Listen to this episode here.
It’s a Dice Exploder EMERGENCY POD! Less than 24 hours ago as of recording, John Harper, designer of Blades in the Dark, released a brand new official supplement for the game: Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts. It’s 110 pages packed full of new setting and new mechanic ideas, and I really wanted to talk about it! I love Apocalypse World’s concept of “advanced fuckery,” and I’ve never seen such a good and extended example of it all in one place.
Further Reading:
Deep Cuts by John Harper
How to Overcome Your Hyperdiegesis Allergy by Idle Cartulary
Errant by
Otherkind Dice on Dice Exploder, with John Harper
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Transcript
Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of dice Exploder.
Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and rush with it out the door. My name is Sam Dunnewold and today I'm coming to you with breaking news, an emergency pod, because less than 24 hours ago as of this recording, John Harper, designer of Blades in the Dark, released a brand new official supplement.
for that game. Blades in the Dark deep cuts. It's 118 pages packed full of new setting and new mechanic ideas. You can pick it up now at Itch or DriveThruRPG and I really just wanted to talk about it. Blades in the Dark has been just such a hugely influential game on me. This very show was born from the Blades hacking community.
And I love this idea of advanced fuckery as it's put in Apocalypse World, which I think of as sort of permission and guidelines from a designer on how you might fuck with a game and make it your own and creating house rules and table culture, basically. You can hear me talk about all that in more detail on the episodes of Dice Exploder I've done with Nychelle Schneider about changing the game and with Aaron King just a couple of weeks ago about love letters, but I find it's still rare to see this kind of advanced fuckery.
Get put down and published even in a big hacking community like Blades has,
unless it's in the form of an entirely new game. So I'm really thrilled to have what feels like 120 pages of advanced fuckery ideas all in one place. It's 120 pages of specific examples of how you might fuck with a game. And I love that.
We love a specific example on Dice Exploder. So today,
we're here to talk about that. And Also, we're here because I thought doing an RPG emergency pod was a hilarious bit and I always follow through on a hilarious bit, so Joining me for this hilarious bit is none other than returning Dice Exploder co host and designer of Blades in the Dark, John Harper.
John, thank you so much for being here.
John: It's my pleasure. You know, I can't, not respond to an emergency in a situation like this. I had to jump in
Sam: yeah,
Before we dive in, I wanted to say one other kind of disclaimer up front. Normally on this show I try to do a good job, and maybe I'm hit and miss, on explaining mechanics enough that if you're not familiar with a thing, you can at least keep up with the general idea of what's going on, but I think for this episode we're just gonna assume you know Blades in the Dark pretty well. We'll kind of get into some of the details on the mechanical changes, so if you haven't read Deep Cuts itself, you should be able to keep up, but if you don't know anything about Blades good luck. Have fun. Hope it's a great time.
And with that I wanted to start with the first question I wrote down as I dived into this last night. Why am I thanked in this book?
John: Yeah. I, I try to, when I do acknowledgements and thanks and stuff, I try to not just, you know, restrain it to like the absolute smallest group of people that directly worked on the thing. But also include people who are inspiring to me in different ways, or spark something in my brain and Dice Exploder, the show, has been consistently doing that. And your insights into Blades in particular, but other games as well, I've been listening to this the whole time you've been making it, and I feel like it got into my head in different ways that I can't really unpack necessarily cleanly, but felt like it was important to thank you there because it's been a source of inspiration and also just like brain training in some way like hearing all the guest hosts, you know insights into other games and systems and things that's just always going to help. I feel like. It's going to it's going to build up the, the design muscle, you know even if you're not totally consciously aware of it.
Sam: When I noticed reading the new, God, I'm already throwing my outline out the window, but like I noticed that in the new threat roll that replaces the kind of basic action roll you're doing that other kind of thing. You're bringing that in. And I immediately started thinking about our conversation on the show about that a year ago.
John: yeah, yeah, that was It's weird that that's not a direct connection, because during that conversation I was like, now I want to design an Otherkind game and we talked about that maybe there'll be a resurgence, and I did start working on one, like, that night, after we talked. And in doing that, I was like, wait a minute, I think I've done this before, this, this same idea. It was, it's kind of this idea about solving the crew problem, like you're on a vessel and everyone has their jobs, like the Star Trek kind of idea.
And other kind I was like, Oh yeah, I made this mock up of like a command console and like people had different things. And when you're placing your other kind dice, you're like putting them in the science thing, or you're putting them in the weapons or whatever. Like, I think I've done this already.
So I went back and scrolled through my Google drive and like all my game folders and all this stuff. And I went all the way back to this prototype Blades when we were first playtesting Blades in the Dark. And I had just been working on Danger Patrol and Ghost Echo and Vincent was just posting the kind of like formalized other kind ideas. And I found this, this thing, but it was for Blades in the Dark. It was like the crew doing that kind of thing where you're like each taking a part of the job and like you do your part, I'll do my part. Very other kind dice form.
