Stress (Brinkwood) with Tan Shao Han

This week, Sam talks with Tan Shao Han about stress from Brinkwood by Erik Bernhardt, a character resource originally from Blades in the Dark by John Harper.

This is one of those episodes where to talk about the mechanic in question, we kind of had to talk about the whole-ass game around it because so much of Brinkwood is tied up in stress. And in this case, we really had to talk about two whole-ass games, because so much of what makes Brinkwood stress interesting is how a few small tweaks from Blades in the Dark ripple out through the design and lead to big changes in play.

Get ready for the full firehose of mechanics: this is an episode jam-packed with delicious, crunchy examples.

Further reading:

Brinkwood by Erik Bernhardt: https://brinkwood.net/

Blades in the Dark by John Harper: https://bladesinthedark.com/

The Blades in the Dark discord: https://discord.gg/uXwCKq3

Thoughts on Forging in the Dark by Small Cool Games: https://smallcoolgames.itch.io/thoughts-on-forging-in-the-dark

An Amateur’s Guide to Hacking Blades in the Dark by past cohost Michael Elliott: https://notwriting.itch.io/an-amateurs-guide-to-hacking-blades-in-the-dark

Socials:

Shao on Bluesky, Twitter, and his personal website.

Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.

Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey via Breaking Copyright.

Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!

Transcript:

Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic out for a photoshoot. My name is Sam Dunnewold and I am Kickstarting a third season of Dice Exploder.

I am Kickstarting a third season of Dice Exploder.

I am Kickstarting a third season of Dice Exploder.

It's gonna be in October, and you can go onto your phone right now and follow the launch page for the upcoming Kickstarter for the third season of Dice Exploder to get notified when it goes live. I've already got most of the third season lineup all locked in, and it is full of people I can't wait to talk to. You are gonna love it. Go follow the page and I'll have more info for you soon.

But this is still the second season of Dice Exploder, and this week my co-host is Tan Shao Han.

Last season, Pam Punzalan put Shao on my radar when I asked them for co-host recommendations. And then I heard this great interview with Shao on the Yes Indeed podcast with Thomas Manuel about the history of Singapore and World War II and how Shao is making games about it and a bunch of other stuff. And then there's Shao's Credits: Pathfinder second edition, ARC, Monster Care Squad, the upcoming Dagger Isles supplement for Blades in the Dark and all, the work he's cooking up on his own. Plus the guy's just fun to talk to.

Shao brings us the stress mechanic from Brinkwood by Eric Bernhardt, a forged in the dark game about a world where you're poor and the vampires are rich and you go kill the heck out of 'em. And this is one of those episodes where to talk about the mechanic in question, we kind of have to talk about the whole ass game around it because so much of Brinkwood is tied up in stress.

And in this case, we really have to talk about two whole ass games because so much of what makes Brinkwood stress interesting is how a few small tweaks from Blades in the Dark by John Harper ripple out through the design and lead to big changes in play.

Harm, Trauma, Bands and Scars! Recovery! Get ready for the full fire hose of mechanics, baby. This is an episode of real delicious, crunchy examples if ever there was one.

Now here is Tan Shao Han with stress from Brinkwood.

Shao, thank you so much for being here.

Shao: Thank you so much. I'm like really happy to be here.

Sam: So what game and mechanic have you brought for us today?

Shao: I've been thinking about and working a lot with Brinkwood: the Blood of Tyrants. It's built on forged in the dark and there's some things that it changes quite significantly. And it's a game about basically Robinhood type peasants who broker deals with ancient fae forces to kill the vampires that rule their land. So it's pretty much a eat the rich and drink their blood kind of game. Yeah.

Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Eat the rich. They're literally vampires. And it, as you said, it's like a hack of Blades in the Dark. Right? So I think today we're gonna be doing a lot of comparing the mechanic you brought from Brinkwood to the way it originally works in Blades in the Dark and how those things are different and the the small changes there can kind of make a big difference.

Shao: Yeah. Yeah,

Sam: So what mechanics specifically did you bring from Brindlewood?

Shao: I think that's what I'm going to work with a lot is this thing of stress. And I mean, stress It's a big bundle. I mean like, like real life, right? Stress is always a big bundle of related issues.

But like the stress mechanic, you'll probably interact with a lot of things to interact with Essence which is another mechanic that exists in Brinkwood you also look a little bit at how harm, which is like some have stated it's a notoriously tricky to decide harm in most traditional forged in the dark games. So it will look a bit at equipment and gear as well, because all that ties in together into the big ball of stress that we have.

