This week on Dice Exploder: it’s the season 2 finale! Nychelle Schneider, also known as Mistletoe_Kiss, joins me to talk about customizing games for your table. Not making your own powered by the apocalypse game or whatever, but like adding new abilities and moves to Blades in the Dark or your game of choice. It’s a big conversation, way too big for one episode. This one is chock full of cool ideas that I hope people take and run with.
But since we don’t have as much in the way of specific examples on the podcast this week, I wanted to give some here on the blog.
So here is The Boogeyman, a custom playbook I wrote for Blades in the Dark right after I got home from John Wick 4:
(In lieu of alt text, here’s a dropbox link to a pdf of this - a single page playbook for playing as John Wick in a Blades campaign. Plus I’ll be covering all the salient portions of this below.)
I’m gonna start by tooting my own horn: I think many of these special abilities fucking rock. Some of my best work, and great examples of adding homebrewed moves to your game that are specifically for your table’s characters. Let’s take them one at a time.
The Boogeyman’s Abilities
Hey John: The GM can always declare that you know the person in front of you and owe them a favor.
John starts with this special ability, and it’s entirely negative. On the one hand, this is a drawback I’m starting the playbook with because there’s several flavorful but “game-breaking” abilities on this playbook, and maybe we need to balance that out.
But do we care about breaking the game? Breaking things is fun. Blades is a super broken game if you’re entirely playing to win. The people I play with and the kind of play I like to encourage is much more “play to lose,” and Hey John is going to make that so much easier for players and GMs alike. I know players who would actively spend an advance on this ability just because they like the idea.
I think this is also an ability like the classic “You can always tell when someone is lying to you” special ability where… it’s just kinda good GMing practice and advice even if the players don’t take the ability. In the same way that I think it’s more fun for players to know “this dude is definitely lying to you - what are you going to do about it?” than to have the rug pulled out from under them later because they forgot to roll a survey or study action on the guy, when I’m a GM introducing a new NPC, I am always thinking about how they might already connect into the players’ lives or other existing organizations or powers in the campaign. Entirely new threads and people just add… so much. A smaller, more densely-packed community plays much better for me.
The Man, The Myth, The Legend: Your reputation precedes you. You get +1 effect when speaking with members of the criminal underworld, and you have as many Deadly Friends as you like.
This is a perfectly normal first half of ability and then what feels like an absurd second half. You can have as many friends as you want? But like, why not? Why would we not want PCs to spend more time tying themselves into the local community? It’s the same deal as with Hey John, but now it’s telling the player to do this instead of the GM.
How Many Have You Got?: You cannot be harmed by anyone the GM hasn’t given a name and backstory.
This is the best ability I’ve ever written. I almost don’t want to say anything else about it and just let it speak for itself.
I’ll just mention that the Apocalypse World advice to name every NPC is something I think about all the time, not just in RPGs. I think it’s good life advice! There is something profound to me about remembering that every single other person in the world is a whole human being, there is value in considering their perspectives, and their story is likely just as interesting as yours.
Who doesn’t love that scene in The Mandalorian where two Stormtroopers are shooting the shit?
You can see this concept’s influence on me in Doskvol Breathes, too.
Walk it Off: You never suffer consequences from falling off a building of any height.
Just a joke. Maybe useful, even. Poor John. I worry about his back.
Guns. Lots of Guns.: You can push yourself to do one of the following: engage a large gang on equal footing in close combat—have a gun in your hand, just like that.
With a Fucking Pencil: Any object you wield as a melee weapon counts as Fine.
Dressed To Kill: As long as you’re wearing a suit, you can spend your special armor like it’s regular armor.
A few more standard abilities. Listen, they can’t all be absolute bangers. Also I write my abilities so short that I needed to work hard to fill up the space on the playsheet.
I think if I’d spent more time on this instead of just firing it off in half an hour, I’d actually cut abilities like this. I’d personally rather have fewer abilities overall and a higher density of bangers.
But there’s also value in giving people some really simple abilities that are rarely going to come up in case they’re feeling overwhelmed by all the other mechanics going on. I don’t think anyone who finds this playbook and actually uses it is going to feel that way, but it’s a lesson about writing playbooks that I’ve tried to learn. Simple and standard is good, actually.
There’s also power in abilities that follow a pattern with other playbooks, like the “spend your special armor” abilities that every playbook has. It’s nice to tie the playbooks together with a bit of a formula.
Not If You Can’t Spend It: You have access to a cache of Coin from your old career. When you take this ability, fill your stash with Coin.
This is such a broken ability. But it’s so cool to me. It immediately conjures up the scene of John smashing up the concrete in his basement.
And again, who cares if this is broken? Break your game. The game is now “you are one person with a shitload of resources going up against tier IV factions. What happens?” That sounds fucking lit. Someone come play a 1 PC Blades campaign with me.
Friend to the Furry: As long as you’ve played in a campaign of Dogs in the Bark, you can push yourself to call on the aid of any PCs from that campaign and have them enter the current scene.
Anything for a Dogs in the Bark reference.
In Conclusion
This is repeating Vincent Baker in the essay I mention on this week’s podcast episode, but when you make content just for your table, it only has to work at your table. Balance doesn’t matter unless your table cares. What I would recommend is making shit that absolutely fucking rips, just the coolest garbage imaginable. Burn the game. Nothing is safe. Fuck it all up. Have fun.
You’re gonna do great.