And I was like, yeah, I remember this was really, we had so much fun with this back in the playtesting and then it, as things do, you know, we moved away from it and ended up somewhere else.
But in revising the threat roll and really focusing the action role into that almost like saving throw kind of idea, which is something I was trying to get at with some of the YouTube videos I was making about Blades and how to play it, it just came very naturally to say like, Oh, well, what if there's more than one threat? Well, you just add another die and you assign it. Wait, that's other kind. Okay, it's just full circle.
Sam: it immediately made me think of the, Agon, the threat phase of the final contest in Agon Island too, where you, okay, we have a bunch of different threats coming in and like, different people are gonna go after different ones, and, it felt like a natural extension of a lot of ideas you've been kicking around for a while
John: Yeah, it's always that thing of how do you have a team of people working together that you can smoothly do at the table, and I've made stabs at that in various ways, and,
Sam: here's another one.
John: here's another one. Yeah.
Sam: I do want to kind of pull back out to the big picture here. Uh, Something that I've become obsessed with over the past few months in particular is like setting goals up top. So I'm really curious, like, what were your goals for this thing? Like why this and not a second edition? This feels like it could be, or even is a second edition in a way, but it's also very different from that.
John: The initial goal was pretty much just the second half of the book, the systems part. That's where it started. Going back through stuff that we developed during early playtesting that was abandoned that was still cool, stuff that I've done homebrewing Blades myself when I run it over the years, and really looking at that stuff and realizing that the chapter nine in Blades, the changing in the game chapter and advanced fuckery and that kind of thing, it tends to lead people to leaving that game and making something new, which is great. We have tons of PBTA, we have tons of forged in the dark.
But I don't see as much people doing that work and staying in Duskfall or staying in Apocalypse World. And I was like, well, I could just like write a tweet about it and kind of be like, wow, no, no one really does this. Or I could like be the thing I want to see in the world essentially and be like, here, here's that chapter isn't just meant to be. to help you make your own thing and move away from the game, but also as a game master and player group playing this game to like continue to customize it for your group and for yourself as you play.
And that house ruling and that kind of stuff tends to kind of fly under the radar. It doesn't get a lot of attention anymore. It's in some ways, it's like kind of one of the most fundamental things in roleplay, I think. There's us portraying our characters and embodying the fiction, but there's also like this huge advantage it has over every other type of group activity thing like this, is that it is what we make it, you know, it's, we are collaboratively creating fiction, but we are also collaboratively creating the game experience. And I wanted to kind of go back to that and be really explicit about it and be like, here's a bunch of kind of like case studies of like how you do this and why might be useful to do. that's where it started.
And then once that was getting strong and, and looking good, I sent it out to some early readers and I had some of the new a couple of new setting things in there hadn't been fully developed yet. And Sean Dintner in particular was like, I think this is only half of the book. I think, I think you need to show the other part, which is like changing the setting, growing the world and like customizing it to do a different type of campaign or a different type tone or different touchstones and that
Sam: because those two things often come like hand in hand, right? Like you need you come up with new house rules because now we have motorcycles and they need to work somehow, right? Like we need to figure out how diving gear works and like we can just say that it's there and handle it the same way but maybe it's kind of fun if we like come up with a little subsystem for it.
John: Yeah.
Sam: What was it like to come back and make
Blades in the Dark has this huge Hacking community and this feels like something that like I would not have made exactly this but I could have made something like this and kind of released it into that hacking community with really similar goals. But I you're coming at it from a really different perspective because you're the word of God when it comes to Blades in the Dark, right?
Like, But also like, this is it feels so like kind of dirty get your hands in there get messy like this is just some ideas I had. And that fuzziness feels really kind of unique to this medium and i'm curious what was it like to design for this game that is still yours but in this community that is so much bigger than you.
John: That, I think, answers the other part of your question, which is why this isn't a second edition because felt like, you know, not that there will never be a second edition of Blades, who knows what the future holds, but for what this was trying to be that felt like too far to go with it, like, because of this hacking community, because of all these forged in the dark designers I felt this sense that, like, if it is sort of official, like this is the new system, people are going to scramble and be like, Oh no, I have to change my thing now. Or I was working on it and now it's different. And should I keep this? Should I not? Da, da,
Sam: I was talking with Riley Daniels last night, who's finishing up a draft of As the Sun Forever Sets and was like, Sam, please ask John, why does he hate me personally? So yeah, no, you're absolutely right about that.
John: yeah, I wanted it to be fuzzy. I wanted it to be clearly my own continual hacking of the game for my own purposes and also like I said, it's kind of a case study, like, you know, you can do this too, which a lot of people are already doing, but keeping that fuzziness and the modularity of it to say, yeah, if healing annoys you in Blades, which it probably does because it annoys everyone, here's a different way to do it that's not as. If you want harm to work a different way, you could use this one. Mix and match them how you want.
