Just wanted to highlight a cool aspect to Blades that I love - stakes matter by default in this game.

I’ve DMed for so many years, mostly D&D and what always bothered me was how low the stakes felt when anyone was past level 1. After you get even a little past that power level, things that should be dramatically nail-biting just aren’t.

If one of the villains in a D&D game had a knife to a PCs throat, we all know at the back of our minds that there’s mechanically no way that that can kill the person. I know there are some that argue that hit points could just not come into play there, but it’s really difficult to not look at it as “well even if they crit, that’s 2d4 so no big.” The scene itself in the narrative is just kind of ehh without that solid mechanical backing. Even if the RP is awesome, all the players kind of just know that fact at the back of their minds.

In the session of Blades today, an NPC had a gun and shot a character with armor, which they resisted.

I narrated that the NPC was furiously trying to reload, and the other PC had to roll to get to NPC before he was able to fire.

Success with consequence - PC and NPC are wrestling/fighting on the floor of a cart with a loaded gun on the floor. It was super tense and we rolled to see who was going to get the gun first.

PC rolled success with a consequence - PC got the pistol but got stabbed in the process and suffered some harm.

PC then had the upper hand and intimidated the guy to back down until they had robbed the cart.

Just such a cool scene that couldn’t have happened without Blades mechanics. I’m curious how other people handle guns, but I’m going to make them pretty scary and do higher levels of harm in general, maybe make them a little more scarce so when someone has a gun it gets really high stakes.

But yeah, loving our Blades game so far - will see if there can accrue less than 6 heat for the next Score lol