A friend of mine mentioned Blades in the Dark at work the other day and it really sounds like something I'd enjoy

Sigh.

This post, you can find it in the PDF yourself.

A good example of how the game spirals came in my last session. The score was assassinating a well-connected (in a low class, gang sense) journalist whose death would spark a gang war. Upon arrival, we find that he was being manipulated by a demon. We kill the journalist and inherent his debt to the demon. My character had gotten the trauma Paranoid and attempted to claim partnership exclusively, beginning a civil war in the group with people who think we should deal with it another way. My character is now a chemist who makes drugs for a living is now learning the occult knowledge of demonhood for a currently unknown price.

I ramble because the session just ended, but characters fighting socially against each other for XP, getting into desperate scenarios for XP, and playing into specific character traits for XP makes players act both bad ass and non- mary sue

I think it actually works really well for one-shots. You can tell cool short stories in Duskwall with it. You can just skip past some of the campaign stuff.

Oh! When I tried that link a few minutes ago it wasn't working.

Thank you!

Oh, nope, it's still not working for me.

Gonna have to disagree, I've never seen anything quite like the heist prep "flashback" mechanic, and while the downtime is not unheard of it's not what you'd call common in my experience. I guess the obvious rebuttal is that I don't have enough experience to realize these things are utterly mundane, and that's fair enough because I've only been in the hobby a couple years. But reading reviews and overviews of it I haven't seen anyone comparing it to other things.

Is that so?

Then, how would you prepare a one-shot for a group of olayers who are completely unfamilair with the system? What parts would you focus on, what parts drop?

Played in a fairly short campaign, wasn't much of a fan. I really liked the setting and the world has a great vibe to it, but as a game it falls pretty flat.

It's also not very well written, the rules are pretty simple, but very poorly explained. They use a lot of keywords and terms which only end up complicating it.

Class balance (both for individual characters and for gangs as a whole) is basically nonexistent with some abilities being auto includes for everyone and others never coming up even when you're a specialist. In addition, since everyone can pick up a few out of class abilities, the only serious differences between characters come from starting equipment.

But don't take my word for it, read it for yourself and hopefully you'll enjoy it more than I did.

dropbox.com/s/hv9as88fscebj57/bladesinthedark_v8_1.pdf?dl=0

Start them with a set crew type. Assassins, Bravos, or Shadows are the easiest to wrap simple scores around.
Ignore the lair, hunting grounds, and preferred operation type, that stuff is only useful for long term role playing.
Just let them chose a special ability (Maybe include the first one that adds a free action dot as a bonus)
Have an idea for the score before hand, the score generator tables are good for basic twists in the score.
Fudge the rules for Tier a little bit so they can go against a high-ish level oponent without being totally ineffective. Starting a tier 0 is good for a campaign, but if you want to start with a fight against the police, go ahead.
Give them mutual interest in the target, but not necessarily backgrounds, give them a couple scenes to set themselves up as general cool guys going about their business.
Play out the score as normal
Play out the cooler parts of downtime if you want, but its not important.
Leave them with an epilogue of greater repercussions for a "Awesome, we did it!" feeling.

For character playbooks, let them choose whatever they want. Playbooks are really just starting stats, specialized items, and a unique XP trigger. There is a lot of mixing and matching.

drive.google.com/open?id=0B1H9jVpUCA-IdXRnc1JDSlI5SnM

Interesting, thanks.

What does the special edition have that this doesn't?

U'Duasha, a second city, separate from Doskvol. Has an Arabian / Egyptian slant, as opposed to Doskvol's more British Isles take.

My favourite part of the game would definitely be the flashback mechanic. It's what makes this system great and really drives down the feel of characters being seasoned, hardened criminals.

For those who don't know, at any point in game, the player can effectively do (or attempt to do) soft retcons of situations by taking stress damage. The amount of stress taken depends on the convolutedness of the situation or how much of a stretch he's making.

For example, my players were doing a gambling con in a pretty busy dockside tavern. A roll went poorly, and the guy they were conning figured it out - he sicced his bodyguards on the team, who was now outnumbered and probably outmatched.

So one of the players takes 2 stress damage to establish that he was in the tavern yesterday and convinced the owner to hire some extra protection (with a partial success on the Sway roll, so the crew gets some extra heat). Which means that as the bodyguards approach the players with violence in their eyes, the two large bouncers step in to interfere.

The rules put it as "the characters are better criminals than the players", which I am absolutely in love with.

I like it quite a bit. It's flexible enough that as GM I can more or less do whatever I like and have it run easily, but there's still enough crunch for the GM and players so that it doesn't become repetitive like Fate. Ran it in my group's homebrew setting's big industrial hellhole city and it worked pretty well, especially since our Whisper shied away from more ghosty abilities and played it more like a shaman type mage.

Thanks!

It's Dishonored, right?

Down to the 'whales' powering the fantastical technology?

It borrows very heavily from it, yes. The blood of leviathans, which are basically demonic whales and/or kraken, are what power most things. Still, it has plenty of original content beyond just that.

Dishonored with labels removed. The rulebook also spells that out multiple times