Posted November 27, 2019 by Charles Simon
Above: one of Hello, World’s pregenerated character sheets using the Roller playbook as it’s foundation.
These things are at serious risk of getting a little belaboured, so I’m going to try something new and bring out my punchline early this time: the Roller is basically a vehicle plus the Spider playbook, or what was left over after I killed the Spider and raided it for spare parts. There, done! Why that is and what it means for World I’ll explain for the curious.
I said in a previous diary that Blades in the Dark is a power fantasy and the characters are enfranchised by the systems, and part of what’s so clever about the design is that this is true, but only in one of the two contexts of the game: the Score. PCs are authorized and optimized to kick ass during those action sequences, as the system explores the blow-by-blow struggle of acquiring illicit wealth in Doskvol. In the flipped context of Downtime however, that is turned on its head. Downtime is a place for managing the release valves and pressure chambers related to the character's acquired problems while also preparing the next score. In practice, you go on scores to get rich fast while accruing wounds and stress and you then need to pour the cash and rep you earned back into a variety of coping mechanisms: Vices to reduce stress, Healing rolls, reducing Heat on your crew and so forth. Then the GM layers campaign plot clocks over top of that as the crew gets entangled by it’s own plots. The players are systematically de-powered and scrambling to make ends meet, always with too little time or resources to comfortably handle their character’s own lives while also countering a host of looming threats. Competing criminal enterprises and vicious daemonic cults and the cops all circle like sharks.
Into that context steps the Spider playbook, a curious piece of design (it was a Stretch Goal in the original BitD kickstarter) that promises something I think akin to a reversal of the usual arrangement. Rather than being a dynamo of wild superhuman powers that lets it Do Crimes Better like most of the playbooks, it’s abilities are mostly focused on alleviating the pain of Downtime and smoothing over the rough cost of doing business in Doskvol. The Spider is a crew resource manager, a support class in the context of Blades’ design. This is really cool in it’s orientation to the thesis of Blades, but on it’s own I didn’t find it helpful to for Hello, World.
The first reason is that my downtime is a lot less punitive than Blades is. PCs recover very quickly already and therefore have a lot more time to set personal goals, pursue long-term clocks, etc. Secondly, I wanted to set aside the implied narrative of a “designated Leadership” playbook because it doesn’t work for what World wants in terms of the egalitarian feel of being a User. The Breaker shouldn’t feel like they’re subordinate to doing things on behalf of some de facto mastermind; they should be here on their own initiative. Any PC can be the situational leader, and the crews of HW are implied to be self-fulfilled equals coming together to essentially pursue a collective passion project.
Still, I was thinking about my desire for a playbook centered around having a vehicle and trying to figure out what I’d do with it. To me, vehicles are a little bit like Hacking in RPGs: they have the potential to give one player a lot of things to do and leave others as observers, or create other party-splitting narratives. That’s not necessarily wrong or bad, but for my game I wanted to provide interesting intersections that explored it. A vehicle, I figured, can be a rallying point. The crew can retreat to or group up at it, it can swoop in to rescue you from danger. It can bring the driver around to wherever they are needed. It can be a symbol for the crew. If anyone has to be a leader, why not the User with the bangin' ride?
It’s for this reason that while I tore apart the Spider playbook and you can find bits and pieces of it scattered everywhere, most of what’s left behind is actually in the Roller. The Roller can take options to be a mobile switch-hitter, rescuing allies or redefining a scary situation using Dynamic Entry. They also have the plurality of abilities related to accelerating downtime for the crew.
The Roller starts with all of it’s playbook dots in Move, leading to lots of build diversity as it’s thematic portfolio doesn’t strongly demand any secondary skills in particular. I decided that this highly kinetic lifestyle made the most sense to have Daredevil (or as I like to call it "the actual best special ability in the game") as a stark contrast to the Filcher. If the Roller is a leadership position, it's a leadership based on aggressive, seat-of-the-pants decision making. Thrillseeker merges this playbook’s interests in grouping up or gathering it’s allies and engaging in dangerous action scenarios, offering great XP flexibility for the whole crew.
I have been avoiding talking about the Playbook Item choices to this point since they somewhat feel obvious to me, but now is probably a good time to mention it in connection with a playbook that has an obvious connection to a physical artifact in World: the Ride. The Ride is a customizable chariot, that can come in up to 3 different configurations. It was a lot of fun to write!
The Roller: be a leader, have the coolest ride, succeed at life. What more could you want?