blades does, in fact, have assertive-type moves:
1. Downtime, especially Entanglements, in which all actions are more assertive and invent fiction, and
2. Jex Thomas’ unpublished Bump in the Dark, which uses those active MC move approaches.
While it’ll be a while before I get to talk about entaglements (p 150), I may take a detour tomorrow to talk about Bump.
