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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] -1 points 11 months ago

I disagree that the system is simple. It's dead easy. Which is why it is unacceptable and frankly terrible that it plays so badly.

And no I will not let you say 'oh a good DM will just fix it' because that's true for any game. Just going off of the examples BitD gives for when you are supposed to roll makes it clear that they did not consider how their own damn game plays:

This is how they define a Controlled roll, aka the least risky roll you can make: "You have a golden opportunity. You’re exploiting a dominant advantage. You’re set up for success." This is how thy define a Risky roll: "You go head to head. You’re acting under duress. You’re taking a chance."

The phrasing of 'you go head to head' under risky means that any time I am rolling against an NPC, it's a risky roll. By their own definitions, controlled rolls almost never happen. They state this again saying that your default roll is risk,y because if there is no risk, why roll? That's fair enough as a guideline and I agree with the statement in principle, but the fact remains that you're one failure away from a desperate roll in any situation where dice come up. That's bad.

Since you need a 6 to succeed without issues, if you have 3 dice, that's a 42% chance to actually get a 6 on one of them. Not great for what amounts to a great stat for a starting character.

I could trawl for more examples but I'd rather not read this book again.

As for me: I have played CoC, yes, though my TTRPG background is in Shadowrun, Feng Shui, Vampire, Mage and D&D mostly. But no, BitD is not comparable to COC is my opinion, because in CoC I can make a character that can almost always succeed in the things I deem important for the character. Sure they will be a bit of a lump otherwise, but since there is nothing keeping you from having 80+% in your main skills, when it's your time to shine, you can more or less depend on that working out. And sure once the eldritch horrors come out you may die, but so much of a CoC session is sleuthing around, finding clues and unraveling mysteries at a slow pace...I have trouble imagining your average BitD session would feel similar. maybe on one of the guild types I didn't play, but with the default of a thieves guild, I don't see how it would.

I guess what it boils down to for me is that at no point did I feel I was playing a competent character in BitD. Any roll, even in your supposed expertise, was a crapshoot. I played a Lurk and tried to play to their strengths and it just didn't work at all, which felt like bad luck because I didn't think the DM was piling on unnecessary rolls.