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Let's track the character sheet for Band-Aids & Bullet Holes over the course of design. "But wait," you say. "The game doesn't have a character sheet!" Well then this should be extra interesting.

Last week I did a thread called 10 Guys Named Barf about how BABH uses pregen characters while still leaving you room to customize them. You do this by writing them custom "calling cards," basically character traits you marker directly onto playing cards. This week let's follow Lockhart.

Lockhart (or Lockhardt back in this first draft) is the Hotline Miami character. I thought it'd be fun to do some pregens that called out particular game influences, so they get a chicken mask and, back at the beginning, a briefcase handcuffed to their wrist.

So here are 2 Lockharts on the first character sheet. Back before I wanna say @randylubin.com suggested writing directly onto cards, I assumed characters would need sheets where you marked which calling card matched to which playing card. So on this first sheet the 6 of spades is "animal head mask".

This sheet has a lot of other things that got cut from the game. "Desperation" was a second wound-like mechanic that stuck dead cards into your deck. "Obligations" became needs. "Who Owes You" and "War Stories" was me trying to mechanize the idea of Debts. All of these eventually proved unnecessary.

Here's a 2nd/3rd pass at the sheet. On the first of these I've cut Desperation; that makes it the newest version. On the others you can see I reworked how Debts are marked - you write names below questions that lead to Debts.

Debts ended up getting cut for two reasons. First: where do we write down that Lockhart owes Sterling? It always took a sec to sort out if I owed Sterling or he owed me. Then we have to write the reverse on Sterling's sheet. And if the Debt is paid, we need to update both places. It was a mess.

Second: no one ever used them. Easy cut. Anyway, looks like that second Lockhardt in this pic didn't survive, poor sap. I miss tearing up dead characters.

A third full-page pass. The idea here was you could put each character card in a slot on the sheet and see your whole deck laid out in front of you. This was especially useful during Duels when the game asks you to... lay out your deck like this. But it covered up the names of your calling cards.

Now we jump forward to post-Big Bad Con 2024. I did some major playtesting at that con and someone (again I think Randy) suggested writing directly onto cards. I really wanted to playtest this but immediately knew it would be a huge pain in the ass to track how characters were related to each other.

Enter the "powder-keg", a relationship map with slots like on the last sheet that you plug character cards into (each character gets a card now instead of a whole sheet). These slots then showed how they related to other characters in the situation. Very Blades in the Dark crew sheet.

This is my very first sketch of a powder-keg drawn 20 minutes before playtesting at Geeky Teas. It immediately worked so well. I was kinda shocked. Here's also a closeup on what those character cards look like. You can see how slimmed down character info got relative to that first sheet!

My other favorite detail here is the writing on these calling cards. Most people just write down "animal head mask" or w/e, but my dad instinctively doodled a picture of the calling card instead. Love these.

Gradually I fleshed out the details on powder-kegs. I added an overview of the situation, an icon indicating the mentor is already dead, plus each character gets a description and a suggested scene (tech I stole from @jmstar.bsky.social's Space Larps).

The other obvious addition to this photo is a new character: Charon. What are they doing barging in on our beloved Lockhart? At some point I decided the chicken mask was just too goofy and reworked Lockhart as Charon, a differently masked character. You can see Charon has Lockhart's old briefcase.

But then while recording last week's Dice Exploder with @sidneyicarus.bsky.social, Sid had remembered Lockhart so clearly from a game two years ago... I felt like I should bring them back. That stickiness felt powerful, like something I shouldn't just give up.

Lockhart had always had two weird things going on though: the chicken mask and the briefcase handcuffed to wrist. It was too much. I decided to leave Charon with the briefcase to give them a hooky mystery and let Lockhart's mask stand on its own.

This wildly improved both characters in play. Charon felt like a dark counterpoint to Lockhart instead of a stand-alone dark figure. Lockhart could cleanly keep the focus of their schtick on the chicken mask; I gave them another Hotline Miami reference as a second card (the pool cue).

And that's how I designed a character sheet right out of the game. Kinda cool to see what often feels like an essential piece of rpgs gradually be revealed to be unnecessary through playtesting and iteration. Anyway if you like the look of all this, BABH is still on Kickstarter. Thanks for reading.