And been following some responses on various discords and places and some people did get into that discussion like, well, like I love this, but not that. I don't know if I'm going to use this because of this part of it and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And people started to try to kind of like come to this consensus of like, okay, how are we gonna use all this together? And then the conversation evolved to like, whoa, hang on. The point of this is so that you don't have to use it all. The point is that so you can pick and choose.
And I'm kind of, I haven't seen someone say this, maybe somewhere. I'm waiting for someone to say, and that's also how the original game works
Sam: Oh yeah. Yeah.
John: Like it doesn't expect you to keep everything the same and use every system the way I wrote. It asks you to create and change and hack and pick and choose already. That's kind of part of Blades DNA. So I wanted this to stay in that space and be more of that toolkit kind of mentality instead of here's a new edict of like how things have to be
Sam: Yeah, yeah, Moses. Here's two more tablets. Yeah.
John: Right.
Sam: No, and that all feels really true to how Blades, I think, is played. Like, I I've talked with Mikey Hamm a lot about how his home games of Blades are really focused on turf and acquiring turf and my home games essentially never use them and like Other people, I know like Sean has played campaigns where you end up tier 3, tier 4, tier 5, and every time I play a game, everyone's just struggling not to all die at like one tier week and never gets above that, and it, there's clearly a lot of stylistic to the table toolboxiness to it. And I hope people do Listen to you when you say that's how the original game works, too.
John: Yeah.
Sam: I wanna also ask about other people's work. You're clearly being inspired pretty directly by some other people's work in this, I would say. Blades in 68 is the main thing. Like, this to me feels like a bridge product from this, it's like Blades, is the first movie, and Blades in 68 is the sequel that's coming up, and this is the comic book that the studio is putting out between the two, it has that feel to it. I'm curious how much you're thinking about it from that perspective, you're nodding as I'm saying this, but also, like, what other work out there feels like it was influential to you as you were making this?
John: Yeah, you're right about Blade 68. Tim and I have not been conspiring per se, but not directly. We're kind of like sending each other coded messages. He'll do some work on 68, send me an updated thing and be like, Hey, when you have time, check it out, but not say anything. And I'm reading through and I notice he's referencing some deeper part of the lore that some fans of the game have already theorized about over the years and Tim is like, I'm gonna make it a little more explicit, just a little. But that could be true. And make that reference a little stronger.
And I'm working on this at the same time. So I'm like, Hmm, I, okay, the city is bigger in blade 68. The size of the city is bigger. So I'm like, Hmm, okay, well, I know what the foundations faction goal is going to be. They're going to expand the borders and I'm going to look at Tim's map and kind of go, Oh, okay, this could go here. This could go there. And technology wise at 68 has, you know, more modern seeming technology. And so we're kind of like playing back and forth there.
And I did a couple of things that put him in a weird spot that he had to adapt to. I changed the calendar and the year system. At one point he was like, my game is called Blades 68, John. Like, I don't, you're messing, you're, you're just, it's in the title. So. You know, I adjusted it there and changed it and like, well, people don't like it. They don't use the new calendar really.
So it has been this back and forth without us, like having a meeting and sitting down and planning anything. It's just more like seeing each, what each other is doing and, and most, mostly Tim, because he has been, he has this like really uh, strong, vibe based kind of knowledge of the Blades lore and the setting, stuff. That I've never said anywhere or really talked to people about, he just, like, is picking it up and getting it and drawing those connections and teasing those things out.
So, that was the main, I would say the main inspiration for that part of the game. For the, some of the lore and the sort of situation, the catalyst the type of fiction that the new factions and the new situations are kind of pointing towards, a lot of that was inspired by my most recent rewatch back through the X Files and just loving, I love that series, even the bad, well,
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
John: periods
Sam: Also really giving, like I read it and I was like, oh, we're doing Counterpart now in Blades,
John: oh yeah, Counterpart for sure, I think I even mentioned Counterpart directly, yeah um, Counterpart's amazing,
Sam: also, Fringe feels like the the bridge show between X Files and Counterpart too, right?
John: totally, yeah, and, that strange lights in the sky core concept there, like what's going on thing naturally leads to the other part that I love about the X Files, that the conspiracy theory government coverup kind of thing. And that immediately connects to something that I tend to emphasize when I run Blades.
And I think something that's really baked into its DNA is the oppressive governmental forces of the world and how they're not out for to help anyone. They're not out to be a good force for good in the world or anything like that. And adding that kind of cover up conspiracy secret kind of thing to it I think it, it lends itself to painting the systems as even more oppressive and, harmful. But also, if you're scoundrels undermining the forces that control the world, then having those kind of secrets and stuff kind of makes them more vulnerable because now you have these cracks and these ways to like expose them or undermine what they're doing in secret and it all plays back into the idea of the game, the scoundrelly heisty kind of
Sam: Yeah. One thing I liked seeing in this was greater expansion on some of the Union stuff too. I think it's sort of the the counterpoint to that but something I've long thought I, I wished was in base blades was a revolutionaries or unions or something like that kind of crew book. And I was thinking this time like, yeah, I mean I guess you just say your Bravos and then you go start a union and like that's your thing.
