The demise of the Mole Matrix

[fub]

I had been running an online RPG group, using Blades in the Dark. It’s been a lot of fun when it worked well, but it hasn’t been working well consistently enough, and some weeks ago I decided to end the campaign. It’s been an interesting journey, and I wanted to write down a few things about what worked and what didn’t as some kind of “post-mortem”.

I’m not going to explain the whole concept of Blades in the Dark (“BitD” from now on), but the idea is that you play a crime gang in a Victorian-like era, where magic exists. Oh, and the sun has gone out and there is a barrier around the city to keep all the demons out. Oh, and the barrier is powered by the blood of deep-sea demons that are hunted. If you have played Dishonored, then it will be vaguely familiar to you (and it is, in fact, one of the inspirations mentioned.)

The play-cycle revolves around the Score: a daring heist the gang tries to pull off to further their influence over the underworld of the city.

The Mole Matrix was a crew of Shadows: spies and burglars who operate subtle and unseen. We’ve had some nice scenarios: shadowing a suspect, rescuing someone held by a cult, identifying the cargo from an illicit transaction, things like that. But ultimately, a crew of Shadows need to plan their heists carefully, and that is where things broke down.

The setting is not defined clearly, and many things that are presented as an important part of the game (such as how the ‘Ghost Field’ really works, or how the blood of leviathans is harvested and processed, or what spark-craft can and can’t do, or the structure of noble society — that’s never explained. And while that means GMs have a lot of leeway to define their game, which is nice, it also means that GMs have to define these things if they’re important to the game.

In our case, that meant we had sessions full of “info-dumping”: things that the characters would know, but the players had no other way to find these things out by asking me questions. We got too bogged down in details, and the game got boring.

Now, BitD has a mechanic where you can retro-actively state that you have taken some kind of precaution because you are a professional scoundrel, but this is more for things like “I made sure to unlock this door when I was scouting earlier”, not to retro-actively make up some fact about the world such as details about how the Leviathan blood is unloaded from the ships and transported to the refinery.

We had quite a few long meta-discussions about the game, about what we wanted to get out of it, and what prevented us from getting that. In the end, I made the call to end the campaign.

Perhaps one day I will return to BitD, but not in a campaign with Shadows. Some other crew playbooks are much easier to run, as they do not require plans that are so carefully laid out (and thus need less background info-dumping).

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Comments

[andrewducker]

That's a shame that it didn't work out. I hope your next game does!

[fub]

The game was a bad fit for this group, but the player expressed that they would play with each other again -- so I might pitch another game to this group later on. But I need to take a bit of a break first, recharge the batteries.