I’ve been playing a lot of Blades in the Dark lately, which is one of my favourite systems because I absolutely hate both above-planning and discussing plans in-character. It’s something I really struggle with as a DM, too, because I get probably too impatient with wanting to cut off planning, especially when it’s happening in an urgent situation where a lot of in-character chat makes no sense.
Daggerheart actually provides some good tools for this, mostly being able to start a Countdown and spend Fear to keep filling it the more time the PCs take discussing what to do.
Unexpectedly, today the characters ended up facing a series of admittedly really difficult decisions, having to choose between priorities or deciding if they want to risk losing opportunities for good in order to gain instant gratification. I love posing hard choices… and hate when people spiral in indecision about them. Yes, I’m causing my own problems.
But one of the best ways to make a story and a place feel genuinely frightening and dangerous is for choices not to come cheaply, and (as I’ve discussed before) for everything to have consequences. You can’t act lightly with Strahd’s eye upon you. You can’t only think one step ahead, or fail to consider the allies, resources, or options that could be useful to you in the future. I’ll talk more about that next week…
This week, though, I tried out a method for streamlining decision-making while still trying to give the players and characters space to discuss. I didn’t implement it as rigorously as I could have, but since the players spoke highly of it afterwards, I think I’m going to lean it way more heavily in the future and in future games.
In brief, when the conversation started circling, or taking way longer than I felt like seemed plausible given the circumstances, I went around and asked every player to tell me, “What is your character thinking, and what do they say the group should do?”
The players said they found it helpful, because it let them take the out-of-character considerations off the table and just focus on and articulate what was happening internally and in relation to the story for their character, which helped them come to a decision about what their character would want to do… which in turn helped lead to a much simpler conversation about whether the majority’s decision was a path they as players wanted to pursue.
It also lead to some really great character moments, as players had space to reveal what was motivating their character beyond just what they were arguing for in the moment. One player revealed some really wonderful internal self-loathing that their character was experiencing that hadn’t otherwise come out in description or dialogue; another player came to an idea for a solution that hadn’t come up yet at all, and ended up being the option they chose.
I think that D&D and its knock-off games are fundamentally about solving problems, so presenting players with difficult problems to solve, problems with no right answer or even sometimes no good answer, is core to creating fun and drama, and to making a game compelling. It raises stakes, forces them to use their abilities, and gives fodder for roleplay. I never want to resist asking questions just because the process of answering them is frustrating and takes way too much time. And it’s just too important to creating an atmosphere of tension and fear. So I’m really happy that this solution worked so well, and I’m looking forward to continuing to refine it, and finding other ways to spotlight the characters’ inner workings, because it’s really fun and fruitful… and it really helps keep things moving.
It was only reflecting after the session that I realised there’s another essential element to making hard decisions land: I have to reward the sacrifices they do choose to make. Barovia is brutal, but if the good things they do never matter while they’re also getting constantly punished for their mistakes, the world becomes demoralising rather than scary. One of the themes of the game as we’ve set it up is that Barovia’s salvation will come from its own people, not from heroic adventurers from the outside, so when they make the hard choice to help someone at cost to themselves, or work with someone they have bad blood with, they deserve to be rewarded for that. Otherwise, decisions will just become easy in a different way, because they’ll know things will be shit no matter what they choose, so who cares?
This session really exposed one of the things I truly dislike about D&D and that Daggerheart clearly does not solve, which is the ease of resorting to violence, and the cheapness with which death comes. It’s way too easy for players to just begin classing everything and everyone who opposes them as an enemy, and death as a reasonable solution to the problem of opposition. I don’t like that as either a player or a GM, but I find that even parties who go in with the intention of treating all NPCs like real people start to slip in the face of how much more effective violence is than any other solution in the game.
I don’t want to ruin people’s fantasy of getting to punch their problems in the face, but given they’re going to get the reward of solving most of Barovia’s problems by killing one guy (probably), and given you get the moral absolution of learning that most Barovians aren’t even real people, I think it’s reasonable to ask the party to consider their collateral damage carefully (especially since my party doesn’t know about the no-souls thing yet).
I think next session is going to be a chance to really try to hit that balance, and make both types of decision have weight. Make it matter that they killed… a lot of people… but also make it matter that they saved some people they didn’t really want to save.