So I recently made some kind of big changes to Bump in the Dark and I've playtested them a bit and I'm excited to get them out into the world, but I thought maybe I could talk about them a little bit here. I'll break this up into two posts for readability and also because I don't have a lot of time this morning, so part two will have to come later.
First, let's talk about conditions and harm.
So let's talk about downtime! I love downtime and free play in Forged in the Dark games. My default mode of play is to let downtime take a full session, so in a game of Bump, for example, we'll do a hunt over 1-2 sessions, and downtime/free play for the next session. I like to get in a lot of character stuff, but in a game like Bump it's also a good way to alternate between "monster of the week" and "mythology" episodes like you'd see in X-Files.
So I want to start this out by saying that I don't think downtime is broken (even if some people do -- I'll touch on that in a second), and yet the second big change I'm playtesting in the game right now is an overhaul of downtime.
Inspired by work Justin Ford is doing with Moth-Light and the Chew RPG, I've made a change to how downtime activities work in Bump in the Dark. Now, instead of getting two downtime activities per downtime and rolling actions to see how those activities go, each hunter starts downtime with "downtime dice" equal to the amount of Bond the pact earns after completing a hunt, so 0-3 dice. They roll these dice before downtime and then assign those results to their chosen activities which determine the results.
I had a couple of goals with this change:
1. A more explicit focus on scenes in downtime. The section on downtime in Bump already includes advice for framing free play and downtime in terms of "scenes," discrete little bits of story taking place at a specific point in time and containing something dramatic or at least interesting. Of course, scenes occur during hunts as well, but the focus is different. Hunts tend to be more zoomed in, with less hard framing, and the story is driven much more by investigation, combat, and action rolls. In downtime, I wanted to story to be driven by the scenes themselves -- anything from smaller, slice-of-life montages to big, pivotal, character or story-changing moments. One way that using downtime dice reinforces this is through a sort of sleight of hand: you take out the randomness of rolling for results, which allows more attention to building scenes with a specific mood or focus, by moving the randomness (the actual die roll) outside of the action. In a sense, it feels a little more similar to something like Fiasco or other story-telling games. I think it works really well for what I want to get out of downtime.
2. Improved speed and flow of play. As much as I love downtime, I will admit that it can feel clunky sometimes. Blades itself doesn't give much advice on how to run downtime as Harper intended, which has led to a lot of confusion about what downtime is "supposed" to look like. This leads to the criticism that I see over and over again that downtime plays out too mechanistically or procedurally, like a board game. While I can see how this happens, I don't think it's how downtime is meant to go. I do think downtime allows for more variability in how zoomed in or out you are, and if you play all the downtime activities, one after the other, at a pretty zoomed out level, it will feel more like taking your turn in a board game. But there are other ways to play.
Still, even with the approach that downtime is really just free-play with a special kind of scene known as the downtime activity, it can get a bit messy. Having pre-rolled dice allows this part of the game to go much more quickly. The focus on scenes described above also translates to improved focus on flow of play. It forces players to be more thoughtful about what kind of scenes they want to play out and how those scenes are going to go prior to diving into things. It really led to a smoother downtime experience in play.
An additional benefit, though not strictly intentional on my part, was that downtime feels tactical in a way it never did before. You have to be thoughtful -- intentional -- about how you spend those dice, and I think that this really reinforces the "writer's room" approach to play -- you are tactically deciding what goes well and what doesn't, what action is most important, where we want to see the drama. It's really cool!
There are, however, trade-offs:
Rolling actions during downtime is fun. It's true! Randomness is a big part of what gives us our fun in TTRPGs, and there's something enjoyable about deciding which approach your taking and leaving the results up to chance. For me, this didn't feel like a huge shift or like anything was missing by using downtime dice instead, however I did have players who noticed the absence. They didn't necessarily feel that the new approach was worse, but did note that they missed elements of the old approach.
Some cool mechanics had to be eliminated. Relatedly, there were some approaches to downtime activity rolls that I took that I was pretty proud of. My favorite was that for Seeking Solace, Bump's take on stress reduction, rather than rolling your lowest attribute or picking a specific approach and rolling an action, you would take up dice equal to unmarked doom. This led to a really fun dynamic where the more doom you had marked, the harder it was to clear your marked luck. It felt thematically appropriate and I'm sad to see it gone. Similarly, Acquire Asset rolls were always made with the pact's Trust, because I wanted the pact's relationship to the community to be a more important consideration than any hunter's individual approach.
While I like those little bits of tech and feel their absence to some degree, I still think that downtime dice are the better approach. I really like how it focuses play. I'll playtest it some more, but I think it's a change that's likely to stick around.
What are others' thoughts? Have you played anything that uses this kind of an approach? If not, what knee-jerk reactions do you have?
