Notices by rdonoghue (rdonoghue@dice.camp)

Ok, inspired by my other thread, let's talk about planning in Blades in the Dark.

I love planning. Being very good at planning is part of how I make a living. I am absolutely that player who gravitates towards the mastermind or tactician so hard that my GMs have just come to expect it, and I sometimes have to take deliberate steps to keep myself in check.

I also really love Blades in the Dark.

This may seem contradictory on the surface.

For the unfamiliar, one of the coolest bits of Blades is that it's designed so you can play an elaborate heist full of twists and surprises that all culminate with the kind of "pieces falling into place" feeling of a great caper film without needing to do anything more than sketch the loosest outlines of a plan.

That may seem like a challenge to my getting my planning fix, but it's actually only half the problem.

I am *also* one of those gamers who ends every video game with a backpack full of unused recovery items which I’ve hung onto through the whole game in case I might need them “later".

This is relevant because the driver for all those cool BitD plan-replacement mechanics is the spending of currency which I am far more inclined to hoard.

On paper, I am a very bad BitD player indeed.

But the trick (because there's always a trick) is that I still end up enjoying Blades a lot because I rather shamelessly am happy to *plan anyway*.

So what makes it work? Well, there are player answers and GM answers, s let's start from the player side with the two most critical bits - Pacing and generosity.

Planning in RPGs is like meetings at work - everyone has been exposed to so many examples of how to do it badly that they have stopped believing that it can be done well.

When people think about planning in games, the emotion that jumps to mind is usually boredom, with a side of frustration. It's a lot of time talking about doing something, but never actually DOING it.

And honestly, that's a fair cop.

If you think that guy sounds like an ass, I'm not going to argue, but he at least included the artist's credit with the image, so the VP of Something is still doing better than a lot of people.

I like to think we can all clear that low, low bar.

Also, I think “VP of Something" has now permanently entered my vocabulary as a shorthand for an instantly recognizable type of guy.

Hilariously, when I finally found the image, it was posted by a VP of Something on Linked In, and the message he was promoting was that the problem was video meetings, and if there were fewer of those, then we could all happily return to the office and mingle like good minions.

I admit, I am kind of genuinely impressed at the level of self delusion that reading required. I applaud the commitment to the bit, VP of Something. .

@freemo @TabletopBellhop I feel like if I really understood that, I would be a much richer (but much sadder) person.

Someone shared a comic I liked, but I noticed that somewhere in the chain, the artists name had been removed, so that stopped me. Reverse image searching proved surprisingly frustrating and involved diving into the cesspit of LinkedIn, but I eventually identified the artist as Irina Blok, but I can't link to the original image because its in Instagram jail, so here's her site.

That was a pain in the ass. Please don't trim credits. It's an asshole move.

https://www.irinablok.com

One of my emotional anchors to RPGs is a love for imaginary spaces, and this makes me an absolute sucker for good city books. I buy them for game systems I don’t play just to see how THIS author tries to capture a sense of space.

So it was a no brainer that I’d back City of Arches from @slyflourish , but I surprised myself and went for the hardcover. Why?

Because the previews of the maps have been amazing, and maps are another kryptonite.

I sometimes feel like the real trick to getting us all to surrender ownership of anything digital has taken no trickery more complicated than making sure all the tools for managing digital collections are somewhere between total shit and just a little too frustrating to use.

I am slowly making my peace with the idea that D&D’s incoherence is one of its strongest features, and is a reason why so many attempts to “fix” D&D fail long before the size of the business even enters the picture.

D&D is, ultimately, just enough of an excuse for an infinite toy box of wild bullshit. The imaginary toys are the point, and that’s glorious.

But it’s also super frustrating if you want it to make any kind of sense. Which is too bad, but not enough to stop the fun.

Suppose you run across a cool idea somewhere. Can you use it in your game?

Boring Answer: check if it fits the setting and genre as well as the sensibilities of my table.

D&D answer: FUCK YES YOU CAN!

—-
I worry this sounds flip, but I’m very serious.

“But”, says some rational part of my brain, “D&D will probably do a TERRIBLE job mechanically representing the things that made the idea interesting in the first place.”

And that’s super, duper true. D&D is probably going to suck at making it anything but a pile of hot points or some damage dice.

But…who cares? It will be a brief moment of a shiny, exciting thing, and then we’ll be onto the next one.

This is REALLY FUCKING HARD for me to stare down, because I like and value coherence. So much so that the flaws of D&D seem painfully self evident to me.

But I’m also old and boring, and i have had the pleasure of watching people far younger than me play and love the game, and there is no value in my just deciding they’re doing it wrong.

Hell. I think a lot of the magic is that there isn’t a wrong way. Not in the bullshit way we say it while silently judging, but in a real way.

Also, to be clear, I still like what I like, and a lot of what I like is built on decades of my own responses to hitting limits in D&D that were unsatisfying to me and trying to find ways to find that satisfaction. That has accrued into my personal tastes and interests, and I enjoy them a lot.

But it can also be humbling an alienation to recognize them as an edifice I’ve constructed, not some kind of abstractly “better” version of gaming.

Broadly, technical businesses are:

A) terrible at measuring what works and what doesn’t

B) are even worse at holding leadership accountable for terrible decisions.

(True of many non-tech businesses too, but that’s an aside).

Those two factors point to the inevitability of LLM “AI” in the workplace.

It cuts costs, and it doesn’t matter if it’s good if you don’t know how to measure what good looks like.

I am a believer In the idea that if you’re good at one thing, your path to success largely relies on your being in the top 1% at that thing, but if you’re good at TWO things, you can find success by being top 25% at both. Some of this is math (your exact combination is going to have some rarity), but the bigger art is the assumption that you can find and leverages the synergies between the two things.

It’s not an argument for generalization so much as one for diversification.

A big reason we keep using Miro for our virtual tabletop is that it makes it so easy for players to add contributions. As a game progresses, the battle maps become a smaller and smaller portion of the sprawling content as we add in notes, drawings, NPC images, stories or whatever else comes up. By the end of the game, it’s a big messy record of everything that happened, and that is delightful.