Clocks are Easy to Draw

To me this is the defining draw of the clock, as in the tabletop game notation. It’s easy to draw a rough circle and put a few slashes through it to create a quick stress track that’s easy to read and easy to fill in. I can put infinite of these in the margins of my notes, directly on a vtt with whatever rough drawing tools they provide, draw a lil row of pizzas on the erasable mat if I’m playing in person. It’s convenient to do in a way that I don’t find intrusive to playing, and that’s genuinely valuable to me.

The clock, in most tabletop discursive spaces I am in, is seen as a defining feature of the very popular game Blades in the Dark. I do not like Blades in the Dark very much, which I think it is worth being clear about up front — it is a bit of a sacred cow in some spaces. The aim of this isn’t to be mean to it, but if I am in the process of getting where I’m going, I am unrepentant. It’s a very successful game, it can take it.

An excerpt from Blades in the Dark (page 169 of the pdf which I have previously ran the game from):

Fiction-first is a bit of jargon to describe the process of playing a roleplaying game, as opposed to other sorts of games you might be used to.
In a standard board game, for example, when you take your turn, you choose a move from one of the mechanics of the game, and then use that game system to resolve what happens. You might say, “I’m going to pay two stone to build a second fort on my home tile.” We could call this process “mechanics-first.” What you do on your turn is pick a mechanic to engage, then resolve that mechanic. Your choices are constrained by the mechanics of the game. You might color it in with some fictional trappings, like, “The brave citizens of Baronia heed the call to war and build a stout fort!” but the fiction is secondary; it’s flavor added on. In other words, the fiction is brought in after the mechanics, to describe what happened.
In a roleplaying game, it’s different. When it’s your turn, you say what your character does within the ongoing fictional narrative. You don’t pick a mechanic first, you say something about the fiction first. Your choices in a roleplaying game aren’t immediately constrained by the mechanics, they’re constrained by the established fictional situation. In other words, the mechanics are brought in after the fictional action has determined which mechanics we need to use.

On its face I find this a mostly reasonable way of stating something I would probably state differently (though I feel like id put it pretty near the start of a book, if I included it at all). I think of role-playing games as a series of claims. The players involved each make claims about the world — often, but not necessarily, distinguishing the scope of said claims through a gm-player division — and the playfulness itself comes of responding, making counterclaims, and coming to a shared understanding with the others involved. When a disagreement in outcome of claims is reached, it is settled by building an assemblage of tools, conversational or systemic, to bridge that gap in a satisfying way. I find this a valuable framework to think through because to me the value of ttrpgs is as a shared imaginative exercise with my friends. This is not exactly what is being described by the passage on fiction-first, for example I think the emphasis on “fiction” and invocation of ongoing narrative doesn’t get where I want to be with my Claims-claim, but I can do some generous syncretism where I say these are two ways of saying to treat the imaginative and creative processes as having primacy, and the mechanical being something you reach for after the imaginative. A crucial split, though: “the mechanics are brought in after the fictional action has determined which mechanics we need to use.” This text does explicitly say need.

This brings me to the mechanical trappings of blades, which I find constantly intrusive to the act of giving the imaginative any primacy. Clocks are easy to draw. This matters less as they join several other types of stress track, most of which are not significantly different in mechanism but which are presented in a weirdly wide number of forms. Most every mechanism at some point references most every other, and many of those are written such that they adjudicate what claims can be made and how, as selected from a list of mechanics whose import must be constantly unpacked. This is not unique to Blades of course, but I find it a notable thing in a game that positions itself in the way it does. Of course none of this stops me from adjudicating fiction through the game-of-claims process, but I find myself wondering: why these trappings in particular atop that?

The worst offender is position/effect, I think. It narrows the game’s imagination of the world into a space so mechanical that it feels best metaphorized as shifting gears on a bicycle. Some stress track must be overcome, and you have two buttons to click between three positions each to generate the force that will or won’t fail at moving through said track. To both negotiate the fictional claims and to use the mechanics the book prescribes requires subordinating the initial claim to this set of gears and interpreting it through the outcomes it lays out, and then backtracking to square those outcomes to the claims, often tenuously.

There are two takeaways I find valuable from this:

Wherein lies the “fiction?” If we accept the text’s claim at being fiction-first, I think we have to ask this also. There are a number of identifiable fictions: myself and the other players produce claims that are fictional, the game has extensive text on a fictional setting, and the rules themselves claim to mimic the motions of a subset of genre fiction. If all of these are fiction, which do we first? And is there perhaps a value to looking askance at narrowing the broad space of “fiction” to be these alone? If so, is the term fiction-first useful? I tend to think not, and I find interrogating that to be useful in clarifying other thoughts and feelings I have on ttrpg texts.

What subject is assumed here? The subjective nature of games is often invoked when differences in taste appear, which is fine, but I find a value in taking that several steps further. This is especially true of a game like Blades where the rules are sometimes treated as almost a disciplinary force which produces the “good” outcomes of the game. As someone who pretty regularly responds non-normatively to disciplinary forces, I can’t avoid confronting this. The assumed subject of Blades seems to be deeply normative, a player entrenched in a hegemony of play produced by a mode of 5e DnD that looms large discursively, and yet who will find the rhetoric of and small concessions to other modes of play in Blades’s deeply mechanistic framework deeply revelatory — which feels to me like a fairly paternalistic construction of an ideal subject audience who can both be entrained into a new mastery and onboarded economically. Publishing with that player in mind seems to have been an economic decision that has paid off for Blades, but does that leave it alienating to those who are not this assumed subject? Anecdotally I can say yes, and I suggest that this is a more valuable way to approach texts than as will-to-power expressions of the author.