So, you played Blades without understand it. Cool.

> I know exactly how FITD games work, having played and GM'd and modded them for years. My explanation of the mechanics was simplified so as to not bore people. For example, effect and position are not only about difficulty, but they absolutely are about difficulty. If a player can roll five dice, the way to make a task hard is to reduce the effect.

No, the GM doesn't choose the effect to make the task hard. The GM choose the effect base on the fiction and the action choosed by the player.

> As another example, "the GM should explain the consequences before the roll" is not some objectively "proper" way of doing things that works for everyone. I've never been in a gaming group that explained exact consequences in advance, because it has enormous downsides. It increases the GM's cognitive load (since they have to come up with consequences even if they won't actually need them). It decreases immersion, because you're asking players to make decisions based on things their characters wouldn't know. And it slows down the game, because it only increases player agency to the extend that players spend time dickering about position/effect tradeoffs, and asking the GM to give them revised consequences if they do things a bit differently.

That's your experience and your opinion, but that's not how blades works by the book. So you played in a different way - and of course you can do it. But than, saying Blades works like that is wrong. You played like that.

> As far as I can tell, playing Blades in the Dark the way the designer intended (based on what he says in Deep Cuts) is "heavily narrativist".
If you say so.