Like you can, you can fit it in there. But I'm curious that, that to me felt like the one thing I was really hoping was in this that wasn't here. And I'm curious if you thought about that or how you have thought about that.
John: I have thought about it. There's a thing called Steel Weaver's Rebellion. That addresses that directly as a crew and a situation and I think it's really good and I didn't feel like I had more to say in that space, like making a crew and stuff. I feel for this product, I almost, I was close to making some new crew types. And they might still come down. I have another thing that I'm working on that'll probably have a new crew type in it, but again, I kind of wanted this to be very much compatible with Blades as it currently exists and people's current ongoing needs. series, if they want to kind of just drop stuff in.
And and, and I, and I feel like what you just said, like you can be union organizers. You can be any crew and be union organizers. Sean Nittner's Vigilantes crew book is another one to consider too.
But yeah, it's something that I care about a lot like personally, but also I, there's some bits and pieces in the, in Blades that kind of say like, this is, this is a thing that's kind of starting to happen but it doesn't really get into it much.
So for Deep Cuts, I was like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm going to move that forward a little bit and like, put the unionization aspect in a bunch of different factions situation, so it, regardless of what you pick when you're setting up or running your game, like, odds are you're going to pick a faction and they will happen to be connected to that and so it'll naturally be a bigger part of play and not just be a background
Sam: Yeah. I want to go back to the catalyst stuff a little bit. I feel like there's a lot of room for so many different places you could push the blade setting and this is a really cool one. It's not the one I would have thought of or started with. I love that this is the one that we're getting from you, but also why this one? Why not something else?
John: Uh, Yeah spoilers if people don't want to know about this. The idea that there's another world or there's many worlds potentially, I'm not as much into that idea. I like, I like it being a single, like, concrete other world that is connected to the world of, of The Shattered Isles.
Partially it comes from a series that I set up where people wanted to play like Victorian occultists investigating strange things, Victorian X Files, essentially. But they, they really wanted part of it to be that there is this mirror universe or another world or someplace that they're able to go, again calling back to like Fringe and Counterpart. And so they hadn't played Blades and I was like, well, I have this whole other world art sitting here.
Sam: yeah yeah
John: so it's really easy to just have that be the world they go into because it's already there. It's like, it's made. I know it. So they were, they were kind of these outsiders coming into Dustfall and like trying to You know, elude their pursuers and fit in and find the secret of what's going on and all that. And it was just really fun to play.
And then I've seen through some actual plays and stuff, people, some groups wanting more of that, like genre crossing kind of stuff in their game and I, I, I just like it when it's kind of like in fiction there's, there's an easy excuse to have to bring in something into your game that you don't have to feel is like shoehorned in or just it's the GM's pet project or something, but like, there's like an in fiction reason why something from another place or time or universe or whatever can exist in the game.
Sam: And defining what that other world is, you leave it really loose in the text, which is an open invitation to people to come in and do that advanced fuckery thing of defining that world and deciding what pieces they want in there and all that fun stuff. It feels like a smart choice.
John: yeah, that's another thing I've seen in some of these reaction discussions. People saying like, well, I don't, I would definitely never use this because I don't want to have like, people from 1980s Earth in my Blades game, or I don't want to have whatever, they're like, picking a specific thing that they don't like and saying they don't want it in the game instead of imagining something that they would like, and using that instead.
Again, it goes back to that idea, like trying to stay away from like dictating and mandating, and instead kind of giving this invitation, like, here's some options and here's some ideas that I've used before and they've worked well. And I think they're cool, but you know, stop hitting yourself kind of. Like, don't, don't, don't do this. If you're not into it, if you're, if you're not into it at all, then don't use it at all. But if you do use it, Use something that you think is cool, you know you're not constrained by the things that I thought, thought were a good idea.
Sam: There was a great blog post this week from my friend Nova, Idle Cartulary, called How to Overcome Your Hyperdiagesis Allergy that is all about hyperdiagesis.
Hyperdiagesis to people don't know is this term, like I think of the best example of it being that last speech in Blade Runner where the dying android is like, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, you know, all that kind of stuff. It's like, what the heck is this guy talking about? Like you just are left to imagine the rest of this world.
