Design: Alternate Timelines
On the true power of Resistance, Flashbacks, and other mechanics that grant players control over space and time.
Observations and advice for designers and players inspired by actual play.
Forward
This post recreates my entry to the Lessons From the Dark Jam. The lessons herein are inspired by my time with John Harper’s Blade’s in the Dark. If your experience is primarily with Dungeons & Dragons or other games with a mechanics-first philosophy, many of these techniques might feel like cheating. I assure you that they can enrich your own stories, whatever system you prefer.
Topics
Principle 1: Roleplay in the Quantum Realm
Principle 2: Show Them Your Teeth
Principle 3: Have Fun With Flashbacks
Parting Words: Lessons From the Dark
Principle 1: Roleplay in the Quantum Realm
It’s nearing the end of the session and your time in Doskvol is pushing on your own limitations as a player. You haven’t eaten, and you just want to finish this one last score before you call it a night and tend to your failing body. You push your character to do something you immediately regret, but the forward momentum drives you to a conclusion. An unsatisfying one, to be sure, but right now that doesn’t matter.
Then, when you’re laying in bed that night, it hits you: it doesn’t have to be this way.
Sometimes in life we are forced to sit with our decisions. To accept choices we wish we could take back. Words we wish we had said, or said differently. Fortunately, we can. At least in the world of tabletop roleplay. A narrative-first mindset makes it possible.
This decision, to revise what has been established, is controversial in some gaming circles. The idea that one can return to moments of failure, to undo a poor result, or even to return from death, is akin to cheating.
To you I would say the following: hold a discussion, ask your fellow players why they wish to turn back fate and explore another reality? Were they simply inconvenienced by their failure, or did they see another way forward that was, for whatever reason, invisible to you.
Roleplay in the quantum realm invites everyone at the table to bravely explore diverging narratives. To metagame. To prod at the boundaries of possibility. By exploring multiple worlds, we can discover the best possible version of the story we intend to tell.
Stories are not static things. They change and evolve over time, adapting themselves to modern language and sensibilities. In response, it becomes important to entertain two versions of the same story simultaneously. This power needn’t be mechanized, it’s hard-coded into the basic exercise of storytelling. Still, it has been elaborated and improved upon with safety mechanics such as the X-Card by John Stavropoulos or the Script Change tool by Beau Jágr Sheldon.
In Blades in the Dark we also have access to techniques that mechanize these decisions. Namely: flashbacks, the resistance roll, and an adjudication technique referred to as “the conversation”. It’s my belief that embracing the quantum nature of fictional realities leads to better memories. Better memories, in turn, lead to better stories.
Design Considerations
If you’d like to encourage players of your game to roleplay in the quantum realm, consider the following.
Do you entrust everyone at the table with the role of “storyteller?” To what degree?
Do your game’s principles and mechanics encourage players to blur the line between “metagaming” and roleplay? Include moves, special abilities, and mechanics that explicitly blur these boundaries.
Do you utilize safety tools with a low threshold of engagement? Don’t require that players justify a retcon or revision. Being unsatisfied with a detail or decision is enough.
Do you empower GMs to foreshadow the consequences? Give GMs and players the satisfaction of exploring victory AND defeat simultaneously.
Is your game highly tactical in nature? Make distinctions between the tactical and narrative philosophies inherent to your game.
Does your game encourage improvisational play? The quantum narrative requires improvisation to survive. Without it, your story will be tied into impossibly complex knots.
Principle 2: Show Them Your Teeth
The carriage races towards you, its heavy wooden wheels leaping off the cobblestones like snapping jaws. You let loose with a single shot from your black-powder pistol only to be struck down and trampled to the earth. As the blood leaves your body, you wonder if you made the right decision, if your bullet hit its mark. Could you have been more agile, better prepared, stronger, smarter?
Certainty builds and you realize that, yes, you are all these things and then some. You take up the dice and show them how.
As part of the Blades in the Dark discord #hack channel, I have seen many games with novel mechanics but one remains a near constant. Indeed, it could be said that the resistance roll is one of several mechanics that defines the Forged in the Dark genre.
Have you just failed a roll? Did you succeed with a cost? The resistance roll empowers players to show us what you’re willing to do to avoid the consequences of your actions. Players might not be able to achieve what they failed to do, but they can impress us with a firm assertion of their own power, agility, or will.
Show them your teeth is a directive to GMs to not pull their punches and to trust the players to say “no.” Most games have tools that empower players even when they are shown in the fiction to be powerless. By going hard in such a game you are conveying serious stakes. You are properly communicating what might happen if the players chose to do nothing. In response, those same players can choose to act, they can resist the consequences, or they can flashback to show us that they were prepared.
Show them your teeth also asks the players to demonstrate their competence. To show the imaginary audience how they leverage their agency and plot armor to succeed. Employ these weapons often.
