[The pool] Fairies and questions

[Moreno R.]

Hi!

This week my "usual" playing group had a player missing (playing with a rock band) and the 9 years old daughter of another player didn't have to go to school the next day, and she could play with us in the evening, resulting in the same group that played my two-years long Trollbabe campaign (I posted about that elsewhere in this forum).  So I did put on hold for this week our usual DitV adventure and I did took the chance to try a game I never played before: The Pool

It's my understanding that The Pool had different versions from the time it was first posted online (for example, I did read about a old version where people could get more than 1 added die to their pool after a successful roll), so to be exact, I used this (latest) version:
http://jwarts.com/thepoolrpg.pdf

Before playing it, I did read some old forge threads, too, and Ron's essay http://adept-press.com/wordpress/wp-content/media/Understanding_The_Pool.pdf

These answered most of my questions about the game, but not all, there are still a few things I am not sure about:

1) In Ron's essay and in some threads about dice results in the game, it's often said that the maximum number of dice that can be rolled in the game is 15 (9 pool dice, 3 GM-given dice, and a +3 trait). But this doesn't seem true: even disregarding gift dice given by other players (I don't think that many players would give their dice to someone who is already rolling 15 of them), I didn't find in the rules any cap on the traits value. So what's stopping someone from having traits at +4 or +5?
(this is a real question, not a rhetorical one: I have seen that "15 dice maximum" written so many times that I think it's possible that the rule exist and I simply didn't see it)

2) Tied to the first question, the way you increase traits between sessions is not clear, too: from a first reading of the rules it would seems that you have to pay the number of ADDED dice, squared (so, to increase from +2 to +4, a +2 increase, you would have to pay only 4 dice. Compared to the 16 dice it would have cost you to increase it to 4 in the first place). This would make increasing traits in stages very convenient and easy (adding to this the possibility to buy trait dice in the middle of a session, you could get a trait to +5 spending only 5 dice: buying a "+1" five times in a single session...)
Reading the text very carefully, it COULD mean that the squared value, the "added bonus", is the TOTAL, and with this reading, the cost of adding +2 to +2 to get a +4 would be 16 dice, exactly like getting the +4 in the first place (losing the dice already spent on the trait)
What is the right rule, and why?
(I am at the moment using a middle-ground interim house rule, where the cost is ={square of the new value}-{square of the old value} [so, 12 dice to push that +2 to +4])

3) During the game, a character wanted to help another in a conflict. Seeing that there was no rule about this case, I decided to make the helping character rolls, and judge "how much effect" it had if successful by giving the maximum of 3 dice to the helped character (instead of the one I declared before). Thinking about it afterwards I could have even simply given the dice that did come up as "1", without having to decide the bonus myself.
How do you usually treat these cases? And what about the cases where the character want to hinder, not help, another PC?

---
So, how did it go?

For starters, being the very lazy GM I am, I did follow the "start with a picture" suggestion from Ron's essay with a twist: instead of bringing a picture myself, I e-mailed one player saying to her to choose a "fantasy picture that make you want to play the characters in it", without saying to her what it would have been used for (they don't follow Internet rpgs discussions, they don't even know what The Pool is, and I wanted to explain the game myself at the table)

This... backfired a little, at least for her (I had chosen her and said "fantasy" because she had said that she wanted to play again in a fantasy setting after having played DitV, Primetime Adventures in a school setting, a Taste for Murder and Annalise in a contemporary setting in the last months), she asked her daughter to choose among the fantasy pictures she found online, and what a 9 years old girl would choose as "fantasy" these days?
This: http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/31700000/Fantasy-fantasy-31733183-2560-1920.jpg   :-)

At the table, I did explain the game step-by-step and it was very easy (a very good feature for me, being the one that always has to explain the rules at the table), they first wrote the 50-words characters stories (nobody used all the 50 available words, I think I will add the remaining words to the 15 added next time), than I told them to list all the possible traits (replying "just write anything that could be a trait" to the question about what is a trait and what isn't in this game) and then I gave 15 dice to everybody explaining the rules for buying trait bonuses and using pools.

At the end, the characters were:
1) A 4 inch tall winged "flower fairy" that lived happily with her "sisters", afraid of humans, who could use magic with her "pixie dust" (you can guess the player who created this character, I think...  :-)
2) A human girl, that believed in the existence of faires against all odds, and had searched for them all her life, and now had heard "stories" about a enchanted lake near a little human village
3) A (male) unicorn, hidden in human form as a young man, still not fully in control of his powers, searching for her mother, captured by humans a long time before.

I did frame the first scenes for each character putting them very near each other (I have played with these players for years, I know they like to play their characters interacting with each other, they did it even in Trollbabe...), the first scene had the fairies attacked by people who wanted to capture them using nets, the second scene had the human girl seeing this happening at a distance, because she had heard the same rumors that led the capturers in that place, and in the third scene I had the unicorn (in the human village) recognize the capturer's caravan (it was a circus) as the same one that captured his mother years before.

