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Critical Role’s Candela Obscura is but a pale shadow of its inspiration, Blades in the Dark (www.polygon.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Well, the main issue stems from pure success being unlikely to attain because most rolls will not be for 'sure things'. Your combined chance to fail a roll outright or succeed at a cost is far far higher then succeeding a check, so when I played it, we entered a failure cascade pretty fast whenever we had to roll to do something.

Like, in any situation, you only succeed without issue if you roll a 6 in your die pool. Typically, that pool is between 2 and 4 dice, so your chance to roll a 6 is, at lest, okay. And if you don't get that 6, you either have to escalate the situation or suffer complications, or you just fail, if you only have 1-3s on your dice. It's just...I dunno.

edit wasn't done typing: If you had more dice, this system would probably work, but each class is only good at very few things, so as soon as you are out of your characters comfort zone, you are in such high risk of failure that it's just not very fun. When I played it (one time), it felt like a comedy of errors and not like a bunch of hardened criminals doing a heist.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Yeah, I can see where you're coming from. Only looking at some of the SRD stuff, it looks like Blades gives you 7 dots across 12 actions? The hack that I was playing (Blades of the Immortals) had 6 dots across 9 actions and spilled a lot of ink to stress that making the players feel incompetent is bad and should be avoided, partially due to the genre being more dramatic than grim and grimy.