So it's mostly about stress that it's related quantities.

Sam: Yeah. So I'm gonna start by walking through stress as I understand it in Blades, in the Dark, cuz I've read Brindlewood, but I have never actually played it.

So in Blades in the Dark, the way stress works is it's sort of like your hit points in like a Dungeons and Dragons. It's a numerical resource that you have a limited number of, and you can spend stress for cool effects. You can spend stress for bonus dice on your rolls. You can spend stress to improve your position or effect which is sort of, you know, the effectiveness of, of whatever action you're taking. You can spend stress to give other people bonus dice by helping them. And you can spend stressed to resist consequences, which is a whole episode unto itself but it's basically like making consequences so they don't happen to you. It's the game. Sanctioned takesies-backsies.

Shao: Hmm.

Sam: So you have eight stress and if you ever get to eight stress, then you are taken out of the scene that you're in. You receive a trauma which stays with your character forever. You can never lose your traumas and you come back later, you know, a little worse for, for wear but with all of your stress intact.

Then the way you get rid of stress is during downtime when you're not like on a big heist, you go and you indulge your vice. You go get a new tattoo, or you go gamble, or whatever the thing is that makes you feel less stressed. And you recover your stress, you get it back so you can go back in there and make some more bad choices that turn into stressful situations later. Missing anything?

That sound about right?

Shao: I think that sounds well, right. That might be a little bit that comes in about for like how they play with the currency. Because stress is pretty much as you know, like the takesbacksies currencies for consequences for improving your chances narratively. And I think Brindlewood kind of like plays around with giving kind of like a secondary budget for that kind of stress thing. So of course I'll talk about that in more details when, when becomes relevant. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's just start a little bit by talking about the baseline Blades stress Like what do you like about stress in Blades, and is there anything you don't like about stress In Blades?

I guess. intuitively I'll start with the thing that I have some difficulties with when I mentioned stress. Like I play Blades like games cuz I'm trying to make a solitary or small group Blades inspired historical RPG and I have a lot of playtests with people who don't usually play any TTRPGs of whose TTRPG experience is basically linked to the d20 engines. Right? And they get really stressed by the word stress.

So because stress is something which we have a budget, right? We can spend it until we reach a certain kind of state, and then we kind of like just exit stage left and we... we get outta the scene basically for the rest of the session.

But for some players I've noticed like the stress point is, oh, no, stress is something that I don't want to accumulate. So instead of being a resource that you see depleting, so instead of like, hi, we start with nine stress and you are minusing off stress points as you go down. Instead you are adding to the stress, which I think is the whole thematic focus, cuz you're adding more stress to your back. Right? But like I've seen a bit of a minor chilling effect from players who usually takes out a few sessions to encourage them to use stress.

So you have people not wanting to push themselves, not wanting to do things. So I think like If we were to use that most dreaded words, you know, that the whole ludonarrative connection thing, it's like, I do feel like there is a bit of a, oh, this might feel a bit bad. It's a mechanic that might be intimidating or might drive a person to feel bad for, for some new players.

So that's my negative read at first for stress. Yeah.

Sam: Intimidating is a great word for it. Yeah.

Shao: Yeah. And I think like the, what I do like about stress is it's essentially very clear accounting because I like two things about stress. I like how basically you can actually activate and use it when you wish to.

So let's say I'm an argument, right? Somebody shouting at me, and do I pay the stress to shout back and deny their account of events, right? And maybe I decide, you know, it's not worth it because I'll just take maybe the mental psycho emotional harm and just go away and I'll deal with it. But I'll leave of stress for something else.

So I always have a bit of a clear clarity of like, as a story game of like, okay, this is what I need to do. Can I afford this? Can I afford this? So the transparency of that is a lot clearer than a lot of the other story games that I was used to playing because it's a clear quantifiable amount.

And other thing I like about stress is there's a refresh mechanic at the end of a session.

So you can go into do downtime for default Blades and go around and engage in your vices and stuff, and you can always reset. So you're kind of functionally immortal as long as you can know your limits.

So again, I think it does appeal to maybe higher proficiency players to be able to, "alright, I can kinda like map out what is the dramatic range of what I'm gonna do for this couple hours of games or three hours of games" as opposed to maybe somebody was playing more I guess more directly immersively rather than like, okay, I'm gonna do this. Oh no, I'm, I have, don't have enough resources. Oh no, I'm scared of using resources.

