this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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Blades in the dark is such a monkey's paw for me. I'm happy people are playing something that's not dnd nor a close relative, but I don't actually like it very much.
It felt very downward spiral to me, which I do not like at all. I've got "and you'll never fully recover" enough in real life. The book (or maybe just a quick start pdf the guy in my old group gave us) was like "horrible things will happen to your character! They'll suffer and break! It's going to be fun" and I was like no thank you.
Also I didn't really like the group I played it with that much, so that didn't help.
It's fine to not want the dark tone, classic d&d heroic fantasy is much more of a feel-good vibe and there's nothing wrong with liking that. There are a lot of Forged in the Dark games (i.e. Blades hacks) with different themes, I imagine a load are much less dark!
Maybe! The way stress, harm, and trauma worked seemed to be pretty baked in, but I haven't done a lot of digging. You could probably make some hacks to allow easier recovery, but I've been happy with Fate instead.
Yeah I would think removing stress and trauma would fundamentally change the game into something else, but you could still reskin them to change the tone. For example stress could be your mana, and traumas could be your soul ascending, or something like that in a heroic fantasy setting; the mechanics are still the same but it doesn't have the same dark vibe.
Ya several of the Forged in the Dark games change the way these mechanics work. They're great fun still.