And this post is really good about how that having that kind of open ended setting material in modules and in the fiction of RPGs is really fun to play with, but also you end up with communities really wanting like a canon answer and how that's never what Blades has been about. Like, I think of Blades as one of the better examples of a game that is really, really good at leaving hyperdiegesis open, of like really strongly defining some things, like we know this specific person who's in charge of the Billhooks or whatever, but also what's up with the ghost field? Like, people don't know, like, Are there people living in the deathlands? You're asking the question, which, means probably, but like, what are they like? I don't know. All of this stuff is just fun to play with, and this does feel like defining more stuff, but also each of those things asks a bunch of questions that have even more answers and you don't have to bring that stuff in in the first place. And yeah, then back to everything that you've just been saying.
John: Yeah, it's more like prompts or, a catalyst in this case, like a way to start something. But you still have to do the work of play. The creative work follows. It's, I'm not just handing it to you. It's an invitation for the GM and the players to create the thing.
Sam: I want to move into talking about some of the new mechanics here. So first of all you kind of gave an answer to this on the, on the Blades in the Dark Discord, but like, is this stuff going to be in the SRD?
Like, can people take this stuff and use it? I think you have an answer, but like, what is, what should people expect there in terms of running with this stuff themselves?
John: I am open to changing my mind on this, of course, but right now I don't think it's going to go on the SRD because I, the SRD is like the core thing that you change , and this is, this is an example of changing it, not a new thing to start from, even though people are gonna use it that way. That's, that's fine.
And I, what I said on Discord is mechanics can't be copyrighted. I'm not coming after anybody. If there's anything in deep cuts that you want to use in your game, be like, go ahead. Maybe just don't copy, paste the text, like write it yourself or whatever.
Sam: It feels like Deep Cuts at large is like your contribution as a hacker of Blades in the Dark to the thing. And, right, and the SRD just staying as it is makes sense, and anyone who's worried about, like, can they take this stuff and run with it in their own games, it's like, you can't copyright mechanics. Have fun. That, that all feels like a great answer.
I'm curious how much the mechanical parts of this were playtested. The impression that I get is that most of this is just the way that you've been running Blades, and you're now like writing it down and codifying it. But I'm curious if there are other pieces that weren't coming from that, if I'm right about that, you know, where's all this coming from?
John: Yeah, it comes from how I tend to run the game. Although there are things that aren't in here that I also do that are further afield. And they're not necessarily with Blades in the Dark, but my own Forged in the dark design work, you know, future projects type stuff. That's moving, you know, kind of the way like something like Slug Blaster is like clearly forged in the dark, but it's it's pretty far removed in some ways from what's in Blades. And I've developed various things in that direction and they handle all kinds of parts of the system and took very different ways.
And I showed a few of those actually to some early readers, and they all kind of had the same reaction, which was where I was leaning too, which was like, this is too far, like, away, you know, like, you should show, like, how you, when you play Blades in the Dark in Duskfall, show how you tweak and change the game more along the lines of that Chapter 9 idea, and not like, here's a new game design.
And so that was kind of the guiding principle throughout this was to as much as possible, cleave closer, try to unpack what I do. So in that, in that sense, like, all of this stuff was, is play tested if you want to think of it that way, but it's less like I wrote it earlier and then ran it for groups, it's more like I played it this way and now I'm like figuring out a way to write it, So people can understand it, you know.
So it's kind of backwards in that sense. And in that writing process, there's discoveries like, oh, that number I was using for heat or payoff or whatever, like, it could be different. It's probably better if it's a little higher or a little lower, whatever. And that just comes from experience.
And, you know, since this is a digital only product, too, there's going to be like tweaks and changes I'm sure. Some in a week or something, I'll, someone will be like, wait a minute. Did you mean this was supposed to be a six? That seems too high. I'm like, Oh shit. No, it should be four or whatever. So those kinds of things will shake out, but it was more a process of writing.
I mean, and again, this goes back to creating Blades in the first place, like, I played and ran, air quotes, Blades in the Dark for several years before tackling that writing project and trying to capture in a rules procedural text like what we had been doing and why it was, why it worked for us. And this is kind of the same thing. It's, It's a distillation of, of practices into something that other people can use.
Sam: I think that capturing of how you actually play the game as the designer can be so difficult. I'm in the process of trying to do it right now with my first sort of larger game project and I remember I think having Meguey on and her talking about how it was like a meme basically back in the 90s or in the aughts when people would like be like, Oh, yeah, that's great if the designers running it like that, it's like you have the game needs to come packaged with them.
And so there's also been this meme for years in the hacking community of like, Well, that's not really how John runs it, even though that's what it says in the book. And I think it is, you know, it's just you get better at expressing yourself as time goes on. And it's been nearly a decade now since you last took a crack at it.
John: Yeah, and I feel like for the most part, like there are parts in Blades and in the general Forged in the Dark systems that are a little nitpicky or specific in certain ways. But overall, compared to some other game systems, changes that you make to things that we think of as like kind of hard systems, like how many harm slots do you have? How does armor reduce harm? All these things that are like kind of codified, I feel like in the forged in the dark design space, you can change all of those things pretty much however you want, and you're going to get different stylistic outcomes, but it's more rare to have some like so called like game breaking situation.
