Blades in the Dark

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 1:21 am

Victorian is not the same as industral

silva · Post by **silva** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 1:38 am

Whatever.

*Edit*: if anyone knows that the "Devil Bargain" rule is, please shout it out.

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 1:58 am

silva, seriously, your views and opinions are about as dated as your Jake Armitage avatar. Go back to the bottom of page 3 and read what I told you about -punk. Educate your fucking self.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 5:29 am

silva wrote:Whatever.

*Edit*: if anyone knows that the "Devil Bargain" rule is, please shout it out.

You sneak into the camp without anyone noticing you, but a child notices you and you have to kill him to sneak into the camp without notice.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 5:58 am

VG247 interview wrote:Bloodborne takes place in the city of Yharnam, which exists in a different era to Dark and Demon’s Souls, as made clear by all the Victorian architecture, steampunk elements and gunplay. When asked why he prompted a shift in time period, he explained, “There are several reasons, the first of which is the combat.

“We were already thinking of a shift to a combat system where you would enter battle more actively than the sword and shield-based combat of Demon’s. So we adopted the idea of guns, but there was a prerequisite that we didn’t want the game to turn into a shooting game, and the Victorian age fit perfectly. It’s an era where the imagery of old guns still remains.”

It's the interview article dropping buzzwords, but the actual interview question is asking about a shift in time period. Miyazaki then talks about the Victorian era used to suit the use of early firearms for gameplay reasons. No mention of punk punking.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 6:00 am

RelentlessImp wrote:silva, seriously, your views and opinions are about as dated as your Jake Armitage avatar. Go back to the bottom of page 3 and read what I told you about -punk. Educate your fucking self.

No, no, the Armitage avatar fits! It's truth in advertising.

See. Armitage is named after Armitage from Neuromancer, who was a fake personality an AI constructed out of a badly insane man to get him functional enough to follow the motions demanded by the hand up his ass.

So silva is admitting he's just an insane, nearly-mindless puppet for whatever thing happens to have sway over him for now.

Pretty soon his master will no longer need him and he'll be vented out the air lock.

silva · Post by **silva** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 10:57 am

Longes wrote:
silva wrote:Whatever.

*Edit*: if anyone knows that the "Devil Bargain" rule is, please shout it out.
You sneak into the camp without anyone noticing you, but a child notices you and you have to kill him to sneak into the camp without notice.

You sure ? This dont look right, as success with complication already exist in the game resolution.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 11:25 am

silva wrote:
Longes wrote:
silva wrote:Whatever.

*Edit*: if anyone knows that the "Devil Bargain" rule is, please shout it out.
You sneak into the camp without anyone noticing you, but a child notices you and you have to kill him to sneak into the camp without notice.
You sure ? This dont look right, as success with complication already exist in the game resolution.

PCs in Blades are reckless scoundrels addicted to destructive vices—they don't always act in their own best interests. To reflect this, the GM or any other player can offer you a bonus die if you accept a devil's bargain. Take some action or exploit some advantage which helps you now, but works against your overall well being, security, or future plans. Common devil's bargains include:

* ��Revealing a valuable secret for a momentary edge.
��* Sacrificing coin, an item or a crew asset.
��* ��Suffering stress or a lasting effect.
��* Betraying a teammate, friend or loved one.
��* ��Angering a powerful enemy.
��* ��Making a dangerous promise.
��* ��Adding heat to the crew with evidence or witnesses.

Strictly speaking it's not a success with complication, because you don't actually succeed. It's an extra die with complication.

silva · Post by **silva** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 11:51 am

Interesting. By judging the examples cited, it seems the devils bargain catch manifests later.

Thanks.

@Maxus: this Armitage is the one from the SNES videogame, not the Gibson book. Im a huge fan of the old SR videogames (the Genesis one too), and still consider them better then Returns/Dragonfall.

@RelentlessImp: yeah, Ill read your punk essay. Im always open to learn new things. What I find amusing is how people manage to create such a mess just because someone cited the aesthetics of Thief, Bloodborne and Dishonored are pretty similar. Really, if its not the epithome of useless nitpicking, I dont know what it is.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 12:07 pm

silva wrote:What I find amusing is how people manage to create such a mess just because someone cited the aesthetics of Thief, Bloodborne and Dishonored are pretty similar. Really, if its not the epithome of useless nitpicking, I dont know what it is.

