One of the key ideas in Blades in the Dark is avoiding lengthy planning discussions. You go on missions called Scores and you only plan very minimally how you want to achieve your mission.

Then through play you can flashback to when your characters were preparing the score and say “of course, I bribed this guard yesterday so that he’d let us in the back doors”, that kind of thing.

So for equipment you just choose whether you have a lot, some or a little, not what you actually have. There is a stealth penalty for having a lot.

Then during play, when you need something you just mark off a slot on your sheet - obviously it needs to be something you reasonably have access to.

So I’ll often say “you have 3 things with you but you can tell me what they are when you need them”.

Blades in the Dark loadout mechanic I’ve used in almost every one shot regardless of system. Too useful

Inkscape doing whatever god you pray to’s work. I use it all the time for webdev stuff, esp. SVGs in tandem with svgomg.net

Sounds good, it has enough without being too restrictive Seems like it will give you some good angles for character development and choices, I say go for it!

Some great suggestions in this thread (dune and VtM were the two that immediately sprang to mind for me).

Another one you could look at is Pendragon. The social standing and celebrity status of each of the PCs is a big part of this. If you like the setting it could be a good one.

Great! Good luck with it

Took me a little bit to understand it but in summary the mechanic is that failing rolls reduces your points eventually forcing you to need to feed.

I don’t really get the point of euphoria vs thirst though. Say I begin on 5 which seems to be the best starting option, I’ve got a 2:1 chance of failing my roll so very likely I will drop to 4. Now I have a 1:1 chance of failure so I might stay at the 4 or 3 level for longer. As soon as I’m down to 2 the odds of failure increase again, so I would need to feed.

Your rules don’t specify how to calculate the points to recover when feeding, I would definitely add that.

I’d also consider changing the dice mechanic to a linear progression, potentially - unless there’s some additional mechanic to it that I’ve missed.

The way they do it in Cosmic Dark feels like it would fit well here. They roll a d6 to get a result, but in times of stress or if they feel it’s appropriate they can roll a “change” die. That starts on 1 and if you roll higher it goes up by one. So it gets progressively less likely to hit, but you’re out of the game when you reach 6.

Fair enough!

Assume you know about owlbear.rodeo ?

Again, it’s not what you WANT but at least everyone can see what’s going on on their phone

I highly recommend watching or listening to the glass cannon network play through of this (unless you don’t want to spoil the plot for yourself). It’s across roughly 50 episodes and it’s one of the best things they’ve ever done. All the characters are interesting and their descent into madness is performed exceptionally well.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz3Be--ot61MziBtEnjmF7nFjXR166e_6

It’s referred to as Get In The Trunk seasons 4-6 but you don’t really need to have heard the first 3 (although they are good).

Oh yeah then the options basically are you draw it, you nick some similar picture and photoshop it, you commission someone, or you use the image generator.

I’d say for the token itself, I would hope it would not need to be so detailed. But if you want to show key art in full (I don’t feel like specific sunglasses features are going to be visible on a token anyway), then you need a full image…

I’ve tried the image generators for handout images before, the results were OK but it’s still time consuming and there’s obviously the environmental impact of what you’re doing, which we have limited data on

What’s your plan for the two visually distinctive ones you mention? Or is that what you’re asking for advice with?

Some more context detail might help, here

Yeah I dunno, using Firefox mobile the enworld link doesn’t load for me 🤷‍♂️

For some reason their links to drive thru never work for me. Here is the Cosmic Horror 25% stuff

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/browse?promo=1000147&src=mythos2025dtrpgphnx

It probably means something like mothership as well, where the character sheet is designed such that it guides you on how to fill it without the need for a separate book.

But really I’m not sure I agree much with the article. I could be wrong but it seems to me that the audience is growing and therefore what the audience want is becoming more diverse.

My own very biased experience is I that I started playing dungeons and dragons, literally having no clue about this gigantic iceberg of other stuff with a 50+ year history behind it. Did that for a few years, through the pandemic etc.

Fast forward a bit, the idea of playing Combat rpgs now (so pathfinder, 5.5, whatever) interests me almost not at all. I want to tell stories and try out new personalities. I’ve now played a ton of Call of Cthulhu (which I’d argue is extremely rules light if you want it to be), Delta Green, Mork Borg, Vaesen and would have played dozens more if I had a more local group to play with.

Would love to play some Blades though… Weirdly a bit like Delta Green, you’d think it would be great for easier to organise one shots but actually you need a short campaign to get the most of it, I would say

I might be on the minority on all that, I don’t know!

Can someone unpick this for me yes yes no style?

Worked for me luckily. Picked up the BRP book. Haven’t cracked it open yet but I’ve played enough Cthulhu 7th to know the system pretty well.

I’m listening to the glass cannon play Pendragon but the system seems totally different (and very interesting!)

What am I missing?

Ah yeah that is one with loads of minis right? I’d love to play both one day but it was ever thus…

Site seems down at the moment… I’ve never played either game but I do love some of the source material… Macross Plus a particular favourite, and Evangelion of course… Is that what these games are about?

Thanks for posting these