Scores are the Least Interesting part of Blades in the Dark
If you strike up a conversation with someone online and Blades in the Dark (or one of its Forged in the Dark successors) comes up, you can buckle in to hear all about their favorite heist. You'll never believe the flashback that they invoked to bust the job wide open and make out with more loot than they could carry. If you've never played the game, or you've only played one-shots, you might walk away from the conversation thinking "boy howdy, that sure does sound kind of loosey goosey. But they really picked up and played and had a hoot!"
It's really fun to talk about the heists in Blades. They are a great chance to flex your creativity in media res without spending dead air on discord calls looking at the map of a manor and assembling a perfect plan in your heads. When they go well, your crew is richer, more influential, and maybe just stressed out enough to do some ghost opium on the pier, or whatever other weird steampunk vice you've picked for yourself. When they go poorly, you can spin up a new character to play while the old character serves a jail sentence.
Scores in Blades in the Dark are, however, a distraction. They are fun, they are play, but they are not the point of the game text as written, so every breathless word about "backflip problems" is misspent. Blades in the Dark in the text is somewhere between a grand strategy political game and a wargame, and the scores are a trick to convince players to engage with it.
When I wrote Object-Oriented Conversations, I talked about Conversation Games and Object Games as different ways to think about the foundation of the central lusory project of moment-to-moment play. In the commentary that followed, including Vincent Baker's Revisiting the Lumpley Prumpley, we also talked about games that use a prepared sandbox as the foundation of play, or Sandbox Games. In my reading of the text, the underlying foundation of Blades in the Dark is the political sandbox. Up until the moment that the player crew is created, there is a roiling web of interrelated factions that are looking to undercut one another and grow in influence. The player crew is then embedded into this tapestry of connections as a low-level faction looking to make money and a name for themselves at the expense of other factions.
This is all scores do, functionally, within the logic of the game! They're a codified vector for players to think about how they might increase their station at the expense of a rival group! That's not to say that they aren't fun, but they sort of occupy play time the way that a "balanced encounter" does in a game that uses encounter math.
I've been thinking about this in response to a post from Ru's Roleplay Rants, Trying your best and the limits of rewards. A key part of this essay is "The Plan":
Exalted and Shadowrun are both games with complicated settings that directly impact gameplay. They aren’t contexts where you can stick yourself to following the rules and trust that it will produce an effective gameplay experience – you are presented with a scenario in the world, and step one, as a group, is figuring out a plan for how to approach that scenario.
Ru contrasts this with Blades in the Dark, saying that it "actively prohibits the existence of the planning phase". This is true!..in the context of a specific Score. I want to hold this thought in our heads in relation to another insightful quote:
Alongside the desire to see success, and the desire to engage with the mechanics of the game in detail, there’s also a desire to engage with the setting in detail. This, I think, is the interest that the planning step appeals to most. A plan requires overarching conceptual structures to connect element to element, independent of whether it’s connecting mechanical gameplay (fighting one’s way in) or conceptual bypasses entirely.
This, to me, is the heart of what actually makes Blades and its best inheritors special. The setting and the mechanics of Blades in the Dark are inextricably linked. You are not being "tested" with a planning phase in a BITD score because the individual score is one action by one faction (the players) against another. Your planning phase, connecting element to element, is when you target a faction who has something that you want and say that you are going to attempt a score against them. You are using your agency to seek something and ready to face the consequences of failure. If anything, Scores are the closer analog to a PBTA move than any individual threat/action roll - succeed or fail, they change the game state. The actual execution, where you get to use your fun loadout and playbook powers, is set dressing in comparison to the management of crew time and resources in a hostile city that wants you put in your place.
Any time you waste arguing that doing a backflip should advance a lockpicking clock is immaterial in the context of this overarching strategy game, in the way that my friends would get annoyed if I narrated the moment that my soldiers fixed bayonets during our game of Risk.
If you can't tell by my blog output, I spend a lot of time in RPG chatrooms and my jaw never fails to drop when I see either of the two comments about Blades in the Dark:
- I don't run it in Doskvol (and by implication they have stripped out the faction mechanics - I'm willing to be corrected here)
- I get annoyed because players can just always find a way to succeed on action rolls.
Both feel like they are so missing the text that, to my reading, they are no longer playing the game.
I'm willing to make a concession here at the end of this. I've spoken authoritatively on what Blades is as a game, which is self-evidently silly - the game is what you play at the table, the text is not the game. The fact that lots of tables have fun running episodic heists with maybe invisible faction activity between sessions means that it is indeed a way to play the game. The fact that lots of tables play one-shot Scores removed from the context of a dynamic setting means that it is indeed a way to play the game. My argument here is fundamentally that when you overweight the role of the individual player avatar and de-emphasize the crew as an intruder into a dynamic setting, you are irreparably losing the juice of John Harper's rad writing and you shouldn't give that up blindly, or because it seems hard to handle.