So I do see, like, I guess to sum up the good thing and the bad thing. The good thing is that in the hands of players who are very I guess skilled almost dramaturgically in the, in the, structure of how many events should happen in the session play, I think this, this car drives really well.

But for people who might be a bit like, okay, I'm playing it in a immersion sense, like, you know, they, they play it like they're playing d and d, "this is me there, I'm someone there." Then usually I do encounter some degree of stress about the stress mechanic.

Yeah.

Sam: Yeah, yeah. I wanna throw out there. I agree with all of that.

The other thing I really love and appreciate about stress is how much it puts agency in the hands of the players.

Like when you're comparing to something like hit points like I did earlier, hit points are this number that you have that gets taken away from you when the GM does stuff to you.

But stress is a mechanic that you always have control over. You are always the one who decides when am I going to spend stress? When am I going to increase my roll? When am I going to reduce consequences?

Now, there's variance, there's randomness in how much stress it might cost you to do the resisting consequences. So sometimes it's not exactly in your hands whether you're gonna come out okay. But it's always your choice, not someone else's choice to make that gamble. And I think that that is really empowering for players and just really a cool way to frame playing an RPG.

Shao: Yeah. Yeah. Like that agency, right? they say that player directed uh, like, "Hey, you know, I'm gonna fall out of this. I'm gonna stand up for this." It's not like you're forced to basically work on it. And it's a resource that's very clear that,

yeah, I mean the HP analog is really the best one for me, I think. Cuz it's not like, alright, you don't have a hugely inflated pool of HP in which you can, "alright, here's some damage for free. Yay." You know, like the, the way that some, some games go is like, the mood is getting low and you have 60 hit points, and here take 10 damage randomly just to communicate that there's a threat and to kinda like, change the mood, right? There isn't really that There's space to do that random nickel and diming in my, in my opinion of like resources in which hey, it's very agentive. You spend a one stretch, you spend two stress because you want to. Yeah.

Sam: Yeah, you're getting at something else interesting about stress there, which is you only ever have eight stress and so every single one matters. you don't have stress to burn very often, so. And I think that feels a lot better than, or it doesn't necessarily feel better, but it feels very different from the sort of power fantasy of ending up with 120 hit points eventually or whatever you're gonna end up with in Dungeons and Dragons.

Shao: Yeah. Yeah.

Sam: So cool. tell me about what's different about stress and the stress system in Brinkwood.

Shao: Okay, so before Blades we use as a comparison. There's also this separation of stress and harm. Right? So that's a very technical term there: Harm. And when I first started playing Blades, I think when it was released a few years ago, it was it was a bit of a difficulty for me to wrap around "all right, so which one is more important, stress or harm?

And like harm does have some effects on you. So like, to give my example of somebody having arguments, somebody shouts at me, levels accusations at me, and I decide "do I want to some stress by resisting it, or do I want just to absorb this scoldings and just go with a bruised ego." And in some games they may quantify the harm of a bruised ego, of a hurt feelings as maybe a level one harm, a level two harm. Maybe I go away and I get demoralized. Have a bad day.

So in Blades you do have this need to basically figure out what is harm and what is stress?

So in, Brindlewood, one of the things they do that makes it a bit clearer for me personally when I'm thinking in terms of design and thinking in terms of running a game, is that they make stress and harm the same. There's a bit of a unified system.

So when you an injury, you resist something that happens to you, you basically wish to, you have to fill up a stress track so you don't have to have two sets of resources to work with. You don't have a stress bunch, you don't have a harm bunch. Because it goes back to your stress bar as well. So you have only one resource meter to keep track of for this game.

So the example for it is, you have a resistance roll and like default Blades in which you basically try to resist bad things happening to your character that you would prefer not to happen. And in Blades it's like whenever you do a resistance roll, you have to spend an amount of stress which is based on how high you roll. So the higher you roll in the resistance, the lower amount of stress you have to pay.

And what happens in Brindlewood is that when you have injuries and harm, that stress just wraps back over to the stress track rather than you having to worry about, okay you have to mark in two more harm points. Which makes I think they're running a lot easier.

Which, of course, from a numbers perspective, the danger is like, okay, does that mean that we'll fill up with stress a lot higher because now you're burning the candles on both ends, right? Because it's like you're using stress for all your usual enhancement abilities, using stress to resist and now when harm does happen to you, it goes to your stress as well.