It probably has a lot to do with the fact that those things are insanely different, and you would have to be an idiot to not see the difference. I mean, it doesn't really matter in the greater scheme of things, since you believe so many insane things, but pretending your complete inability to see completely different aesthetics that are literally designed to be the opposite of each other is a minor nitpick is pretty stupid.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 12:12 pm

silva wrote:Interesting. By judging the examples cited, it seems the devils bargain catch manifests later.

Thanks.

@Maxus: this Armitage is the one from the SNES videogame, not the Gibson book. Im a huge fan of the old SR videogames (the Genesis one too), and still consider them better then Returns/Dragonfall.

Maxus wrote:See. Armitage is named after Armitage from Neuromancer, who was a fake personality an AI constructed out of a badly insane man to get him functional enough to follow the motions demanded by the hand up his ass.

Silva please learn to read.

@RelentlessImp: yeah, Ill read your punk essay. Im always open to learn new things. What I find amusing is how people manage to create such a mess just because someone cited the aesthetics of Thief, Bloodborne and Dishonored are pretty similar. Really, if its not the epithome of useless nitpicking, I dont know what it is.

You are the one who double downed on the stupid even after it was pointed out to you repeatedly. You don't get to redefine things that already have meanings.

silva · Post by **silva** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 1:06 pm

Leress: the very author of Bloodborne called it "victorian". If you disagree, discuss with him, not me.

Another cool nitpick from the FAQ:

Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh: The "state religion", if there is such a thing. They honor the sensual life of the body and abhor the corrupted spirit world. Structured as a mystery cult.

Thats an interesting twist. As the city culture abhor souls and spirits, the state religion is actually focused on carnal pleasure.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 2:03 pm

silva wrote:Leress: the very author of Bloodborne called it "victorian". If you disagree, discuss with him, not me.

No, I am disagreeing with you saying that Industrial being the same as Victorian which they are not. You seem to have problem with reading and meanings of words, like nitpick. You didn't make a nitpick, you pointed out something.

silva · Post by **silva** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 2:31 pm

Same no. Similar in aesthetics ? Yes, as the Victorian age (183~ to 190~) is chronologically comprised within the Industrial age (17~~ to 19~~).

The same way the migrations period, high medieval and late medieval are all chronologically comprised within middle ages. Thus, their aesthetics will be similar (but not the same).

So it all depends how much zoom you want to apply. On a zoom-out, one can say the aesthetics within each age are similar. On a zoom-in, one can say they are not.

The way I applied the term (and John Harper and Miyazaki ) is from a loose, zoomed-out perspective, because its not the point of the issue to discuss specific historical classifications.

erik · Post by **erik** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 5:15 pm

To be fair, I don't know what an epithome is either.

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 5:30 pm

It's a word in Dutch or Scottish, apparently.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 10:31 pm

silva wrote:Same no. Similar in aesthetics ? Yes, as the Victorian age (183~ to 190~) is chronologically comprised within the Industrial age (17~~ to 19~~).

Once again, Victorian Architecture is a flat rejection of industrial age architecture that preceded it. Things being close in time does not make them similar any more than building a straw hut inside a stone castle makes them the same. Victorian Aesthetics were anti-modern, anti-industrial, and looked back to gothic and ancient foreign styles for inspiration instead of the blocky industrial style that they rejected against.

silva · Post by **silva** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 3:03 am

More details:

The main damage in the game is called "Stress". Take too much Stress and you get Trauma. Take too much Trauma and your character retires.

The analogous for the Crew is Heat, which measures how much the authorities are on your tails. Gain too much Heat and the crew gets Wanted. Gain too much Wanted and your crew is out of the game (I imagine everybody is arrested ? ).

silva · Post by **silva** » Fri Apr 24, 2015 12:46 am

What follows is a feedback from a quick start player after a couple sessions. Sounds good:

Duamm Figueroa wrote:Having played a couple of sessions I think I have some... analysis? observations? ramblings? Dunno, ideas I guess, about Blades in the Dark. I'll need some extended play to actually come up with substantial feedback for the overall game, but for now I have something that might worth a reading. My take after some sessions of play:

(Also: the g+ community exploded since the game got funded [yay!] so I couldn't keep up with all posts. I apologize if I'm being reiterative. This comes from my own experience and is a completely personal take on the game).

