25. Action Rolls - Add Bonus Dice
Bonus Dice exist as a separate part of the negotiation, in a way that violates the fiction-first premise and I want to be cooler about that than I am. But it just…gets me for some reason. I think this is why Blades negotiations feel too long for me. Frankly, it feels like we’re renegotating at this point. You and I have made agreements on Dice, position, effect, etc and then we’re going to go over all of those factors again? I dunno, it just feels off.
“You can normally get two bonus dice for your action roll (some special abilities might give you additional bonus dice).
For one bonus die, you can get assistance from a teammate. They take 1 stress, say how they help you, and give you +1d. See Teamwork, page 134.
For another bonus die, you can either push yourself (take 2 stress) or you can accept a Devil’s Bargain (you can’t get dice for both, it’s one or the other).”
Every time Blades gives a restriction, I want to ask why. I want to ask why it violates Object-Oriented design, I want to ask why this is getting abstracted through the lens of the rules strictness instead of following the otherwise liquid flow of play.
Why is Teamwork giving me +1D? Why isn’t it instead a factor of Position and Effect? Why can I only push myself OR take a Devil’s Bargain? Why is two bonus dice the max? What’s going on here?
This is where Position and Effect starts to feel like too much for me. When we figure out the number of dice and the Position and Effect, and then have to figure it all out again. It’s a clear violation of Touch It Once approach that we’ve been advocating for in RPGs for years. It’s bad for the same reason D&D rolling for hit and damage gives such a slogging negative player experience. Once we agree on a thing, we have agreed on it, but Blades constantly gives us ways to renegotiate those facts that we should have already passed over (this goes even further into the post-roll procedure).
I don't think the mechanics are wrong at all, I just think they demand so many reassertions of the same facts. Blades already gives us three very clear levels for all fictional (or fictomechanical?) interaction to be negotiated around: # of dice, Position, and Effect. And we already negotiate each of them.
Touch It Once is about being intentional with our fiction, and knowing how that interacts with the mechanics set that we’ve chosen. Every time we renegotiate, it eats up the currency that is “playing a game”. Even in very dense mechanic sets (COIN games, Deep strategic euros, 4X Digital), the mechanic set should only ever be there to enhance or facilitate the player fantasy. Even when the fun is solving a gamified puzzle, it’s still observed by the players through the lens of theme and fiction.
This is…probably where current RPGs are the weakest, in that our mechanics set tends to be things like dice and numbers, when our fiction are things like struggle and force. We don’t have a very good method to create “diegetic mechanics”. Therefore, every time we ask the players to step away from “the fantasy” and talk about “the numbers”, we consume some of this currency that represents player patience. And I just feel like Blades asks me to pay that toll a few times.