So there's this thing called bands and it's kind of like a slush fund, I guess. it's kinda like this, like a. shady bunch of resources you can draw in addition to not actually suffer the, stress that you take from harm.

So it's kinda like maybe you, you swear an oath to the faeries, to the fae folk and like, I will no longer wear the color red. And then like basically instead maybe taking a death dealing blow that will drive you over the edge of a severe harm, you'll basically, you can't wear or use anything red or something like that for the rest of, until, until you do some appropriate pleasing of the spirits and then they let you put red bag in your wardrobe.

So basically I think that's how it kinda like encourages you to basically interact with the mysterious forces that you broker deals from. They kind of push you through stress into bands.

Sam: Yeah. I really love the way bands read. It's just like a couple other examples. Like we have "iron: all blades," like you can't use bladed weapons anymore. Or eventually you get up into like "laughter: you're not allowed to laugh," which is like a cool flavor thing in itself. But also you're not allowed to like use the consort action anymore.

Yeah.

Shao: Yeah. You can't be emotionally warm, right? Because you can't laugh, right?

Sam: Yeah, exactly and that feels so flavorful in this game that it's so reminiscent of the lore and mythology of making a deal with a fairy or of how to deal with a fairy. Like you are the fairy and you have just created the like mythological weakness for yourself that someone else could come hold against you.

Shao: Yeah. A big part of it is because you mentioned the mythological aspect. I think this creates a more elusive kind of feeling. So it's like, what Blades players, the experienced Blades players do, right? They try to get a trauma or something in the first session so that they can use it to mark XP for the rest of the campaign.

Sam: Yeah, you you want exactly one trauma. You get that first trauma as quickly as you can, and then you never get another one. That's the goal.

Shao: Yeah, so, so like the emergent playstyle. I'm not, I'm not sure that that was the original, like plan in mind.

But uh, if you look at this, this allows us to evoke and describe with some distance. Because now it's the, the safety point of, hey, there's always, there's a spirit who did it rather than there's something else. And so like in a more emotionally sensitive table where it's like, all right, this person gave up his really laugh for the cause, right? And this person is maybe a new parent. And then they gave up all the chances to laugh because they, gave themselves.

And there's something both terrifying, tragic, and also less gamey, I feel. Which, which is the strength, I think. Yeah.

Sam: yeah. Well there's something so evocative about what a ban can be where, you know, trauma I think is evocative. You know, adding the adjective paranoid to your character is interesting, and then you get XP for playing into your trauma and acting paranoid. Cool. It works totally fine.

But getting something as specific as you can no longer laugh is, there's room for a lot more of those on one character and they're just so specific in this really inspiring way.

Shao: Yeah. And that kinda like really does a lot of the world building work behind the scene. Because once you do that, you know that, alright, this is a world which requires fairies to run around for this Makes sense. They could be elder gods, it could be ancestor spirits, but this is a world where some kind of larger than life entities out there that grants you resources in exchange for behavioral modifications, basically.

Sam: Yeah. I really love everything you were saying earlier about harm in Brinkwood too, because harm I have found to be a notoriously hard to hack part of Blades. Like a lot of people don't like the way it works normally. It's just pretty harsh and I just see a lot of people trying to find something new and I've seen very few people find something new that feels really good.

And Brinkwood, I love. it's like, don't worry about that stuff, just mark a couple of stress. We know your leg is broken. Move on with your life. Like that's not the important thing that this game is about.

Instead, we're gonna combine the trauma and this like new harm system into this new, more flavorful thing that is gonna feel less in the way than harm does I think a lot of the time in Blades.

Shao: Yeah. Yeah. It's like in my head it's really like, considered like a grand unification theory of sort. It's like, hey, we've wrecked harm and stress and we kind of put it around and we shunted all the excess heat like all the breakdown points of the bands and scars. So the cognitive load gets reduced, cuz this band is a separate resource, but now it does feel a lot more like you don't have that cognitive load of do I really want to break my leg? Because the minus one die. You can't do anything you push yourself requires assistance.

One of the things I do like about Blades is the teamwork aspect in which even new players come in, they're like, oh, it's always cheaper for me to help someone than for me to push myself. So people quickly kinda figure out that helping each other is one of the design pathways for success in, in Blades, right? And I think like with the way that harm works in Brinkwood it becomes like "oh, alright, I can help you, but at a cost of maybe reducing my own resources."

