Blades in the Dark vs Wicked Ones
Compare Blades in the Dark and Wicked Ones side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.
| Blades in the Dark | Wicked Ones | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Fantasy | Fantasy |
| Tags | Heist, Mission-Based, Faction Play, Playbook-Driven, Fiction-First, Dark Fantasy, Collaborative, Character-Driven, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Low-Prep | Base-Building, Domain Management, Faction Play, Sandbox, Playbook-Driven, Fiction-First, CC-Licensed Rules |
| Core Mechanic | Roll d6s equal to an action rating and keep the highest result. A 1–3 produces a bad outcome, 4–5 succeeds with consequences, and 6 succeeds fully. Multiple 6s produce a critical success. Before an action roll, the GM sets its position and effect to establish the danger and intended impact. Players can add a die by pushing with stress or accepting a Devil's Bargain. | Build a pool of d6s equal to your action rating and keep the single highest die: a 6 succeeds, a 4 or 5 succeeds with a consequence, and a 1 to 3 fails. Before the roll the GM sets position and effect, which fix how bad the consequence can be and how much the action accomplishes. Stress can be spent to push a roll or resist a consequence. |
| Dice | d6 dice pool | d6 dice pool |
| Complexity | High | High |
| Availability | Free quickstart | Free core rules |
| Runnability | 5 of 5 book tools | 5 of 5 book tools |
| License | Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (SRD only) | CC0 1.0 |
| Third-Party Publishing | Commercial publishing allowed — Open license | Not yet researched |
| Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing. | ||
| Publisher | Evil Hat Productions | Bandit Camp |
| Year | 2017 | 2020 |
| Languages | English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian | English, French |
| Best For | Groups who want a continuing criminal-crew campaign with improvised heists and consequences that change their standing among rival factions. | Groups who like the fiction-first Forged in the Dark engine and want to flip the dungeon crawl: instead of raiding a dungeon they build, grow, and defend one as its monstrous residents across a long campaign. It rewards tables that enjoy a strategic hoard-and-tier economy layered on villain-POV roleplay, and that are willing to set tone and safety expectations up front given the evil-protagonist premise. |
| Highlights | Flashbacks establish earlier preparation during a heist, allowing the group to enter the action without planning every contingency. Resistance lets players reduce or avoid consequences at a potential stress cost. Crew advancement changes the group's influence and resources alongside its relationships with rival factions. | Players design their own dungeon during downtime and later roll its traps and defenses against invaders, which turns base-building into the game's central strategic layer. Giving in to a monster's Dark Impulse earns a Dark Heart to spend for a bonus die, so playing to your character's worst instincts is rewarded rather than left as flavor. The four-phase cycle feeds each raid's fallout back as calamity and blowback that summon heroes to your door, so the campaign escalates its own stakes without the GM inventing threats by hand. |
| Considerations | Action outcomes depend on table judgments about fictional risk and effect rather than fixed difficulty numbers. Recovering harm and clearing stress compete with personal projects for limited downtime activities. Filling the trauma track normally forces a scoundrel into retirement or prison. | The three magic disciplines have no fixed spell lists, so a spell's power is decided by the GM in the moment. During a dungeon invasion the player characters cannot leave the sanctum, so most of the defense is run through minions and traps until the heroes reach the final room. There is no published setting, so each group must build its own region and factions before raiding can begin. |