So last night my group dropped Blades in the Dark after our second session playing it. For the record, we did character/crew creation and then one score the first night, and then we did two scores the second session (we might have had time for more, but at that point I had enough with the game). Myself and another player really didn't like it, and the GM was unenthused as well. For me, the major issues were this:
1. When do I get a chance to roleplay and explore the world?
The game strongly pushes a cycle of choosing a job and then starting the score as soon as possible. It doesn't want the players to spend a lot of time slowly investigating, talking to NPCs, and figuring things out. Then, especially if you get a poor result on the engagement roll, it's a series of quickly escalating problems where you're trying to put out one fire after another while achieving the objective.
There's Downtime, but that's incredibly mechanically rigid. You get to pick from a list of specific things, which come down to a single dice role with rigid results. (More on that later.) What I'm getting at here is that there don't seem to be many opportunities to just talk to NPCs to learn their personalities and express the personality of my character. It's funny that there's such a lot of word count devoted to the city and its factions, but you never get a chance to just move through it, juggling plot threads and making choices. Obviously in two sessions we didn't have a chance to dip very deeply into the faction rules, so maybe there's more there, but I kept feeling like the setting existed to support the mechanics rather than the other way around.
2. For a game about heists, why is Blades in the Dark convinced that planning is boring?
Planning is not boring. Problem solving is not boring. I do not want to 'jump straight to the action' with a random engagement roll determining how deep in the muck things start off. I like Problem Solving in games. I mean, okay, let's take the example of the second heist we did. We were supposed to break into the mansion of this rich noble and acquire some evidence of him hiring assassins. Ordinarily if I wanted to approach something like that in a more traditional game, we'd spend a lot of play time figuring out the layout of the mansion and learning facts about it and its master that would suggest interesting approaches (Who are the guest staying there? Can we suborn a servant? Is there a time when the guards will be distracted by something else going on.)
But not for Blades in the Dark! No, they want you to just make your engagement roll and start hopping over the wall, taking care of all that 'boring stuff' by flashbacks. And yes, we did use flashbacks, but it never felt to me like the players were getting a chance to be clever by coming up with a cool idea based on information they had teased out that would completely have changed the situation or our approach. No, it was all to justify a level of effect shift or a bonus die on a roll.
3. Blades in the Dark is too hard.
Mechanically, it's too difficult to succeed as a starting character in a Tier 0 starting crew. There are always going to be situations where you end up with a few bad rolls in a roll, and they can so easily lead to absolute disaster. Since 4/5 is a 'limited success' it's often crazy difficult to thread the needle between a result that actually is a success without adding a complication so bad that it negates the success. Characters are constantly having to spend stress to survive, which by the way if you screwed up character creation is very hard to recover during Downtime.
The Score that ended the session and the game was specifically supposed to be an easy job, but a few failed rolls in a row and suddenly my PC and other PC were each taking two Level 3 injuries with very little Stress left. We could have tried to resist them both, I guess, sucked up a bunch of Trauma that would have been another permanent crippling effect on the PC plus lingering injuries that last forever for one stupid 'easy' job, but at that point I was so disgusted with the whole thing that I just went, 'Okay, my PC just dies then.' The other player felt the same way.
Now maybe if you're just playing Blades in the Dark as a one shot you don't really see how hard it is because all you have to do is get through a single Score, and sure, usually characters can do that. But you only get two Downtime actions between Scores. No matter what, apparently. I was rolling 0d6 to recover Stress, using one of my Downtime actions, so there was that. And Injuries are insane to heal. They cripple the character while they're in effect, and they take forever in Downtime actions to get rid of. Both the first and second session we ended up having an extended discussion about whether we could use 'Acquire an Asset' to get a Physiker to help treat injuries some of our crew had. Looking at the rules, we kept figuring out that as a 0-tier Crew we couldn't possibly get a doctor good enough to do anything useful. In the post-game wrap-up where we were discussing the problems I eventually said, 'Hey, what would have happened if I just say my character walks down the street, looks for a doctor, finds one, and hires one, roleplaying the whole thing out and completely disregarding the Downtime rules?'
Which leads me into....
4. Downtime is awful.
It really is. Unless they got very lucky during the Score, a character is going to have to spend at least one of their actions trying to recover stress. Very possibly both! Your wounds don't heal at all unless you take a specific Recover Action, and that clock probably isn't going to count down very quickly. In fact, we determined that literally the most efficient way for a character to heal is to over-indulge their Vice and disappear for a few weeks. Then some player is probably going to need to try and reduce Heat. Acquiring an Asset is garbage. And forget about trying any long term projects... you'll be lucky to toss one action at it every other Downtime,
I started to feel so antagonistic that I kind of wanted us to go 'on strike' against Downtime. Like, what if we ignored it and just had our characters go do things instead? Maybe we could pretend to start a Score but then do absolutely nothing to achieving the Score so that we could keep the game in 'open play' mode while the PCs go do things they actually want to do?
On the other hand....
There were some things I did like. The 'decide it when you need it' equipment list was pretty interesting. I think the faction rules might have been interesting if ever allowed to come into their own. The flashback mechanic isn't bad on its own; I just don't think it needs to be a replacement for actually letting players investigate and plan. And I do think the mechanical dynamics during a heist of most things being very hard, but you can Push Yourself with Stress or accept Devil's Bargains to accomplish stuff when you need to, is pretty good. My issue is more how much the game punishes you in trying to recover resources between heists. I'd be interested to see how it played if PCs just automatically recovered all their stress at the end of a Score and injuries all dropped one level automatically during Downtime.
Anyway, that's what I think about Blades in the Dark.