Originally I wanted to write a hot-take on Forged in the Dark game design, before I realized I like writing about my play experience and picking specific gripes over trying to pull apart the capital-G capital-D Game Design of it all. 

I ran a Scum & Villainy campaign every week from January 2024 to December 2024 with three players. We had a Pilot, a Scoundrel, and a Muscle, and they envisioned their crew as bounty hunters, specifically for Mecha pilots. This campaign took place 30 years after the events of my previous Lancer campaign setting. This campaign was also a stop-over before my next campaign, which I think will be in Armour Astir: Advent. If you know those two games, I had to move the setting from sci-fi to sci-fi-fantasy, which became a large portion of my work in the campaign. It was incredibly ambitious and quite a heavy lift, at times overwhelming the players with new aspects of the world. Foolish but in my mind necessary, and besides, they sorted out through play which of the new factions or approaches were going to matter, so it's not like they had to dwell on anything they found boring.  This is relevant to one of my gripes with Scum and Villainy and FitD generally. 

Gripe #1: Random Entanglements Started Fine, Became An Annoyance

The Bakure of many years ago originally reading Blades in the Dark thought Entanglements were so cool and evocative for making a spiralling world of characters and plots. The Bakure of 2024 still thought that for about 4-5 downtimes, before the rolls seemed more like a hindrance for the important parts of the game that I'd have rather gotten to with that time. The last few jobs I rolled the entanglement, sighed, and ignored it. I had a lot of lore and world development to introduce, and these entanglements were getting in the way of that, which is a fault in my campaign but might not be in someone else's. 

If I was going to design a FitD, I would make entanglements rely more on aspects of the previous job, like what type of approach the crew used, or base it off of the category the target faction was in (Institution, Weird, and Criminal in Scum & Villainy).  More tables is not an elegant solution, but its often an effective one.

Gripe #2: Some Action Ratings Are Bad

Picking your handful of Action Rating words is likely the most important part of any FitD and I don't begrudge anyone trying to design one. Consort, Command, and Sway are different for sure, but they don't all feel necessary. Hack, Rig, and Helm saw little use in our campaign, even after I agreed with the pilot that animals could be Helm'd. 

I like Case&Soul's (by Briar Sovereign) approach that locks an Action Rating for each Playbook, decided between two choices by the player at character creation. They have 3 skills per Attribute category instead of 4, but they also add an extra Action Rating that's basically "do the thing you're good at," with its Attribute category being Playbook dependent.  I think of everything FitD I've read lately, Case&Soul is the one pushing the Action Rating envelope. 

Gripe  Mistake #3: Align Your Touchstones

This isn't a Scum and Villainy failure, but 100% my screwup in Session 0. The biggest mistake of my campaign, bar none, was not clearly identifying a cultural touchstone for what a bounty hunter sci-fi game would look like with my players. I had assumed the inspiration was obvious.

I want you to take a beat and think, "What is your first cultural touchstone for a science-fiction bounty-hunting story?", then go ahead and say it to your screen like a weirdo.

If you said Cowboy Bebop, congrats, same, welcome to the hive mind. The obvious choice

If you said Dog the Bounty Hunter but we're in space, what the hell, how are there two of you?

Tonally, one of my players was imagining the second choice and I never clarified. He had seen Cowboy Bebop! Dog the Bounty Hunter hasn't been on television in like 10 years!  I was perplexed, and when we sorted that one out, boy did I realize I should have made things clearer from the jump. When we do Armor Astir: Advent, I'm gonna make it clear Gundam and Escaflowne are the primary touchpoints so no one gets the idea we're doing Transformers in Middle Earth or something.