Who are you?
You are part of a group of people who keep people safe, who keep the world safe. You topple villains, fix problems, right wrongs. And you do it from the shadows, without notice, without glory.
You might be on a crew of the best criminals in world who know that the rich and powerful take what they want, and you steal it back for the victims. You and your squad might have been sent to prison by a military court for a crime you didn't commit, and survive as soldiers of fortune. You be a burned spy, an ex-Navy seal, a former terrorist, and another spy you met along the way, and your mom keeps asking you to help people. You alone might wield the strength and skill to stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers, except you don't really believe in that 'alone' thing. You might be a hippie who drives around in your van exposing real estate scammers with a rich girl, a brainy lesbian, a trap-obessed lunatic, and your best friend, a talking dog.
You are also technically vigilantes, committing a bunch of crimes along the way, and the authorities are not on your side, even if it's possible they are willing to look the other way sometimes. Or perhaps the authorities themselves are the villains.
But regardless of who you are, and how you got there, and how you accomplish your goals, you're the only people solving the problems.
What this system isn't
This game was written for my own Leverage campaign, which originally was on the Leverage RPG but that feels really outdated and is complicated mechanically. A lot of it is dealing in manipulating 'assets' and keeping track of them online is a mess. And when people like us kept asking the producers of Leverage for an updated license, they kept replying 'use Blades in the Dark'.
And Blades in the Dark is a great game, for what it is. But Leverage isn't a grim and gritty low-magic steampunk crime show, at least last I checked. But there's this Forged in the Dark thing, where people take that system and build something with the same rules. Has someone built something modern, without magic, that is the right tone for Leverage?
Not...really.
Let's look at 'Copperhead County'? Okay, the magic and steampunk are gone, and it's modern day, but it's still a gritty game where the stakes are high and you operate a crime group that collects and maintains territory. That isn't Leverage either. It looks awesome, if you want to play something close to Blades in the Dark in the real world, but it's not what I want for this.
Okay, what about 'Adrenaline'? It's a little too cyberpunk, but the game says you can strip that away and run without it, but you're still a crime syndicate. It also is still very gritty.
Then I stumbled across 'A Family of Blades', which sounded like what I set out to find, as it is essentially the Leverage RPG translated into Forged in the Dark. That's it, right?
But it didn't have the interesting things I wanted. It had the exact same roles of hitter, hacker, grifter, thief, mastermind, (Which even the Leverage revival show had moved from.) making things much more simplier than I wanted. It was designed as a one shot, also. Ultimately, reluctantly, I set it aside, and built my own.
What this system is
After I couldn't find a system, I sat down with the idea of making a FitD system for a concept that I will freely admit I stole from the Leverage RPG: This game isn't real life, this is a TV show. I don't mean 'is based the specific setting of a TV show', although it can be. But thematically, the GM should think about things as if they are running a TV show, and you, the player, should think of your character as if they are part of an ensemble show. All TTRPGs are collaborative fiction, but this is collaborative fiction with all the tropes of a specific genre of TV show, specifically, an action- and character-driven 'We help the hopeless' show.
It could be a TV show like Leverage, of course, but also like the A-Team. Or Person of Interest. Or Burn Notice. Or Buffy, or the Librarians, or Warehouse 13, if some minor magical rule are added, but it only really need magic rules if the players have access to magic. Or maybe you could even do Scooby Doo, I was only halfway kidding about that. Anything that is 'a bunch of people without any real legal authority run around helping people, usually doing a bunch of crimes along the way, but for a good cause'.
It might be literally be one of those shows, where you play those exact characters. It might be an imagined spinoff in the same universe, and the OG people sometimes show up. I'm not specifically going to get into too much detail about those, for copyright reasons, but it's pretty easy to sit down and apply this system to an existing works, you might even recognize some of the abilities as things as things that specific characters in those type of shows can do. As I said, I this was created to replace the outdated Leverage RPG.
Or you might have some completely new idea. Just a bunch of...people who discovered something that the police won't, or can't, do anything about. I'll get into how to build a unique setting later.
Also, you don't have to be the good guys. If you want to play Oceans 11 or Hustle in this system, going after the next Big Score, you can. I should point out that this system isn't designed around doing large amount of violence, using force to get what you want, building a scary reputation and seizing territory, and if that the tone that you're aiming for, Copperhead County is right there. This is game for heists and cons, not raids, and even if you're the actual bad guys and not helping anyone, you're gentlemen thieves or smooth grifters.
Theme
This system is designed with the idea that, while you might be criminals (Or just people committing crimes along the way, as basically all vigilantees do.), you're probably ultimately good guys, in that your crime's purpose is helping people, and the people you target are the Bad Guys.
Regardless, you're the protagonists of this show. You might be the villain protagonists, but you're still the protagonists.
So things always somehow work out for you in the end. Cat burglars dance through lasers that are inexplicably visible, hackers say 'I'm in' as gibberish scrolls past, you have rare car chases where everything works out and somehow everyone doesn't get arrested, and everything tends to be tied up at the end of the episode or at least the two-parter. Sometimes there is a seasonal arc and a big bad at the end, sometimes there isn't. Injuries last until the end of the episode, and when they don't, it's usually because the actor actually got injured. When a character dies, it's usually planned well in advance and always shocking, and is a way for the actor to leave the show.
That's what this system is going for. This is a TV show.