Always make your games your own.

I was trying to convince my sibling to play Blades in the Dark with me, and kept running into a wall. They just didn’t want to—more than that, they said it felt icky. I, like a good little sibling, kept poking at them until truth poured out.

My sib had played several games of Blades in the Dark before. All of them had been convention games. They liked one of those games; the rest they found distasteful and uncomfortable, like slowly realizing that they’d bitten into something rancid.

Their first instinct was that they’d liked one game of BitD and not the others because the fun game had been set in a queer context. The other games, they said, had felt like oppression tourism—a bunch of not-especially-oppressed folks sitting around a table and saying “gosh isn’t it fun to be oppressed underdogs,” enjoying the thrill of slumming it delivered vicariously via RPGs.

I could see how that critique would get in the way of enjoying Blades. But I also knew that my sib had enjoyed playing various cyberpunk games over the decades, in settings rife with oppression of many complicated interlocking flavors. They’d played that oppressed underdog, and they’d had fun doing it. So I dug.

It turned out that the big difference my sib had experienced between those cyberpunk games, the queer BitD game, and the not-queer BitD games, was that the cyberpunk games and the queer BitD game had all taken time to build shared context and deeper social commentary. Those worlds felt more real to my sibling. The oppression showing up in those games was clear, had weight and meaning. For my sib, those RPGs could explore the complexities of real life, while including fun action and drama. By contrast, my sib felt the not-queer BitD games had handwaved the setting’s oppressive elements—a thin gloss of paint as tawdry background rather than anything with more depth and forethought.

Reflecting on that, neither of us were terribly surprised that most of the convention games had felt icky for my sib. Convention games are only a couple hours long. That’s hardly enough time for the games we usually play. It’s a running joke in our friend groups that “one-shots,” RPGs meant to take a few hours from start to finish, are more like “three-shots.”

If you want to get players into the action, to finish a run in a couple hours, you’ve got to move fast and push the game forward. If you don’t specifically set aside time for digging into the characters and the setting’s background, you won’t get depth. Achieving both depth and speed in any run is a stunning accomplishment, let alone in a convention game.

My sibling wanted more depth in a game about playing the oppressed underdogs. And in playing those convention games that left a bad taste in their mouth, I think my sibling discovered the cost of not making the game their own.

Making the game your own, as I think of it, means finding the meaning and depth that you want and ensuring those are present. It means leaving your own smudgy fingerprints on the setting. It means adding the distinct flavors you love most to the general stew of the game, and making sure that they’re rich and complex enough to satisfy you.

This could mean ensuring the game includes contexts and challenges that you delight in: Robin Laws’ gamer typology from Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering has a useful breakdown of different player-drives. But it also means ensuring that your game isn’t giving short shrift to things important to you—if your gaming group isn’t on the same page about the tone of the game, its seriousness (or lack thereof), or the respect you’ll pay to any given topic or material, you’re all going to stub your emotional toes (or worse). So help yourself and your fellow players out; do your homework, pay attention to whether something is fun, infuriating, or icky, and make sure that you’re all playing in games that you actually want to play.

This is something you do with others. Making the game your own has to be collaborative.

Ideally it happens naturally. I usually make it a group effort in my session zero. When doing this on the fly I find it easiest with folks comfortable with improv, but pausing mid-game to ask explicitly about what people want (or don’t want) is good too. If no one in the game has practice doing this, you might want more structure.

Making the game your own at other players’ expense is shitty. Don’t. If you do, apologize, and figure out something else that works.

The process will look different, and the final result will be different, for any given gaming group. To each their own, after all.

Anyway, as my sib and I kept talking about Blades, it became clear that they actually would enjoy playing more BitD. They just wanted to make sure that it felt deeper than the games they’d played in those two hour convention time slots. I hope we’re able to do that some time soon. I know they love a lot of the concepts and mechanics Blades is designed around, and I want to put together a version of Duskvol that feels more real, more nuanced, more like what they’re looking for. I trust that will happen over several games, with good conversation and a few steady hands on the wheel.

It’ll be fun. And it’ll be ours.