We ended one session early, the guys had taken up a lot of stress this and last sessions (two of them even got trauma) and we wrapped up arguing about stress (or discussing, something in between). Some neat takes came from there (specially from Uriel and Diego, I'll expand on that later), but one of the ideas that formed in my head from that argument was that the game is not about characters, its about the crew. Trauma might take your character away, he might even end up as a cool contact in the future, but the crew? The crew goes on. I think that vice overindulgence, gang mechanics and trauma support this. There are rules that complement the idea of a player having more than one character. Hell even coin is managed as a group. So:

THE SCORE AND CREW GAME
I started to notice that we were playing two interconnected but markedly different games. Every score has its own set of priorities, challenges and rewards. Action and Effect rolls, Teamwork rules, etc. This is the score game, an inside perspective of the adrenaline fueled lives of a scoundrel. S**t blows up, blood is drawn and characters dodge the bullet, come up victorious or die trying.

But then there's the crew game. Development, Downtime and, specially, Tier and faction status rules. This is when you zoom out and get to play a bigger game. The crew is a low-level character struggling to reach true "movers and shakers" status. The players speculate who they're going to help and who they're going to screw, deal with the fallout, get contacts, get intel, move the gears inside the Duskwall clock.

And here's where it gets interesting: both games form a virtuous circle.

Lets start from the beginning: we five guys get together to survive in the streets of Duskwall through the dark arts of thievery. We move contacts, get a neat spot, and are approached by the Crows, they run the district, they are cool, they are powerful and above all, they are not starving. We want that, we will get there someday. But there are bills to pay, so we plan a score. Things get rough but we get some decent coin out of it and some minor entanglements as fallout. Not enough to rule, but enough to eat another meal.

Things move around us, there is a war in Crow's Foot, people start asking us favors, we form contacts and hell, maybe we could get somewhere with this. We have to help this guy, Baz, he says we have future.

So we play the score game, things happen, people are killed, favors are earned and paid, ghost haunt us, coin is spent. But we don't live in an isle, we make enemies and allies, we have s*t to take care of, we have a goal, we are playing the *crew game.

The cycle is: we start a score, the score introduces new elements in the fiction, those elements affect other factions, those factions react, we try to take the most of this reactions and climb the tier ladder, it affects other factions, we have to deal with it so we make another score... S**t happens.

*Score game -> Crew game -> Score game *

Why this is awesome? Because the game ensures that player actions MATTER. They affect directly and deeply the game setting. By zooming in and out in scope we as a gaming group form together a snowball of adventures.

Again, I have to play extendedly to see how this develops, but if I have to take something from Blades in the Dark, is how it addresses the issue of players having an impact on the game world. I think this is my feedback. What you think?

Aryxbez · Post by **Aryxbez** » Fri Apr 24, 2015 3:56 am

Honestly, I'd be more interested in someone from the Den looking at this game, and possibly running it. I'd find it much more trustworthy than the irrational mind caulking masses (to the point they're probably not even using the actual rules themselves).

That said, if there is actual impact as the person said, then I think it succeeds as a Roleplaying game (least, in that aspect).

silva · Post by **silva** » Fri Apr 24, 2015 1:12 pm

Ary, I think Longes has the quick start. Perhaps he could give us a more complete analysis.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Fri Apr 24, 2015 2:17 pm

I'm currently busy with writing a paper for my seminar, but I can send the quick-start if someone wants to do a review.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Fri Apr 24, 2015 4:42 pm

Please do! I need to write about something that's not Milton.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Fri Apr 24, 2015 10:48 pm

Review Preview:

Pros
--Good, innovative teamwork mechanics
--More player agency than Apocalypse World
--Advancement at a satisfying rate in interesting discrete chunks
--Good character sheets
--Dice mechanics explained with good layout and graphics
--Procedural generator for locations, jobs, npcs
--Every character gets contacts, with defaults provided; default suppliers provided for each vice
--Crunchy system for tracking relations with and between npc orgs

Cons
--Terrible, innovative teamwork mechanics
--Jarring separation between solo system and team system
--Mechanical terms are extremely confusing, and also defy linguistic parallelism.
--In some cases, being cautious increases danger
--Equipment management system likely to produce conflict
--Game is obviously unfinished
--"Produces supernatural effects."

An interesting observation: This game draws heavily from Apocalypse World for all kinds of things, stretching beyond mechanics to include prose style, nomenclature, and authorial attitude. In almost all cases, the AW influence makes BITD worse. Either this means that Apocalypse World is in fact very bad, or it means that people don't understand what was good about AW. I want to believe it's the latter but I have to admit that this is good evidence for the critics.

silva · Post by **silva** » Fri Apr 24, 2015 11:12 pm

More! More!