Adjusting Tone and Lethality in Forged in the Dark RPGs (Patreon)

If you've been following indie RPG design in the past few years, and/or my recent renaissance of tabletop gaming, you've probably heard about Blades in the Dark and the Forged in the Dark family of games.

Last week, a friend asked about scaling threats/danger/lethality in Blades in the Dark/Forged in the Dark (FitD) games. By default, Blades in the Dark is a pretty lethal game - characters are constantly going up against threats above their scale, and the consequences of a failed roll in Desperate circumstances can be life-threatening. The default tone of Blades in the Dark is also pretty dark (see the name). Scum & Villainy (a space opera FitD game) is less lethal/more heroic by default due to largely to the Gambit system, which provides another source of bonus dice to the group and enables more ambitious actions. The source material for Scum & Villainy is (IMO) also a bit more heroic in tone.

As a storyteller, I tend toward more heroic/optimistic tones in my games and fiction, so I'd already spent some time thinking about these semi-opaque sliders of tone and lethality, specifically in Forged in the Dark RPGs (though you can find ways to apply these to other games!).

The first, most important point here is that the game is your game, and you can play the way that helps you and your group have the most fun. There are no RPG police coming to knock down your door and tell you you're having Bad Wrong Fun. And if someone *does* want to tell you you're playing wrong because you're making a game more grim or more heroic, those people are being jerks.

If you want a game of Blades in the Dark where your characters are likely to die every time they go out on a job, where the success of the crew is more important than any one scoundrel's life, where your gang will run through members over the campaign as the meat grinder of Duskwall churns through ambitious scoundrels? You can play that game, and that's cool! And if you want your game to be more heroic, to tell the tale of plucky heroes that rise from rags to riches while thumbing their noses at the Bluecoats, Demons, and the Immortal Emperor himself, then that's cool, too! 

Communicate with your group and help figure out what tone you're all shooting for together and then discuss whether the rules need to change to help you do that.

Here are ten ideas/options for adjusting lethality and tone in FitD games. Many of these just build on elements from the core books (Blades in the Dark, Scum & Villainy, Band of Blades, etc.) or things I've seen in play from Actual Play series (which are another great source of inspiration for how to make the game fit your preferred style of play).

1) One of the easiest ways to lower the temperature of lethality is to focus more on complications than harm when the dice come up as a Mixed Success (a 4-5 on the highest die). 

Here's an example of what that might look like, using situations from the game Band of Blades: "You're able to bring down the house on the serpent-corpse Horror, stopping its advance (you finish its 8-clock with two ticks from the Mixed Success), but the crashing rubble cuts you off from your squad just as you hear the howls of a pack of Hounds charging down the street. What do you do?" 

Since these are complications, they can be Resisted just as can Harm. So maybe the Scout bringing the house down on the Horror rolls resist with Prowess and nimbly climbs up and over the rubble to rejoin their squad before being cut off by the Hounds. They roll Resist and pay the stress cost based on the roll.

2) As #1, but you can go even farther. Depending on the situation, it's also fine to treat a Failure (1-3 on the highest die) as a success with a major cost or complication.

In the same situation as above, maybe that looks like:

"So, you bring the house down, and it stuns the Horror, saving the fleeing civilians evacuating through the streets. But you can tell it's not dead, and what's worse, as the Horror collapses through the floor, you see that it's collapsed into the sewer route you and the squad used to get into the city. So now you're either going to have to find a new route out of the city, pop up here during the escape and then try to get back into the sewers, or something else.

And in the meantime, the Hounds have picked up your scent, and they're pressing in on you from all sides. You're in a Desperate position. What do you do?"

Mechanically, the Horror isn't quite removed as a threat (you'd only add one tick rather than two on a Mixed Success), the character's in a desperate position, but the civilians won't suffer the harm that was threatened before the Scout's action. Again, the Scout could resist the consequence of the Horror cutting off the escape route or the Worse Position of being surrounded by Hounds.

3) If you're treating obstacles as clocks (where action results fill up a clock representing the obstacle and the obstacle is only overcome when the clock is full), you can decrease the size of the clocks so that complications/harm doesn't stack up quite so much as you overcome the obstacle. An 8-clock tends to take fewer actions to overcome than a 10 clock, and so on.

Example - if your Scum & Villainy crew is met with the obstacle of guard robots, you could represent that robot squad as a Clock with 6 segments rather than 8 to make it a bit easier, or maybe even a 4-clock if they're numerous, but not a major threat. A 4-clock would only take two standard effect rolls to overcome, or one Great effect after a single Lesser effect. If your crew is facing a large squad of minions, you can have each segment of the clock represent several robots rather than one. And so on.

4) You can increase the base Gambit pool or modify how characters can get Gambits so that they have more access to that boost. 

