Revisiting Black Light
Released back in 2019, Black Light for ICRPG was my first time creating a game hack. I've learned and grown since then. Five years later it's time to give Black Light a proper treatment.
Now, before sitting down to give Black Light a complete rewrite from the ground up I first need to ask myself a couple questions:
Why Rewrite Black Light?
Black Light first started as a way to play Delta Green without all the heavy accounting of DG. I'd been playing a lot of ICRPG and wanted that DG feel in ICRPG. That was accomplished, for the most part, I think.
Now, as modular and easy-to-tweak a system as ICRPG is, I don't think it's the ideal system for what I'm wanting out of BL. Which brings me to...
What Do I Want BL to Accomplish?
Black Light is about characters who push themselves to ruin in order to prevent unnatural incursions into our world. The game should encourage risk taking and, due to those risks, characters should degrade over time.
BL is primarily a game where Agents journey to dark places to find clues (hmm, there's a discussion to be had about an Agent's clue-hunting to a dungeon delver's treasure seeking). But, I also want there to be room for Agents to kick ass on an army of ravening frog men, too.
Let's take a look at some of the games and mechanics that are inspiring me...
Inspiration
Trophy
Elegant, simple, and a smart way to instill ruin in your character. Uses a few interesting mechanical elements:
- Skills
- Ruin
You always get a Light die for your roll. Take an additional single Light die if you've either a skill or piece of relevant gear. If your action roll is risky, or if you push to re-roll your result then you get a Dark die. Each time you push add a Dark die to the pool. Push as often as you wish or until a Dark die is the highest result.
If your Dark die is the highest result, add one Ruin to your character. Max 6 Ruin, then your character succumbs to their Ruin and is no longer playable.
Success depends on mixed results: 1-3 something bad happens, 4-5 success with a consequence, 6 clean success.
I dig that the Dark die increases probability for success and makes it very clear to players when they are risking their character. And more often than not, Players are choosing to increase chances of Ruin by adding Dark die to their pool.
The interpretive skill system is great, too. Demons or Silence as skills allow so many ways for players to bring a skill to bear. Fighting a demon, researching a demon, recognizing possession, or even infernal hierarchy and hell politics.
I'm also a fan of the mixed success results, similar to Blades in the Dark.
Blades in the Dark
One of the finest games I've had the pleasure of running, and a highly influential game for damned good reason. Blades also uses mixed success coming from the highest d6 of the rolled pool.
A character has three Actions which sort of define how the character engages with the world.You never really roll the Action to do something, though. Under each Action are 4 skills. To do something, you describe what you're doing then roll the most relevant skill of that narrative action. The idea being, the fiction dictates what skill you roll rather than a skill dictating what the fiction looks like.
Trophy has you accumulating Ruin when you put yourself at risk or re-roll, Blades has you add Stress, max of 10. Take on stress to add dice to your pool, or to take certain meta actions. Reach your 10 stress and you accumulate a Trauma which resets your Stress to 0. You can only take 4 trauma before your character becomes unplayable and must retire.
Damage is abstracted into Harm. Anything can pretty much become Harm. Physical damage, sure. But so can being embarrassed in front of a crowd, or nauseated from a bad burrito. Harm escalates from less effect, to less dice, to death. I do dig that there can actually be social harm which HP doesn't handle well.
In both Blades and Trophy (which is a Blades hack), the game really comes down to stress management. Stress (and Ruin) are a currency not dissimilar to HP, but the currency is spent quite differently and creates a different experience.
Also, that mixed success roll... I dig it. Can you have mixed success in your typical binary pass-fail d20 game? Sure. The GM simply states, "If you don't hit the target number then you trigger the trap and take damage. You'll still get the jewel, but you'll have triggered the trap." I do that plenty in my d20 games because pass-fail is so yawn. But, what the Blades rules do is require this... roll a 4/5 and you achieve a degree of success and the GM is required to introduce some sort of complication. The rules say it must happen.
Alien (Year Zero)
The core mechanic of Alien is it's stress dice, and it is awesome. Similar to Trophy, you add a different colored stress die to your pool whenever you push a roll. If you roll a single 6 on any of your dice, it's a success. Roll a 1 on a stress die, though, and you must make a panic check.
Similar to Trophy, this is a fantastic way to reward players for taking risks but also ratchet up the tension with increased risk for panic. Plus, it's not arbitrary. The GM doesn't simply say "I think this is a good moment for y'all to take stress". It's the players themselves pushing their characters to a breaking point, and I love that. The mechanic has that Blades in the Dark feel where it's ultimately the player who decides how much risk they're willing to accept with their character.
We're back to relying on a good GM to not stall the fiction whenever the dice do not show success, though. The Alien RPG does explicitly counsel in The Art of Failure for the GM to keep the story moving forward, but the mechanics do not facilitate this.
The game does use attributes with specific skills linked directly to an attribute. Close combat is linked to Strength, for example. What about the speedy fella, is he not capable of a good scrap then?
Shining Light
These ideas are currently coloring my thoughts. The big ideas being:
- Stress. Player induced.
- Skills. Narrative driven.
- Degrees of success.
What's taking shape here is the belief that players should be driving their own doom. This fits the theme of Black Light where Agents choose to stand on the cusp of madness and stability, sometimes taking steps away from the midline. Imma noodle some on these concepts and see where the dark hallway leads.