Blades in the Dark

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Blades in the Dark, version 8.1. Evil Hat Productions.

TL;DR: Don't read this. Don't read the system. Don't taint your mind with this brain-eroding toddler's scribbles of a game. I made it as far as page 11 before the intracranial hemorrhaging set in and I needed a break. For the academics out there who seek to expand your insight and perspective with reckless abandon, Blades in the Dark will as painful and depressing as its name.

Roleplay
This system gives the party members some authority over the world, which as I point out in Tabletop Thought deletes the immersion. In this case, the system outlines several times when the players get the final say.

- The player decides if their action applies to a situation. No matter how impossible the GM says it is, the player is allowed to roll, and there's a hard 25% minimum chance of success no matter how many penalties the GM throws their way. If they want to leap a 50ft gorge, 25% chance. If they want to pick a padlock with their bare hands, 25% chance. If they want to bang their head on a keyboard to write a game system called "Blades in the Dark", 25% chance.

- The player decides when they and the party get experience points. I can't think of a way to make this funny; it's just sad. Egomaniac players are given full license to mechanically represent how awesome they think they are every time they belch out a monologue, having "won" the social encounter by speaking over everyone else, advancing their character and feeding their ego even further as their greatness leaves the rest of the party behind. Self-critical players are mechanically penalized for their real-life neuroses, creating a depressing feedback loop where their own self-image of ineptitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy for every character they play. Never do this. If you make a game system like this, you are actively harming humankind.

Remember when I spelled out how important it is that players make informed decisions and understand the potential consequences of those actions?

- The GM can change the order of operations on the fly. The example they give amounts to "The other guy is more awesome than you so when you attack he gets a free disarm attempt before you can even act."

- The GM can partially veto player-side mechanics. The example they give is a player spending a limited resource and the GM going "Nah, it doesn't work like it should this one time. You still lose the resource, though."

Dice
This system essentially uses a single d6 for chance rolls, with the relevant modifier giving advantages (roll another, ignore the lowest) instead of a bonus, avoiding the bell-curve issue of multiple dice. However, the lack of raised minimum rolls means even the most qualified character might trip over their own feet getting out of bed, and the lack of higher roll difficulties means anyone can do anything if they're lucky.

A result of 1-3 is a fail, 4-5 is a pass but with negative consequences, 6 is an uneventful pass, and if you get a second 6 you get a positive consequence. Combined with the lack of flat modifiers, even characters with the maximum possible skill have a 41% chance of something going wrong. If the world's best information security expert checks their email once per day, 3 days per week they successfully read it but their computer gets a virus. Once every two weeks they fail to read their email at all. It's outlandishly farcical, beyond the point of being funny and not even approaching quality narrative.

One particular tool they give GMs is the Fortune roll. Whenever the GM doesn't care about cause and effect and wants to hand-wave something that matters, they can roll for it instead of thinking.

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