Maybe you make this change and it has an unintended consequence. Like it turns out, Oh, well, healing is way too easy now, so people aren't really worried about harm. And that might not be what you want. And so you need to address it. But that might mean you go, oh wait, now I can make a Forged in the Dark game where healing is not a big deal and people aren't worried about it, and that's, that's like a functional and useful thing in that space.
So, in Blades itself, like, there are things that are in there that maybe they're not exactly the way I did it, but I included it that way because stylistically, it was kind of more unified, or it felt like more of a a whole. And the same thing with this, where there's things in here that are, people are going to react to. Mechanically, in some cases like, well, I don't know about that. Or maybe it should be one instead of two. But when you actually play and try it, A, it's easy to tweak and change, which is the point of the book. And B, those stylistic things will come to light and you'll start to see them.
And I feel like that's a really fruitful place. I, I feel when I play a role playing game, I want to have those experiences in play where there's this emergent property that's happening and we go, Oh yeah, okay. Like getting rep from your heat is like, that's, that's having this big, big Impact impact on the game. And maybe the group goes, that's too big. We don't like, like that big an impact. But another group might be like, oh yeah, this is it now. Like this is exactly what we've been missing.
And I I just keep saying this, the same thing during this conversation, I think, but like, the point of this is like, go play and do and hack instead of like trying to like treat any game text really, but especially blades and deep cuts, like as a set of ironclad instructions. That's, that's never been the
Sam: Yeah. I want to get into a couple of the specific mechanics here. I think we will skip past Harm, even though I j I just want to say this about Harm Harm has notoriously been one of the hardest subsystems for Forged in the Dark designers to hack, and I think this is my favorite variant I've seen. I really love this Harm system. It's very
John: Oh, wow. Thanks. it is how I like to run it generally. Whenever I'm in like a actual play, if I, if I'm in the chat or something and they're doing like end of session XP, I would usually pop in and say like, here's an end of session XP trigger to use. You know, it did your harm you know, impede you. And every time I did that, the group would be like, Oh yeah, that's great. That'll help us remember. So it was obvious to include it in this
Sam: from stick to carrot is a really effective way to change the mechanic. Let's do Diceless Downtime next. Why Diceless?
John: A couple reasons. One, there was a version of Blades in playtest that worked that way as well. But it was more complicated and got discarded. so I've seen it in play and I like it.
The second part is the player's reactions sometimes in downtime when rolls are going really badly.
Sam: Mm hmm.
John: I tend to Be into that. I think we've talked about this before. We kind of have a similar vibe here where things are going really badly for your character and they continue to go badly even in downtime and you can't recover and your projects aren't working and like it's miserable. I Like that, personally,
Sam: about to me. Yeah.
John: yeah, yeah, but I've seen it a lot in my own groups and in watching other tables. There is a certain vibe of like, I want to get through this, I want to get downtime done, I want to get back into the score, I want to achieve these things we need to do and then move back into it and not feel like I'm spinning my wheels or there's all these missed opportunities and things.
So, a condensed, shortened, more, more, it's player choices, essentially, like, you still have a limited amount of resources, a limited amount of activities to do so you pick and choose and do one thing and not another, but when you choose to do the thing, you do it, and we move on, and it also is embodying some of the Devil's Bargain stuff, which maybe we'll talk about too.
but,
Sam: Yeah. I want to end on the devil's bargain stuff. But before we get there We got to talk about the threat role.
This is like a really big change to how the action role potentially, not even necessarily how it works sort of in practice but how it is framed. Like this feels like the biggest example of the thing you were talking about of changing the expression of describing what you're actually doing at the table.
So the way this works as it's described in here is as the GM, you say, yes, you do the thing, you leap to the next building, but this bad thing happens to you. You get cut. Unless, maybe you don't. Let's roll and find out if you're able to like, not have the threat come to fruition.
And You made this video a year and a half ago, something like that, that sort of framed things that way. You put out some new versions of play sheets for the game that framed things that way, and I think that's really smart.
And this kind of takes it a step forward and hard frames the whole thing that way, and has extended rules for how to make that work, and there's a lot of adjustments there.
But the thing that I was most interested in with this is that this is exactly the same change in how saving throws are framed in a lot of NSR, post OSR, like Into the Odd kind of games, stuff like that. And I'm curious if that was a direct influence on you, or if this is sort of convergent evolution, and sort of, if it's convergent evolution, or even if it's influencing you, like, what do you make of that overlap?
Like, I find this overlap between kind of what that NSR world is doing and what this part of, like, this feels like, Blades has always felt like a hybrid trad story game kind of thing to me, and it, the fact that those things are ending up in this same place of like, this is how you do resolution for conflict is so interesting to me, and I, I'm just curious what you have to say about that.