Gambits, from Scum & Villainy, are a group-scale resource that represents the crew's ability to dig deep for amazing feats. It's not hard to port Gambits into other FitD games. They can represent the spirit of camraderie and the Legend of the Legion in Band of Blades, or they can represent the razorblade grit of scoundrels in Blades in the Dark, etc.

Conversely, if you wanted to make Gambits less powerful for a grittier game, you could require characters spend 1 stress each time they spend a Gambit, which turns them into a half-cost push. 

5) There are lots of ways you could build more systems around Gambits if you want to use them. You could award Gambits for great role-play as well as 6s on Risky rolls (the default way to earn Gambits). You could allow the crew to create a Long-Term project to increase the Gambit pool in some way (maybe the crew runs a series of group training exercises that increases their cohesion). Or you could just make the game more cinematic by increasing the base Gambit ratings on the ships from 1-2 to 2-3 or 3-4.

6) You can increase the stress tracks a bit or reduce the cost of Resistance (from 7 minus the highest result to 6 or even 5 minus the highest result. In those cases, it can't cost negative stress to resist, but it's more likely to be free). We see this choice manifest in the design of Scum & Villainy, where Resistance costs 6 minus the highest result rather than 7 minus the highest result. This is another subtle but important way in which S&V is more heroic in tone by default. 

7) If you like the ways that characters can spend stress to get out of trouble or to pull off amazing feats, you could give your characters a larger stress track, with more to spend before getting a Trauma. A longer stress track gives the characters a deeper reserve of that game-changing ability to resist consequences or push themselves in critical situations. If you do this, be aware of the ways that the Indulge Vice system removes stress and see if you want to adjust it to let characters remove more or less stress when they blow off steam. By default, Indulge Vice and the other stress reduction systems are designed around the game's default stress track.

8) If you want to keep the amount or number of consequences the same, where heroes are still facing big consequences and/or harm, but you want the heroes to have a greater ability to mitigate those consequences, you can change how Armor/Special Armor works. 

In FitD games, there's normal Armor and Special Armor. Normal armor is physical - it's boiled leathers and steel in Blades in the Dark, it's plasteel or personal shields in Scum & Villainy, etc.

Special Armor is less concrete by default - each player decides what Special Armor means for their character when they have it. Special Armor tends to come from abilities, like the Muscle's Battleborn ability in S&V, which they can use to reduce harm from an attack or to push yourself in a fight. Maybe one Muscle's Special Armor represents their nanotech going into overdrive, while another Muscle's Special Armor represents the super-human strength and toughness from their heritage (see Chewbacca in Star Wars and his Wookiee strength). Other Special Armor for a sneaky character might represent their sixth sense for danger, and they spend it to avoid the consequence of being caught by a patrol walking around the corner at the wrong time.

Special Armor is *really cool* once you can wrap your head around it. So in your game, maybe armor can resist two levels of harm rather than just one. Maybe Special Armor comes with a resistance roll, and if you get a 6 or a critical, the Special Armor automatically refreshes instead of being spent for the mission/job.

9) By default, pushing costs two stress in FitD games. If you wanted the characters to be able to push themselves as easily as they can help one another, you could reduce the cost of pushing to 1 stress (note that some abilities do this, so you may need to replace that ability). 

10) If you want to focus on teamwork and the way that characters help each other out, you can make assists more powerful by adding a team/crew resource called Teamwork (similar to but different from Gambits). A character could spend a point of Teamwork to give a free assist to another character without spending stress. That Teamwork pool could be increased with Long-Term actions or at milestones based on the cohesion of the team. Or maybe the Teamwork pool is blocked or set to zero if there's a rift in the team and that trust is lost, and takes specific work to re-activate. Maybe Teamwork in Band of Blades is linked to the Morale of the Legion - a base of 2 in High Morale, 1 in Medium Morale, and 0 in Low Morale as each member of the Legion is more focused on their own survival than they would be in happier times.

Takeaway

The biggest takeaway for me is that these Forged in the Dark games were made specifically to be hacked. The designers built them for players to have an easier time making the game their own, and you should feel free to push, pull, and tweak the game system until you feel like it's serving you and your group in telling the kind of stories you want to tell. If you do decide to make a change like the ones above, maybe treat it like an experiment you're all running together. Make sure to solicit feedback so that the intended effect of the change is what's actually ends up happening. And if not, you can always adjust! 

And if you take a step back, these tweaks can be adapted to other rpgs. You can add Teamwork to D&D 5e as a pool to focus on the ways your party helps one another (where you can spend a point of Teamwork to perform Help as a bonus action), or implement Mixed Success rolls in your Horror games to help the story move forward without sacrificing the threat of consequences.

What are some of the ways you've tweaked Forged in the Dark games or other RPGs to hit your groups' preferred tone?

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