But I don't have to worry about anything else. So even though it looks like you're paying more at the beginning, I do feel that the lack of having that whole, alright, minus one dice, can't do anything unless someone helps you that comes with harm it does create a much more larger than life superhero kind of players.

Yeah.

Sam: Yeah,

I, I just wanna be clear on the, my feelings about harm in Blades, where I think there is often an interesting choice to be made about do I wanna spend stress or do I want my leg to be broken? Like, do I want to take the harm or not? You talked about that a bunch.

Shao: Yeah.

Yeah.

Sam: But I think oftentimes at my table, people have ended up just feeling bad for ending up with harm that feels oppressive and like it sticks around forever. And it maybe doesn't make sense that like I took this level one harm that I got drunk and then the rules say it doesn't go away until I invest a lot of time in it. When really it should just go away when I'm not drunk anymore.

Or the same thing with, with more severe harm. Like, why isn't this going away on its own? Like, even if there's good answers to that, the harm system has often felt like it drags people down as opposed to giving them cool new restrictions to play with like bands do in Brinkwood

Shao: Yeah, it does feel a bit like a player where like, yeah, I wanna get drunk. Hit me. And it's like, yeah, so no, you've slept with this level one harm. And then they thought like, oh my God, it's so painful. It's that penalty. And I was just doing this as a role playing flourish. I was doing this as a immersive thing. And now it might lead to that repeating, chilling effect of " let's not role play any of our character quirks and let's just do something really cautiously."

Which I think is one of the dangers of any kind of traditional story game where it kinda encourages us to, to take a step back into a... you know, like back in like Fate for example. Like, okay, how does my aspect cover this? So it's like, it gets into this like very strategic composition of how to fit things over to stuff. Right?

And I feel like, like, in Blades, I was running a lot of Band of Blades for a while and it does fit Band of Blades because Band of Blades is a gritty military horror strategy. So yeah, you

Sam: It's so much about that horrible harm situation.

Shao: Yeah. It's horrible harm. It's like, yeah. Somebody spit stomach acid at you, and now you're infected with undeath.

Yeah. that, makes sense. But when I'm running something like Scum and Villainy, for example, which is a. it's kinda like Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off, right? It's like you're supposed to be larger in light rogues. And Blades in the Dark you're also kinda larger in life rocks. But, uh, it does sometimes have that feeling, oh no, we're larger life rogues but we can't a bender. we can, we can't take a few drinks. Right? So it does sometimes lead to this bit of a whiplash for harm. Yeah.

Sam: Yeah, i I like the word whiplash for it. Yeah.

So you said the word scars in there at one point. I just wanna say that scars are just bans that have become permanent. Typically bans go away on their own. But if you take. if you go in extra over your head and end up in real trouble, they can become permanent and require a lot of work to get rid of.

Shao: Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's kind of like basically the hardening of the behavioral modification. Right? It's a permanent feature of me that has to be removed through severe effort. Yeah.

Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about how you get rid of stress in both of these games. So, in Blades, as I said, like the way you recover your stress is by going out during downtime and carousing around or indulging your vice, whatever that happens to be. But I actually don't remember how you get rid of it in Brindlewood. What, what's the deal in Brindlewood?

Shao: In Brinkwood thematically and ton ally speaking for stress, it goes like this.

So what happens is there's two things. One is reconnect and recover. So these are moves that you do during downtime actions. So reconnect is you narrate how your character spends the time resting and reconnecting in their bonds, whereas we're visiting a favorite place, spending time with friends and family, or by practicing a relaxing hobby. When you reconnect, roll a number die equal to your lowest attribute, and remove stress from the stress track equal, to the higher dice roll.

So it's a bit similar mechanically speaking to indulging your vices. But thematically speaking, the main difference would be that, number one, your character doesn't have to declare a overwhelming vice at the beginning of character creation. Instead, the main thing you had to describe is that thing you notice a bond, which is I guess your social bonds, your, your emotional bonds. And so bonds could be basically to people, places, pastimes or something else.

And in Blades, I do get this problem with the vices because people will be like "but I don't want to have a vice." And I think Brindlewood basically dodges that by maneuvering it over the center on community and to center on psychological and emotional taking a break wellness rather than the hair of the dog, right? Rather like, okay. How, how do you, get rid of problems? I drink more. And uh, that, so like basically the reconnection rather than isolation. Because in Blades a lot of it is you could go on such a huge wild bender that you disappear and you are not available for couple of sessions for that character.