John: Yeah, you're on the, I mean, you're spot on. I have run a lot of OSR, NSR games, Into the Odd especially. I love it, it's brilliant, and I was actually a very early playtester and my friend and I went out to the bar one night and I, I had the Into the Odd, like, first little playtest thing, and we did a little scene, created a character and did a little scene in a, in a kind of a fight. And we both played a bunch of like OSR stuff and like 80s D& D stuff too and were in love with saving throws and that kind of stuff already because they're just so functional at the table, it's just so easy to just say like, this bad thing's about to happen to you. Instead of, oh, give me a roll. You got a 16. Hmm. Let me make up stuff now that was unclear before. And so Into the Odd, just really just cutting that down to, okay, you're basically just making saving throws.
And then we, the also into the odd, you just roll your damage. You don't roll the hit. And we, there's something about that early playtest document where it kind of wasn't super clear I think, I don't remember what the deal was, but I remember writing back to Chris and saying, hey we played it tonight, it was fun, we loved the focus on the saves. We played it where there was just like no roll to hit and we just rolled damage and we thought that was really cool, so if that's what you meant you should definitely keep that. And Chris was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And I still don't know. Like, I think he meant that to start with. Maybe we just misinterpreted it. I don't know.
But those two things together, like, it's kind of saying, like, you're focusing on the threats your characters are facing and their effect is kind of not at risk. Like, you're going to do something, you're going to, in the, Into the Odd sense, you're going to whittle away their hit protection and eventually their, their attribute points. There's no whiffing, there's no moments of beats of fiction where nothing happens and that kind of thing.
And I ran a bunch of stars without a number for a long time. And. It also has, like, very traditional, like, saving throw systems there, and we used them all the time, and they were great. And that was right before the development of Blades started,
Sam: Yeah.
John: and that definitely influenced that idea, trying to get, well, resistance rolls, obviously, but, like, in the action roll, trying to get at that idea that the scoundrel's action and the friction of resistance from the enemy is being all resolved together in one action.
But over the years like I made with those videos on those new sheets, I noticed that there were some groups that were just not framing it as hard, or it, it, they were not, they were framing it in a way that made it hard on them to to prosecute. So I was like, there's a, there's a way to frame this that will make it easier on you. And it's different and it's not exactly the same as the bare, like the original actionable text is open to interpretation in various ways, in a intentional way. But I saw people struggle and, in my own game, saw how successful it was to have this other framing, so I was like, you know what, I can just, I can throw a bone here and be like, if you're struggling with this, like, here's a way to do it that will take that, that frustration
away.
Sam: yeah, yeah, another kind of overlap between the NSR and story game thing here, I feel like, I was reminded of Errant a lot as I was reading through this, and that rules light, procedures heavy mantra of it, I don't know that I would call Blades, rules light at large, but I also do think everything we were talking about earlier of like, here's a new batch of things that you might try out, here's a new set of modules that you're calling them feels very similar to Errant, and the whole, like, OSR, post OSR scene of like, there's a hundred blog posts about different ways you can do different mechanics, and like, most tables are pulling together, yeah, we're playing Cairn, but we're using like 70 percent of Cairn and also these six blog posts. And I like that framework for how to think about this product and how to think about Blades in its original form and how to think about gaming at the table in a long term campaign generally.
John: Yeah. I love Errant, I It's great. Yeah, I was just blown away by it when I first got it. I think it's just such a cool approach. I mean, I would, it's like my thing type of thing. Like that's, that's what I like. I like that di IY, pick and choose, build the game while you play it, lay the tracks down in front of you as you're going, kind of thing. That's just, I'm, I love that. Yeah. So I, yeah. OSR, NSR, Into the Odd, all that stuff were definitely big influences, I would say, on me, just as a
Sam: Yeah,
John: But, yeah.
Sam: I think that brings us into the last thing I want to talk about of Devil's Bargains, which also feel kind of like an extension of that style of play, where this new take on Devil's Bargains, I first saw it from Emma Acosta, who was doing it in Exiles and Crescent Moon, where instead of doing a Devil's Bargain to get a bonus die on a roll, you just like make a bargain, and then you do the thing, and we don't have to roll about it, because like, you took the consequence, and now you do the thing.
And you formalize something that feels a lot like that, and I really love it, and I think that that then ends up becoming the sort of baseline conversation at the table. That like, 50, 70 percent of the time when we're talking about something, we can just say, okay, you can do that, but here's the cost. That sounds good, or I'm gonna negotiate, you know, we're gonna go back and forth, but we're just having that conversation of give and take, what's the story gonna look like here? And then, when we can't come to an agreement, we can pull in one of Blade's many crunchy mechanics to kind of handle it.
But I love that framing of Devil's Bargains allows you to sort of stay within the framework of the rules, while also relying primarily on that, I think, very, very effective traditional kind of conversation.
