Rascal Reading Club Homework: The Setting of Doskvol
Answering questions posed on Episode 1 of Season 2 of Rascal News' Reading Club by Thomas Manuel.
What's your experience with Doskvol?
Pretty extensive. Played and gm'ed a variety of crews, longer and shorter campaigns. It's been pretty foundational also in being the background of my currently long lived little game group, as we met playing and learning BitD together.
Do you have a cool example of a moment in the game that came out of the factions and their interactions?
Actually, not really: in play, each crew is so fundamentally situated by their relation to other factions (and the interrelations between those) that not a single moment stands out, instead it's a factor in almost every moment of play—even sometimes in the most personal kinds of scenes. So, every cool moment always was reverberating and had been born out of the social group dynamics that the factions set up, one way or another.
What do you think about the idea that Duskvol is a city designed for heists? Is there anything that works against that?
It is. It is always some form of dark. Everyone is always under some kind of pressure. You can't mindlessly brute force just any problem. And this always creates in character motivations for both player characters and NPCs to find alternative ways to resolve impasses—creating complex future opportunities for criminal relationship hijinks.
Do you feel a strong difference as a GM between rules in systems and rules of a setting?
I find rules of a setting a bigger barrier of entry, actually, as making a mistake on them easily leads to a much harsher disconnect. As a player, one can get quite dismayed when the concept of your character in your head has unforeseen, undesirable fictional consequences—only because you did not know this hard and fast rule of how something works in the setting. The issue there is, you finding out in the fiction at the time of its creation, not on a more abstract meta level that are interpretative. This can also be a strength but when it's something designed as something to be learned and discovered through play (like in "living" settings with an over arching plot, as in 90's Vampire, Shadowrun, Battletech... a heavy feature of The Dark Eye's setting).
And on the GM-side, it is much harder to assist that player without imposing on their narrative agency. And when I make that mistake of getting a setting rule wrong myself, I can easily feel that I am losing cohesion of the world.
(The solution, of course, is to not 'cinema sin' myself and others over these things—as we don't need to fall into every plot hole, most are easily stepped over.)
What do you think about the idea that a good setting helps you figure out cause and effect, so that it is easier to make players' actions and decisions more meaningful?
The way a good setting does this is by being assistant in (the Apocalypse World coined) "disclaiming decision-making": I don't need to hold and act out all of the verisimilitude of a world in my head; I can be concentrating on the point that really interests me and that I want to explore. Other things I can leave for my players, or the dice with this technique to create this diverse shading—but both of those either require more attention on executing or put the spotlight on and makes us focus on whatever is discussed. Good setting play material on the other hand is great for all those small little details, already there, ready to serve to flesh out moments and situations in an unobtrusive manner. Do I need a gang that potentially preys on the efforts of the PCs when a dice roll asks for things to get more complicated during a score? I just pick a suitable seeming one, I don't need to come up with the background to characterize the new threat, or how they operate. In this score, they just serve as an unforeseen twist. And later I can reflect on them to get more inspiration, how are they situated and what are their relation to other factions? And how does what transpired between them and the player characters impact those dynamics?
A good setting gives me a lot of fodder for all those arbitrary world building decision that I am not really interested in engaging in any specific moment—while still offering the opportunity that they can become impactful. Especially with something so laden with potential reverberations as is present in Doskvol's factions.
Doskvol makes Blades in the Dark enjoyable and easy to prep for, as the game is already enjoyable and easy to play off the cuff of systems-wise.
