Rascal Reading Club homework: Blades in the Dark

The Rascal Reading Club is a series Thomas Manuel has been doing breaking down a series of games through the lens of a specific topic. First season was GM advice, second season just started with “settings” and kicked off with Blades in the Dark. The series is great, I think setting is an excellent choice of topic here, and I’m excited to follow along. Each ep ends with some homework questions, and I saw Judd Karlman wrote up his answers as a blogpost. Only a couple of the questions really interest me this time, but here they are with my answers: Q. Do you feel a strong difference between the rules in systems and the rules of the setting? Do you think one is easier for you to remember or forget? Thomas comes out of the gate swinging with this take on settings in rpgs, that the setting of a game and the game’s rules are essentially the same thing. I think this is very smart, I think it’s true. It’s how I solved “system matters” discourse for myself (we can get into that another time if…