In Moth-Light, my FitD Sci-Fi game, I ask that GMs present the exact consequences of an action up front, as part of the initial conversation. Not only does this technique clarify the stakes for new players, it offers GMs an opportunity to bare their fangs in a setting that is slightly more heroic and hopeful than that of Doskvol.
Consider employing this technique in your own game if it aligns with your design goals. This technique can be especially effective in the horror genre, where opportunities to vividly describe violence, death, and tragedy are at a premium.
Design Considerations
If you’d like to encourage players of your game to show them your teeth, consider the following.
What’s the cost? Is this a high powered setting or is it dark a gritty. The price you set will determine whether resistance is common or rare.
Does your game encourage players to consider failure? Is failure an interesting option in your game or is it anathema to the table? Choosing not to resist should be a valid option, too.
Does your game’s table culture distinguish between player secrets and fictional ones? Reluctance to reveal in-game secrets can discourage players and GMs from going “all out” with their descriptions.
Do you reward players for engaging in vivid descriptions of competence? In FitD games, the details of an action or situation have mechanical benefits and consequences. Tap into this loop to improve your own designs.
What are the stakes of your game? The higher the stakes, the more effective this principle and the techniques that empower it will be.
What are the consequences? Blades in the Dark plays with emotional and logistical consequences as readily as it does physical ones. Effective application of this principle requires GMs understand the spectrum of consequences at their disposal.
Principle 3: Have Fun With Flashbacks
It’s a rain soaked evening in Crow’s Foot when the Inspector springs her trap. Blue Coats rushing in to surround you. Guns drawn. We can’t see the fear on your masked face but her desperation is palpable. Hollow eyes swivel about on heavily cloaked shoulders, your face scanning the buildings for some avenue of escape, but there is none.
At the table, you laugh quietly to yourself. “I have a wild idea. Let me show you how I outmaneuvered the Inspectors, got away scott free, and sent my most hated rival to Ironhook, all in one day.
After an extended flashback, we return to the present time. In the alleyway, the man who appears to be you is breaking down, his fingers fumbling over the knotted chords of a mask that will not loosen. The Blue Coats close in.
As often as they are employed in film and television, flashbacks are often underutilized as a storytelling device in roleplaying games. Perhaps this is because they would classically be perceived as “cheating” in games with more tactical elements, or perhaps the assertiveness they require conflicts with the sensibilities of players who have been taught that the GM drives the story.
Whatever the reason, I would assert that they are an exciting and powerful weapon when placed in the hands of your players, and that mastery over the flashback can open doors to other storytelling techniques with their own fascinating implications.
In Forged in the Dark games I have seen PCs unmask themselves only to reveal that they were another member of the party all together. I have employed mystical pocket watches to make amends with my relatives or even to bring player characters back from the dead. I have seen players turn defeat into victory and bring context to seemingly senseless actions.
In a roleplaying game, we cannot know the things our characters know. We cannot hope to be as clever or shrewd or as powerful as they are, but we do have one advantage over the heroes we embody. As storytellers, we are gifted with the power of foresight and the ability to turn back time.
Have fun with flashbacks is a command to stretch the bounds of credibility in service to the plot. Player characters, too, have agency of their own. Let their actions surprise even you by turning back the clock.
Surprisingly, this principle extends to any mechanics or narrative device that empowers players with foresight. Indeed, from a meta-narrative standpoint hind-sight and foresight are essentially the same.
How might someone with the ability to see future events obsess over meaningless actions? How might their attempts to avoid one reality result in the creation of another, more dangerous one? How often do you see these situations explored in fiction? How little do you see them explored, extemporaneously, in roleplaying games?
By embracing the idea that playing with time is fun, and putting questions of balance to the side, we can bring new experiences to the table.
Design Considerations
If you’d like to encourage players of your game to have fun with flashbacks, consider the following.
What’s the cost? Blades in the Dark establishes that players must pay a price to engage in this technique. Is that right for your game? What might that price be?
Where do you draw the line between player and PC knowledge? In games with psychic powers or magic spells, these two spheres may overlap. In ones that get surreal, they may be overlapping circles.
What are the risks and benefits? Narratively speaking, flashbacks are a powerful tool, but it’s important to consider the tactical implications. Perhaps balance requires limitations.
How will you handle the paradox? When you allow players to meddle with time, it’s important that you address the potential for narrative paradoxes. This might be as simple as forbidding them completely and working to find a compromise. Alternatively you might design an entire game around exploring the implications of a paradox. Regardless, encourage the table to talk it out.
Parting Words: Lessons From the Dark
Though the techniques demonstrated here are not unique to Blades in the Dark, few games go to such lengths as to mechanize and encourage their use. Indeed, twists of space and time are often the purview of the GM, or storyteller, alone.
When we roleplay in the quantum realm, we allow ourselves to experience the best and the worst that could happen.
When you show them your teeth, you imbue the stakes with unparalleled impact.
When players have fun with flashbacks they open themselves up to the characters they embody and display a level of competence other games only pretend to allow.
Consider these principles to blur the line between the games you play and the stories you intend to tell.
