Blades in the Dark has this requirement of you to start the daring heists and breakneck schemes of the game in media res. You begin play of The Score, the actual thing happening, in the middle of it. There is an Engagement Roll to determine how well everything went up until this point. You begin play in action. You start grappling with challenges and obstacles and consequences immediately.
This was an ice-water shock to me when I first heard about it. I liked the proposal (who doesn’t like having fun faster?) but I really had to reconsider what I had thought about games up until this point. Thinking about it, the general ttrpg starting point of a genericized idea of a fantasy inn (in practice an interchangeable term with pub, or tavern) has been long derided in the broader play culture. I can provide points on how the Engagement Roll highlights what the struggles with the inn start are: First, it siloes a space that could be played in into a procedure. Second, it categorizes that roleplay as undesirable, and it shifts the focus of the game through this excision. When looking at the change it makes to the tone of play, it changes the start of play to being in action and not at rest.
The Engagement Roll in Blades in the Dark is a fiction calculator that you use to determine the odds of how well the characters do based on a series of input factors. Is someone interfering with your plan? Do you have an ally helping you? Are you exploiting a weakness? Stuff like that influences the outcome. This can cover and expedite some steps towards beginning play in the action like beginning the operation and traveling to a location. Now, this is an interesting tool because of the context it precedes.That context includes challenges with meandering roleplaying.
Do you ever think about why so many D&D games have started in Inns or Taverns? It’s a place where people gather. It’s a social space where everyone comes together. Great. Do you ever think about how that’s a place for people to relax or unwind? I think that this contradiction is at the heart of a lot of ttrpg grief. The socially understood context of an inn contradicts the premise for play requiring excitement. It’s the Contradict-inn. If we are in a play group, we got together to go on an adventure yet here we are starting at rest, and now must work through how to get from rest into action. People make memes about this premise. It’s perennial. You could find it cited by any D&D Fan twitter account reposting it.
Just look at starting at an inn as your introduction to roleplaying. We have seen a shift where people are reaching for other delights than a slowly paced deep immersion into a fantasy world. But does this adequately introduce you to what roleplaying is going to be like for this journey? What new players are confronted with here is that they have to presuppose some choices (for example “I will pilot my character as a genre-aware player”). For the Inn opening, the solution in broader culture has been to sand down these rough spots with out-of-session work (“session zero,” “talk to your players”). Facilitators request that player characters show up ready to cooperate with the party, emerge from a position at resist, and participate in adventure.
So here’s my problem with starting play at rest. I think that beginning at rest means you have to address a choice to move into action or stay at rest, and presupposing the first choice is fumbling the introduction to roleplaying games. If that’s the case, then why start at the inn with the choice to remain at rest at all? Why not just start during the adventure? This is what makes the preamble to the adventure ripe for the engagement roll. The aforementioned Engagement Roll and its variants have the advantage of overtaking this moment to push the game into action through a procedure.
I think that Beginning in Action is right now, the most developed solution to the problems of Beginning at Rest. So if you’re at session zero ask to ditch the inn or have something fuck it up in the first two minutes. If you’re a designer, see what new format you can draft.
Note 1: Agency
We don’t even need to talk about the huge topic of individual agency in games when analyzing this moment in a group setting when someone comes through the door and cries out that goblins are attacking the town. By starting the game at rest, players are denied their first opportunity to express agency. In a group dynamic, players have the opportunity to be experimental by choosing different things than the rest of the players. The first choice they have in the inn start for “What if I made a different choice than everyone else?” is “what if I didn’t pursue the game and just stayed at rest.”
Note 2: Free Play
Though in Blades in the Dark there is a preceding Free Play stage. Please note that the Free Play stage has the same problem as the Inn. It requires players to choose to move into action. Other games that use similar procedures, such as Armor Astir’s Lead a Sortie move need to be met with facilitator leadership that gets players out of rest and into action ASAP. No dawdling.
Note 3: Idle Dreaming
That’s not to say that Beginning at Rest has been or must be abandoned; this a key feature of Idle Dreaming games such as Dream Askew, Galactic 2e, and Wanderhome which have taken steps to change how people operate while at rest. For one, they are GMless which means that they are not mediated through a Referee, and have much more room to make choices that differ from other players. Since there is no Referee to look through, they are responsible for carrying themselves through the process of working through the consequences of those choices. I think that is good. It’s quite marvelous how it’s diverged and taken on that dilemma and made something really cool out of it.
Note 4: Exilium
This was secretly a post to make you read about my game the entire time. Ok so I’m really interested in seeing how I move this theory into practice. Because I honestly hate the “getting to know each other” phase of any story, and that’s not like, what I want to really engage with in a ttrpg. For Exilium, I want to engage with swashbuckling adventures that are actually a series of roleplaying prompts disguised by all the pulpy sci-fi. I want players to make decisions that they can reflect on and use as a foundation to further characterize and develop their characters.
There will be no free play in Exilium. These are runaway mages being pursued by imperial agents. They live in an absence of rest. There is downtime, but I have a design goal to make it fit while the player characters are in transit to the next adventure. You never see Luke Skywalker at rest. He’s always doing something. I wanted that kind of energy.
It’s not that I don’t think playing characters at rest should be removed entirely. I think it is the right move when you hit something that the table has to talk through. But starting things off at rest is just putting an unnecessary obstacle in the path of play.
