3. The Setting
The Wire is a gorgeous crime drama that, over the course of five seasons, tells many stories. Stories of street dealers and cop bureaucracy, stories of families and corruption, stories of drinking and death. It jumps its way around time and lens over the course of five (long) seasons, 60 (long) episodes. When it comes time to figure out who The Wire was about, it’s tough. No one is particularly protagonised in script, the camera isn’t particularly kind to any one character, and no one has a clear heroes journey. Jonathan Brill once wrote that the main character of The Wire was Baltimore.
In the same way Doskvol is the main character of Blades.
This setting section is so well written. Setting is TOUGH to communicate quickly in RPGs. It often gets frontloaded as a lore dump, or worse as homework. It’s tough for a setting to be distinct, smooth, interesting, and leave room for the protagonists all at once. Well, I used to think it was tough, then I read Blades.
“You’re in a haunted Victorian-era city trapped inside a wall of lightning powered by demon blood.”
So, I want to talk about why this setting is SO important to me as a Systems Designer. There’s like, 3 important parts of this setting to draw out:
Industrial - “There are trains, steam-boats, printing presses, simple electrical technology, carriages, and the black smog of chimney smoke everywhere.”
Fantasy - “The world is in perpetual darkness and haunted by ghosts […]”
Constrained - “The cities of the empire are each encircled by crackling lightning towers […]”
These mean something. Each contribute to the play experience. As we pointed out in our previous day, it’s important to know the state your game is searching for so that you can design mechanics toward it. Blades needs a way to hinder players murdering all their problems, so it introduces ghosts. Blades needs a way to keep players in the same geography as their decisions so they can bear consequences, and so it has a ghost field. Harper says as much in text:
The point of all this is to create a pressure-cooker environment for our criminal escapades. […] Everything the players choose to do has consequences for their characters and shifts the balance of power around in the city—driving the action for a sandbox style of roleplaying game.
I’m really here for John’s approach of “Here are some fictional facts about the world, and now here is why it’s important to you in playing the game”. I really appreciate the Player Experience focus it provides. Doskvol isn’t worldbuilding masturbation, it’s a stage set for players.
There’s a term used in MMO discussions that refers to Theme Park vs Sandbox Design. Theme Parks script content to provide the “best” experience, Sandboxes simulate a world to provide an “emergent” experience. I’ve never bought into this as a dichotomy, and I think that Blades is a perfect example of why. Blades is a world built for play. There’s nothing real about it (and I don’t just mean the Leviathan Blood), it’s an unreal world that is created ONLY for the players’ enjoyment. Nothing else matters. Lord Scurlock doesn’t really DO anything when the camera isn’t on him, he doesn’t exist. And nothing would be gained from simulating behaviour that doesn’t impact what is happening “on stage” or “on camera”. The entire Blades in the Dark setting is a reverse Weeping Angel: It only moves when you look at it. And that’s GREAT.
I’ve seen “Stagecraft” used as a name for this kind of design, but even that isn’t right because the people who matter are on stage too. It’s kind of like a really good escape room: The place gets set up and littered with content, but the moment that you’re in there, the content only progresses when you, the player, fuck with it. If you leave a room and come back, it might look different (as staff scurry in and change stuff around), but only in such a way as you, the player, are intended to interact with it. The world is a pressure cooker from the start because John designed it that way, and he did that FOR YOU.
Okay, let’s call it “Puzzle Room” design for now. A nice win for The Daily Blades.
