WallaceCrow

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WallaceCrow
@WallaceCrow

Blades in the Dark and Character Concepts

I've been GMing Blades in the Dark for a couple months for my TTRPG group. There's a lot to like: a fantastic setting, flexible systems, and great GM resources. However, I've noticed that my players haven't developed their characters as much as I'm used to from campaigns in other systems.

I think that this arises from having few flavorful choices to make during character creation and progression. The playbooks provide a solid archetype, but not much to flesh them out. It's easy to come up with a Hound character concept, but what can you choose during character creation to make them your Hound character?

The special abilities provide the most character flavor, but they fall a bit short for me. They tell you what your character does, but not much about who someone that does that is.

D&D 5E has this issue to a lesser extent with its subclass system. Each of the subclasses, like the different cleric domains, has a strong identity and interesting mechanics, but it can be difficult to distinguish your character from the subclass archetype.

On the other hand, Pathfinder 2E avoids these issues through its feat system. Similarly to 5E, both classes and ancestries have subgroups that communicate a strong identity. However, this is combined with choosing from a pool of feats that is largely independent of your subgroup choice. These feats add both flavor and mechanics that players can latch onto while developing their character concept. For example, this makes it easy to go from a human rogue ruffian to a menacing brawler (You're Next rogue feat) with a rebellious streak ((Haughty Obstinacy)[https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=69] human feat).

If I were to GM character creation for Blades in the Dark again, I'm not sure where I would introduce more character concept hooks. Trying to use special abilities as a starting point, like asking "Why does your character specialize in this?", ultimately leaves players starting from a blank page.

The best option I can think of is akin to Pathfinder 2E campaign feats. Given an inciting event for the party's story, let the player choose from various prewritten reasons that the character has ended up in this situation. These reasons should reflect who the character is and not just something that has happened to them. While more experienced players may decide to come up with their own backstory, I think that this approach would give players a more developed starting point for their characters.

WallaceCrow
@WallaceCrow
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The Barnacle Goose Experiment Review
★★★★★
★★★★★

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Mechanically, a clever variant on the idle genre that manages to hit the satisfaction of constant growth without ever actually giving you a thing that automates your clicks. You only get to the point where your clicks are the only limit to your progress well into the game, and even then in a constrained context—a logarithmic-scale idle game rather than exponential-scale, and to my mind more fun for it. The experiments at the heart of the game bring an aspect of exploration to the genre which my wife aptly describes as "the map discovery of a 4X + cooking in your kitchen + being four and combining dirt and leaves and water in the backyard to see what happens".

Thematically, haunting and intriguing and baffling in all the right measures—particularly once you brew up a radio and start listening to the excellent soundtrack. Evergreen Branca is a character whose only explicit personality comes from their opening letter, but they're well-defined even so by the empty space you see of them in the letters they abiogenerate. Even comes the brief descriptions of objects and locations feel like they come from Dr. Branca's wry and weary mind, rather than a separate narrator.

Altogether a short, quiet game but an affecting one.