Playing Blades in the Dark Without Scoundrels

Disclaimer, this post was spured by a tweet by Steven Lumpkin about Blades in the Dark. I kinda assume you know what Blades in the Dark is, you probably played it and want to play it weirder.

I love Blades in the dark. Have DMd it for a few sessions, have a group where i have several characters for a few months now. But when I play this, I am still mostly in my Powered by the Apocalypse mode. I have my character, I do stuff, I make rolls, get closer to the goal, I resist the bad consequence, my stress goes up a bit.

But there is a part of the game I seldom interacted with, and that is the tier. What if I played a game where there are no scoundrels. Because there are more entities you could play as.

The big entity is the Crew itself. But how would you do that. Crew can’t really use the action. But inside of the crew you have Cohorts, and a Cohort could be an Expert or a Gang

Probably the simplest would be to play as an Expert. Your expert can roll its tier anytime they attempt to utilize their expertise. What about other rolls? You can still argue for your Crew’s tier, and definitely argue for your crews tier to set the scale of the effects of your actions.

You can still get devil’s bargain. I’d let players argue for better or worse position based on the flaws and edges, but probably not for the extra dice.

Then there are several Crew upgrades that dive you extra dice, either as a claim of the crew, because of course you’d be negotiating in your own tavern, if it gives you +1 to sway, or as a special ability, and if you are a zealous cult with an axe to grind, zealotry gives you +1 on all actions against the enemies of your faith.

Group actions probably won’t work, because there are no characters with their precious stress-bars, but setup actions should still work.

What about resisting? If we play by the rules, only player characters can resist consequences. Being the Expert, I would assume you can anticipate the consequences, so as a DM I would play my hand open, to let player be able to decide. Because there is no stress, I’d use more clocks to make the danger even more apparent. Of course, you can use the armor and the little condition boxes.

What about playing entire Gangs? Generally, it would be the same as playing an expert, but you get one more number to count on. The scale of your cohort. While a single Expert will always have a scale 0, your gang has the scale of your crew’s tier. I would play mostly at a greater level of detail, than usual for playing with a Gang, maybe making little clocks for the various members and their eventual fate.

There is one more thing that would have to stay not to break the game, even though with rules as written, only PCs can do. Every player would still have two downtime actions. There would be two really powerful tools still at your disposal, ability to craft items and perform rituals.

For the purpose of this experiment, every player would have one Expert leading an Elite Gang, and every Cohort would have two types from the start. For a real meat-grinder experience, start at Tier 0 and name all of the people of your little crew. You definitely could finish a score with that ;-)

To sum up, I think it could be interesting to play a variant of the game, where

• Your players wouldn’t create characters
• They’d create cohorts instead, playing with their type and scale
• Each player still has two downtime actions
• You’d all lean into playing the tier, turf, status and faction game
• To have a greater edge, you’d utilize crafting and rituals

Would this be kind of limiting? Yes. But it still could be a really nice exercise for people like me, that didn’t touch this part of the game as much :)