But, so that's isolation as a team. But in Brindlewood is reconnection as a team.

Sam: Yeah, yeah. I think, the indulging vice makes a lot of thematic sense for Blades. I think it fits into that world well, and it builds out the scoundrel kind of

Shao: character that you're playing.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, like, like you've got, you've got, you've got ghosts everywhere. Nobody can, nobody can actually really die peacefully. And

then,

Sam: you, you want me to live in this world sober? Like, come on.

Shao: Yeah. I mean, like you would be pretty much high all the time to get rid of, of the stress, right? Yeah.

Sam: And Blades also like to its credit has this mechanic where you get a bonus die on any downtime roll, including indulging vice, where you bring a friend along. So it is, it is encouraging you to at least involve other people in your indulging of vice. And some of the like, best scenes I've had in Blades in the Dark games have been where people are indulging their vice and said, "Hey can you just like come along with on this with me so I get the bonus die?" And then some kind of fictional thing comes out of those two people being together .

So I wanna give Blades that credit. But I also, I really like making it more explicit and I like especially when you take away the scoundrel context Brinkwood, like Brinkwood seems to be a game that is much less about destroying yourself as you try to build up a criminal empire. And in that context, indulging vice doesn't make as much sense and that, that making

Shao: yeah.

Sam: making the relationships importance more explicit, like more textually part of the way you are getting rid of the stress, I think is really smart and makes a lot of sense. And this isn't even the only game that's doing it. Beamsaber also famously has a, a pretty similar system.

Shao: Yeah, you were talking about like the criminal empire, destroying yourself is the first thing that came to head when you said there was like the image of like Al Pacino in in Scarface. Right. You know, you have like, he's just putting his face into it, into the mountain of like of powder inside. It's just like doing all kinds of self-destructive things because.

And then of course you know, like the post Sopranos world in which we all looking at like the emotional stress of being a criminal leader, right. Yeah. And Breaking Bad. So definitely that is that very evocative centering the moves there.

And for Beamsaber actually, it's also because PTSD from being often an enemy, being a child soldier, you know, war machine that seventh that's like, you know, 30 meters tall and shooting like a nuclear powered guns at people. I mean, that will basically require you to basically isolate, freak out and, and have a lot of quiet moments.

And that's something that you said about the favorite scenes about, you know, like sharing indulging the vice with a friend, right? Like yeah. I, I, I do actually also remember like a lot of good scenes coming out of this. So I remember some friend had a vice was obligation. They had to go and help up the community and then they say "Hey, can you come along." and hey became one of those like very suddenly like in Blades, everybody's, you know, like killing and jumping. Then we have to go to this neighborhood to do a bunch of like soup kitchen stuff to help people out, right? Because that, that's the obligation to the community.

But of course the feeling of like the way you say explicit in Brinkwood, basically there's no resource tax, right? You're not like, this is something that everyone does by default, because the basic physics of the game is reconnect equals to minusing of stress. I do feel that by making it a universal move in a sense and changing the context of the stress recovery, it does lead to a very different implied role of what you're supposed to do to be functional, I think.

Sam: Yeah, the in Blades, the relationship building is sort of a side effect of the vice that is, is destroying your life, presumably in some regards. Whereas in Brindlewood, the relationship building is the thing that is allowing you to keep going on this mission

Shao: Yeah.

Sam: to eat the rich.

Shao: Yeah.

Sam: Do you wanna talk about Essence at all?

Shao: Oh, essence. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, before we talk about essence, I think maybe we can talk about the stress in Brinkwood like the reduced budget, right? Because that's where, how essence flows in. You have less stress to work with compared to Blades where it's eight to six. Right? And so essence kind of plays into that because there's two related concepts.

That one is you have this thing know as a mask. So what is the mask? The mask is the mystical, supernatural artifacts that're given to the characters by the fairies that they work with. And this thing's got access to supernatural powers. So essence is a kind of like a stress, but essence can only be used to power the mask's special abilities.

So some special abilities might be, for example, you can inspire anti authority bravery. So maybe they have a whole bunch of peasants who are being oppressed by armed machineries. So then you're like, you know, let's all set up and we do that famous scene in Andor, right? Like where everyone rushes at people, right? But that'll cause you either stress or essence. You can pay for it from essence.

