When Failure Does the Heavy Lifting

I went into a recent session of my Blades in the Dark homebrew (think the prole areas of 1984 or the setting of V for Vendetta but without the fellow in the mask) expecting a quick scene.

The job was simple. A highly competent character decided to quietly eliminate a low-level thug from a rival gang that had dealt a beating to a friendly fence. The sort of thing that usually resolves in a couple of rolls and a bit of colour before moving on. In the fiction, she was absolutely the right person for the task. Skilled, prepared, and in control but the dice had other ideas.

The engagement roll was dreadful. The action rolls that followed did not improve matters. What should have been a silent murder turned into a brutal, desperate fight in a cramped kitchen. Noise. Blood. Panic. Nothing clean, nothing controlled.

Pulling the situation back from the edge took a lot. Stress was burned quickly. A flashback was used to justify backup arriving at just the right moment. And then there was a choice about collateral damage that no one at the table felt good about. The kind of decision that technically solved the problem while making everything worse. It ended with what was, in truth, the unnecessary death of an unarmed and helpless uninvolved civilian.

By the time it was over, the character was badly wounded and struggling to get home through curfew. That return became its own tense sequence, relying on help from others and the hope that no one asked the wrong questions at the wrong time. Once everyone was back and the immediate danger had passed, two of the player characters ended up in a quiet confrontation. One of them said, more or less, “This is not who we are supposed to be.” The other pushed back. “If we had not struck back, we would have looked weak.” Neither of them was entirely wrong. Neither of them backed down. The conversation ended without resolution.

That moment stayed with me more than the violence. I had expected the assassination to be a small beat in the session. Instead it expanded into a tense action scene, a moral compromise, a risky escape, and then a crack running through the crew that had not been there before. All of it came from failure. Not from incompetence, but from the situation refusing to cooperate.

I do not really have a point beyond this. I went in expecting to get past that scene quickly. Instead it became the heart of the session, and it gave us more to work with than success ever would have. I loved it.