My early-year "post daily" attempt obviously ran out of steam rather rapidly, but I'm going to try and pick up the slack a bit. I'll keep continuity with those by covering Blades & Basilisks thoughts for this first one. I have some other topics I want to talk about later - aiming for perhaps once a week - but once I'm through those maybe I start filling out character content.
One of the struggles of being an amateur game designer is the tension between wanting to be informed and wanting to be original. On the former, being conversant in what people around me are doing can inform me of solutions people have already devised for problems I may be wrestling with and prepare me for comparisons others may make. On the other, there's a draw to being original, to truthfully be able to say "I came up with that". I'm dealing with this precise problem from a couple of vectors with Blades & Basilisks.
The first is the dice system. While I'm reasonably sure the exact mechanics aren't in existence anywhere else, it does have some broad-strokes similarities to what I've heard of how Cortex works - roll a fistful of polyhedrals, select a subset of them, and compare that to te resolution system. It may behoove me to read the system if only to see if there are any good ideas or advice interfacing with that sort of system.
The second is the form factor I've been aiming for; small, contained "silos" of character abilities you can freely mix and match over a character's lifetime, probably enabled by using reference cards for playbook tracking. This has been floating in the back of my head since at least 2012's Gamma World 7e and been refined by contact with PbtA and later BitD games. From what I've heard of it, this is broadly similar to how Daggerheart is structured.
I've been resistant to investigating Daggerheart because I'm not very interested in the Actual Play environment it developed from and because this project of mine has already jumped from PbtA to Blades-based, but I may need to at least sit down with a quickstart. I would certainly be more comfortable writing and collating supplemental material to, say, enable an Eberron or Dark Sun game using the system than I have been with trying to decide what parts of Blades are load-bearing and what can stand removal or modification.
