Droll Initiative

For the past... oh, gosh, I don’t know how long, I’ve been running Blades in the Dark for a local group of friends. It’s really pulled me out of my comfort zone in terms of how to run games, and frankly has spoiled me for how rule sets should be structured. It’s really something.

But you probably already knew that. It has become an indie darling, after all. What I love about it the most, though, is how easy – and rewarding! – it is to no-prep it.

I don’t like prep under normal circumstances, but the past couple of weeks have been really stressful at work, and bad scheduling and luck have prevented my weekends from being as relaxing as I needed them to be. So I didn’t prep the last session, outside of remembering what happened on the previous few sessions and thinking “what if a faction was eliminated?”.

It was a success. All I did was come up with a starting situation, and the players did the rest.