20. Stress and The Supernatural
Firstly, let’s just take a moment to revel in twenty days of this. What a joy. Hope you’re all learning stuff? I certainly am! Day Twenty - Stress and ghosts. Let’s go.
This section of text is a great example of what I love about Blades in the Dark, and what I find so difficult about it. It is absolutely fascinating, and it shows how Object-Oriented Design can be wielded for such good!
“By default, the standard effect is to either paralyze a person with fear or panic them into fleeing from its presence. A PC can choose to freeze up or flee or make a resistance roll with Resolve to ignore the effect.”
Great! We have a fictional circumstance (ghost!) and called-upon class (Preemptive resistance per page 11). It’s easy, smooth and beautiful. For example, look at how this section escalates: “Mind-bending horrors (such as the physical manifestation of a forgotten god) may have additional effects on sight (in addition to causing viewers to freeze up or flee). You may choose to resist them, too, as normal.” Look at how much work that “you may choose to resist them” does! Imagine if that text had just said “PCs may not be affected by them” instead of using the word “resist”. It would have been a whole different message. This is the joy of Defined Frameworks like Resistance. It’s why I much prefer the language of Make an Action Roll rather than Roll a Collective of D6s. The usage of the term creates boundaries that I as a reader, player, and GM can interact with.
The risk of systems like this is overspecification that violates the conceptual boundaries. For example, if you read around 5e spaces, you can usually find people discussing the difference between an Attack, a Weapon Attack, a Ranged Weapon Attack, and a Spell that Uses a Weapon Attack to make a ranged spell effect (which is different to a Ranged Spell Weapon Attack). There’s a fine line between conceptual Object-Oriented Design and a game of unpicking codewords. I’m not sure on the secret myself, but I’d like to consider it fertile soil for future designs.
While also being one of the coolest parts of the design, Stress and the Supernatural also the first step toward attempts to generate granularity outside of position/effect, which will slowly shred the framework of an Action Roll down into “it’s all just vibes” by the time we hit page 188. Not a criticism, but this is really the first time the game breaks and shows it’s hand that it’s actually not that committed to telling you WHEN to implement the Objects of Play, only HOW to implement them. It’s also just kind of weird that this section is called “Stress and the Supernatural” when it’s actually ab out fictional responses to the supernatural, and maybe resistance. It never mentions Stress at all. I think it’s telling that the Resistance “object” is being used here as the codeword for “Spend Stress to act”, which is why the heading is “Stress and the Supernatural”, because that’s what the game is seeing as the output - When ghosts show up, ask PCs to mark some stress. And that could have been the application of it! “Stress damage”. “Take four stress harm from the ghoulies". But that’s not what Blades is, and John Harper is way better than that. Instead it’s “when a ghost arrives, execute play structure Alpha-Two: Tell the players a consequence, then explicitly remind them that they can Resist it”. It’s honestly inspiring to see the approach have such an interesting and dynamic result, without asking GMs to engage with new mechanical sets. Blades is really fascinating at just how simple it can be.
And that’ll be the end of the piece then. These sorts of “call-on” frameworks are great, and this one makes Blades super simple.
See you tomorrow, I guess.
Sometimes
Ah FUCK! We were so close. Okay. Sometimes. Sometimes these sorts of call-on structures make Blades so simple. And sometimes it’s just really unclear why we use one rather than the other, because the Objects have the same inputs and outputs. I mentioned really early in this piece that Harper had this cool rhythm of saying “here is the rules of the game, and now here is why the game is the way that it is”, but that kind of supportive context is absent here. Why are ghosts using resitance rather than an action roll? We could just use an action roll instead of the Resistance mechanic for freezing in place:
“You feel your boots are stuck to the ground, what do you do?”
”I will it shift and push against it with all my might”
”Okay, that sounds like an action roll. What’s your rating, and we’re probably at about controlled, standard”
Instead we’re using resistance, making a demand on PC resources. Which is kind of what the Action Roll does too! And this is why there’s a gulf between good and mediocre PbtA writing. In a good PbtA game, you should have a few moves that could fit, but clear tradeoffs between them (This one rolls +Hot, but this one let’s me make sure they don’t tell anyone). In the best example of this writing a lot of different actions could be called Keeping your Cool, Shutting Someone Down, or Turning Someone On, depending on where you want to point the camera on the action. In each case, though, it’s easy for the player to make an informed decision as to which move best aligns with their intended result, and so which framework they should engage with. In Blades, that is less clear, because both Preemptive resistance and Poor Initial position/effect have the same inputs and outputs: We input a challenge that directly impacts the PCs, and we output (at the end of it all) a stress cost or short-term consequence in both scenarios. This section could just as easily say “A PC is required to Push Themselves to act” and the structure would be no different (take 2 stress instead of the average 2.5 of resisting with 1d6), because it’s all coming back to Stress in the End. And this is why I’m the most unclear with what this preemptive resistance for ghosts is doing that isn’t already done in the Action Roll. it’s gorgeous and lean, and I’m glad it explicitly calls out that ghosts should unnerve player characters. But I’m fascinated that John chose to say “here’s a method for engaging with spooky ghosts which occurs before an action roll, if any” and has not told us why its important that this be a separate framework.
And it’s unclear, at least at this point in text, why it does this. There are a bunch of resultant effects, like it provides another place for generating a sense of scale and granularity, by creating a step before we negotiate scale and granularity. I’m really interested in the nature of this kind of “assumed failure action roll” and when and why it’s used. I look forward to exploring it some more, especially after pages 17-23 in the Action Roll procedure.