John: Yeah, yeah. Again, it comes from play, it comes from just that being the normal process of play, and back when the Blade text was being written, one of the players pointed out that I tended to do that a lot. I tended to, we didn't have a name for it at the time, but I tended to offer devil's bargains.
And the suggestion at the time was like, let's just keep it simple, and just say it's just a bonus die and not unpack what it really is, which is the fundamental process of play, essentially. It's, I you say what you do, and I either say you do or you have to do something else before you can try to do that, or you have to pay a cost, or we activate one of the other systems, a threat roll or something else.
And when I was writing the new threat roll section, I approached it in a, like as a part of the procedure there and didn't call it a devil's bargain. And the devil's bargain was still kind of the same as like a bonus type thing.
But the more I thought about it, I was like, you know, it does it's just more fruitful to give the thing the name. Instead of trying to talk around it and be like, this is a fundamental act of play, and this is the foundation of what you do when you blah blah blah blah. It was like, let's just keep that nice, handy phrase, the Devil's Bargain phrase to mean that, to mean the, that core thing that you're constantly doing when you play. And then in these other parts of the text, I can just say Devil's Bargain and you know, like, okay, go back there, go back to, you do it, there's a cost or there's a threat. And once that got codified it just, it made all the other stuff easier to kind of Unify.
And just it goes back to that idea of like I, I, I've probably talked about this before, but a lot of the development of Blades was like giving things names that we were doing so that it was part of the game, game, and not just the fiction part. Like Heat. Like, we, we, we had heat in the game, fictionally so we give it a name, and we give it a thing, and we track it, and we care this way, and yeah, it's kind of circling back to that.
I also want to say, I don't think, now that you were just talking about Ema, I don't think I put Ema in the thanks for this book, which I definitely am going to do, because I think I just forgot, uh, yeah, because those games are awesome and the devil's bargain without a roll is like,
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. I think bargain is such a perfect word for it, too. Like, it really does feel Oh, yeah, the thing that we're just gonna do is sit here and bargain, and, you know, you're supposed to bargain about this, and I'm bargaining about this, and we come to an agreement.
John: Yeah, something Vincent and Meg got at in the Apocalypse World text, like the baseline thing you're doing always as the GM is you're asking questions, building on the answers and then, Oh, it sounds like you're doing this. Do you want to read a situation? No, not really. I want to do this other thing instead. Cool. Do you want to just drop some barter to get this? Yeah, well, actually I want to manipulate them, but you know that's, it is that,
It feels fundamental to what role playing is, but talking about it that way in this text felt mushy, and so at one end I was like, okay, I'm just, let's just have a two page spread, devil's bargain, here it is, that's what we're calling it, and encapsulate it under that
banner.
Sam: Well, I love to maybe close this out here the way you put it in the designer's notes in the back of this. Love to see designer's notes in the back of this, love to see a publication with uh, designer's notes, but you, tell this little story about talking with Allison about how the whole nature of playing Blades is sort of this devil's bargain of like, do you want to take over the city? Okay. Well, here are the things that it's going to cost you and that framing of like, okay, cool. We're doing that at this level and we can zoom in and have the micro version of that conversation as many times as we want at whatever scale we want is I think a great framing for how this game works.
John: Yeah, that was,
it was one of those moments, you know, that just, it hit me in that conversation. Like, wait a minute,
Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
John: it's fundamental to like the scene work of the game, but it's also fundamental to that big 10, 000 foot view of what it is. And, it's, it's devil's bargains all the way down.
Sam: Yep. Oh, love it. Love it. Okay. I have one last question for my listeners, which is who's playing Blades with me? Come on, we gotta get back in there. I can't wait to do more of it. John, thank you so much for making the time today and for putting out this thing. It's really cool. It's a really
John: Thanks. Thanks. It's my pleasure. It's great to talk about it. And, whenever you need an emergent emergency podcast, co host, I'll jump in
Sam: Yeah, yeah, sounds great. Sounds great.
Um, Listeners, if you live in the US, you can still pre order Dice Forager, which is my upcoming little zine of games and designer commentaries by going to diceexploder. com and clicking zine pre order. For more intro about that, you can check out the episode I just did with Aaron King where they interviewed me all about it.
You can find John and I both on socials. John, what are yours?
John: I'm on blue sky, John Harper and Twitter is John underscore Harper.
Sam: There you go. I'm at S Dunnewold on basically just blue sky at this point. DiceExploder. com. You can go there. You can come join me in the Dice Exploder discord, hang out. Things are popping off this afternoon in there.
Extra special thanks today to the Design Loop discord, Michael Elliott, Riley Daniels, eli Kurtz, Jex Thomas, Ema Acosta, Nevin87, and Hendricks for talking through this whole fucking thing last night with me and suggesting some of these interview questions. Uh, really, really great, thanks to you all.
Our logo is designed by Sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and thanks to you for listening. I will see you next time. Woo! Hopefully no more emergencies this week.