Having started a little design blogging about the classes for NEW BLOOD, I thought it would be fun to talk through my design thinking over here! Plus I actually heard from someone that they read one of these - if there's anything you'd like to hear about, let me know! On today's docket is writing generally about forged in the dark playbook design, Girl by Moonlight's twist on the formula, and some of my thoughts on what I wanted to accomplish with new playbooks.

For this introductory blog for the whole Daybreak on the Battlefield project, I want to start with my own relationship to magical girldom! I've been thinking about this as I playtest and introduce more and more friends to the game; a lot of my friends were really into Sailor Moon! Somehow I missed that one - my major entry point was Cardcaptor Sakura, I think. Later, I would have friends who implored me to watch Madoka (which I liked ok), and I followed Rebecca Sugar from Adventure Time to Steven Universe (which I liked a lot). My friends share some of those, but none of us share all of them! And I actually don't know how well I think they translate into each other. It's obvious that they're in dialogue with each other, but more and more what comparing them and trying to draw throughlines between them makes me think of is that "Magical Girl" as a genre is more like "Fantasy" than a genre like "Heists". Saying "we're playing a magical girl game" will get you in the right aesthetic mode and might suggest some themes - but it isn't sufficient on its own to jump you into the action.

To dig into the distinction I'm trying to make here, I think Blades in the Dark has a really strong arc, or loop, or whatever you want to call it - you're doing heisty crimes in a weird city. When Blades draws on tropes for characters, it can pull on characters from various works of fiction who perform similar functions to accomplish crime; like being the brainiac who plans it, the intimidating muscle, or the roguish socialite. These are roles defined about what they do in the fiction/story/job. While those functions often suggest or most easily collapse into particular social relations (I'm sure we have fairly similar first thoughts about the relationship between the mastermind and the muscle, even if we want to complicate it), those relationships can emerge out of the functional ones, or could be "free floating", unattached to the crime job.

I don't quite think the character tropes for magical girls are quite the same thing - while it's not uncommon to see some shared functions ("over here we can see our red magical girl who shoots fireballs at the badguys"), I think that the directionality goes the other way. The defining part of the trope is the character's relationship to the team (if there is one), and it's the kind of relationship/s they have that determines what role they play in the "mission" (the difference between GbM's missions and BitD's jobs is one I will have to get into for the full series writeup, because I think I have too much to say about it here - suffice to say for now that I think GbM handles it pretty well but loses what I think is Blade's best and most useful piece of procedural text).

Anyway this is my attempt to analyze why a lot of magical girl ttrpgs have fallen flat for me - I don't really care about Garnet's powers, I want to see how she and Pearl resolve their competing claims to the team leader position; I don't need to know what Sailor Mercury's bubble spray does, but I do need to know whether or not Ami will confront Usagi about her carefree attitude. Yes, I do cheer when Garnet lands the big punch or when Sailor Mercury stuns the baddies with bubbles - that's great action to see on screen, but the action beats aren't the primary thing I'm excited for about the character.

I think Girl by Moonlight's approach goes a long way to resolving this for me! I don't think all of the core playbooks land it perfectly. The Harmony and Time Traveler are the two that really jump out to me. They're both cool! But they don't personally speak to me as helping me build out the genre space - I don't know what I would do with a Garnet in Madoka, just like I don't know what I'd do with a Homura in Steven Universe. By putting the emphasis back on their powers/abilities/magical nature, I think they're less legible to me as character archetypes, and instead come across just as the source material.

The last thing on this topic is that I think the benefits of the relationship-centered approach is that there are a lot of salient archetypes that could make for interesting playbooks! Which stands in contrast to Blades in the Dark, where I don't know that I've seen hardly any playbooks that I thought were necessary additions - there are a lot of cool ones! But because they kind of have to be focused on the kind of job you do, the design space is more limited - what are the useful/fun/interesting things to have for a heist? The conceptual space for "what are the kinds of ways you can relate to your magical friends?" is much more open.

Switching gears to FitD playbook design - although the conceptual space for Girl by Moonlight is bigger, I think the "mechanical" design space is actually a little constrained! I mean, we're still light enough on rules as to make the design space approximately the size of "understandable  phrases communicable by text" - we can do a lot of iterations on "when you x, take +1d/increased effect/better position to [skill]," for example. But I actually think that fitd demands that everything ultimately be flattened into position & effect winds up squeezing the space on both sides; you lose the granularity of stuff like LANCER (and even not going that far - "tactical" games of that ilk can get a lot of mileage out of, like, a character option that's great at buffing, or one that's great at dealing damage; I don't know that fitd has a lot of tools to support that kind of distinction); and on the other side, I think fitd has much more limited access to something like pbta's wide-open world of bespoke fiction.  

Admittedly, I think that distinction against pbta is more on the "implied play culture" than explicit rules dictates. I think that's transmitted through fairly uniform adoption - there are a lot of fitd hacks that simply repurpose blades' "special abilities", even to good effect (including GbM!). I think the effect is a narrowing of the space, and I don't think you can widen it without taking specific measures. Showing up with a custom playbook that doesn't have any text about how your stuff relates to position and effect is not setting up players for an easy time meshing with the base game, I think. Abilities are often short & punchy (there's not a lot of space on the classic playbook layout for them), and if you want to communicate to players that they will be useful, the easiest way to do that is by having them interface with the game mechanics. Since the game mechanic boils down to "how many dice do you have? what is your position and effect?" I think it's not a surprise that lots of people just copy blades' - it's hard to do something different, that feels interesting and cool, and doesn't take up too much space on the page!

One way that blades accomplishes a little more distinction between playbooks (and most every fitd game I've seen has followed suit) is in offering unique gear to different playbooks. GbM doesn't have any gear at all! So that's a neat chunk of design space gone, too. Plus it has fewer downtime activities, plus it does away with tiers and explicit factions, etc etc etc - pretty much everywhere, GbM has simplified (or simply excised) the mechanical pieces of blades in the dark. I do think the result is pretty snappy, but it does limit the mechanical space!

I'm pretty happy with the way some of Daybreak's playbooks push against these boundaries (even if they tend a little verbose, go figure), but I'll save those thoughts for next time, when we start digging into the individual playbooks. First up will be the Dissident!

One last note before signing off - I said at the top that I wanted to start with my relationship to magical girldom. Well, I'm queer! This is kind of a coming out post, actually. So, thanks for reading, if you made it this far! My being queer isn't related to my time reading or playing Girl by Moonlight, but it has been fun and felt good to be designing with an explicitly queer lens. And it's been rewarding to dig back into some of GbM's touchstones with my personal experiences in mind. Ok, that's all! Next time is the Dissident!