Blades in the Dark campaign retrospective

On GM authority

Been a long time since last posting, because work got in the way; so it goes with blogs!  But I have been playing during that time, most notably running a campaign of Blades in the Dark.  Overall the game was extremely fun, and very useful for me as a GM and for my players as well, in getting into a different mindset when it comes to TTRPGS.  I had run Blades before but for fewer sessions (this campaign ended up being 12 sessions, which is about as long as we end up playing anything).

There was a lot that went well.  First of all, the game was perfect for a group that plays for two-three hours, online, sometimes with inconsistent player attendance.  It was easy to run a score + downtime, and for characters to miss any given score.  As a group, we really liked the interlocking mechanics, and the way that advancement in general always came with complications and entanglements (which returned in later episodes).  The most important thing we learned was the idea of using fictional positioning to contextualize rolls.  The concept of greater or lesser “effect” was a little bit harder to grok, however.  

As a GM, I enjoyed both the undefined quality of the setting elements and the fact that I could be a player and “play to see what happens.”  The tumbling fail forward mechanics, and the improvisation they necessitated, produced genuinely surprising results for each score.  I surprised myself at my ability to just think of what narrative consequence would entail from a given fictional positioning.  As a player, I could even strategize with the group of how to handle a situation, suggesting flashbacks or particular actions, highlighting not only or primarily the likelihood of success but whether it would make for an interesting narrative.  It felt the fictional situation was something that was a bit independent from my presentation of it.

This idea of the GM as player is usually contrasted with the notion of “GM Fiat,” attached to classic and OSR styles of play.  It seems many people purport to use the term as a neutral descriptor, but like so much storygame jargon I find it that it contains it’s own judgement of that style of play.  “Fiat” connotes a sense of absolute power that is arbitrarily wielded.  Obviously there are plenty of RPG horror stories out there, but I have not found this to be the case in practice.  So we can turn to a game like Blades in the Dark and appraise the role of the GM within it.  On the one hand, as described above, I did feel like the fictional situation was something independent of my will, and I was playing to see what would happen through the alchemy of setting a reasonable fictional position and the players rolling the dice.  On the other hand, any game with a GM still relies on copious GM adjudication.  Both in determining the specific consequences for rolls and in presenting and framing new obstacles and scenes, there is still a concentration of narrative authority in the GM’s hands.  The fact that this is improvised based on what happens during any particular score is merely a different articulation of power; I found myself, for example, of only having a hazy idea of what ghosts could or couldn’t do, or what kind of supernatural power was available to NPCs or not.  It always made narrative sense, but from a different perspective is also “unfair” to the players in its mutability.

In conclusion, playing Blades was a revelation in how the GM role could be different, but also did not convince me that that difference was as fundamental as some make it out to be.  Just as in general, playing avowedly narrative-focused games is different but not so fundamentally different from playing traditional games (and the narratives they also produce).  If one is so concerned with GM authority, the best solution is to play a game that removes the GM entirely.  Otherwise, there is always some measure of necessary adjudication and arbitration that resides in the hands of the GM,