Choosing Death

Editor’s Note

This is a revised post from my old blog, updated here to clear up some things that I thought were missing and needed better scaffolding. I also reorganized the content to flow more intuitively, and added a few play examples to demonstrate how this modification could play out at the table.

I mostly like Blades in the Dark. The worldbuilding is interesting, the tone is grim in a delicious way, and the systems for building characters are robust enough that you can swiftly build a character that does the things you need them to do, while giving you room to play.

That being said, there’s a few things that I personally don’t like, and would rather not have to deal with during play. The problem for me arises when all of them come into contact with each other, so I’m going to list them here and then break down the issues I see before offering a possible solution.

On writing over someone’s work

I want to be careful, when I use someone else’s work as a jumping-off point. I think it’s important for designers to support each other’s work; we want to riff on it, grow together, help everybody make the things they want to make. We have to be careful that when we do this, the thing I’m doing now, that we don’t establish negative judgments of value on the work someone else did. So.

I’m writing this for myself, and for anyone else who wants to use it. The goal of this post isn’t to critique or tear down someone else’s work; I would not be the game designer I am today without having read and experienced Blades in the Dark, and I’m definitely not here to tell John Harper that he did anything wrong when they wrote their book. So take this post with a grain of salt, and understand that it comes from a place of wanting to grow things, and hopefully to give readers a bit of insight into how and why I do things when I design games.

There’s no singular correct way to do any of this; this is merely the solution I've found that works best for me.

Explaining the Problem

These are the components I find troubling, especially when combined together:

• Trauma
• Harm
• Stress

On their own, none of these things are necessarily bad.

Trauma represents a significant event in the character’s life that changes their outlook in a meaningful way; it gives the player a thing to engage with, which can be cool; and it also provides a way for characters to leave the story when life in the crew is too much to bear.

Harm gives players meaningful mechanical consequences when things go badly, some escalating effects that are tangible in satisfying ways.

Stress is a resource that gives players a way to say “no” within the mechanics, which can be a useful lever to pull when you don’t want to let an opportunity slip away. (important note here: resistance rolls are not a player safety tool, and shouldn’t be relied on as if they were)

The problem, then, comes when all three systems come into contact with each other. The GM can corner you in a situation where your character has to take a serious injury, or something narratively has to happen that you’re not okay with, or you have to take on trauma. If you have no Harm boxes open and you already have three traumas and your stress meter is full, your options are “Take whatever consequences the GM describes” or “game over”.

My personal view (and everyone’s allowed to feel differently) is that a player should never be wholly at the mercy of another player. The current setup for Harm, Trauma, and Stress can lead to that exact outcome if play groups aren’t careful. I think we can probably do better.

So.

The House Rule

First things first, here are the mechanics we’re going to alter:

• Stress & Resistance
• Trauma
• Harm
• Downtime Actions (Indulge Your Vice, Recovery)

We’re also going to be touching on Position a bit, but won’t be altering any of the ways it currently works.

Pursuing an Opportunity

While playing, the GM can present you with opportunities that you can pursue: a way into the heavily guarded manor, for instance, or a valuable piece of jewelry you could try to steal for coin. You can also carve out your own opportunities and try to establish parts of the world you want to engage with.

You choose an action to take that will let you seize that opportunity; then, based on the action you chose and the circumstances surrounding the opportunity, the GM will assign you a starting position of either Controlled, Risky, or Desperate. You roll your pool of dice, and assess the outcome:

• Bad Outcome (1-3): Your opportunity is slipping away from you; the GM describes a narrative consequence appropriate to the circumstances. If you want to try again, you must do so with worse position.
• Mixed Success (4-5): You achieve your goal in seizing the opportunity, but the GM also describes a narrative consequence appropriate to the circumstances.
• Success (6): You achieve your goal with no narrative consequences.

Consequences

When you roll a bad outcome or mixed success, the GM must choose a narrative consequence; that is, something happening within the story. Narrative consequences can include heat or the ticking of clocks, since these things represent narrative events, but the GM cannot choose to harm a player’s character directly.

Position

When pursuing an opportunity, if you roll a bad outcome, your position worsens by one step: from controlled to risky, from risky to desperate, or from desperate to lost. You cannot pursue the same opportunity if your position is lost.

However, if you change tactics (that is, choose a different action), your position improves by one step. (Tip for the GM: when a character changes tactics, that might be a good opportunity to shift the scene’s focus to another player’s character.)

Example:

Emily tries to chase down a mark before they can alert the city watch, but rolls a bad outcome on her Finesse action, and her position worsens from Desperate to Lost. If she doesn't do something now the mark will alert the watch and the crew will be in serious trouble.

Changing strategies, she reaches for a knife and throws it, using Skirmish to recover her position. This improves her position from Lost to Desperate. She rolls again, and this time she achieves a mixed success: she hits the mark, but now there's a dead body in the street.

Pushing Yourself

When the GM describes a narrative consequence, you can push yourself to avoid that consequence. This replaces wholesale the concept of Resistance rolls.

The stress cost of pushing yourself in any context is also modified to reflect your current position:

• Controlled: 1 stress
• Risky: 2 stress
• Desperate: 4 stress

If you push yourself while you are vulnerable, as soon as the action is resolved you become incapacitated, unable to take actions until the start of the next Downtime phase. How this incapacity manifests in the story is up to you.

Stress

You can accumulate up to 6 stress. When the crew's tier increases, the maximum stress for each member of the crew also increases by 1.

When you accumulate the maximum amount of stress for your character, you become vulnerable. You cannot accumulate stress while in this state.

If you are not vulnerable, all of your accumulated stress is cleared at the start of the Downtime phase. This happens automatically; you don't have to spend a specific downtime action to do it.

