I was sitting with my friends a few weeks ago, talking about our Blades in the Dark games. A cool thing about talking about Blades, especially with a friend who is GMing is that you not only talk about the cool things that happened but you ask how they handled it within the rules. There are so many choices for dealing with the same outcome with partial successes, harm and clocks.

Something that is a job in one game could be a downtime action in another. A wound that would kill a character in one game is shrugged off for stress in another.

Charlotte shared her cheat sheet with me; Janaki and I were dazzled by it.

tith treasure

The group’s tithing house-rule jumped out at me.

TITHING RULES: Six segment clock for tithing entanglements

Add together tiers of factions tithing to the crew. Can choose to take up to that in coin per downtime, but each coin taken marks a tick on the entanglement clock. When the clock fills, roll entanglement.

What do I like about it? It embodies mo’ money, mo’ problems through simple game mechanics. It makes the gang’s life more complicated; they get more coin but there is a price.

Another interesting thing about this is it causes the gang to be invested in another gang’s growth. They directly profit from a smaller gang advancing in Tier.

Tithing house-rules by Charlotte, Jim, Aaron and Nikki