And essence, instead of being something which you accumulate as you get closer to end state of less functionality, essence you gain it by swearing an oath when you put on the mask. And the oath is dependent on the mask. So maybe it's like if you wear the, the mask of war and rage, you swear oath to not let insults fly past you. You basically end up modifying your behavior again to get some supernatural energy that you can spend on getting supernatural powers.

So when you fulfill the pact and you kind of like pay off this oath that you've sworn, you basically also increase the mask's powers that are transferred to whoever wears the master next, not just to your personal character.

So in a way it's an organization, XP or the crew, because you're building a long term resource that's not tied their character, you're distributing their stats out across someone else as well. So Essence is sort of like that budget that allows that to happen. And it's a bit like a credit card in which you you basically sign the deal and then you have a budget to play with, and then you, you have to pay it off later. And then if you get, you earn a credit rating and a bank likes you more and then they give you more, more abilities. Yeah.

Sam: Yeah.

That, I mean, I, I don't know. You, you kind of said it right? Like I think it's really interesting to put part of your stress meter onto this resource, the masks, that get passed around from mission to mission.

Is there anything else you wanna say about stress or Brinkwood or Blades in the Dark in general?

Shao: Yeah, I think there's one last thing I wanna talk about, which is, I think you'll be remiss if I don't talk a little bit about the vampires. So, instead of being a just a toolbox image, okay, let's create a campaign, they give like a bunch of set of very specific kind of vampires that they, they kinda like depict and evoke different kinds of social and cultural problems, right?

So you have a vampire who is a warlock who is doing all kinds of industrial exploitation of the resources to make war machines, right? So you have basically the military industrial complexes of empire. Then you have like this high society vampires that all focus a lot on basically dancing and playing music as the war burns. And then you have empires that all based on gluttony. So they all have different campaigns and they all have different kinda win conditions and lose conditions.

And I think that's something that's quite cool because even though the odds are against you, it does push it towards a narrative structure of "Hey, there's something you can take this book, you can open this book, you can play it instantly." It's a bit like Band of Blades, right? Where there's a campaign mode. Get to this place by X Day before the zombies eat you.

So it's the same thing, which like especially in this day and age where, you know, I don't really have the mental resources to plan a campaign. If I take this thing, it gives me a bit of scaffolding and I know, alright, this is where the implied play is supposed to be. This was fight vampires, defang them, and maybe change the world for the better.

So I do feel that Brinkwood that's one angle that might be encouraging to I guess newer groups who might be a bit more intimidated by the directly open sandbox as given to us sometimes. Like for me, I enjoy sandboxes, but also enjoy basically this almost choose your own adventure game book style of this design, right? Or product design where people like "Hey, there's an end to this game. It's okay." Especially, I guess as I get older and I have less and less free time to spend RPGs. Yeah.

Sam: Yeah. We love a campaign framework. It makes everyone's life easier. It gives you a, a end that you can go for, as you're saying, which also lets you sort of know how many sessions, how much time are you gonna put into this story too. I, I think it's just a great tool for getting everyone in the group on the same page.

Shao: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, yeah, I forced like, no, you know, like the, the joke about the biggest challenge you to face in any RPG group is everyone's conflicting schedules, right? Yeah. So like things like that. Like, okay, I'm in this for six months. All right, so, can I do that? Yeah. Six months. Like I got a kid coming nine months. Yeah, sure. I can do this before.

So like, you know, it's as supposed to the largely teenage life when we're playing like, yeah, let's have eight hour sessions every day. It's like, it's very different, very different gig experience intersections.

Sam: Yeah.

Shao: Yeah.

Yeah.

Sam: Well, Shao, thanks so much for being here.

Shao: Thank you very much Sam, and I look forward to hearing the episode and also to work with you on, on other things again if possible.

Sam: Yeah, I hope so.

Thanks again to Shao for being here.

Wow. Remember how I said I'm doing a Kickstarter for the third season of Dice Exploder. You should still go follow that page to get notified when it's launching. You're about to take out your phone anyway to turn this podcast off, I assume you might as well go follow the Kickstarter page while you're in the show notes in.

You can find Shao on Twitter at TanShaoHan, on Blue Sky at bigprawn, and you can go to his website at tanshaohan.com and all his games are there and such too. There's a Dice Exploder Discord. Come and talk about the show if you want to.

As always, you can find me on Blue Sky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch at sdunnewold.

Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray.

And as always, thank you to you for listening. Follow my Kickstarter. See you next time.