On the other hand, if you are vulnerable, your stress can only be cleared by taking the Indulge Your Vice downtime action. When you do that, your stress is cleared and you are no longer vulnerable.

Vulnerable

You become vulnerable when you accumulate your maximum amount of stress, and you remain vulnerable until you Indulge Your Vice even if some other effect reduces your current stress or increases your maximum stress (such as increasing the crew's tier).

While vulnerable, any time you roll a bad outcome or mixed success, you receive an injury.

Injury

An injury is something directly inhibiting your character's ability to take actions. This mechanic replaces the Harm system entirely, although parts of it should feel familiar.

You suffer an injury only if you roll a bad outcome or mixed success while your character is vulnerable. The severity of the injury depends on your current position:

• Controlled: Level 1 injury, or increase the severity of an existing injury by one level.
• Risky: Level 2 injury, or increase the severity of an existing injury by two levels.
• Desperate: Level 3 injury.

You can have as many injuries as you can stand. The table of injuries on your character's playbook might look something like this:

The effects of each injury's severity are as follows:

These effects are cumulative; so a level 2 injury bestows both -1d and reduced effect when it's applied to an action. If multiple injuries affect the same action, their effects do not stack; use only the injury with the highest level of severity.

At the start of the Downtime phase, all level 2 injuries become level 1, and all level 1 injuries are removed completely. Level 3 injuries must be reduced with the Recovery downtime action.

Describing the Injury

There are two important considerations here. The first is that when your character receives an injury, you decide what that injury is and how it happens.

The other consideration, which is also true in the old Harm rules, is that your injury only impacts actions where the injury would reasonably make things more difficult.

A broken arm, for instance, is a level 3 injury, but it doesn’t stop you having a conversation where you might Sway your way out of trouble. It would, in contrast, make it all but impossible to swing a hammer with that arm if you need to Wreck an obstacle in your path.

Recovery

If you have level 3 injuries, the only way to remove them is to first spend a downtime action in Recovery.

When you take this downtime action, choose one injury of any severity and reduce its level by 1. If you receive treatment from someone with the skill to treat you properly, choose:

• You choose two injuries to reduce in severity instead of one
• You reduce your chosen injury's severity by two levels instead of one

Example of Play

Emily was badly wounded during her escape from Iron Heights, sustaining a broken leg and two fractured ribs, represented as a level 2 injury (broken ribs) and a level 3 injury (broken leg).

At the start of downtime, Emily's broken ribs are reduced in severity to a level 1 injury. This happens automatically, just by taking care of herself between scores. But the broken leg will require more concerted effort to mend and repair. Fortunately, the crew has a talented Stitch ready to piece her back together, so she spends a downtime action in recovery.

Since she's receiving care from a skilled physician, Emily chooses to have her broken ribs healed completely, removing the remaining level 1 injury from her playbook. In addition, she reduces her broken leg to level 2. This doesn't remove the injury, but it puts her on the path to recovery: at the start of the next Downtime phase, she'll be able to reduce its severity to 1.

Indulging Your Vice

Indulging your vice isn't required to clear stress. We assume that you're indulging your vice all the time between scores. The Indulge Your Vice downtime action, then, is reserved only for the most dire situations where your character is unable to function without their vice. These are the times when it's appropriate to zoom in on the action and see what it is your character goes to when they're really desperate.

If you've been made vulnerable, no ordinary rest during downtime can help you recover. The only way to get back on your feet is to indulge your character's chosen vice.

In the standard rules, you roll your lowest attribute and clear that amount of stress, and it carries the risk of overindulgence. In this rules modification, you treat your vice as an opportunity you must pursue, with action and position that must be resolved accordingly. The only differences are that for the purposes of this opportunity, you are not treated as vulnerable, meaning that you cannot take injuries in pursuit of your vice. You also cannot push yourself.

If you successfully seize your opportunity, you clear all of your accumulated stress and are no longer vulnerable. If you lose the opportunity, choose:

• You remain vulnerable.
• You overindulge. Follow the standard rules for Overindulgence. Then clear your stress; you are no longer vulnerable.

Example:

Emily is burned out at the end of the score, and she goes out to Prowl in search of her drug dealer; a Risky task under any circumstances. But when she gets to the usual rendezvous point, she rolls a bad outcome: her dealer doesn't show. Unwilling to give up, Emily searches for her drug dealer, wandering further away from the crew's hideout.

She eventually rolls a mixed success - she finds her dealer...face-down in a pool of his own blood. She manages to scavenge one last dose before the Bluecoats show up, and she escapes without being seen. But she's going to need to find a new dealer—and maybe find out what happened to her old one.

Wrapping Up

Think that’s about it.

It eliminates three problems for me (trauma, resistance, and harm as a GM lever), and replaces them with a coherent single system of Push -> Stress -> Injury. It also (quietly) asserts a cultural shift I think might be worth exploring in more detail: Letting a character try again, knowing what it costs to do so, knowing that there are limits.

If you like this rule and you want to use it in your home game, go ahead. If you want to borrow it as part of your game design, that’s okay too. If you want to use parts of this essay verbatim, credit me near the excerpt ("this portion was originally written by Dee Pennyway and is presented here with their permission", or similar language).

I know that this house rule makes me feel a lot more comfortable playing Forged-in-the-Dark games. It admittedly makes things less lethal, but there are ways to adjust that too:

• Reduce the size of the stress bar
• Increase the cost of pushing yourself
• Limit the number of injuries you can have before you have to spend a Recovery downtime action
• Let the player retire their character as part of having them become incapacitated

I’m, personally, a fan of games that don’t take characters away from their players before the players are ready. I would much rather provide tools for saying good-bye to a character when the player is ready. But that’s a spitball for another day.