Blades in the Dark is a horribly shallow system that is terribly balanced in that your character is meant to fail most tasks so that ‘Drama’ can happen as you bargain with the DM for success at a cost, which then heavily penalizes your character with injuries or stacked odds for future rolls, making the whole thing a slip and slide into guaranteed failure.
It’s bad. Like, real bad. I understand the idea of it and it could have worked, but the default success chance is simply too damn low for it to work without heavy DM fudging and that’s really really bad for a game with such simple rules. And since the author seems to like Blades, I cannot value her opinion on TTRPGs
From my understand of running a single Forged in the Dark session Saturday, I would have thought that just relying on conditions and debuffs in general isn’t the intention, and they want you to be creative and use clocks and have narrative or situational consequences be tied to them.
I’ve never played Blades in the Dark, but maybe this will be a good introduction to it at least with a different setting.
The setting of blades is while well crafted utterly dark and dreary. Personally I cannot stand it. So anything that is forged in the dark (what the generic mechanics are called) but with a bit more sun is in my opinion pretty much an upgrade. So if you are interested in the forged family of systems and you find CO’s setting/premise go for it.
Can also recommend you to have a look at the larger FitD ecosystem as there are plenty of goodies.