Without going too much into details: they quickly joined forces, and did easily beat the humans at every turn, with relative ease (they won every single conflict for the first two hours of play), then right when they were about to defeat definitively the black magician who owned the circus...  the unicorn did fail a 10 dice roll where he had used all of his dice, and was defeated and captured, the other two players had often chosen a MOV instead of adding dice and when they tried to help him failed a couple of rolls and were captured too. The fairy was able to escape with a last roll, with very few dice, and the session ended with the "heroes" defeated and in chains, with a single 4 inch tall fairie (the others were all captured) with no magic pixie dust left as the only character free to try to save them next time.

Seeing how the dice rolled, I think that this "everything goes well for the heroes, until everything goes wrong" is a normal pattern for this game: am I right? After this single session, as far as I know, I think I like it, it gives a "old movie serial" feel, with the "heroes" in dire danger at the end of every episode, but saving themselves at the start of the following one (when they are again with a full 9 dice pool)

The players enjoyed the game, too, even with that downbeat ending. One asked where I did keep hidden this game all this time...  :-)

Coming up with adversaries, "villains" and perils on the fly was much easier than I thought. It's a skill I honed in years of lazy D&D illusionism (preparing the monsters beforehand was too much work...) but in the context of these rules it was finally used for good (at least, good old fun villainy) and not for "evil illusionism".  It comes to me much more easier than doing any prep work  (I really hate having to prep games...)

Something I was rather unsure about was how much I had to "go against the players wishes" when they did choose the added die instead of the MOV. They had won the roll after all, but by the other hand I wanted them to really want to choose the MOV instead of taking the die every time. After a while I think I got a good middle ground, giving them exactly the result they wanted (avoiding cheating them of that victory) but no more than that, and always adding something bad to the narration (for example: the unicorn wanted to use his badly controlled powers to escape from the circus owner that still believed him a human boy, so when the player did choose the bonus die after winning the roll, I narrated that his powers created a blinding ball of light on his front, that pushed everybody away from him... but that turned him back into an unicorn in front of the entire village). In the second half of the session (before the catastrophic roll) they did choose the MOV almost every time.

[Christoph]

Ciao Moreno


Yay for fairies! Haha! I think it worked quite nicely, with the mix of characters and the evil circus. The win streaks being cut by sudden and harsh losses seem pretty typical from what I've seen and read, and your session casts this yet again as a feature. I reckon you managed your MOVs nicely.

As a point for comparison, the French version of the Pool allows backgrounds of 55 words, because French is so bloody wordy compared to English. Italian is particular economic in words in my experience (io/tu/... are "optional" some word duos are fused together), so maybe you'd want to try with a bit less than 50 words, but it's not particularly important I guess.

I think I can somehow shed light on your rules questions.

1) Indeed, 15 comes from the formula 3 GM dice + 3 Trait dice + 9 Pool dice. And that's it. See next question.

2) From the version you linked, p.3: "You may add or increase Bonuses to Traits anytime you wish the same way you did when you created your character: the desired Bonus times itself (+2 costs 4 dice, +3 costs 9 dice, etc.)" It's the bonus from the end result that determines the cost when adding a new trait. The "etc." indeed suggests you could add a new +4 trait for 16 dice (it's just impossible to have that many at character creation). Increasing an existing trait is done "the same way", which doesn't literally make much sense. It would actually mean that going from a +1 to a +3 or going from a +2 to a +3 costs the same (if it's treated the same as defining a trait at character creation), that is, 9 dice. I've always interpreted this rule the way you do.

3) Isn't that covered by Gift dice? Also, we've pretty much always played in such set-ups that characters just don't even want to hinder one another in the first place, nor do they really confront each other. However, as the GM, you could decide that if a character is hindered by another, he only gets 1 GM die.

[Ron Edwards]

I wish I'd preserved each and every iteration of The Pool, even if Moreno and I are the only ones who care in the long run. Since I don't have such an archive, I can't

My reading of the Trait payment is that it's one die for +1, four dice for +2, and so on by squares. Regarding increasing existing Traits, I agree that there's some inelegance there. I have generally thought that buying them up is simply more expensive than the ones you start with. In other words, if you start with a +3 Trait, you paid nine dice for it, but if you built it from scratch, session after session, +1 by +1, then it cost a total of 1 + 4 + 9 = fourteen dice, cumulatively. But what if you want to buy it outright at +3? Nine or fourteen? I have no idea.

At least one minor benefit of that approach (however one decides the final question), if the pool is capped at nine dice, and given the assumption above, then paying 16 dice outright for a trait at +4 is simply not possible.

(I am at the moment using a middle-ground interim house rule, where the cost is ={square of the new value}-{square of the old value} [so, 12 dice to push that +2 to +4])

Jesus. I guess that would be a solution, although it's sophistication relative to the rest of the mechanics makes me blink.

For helping, I don't think it's too difficult, as long as you're not hung up on some intrinsic difference between (i) two people trying to do the same thing together, and (ii) one person helping another do the thing. One could have both players roll independently and if either succeeds, then the job is done successfully. Christoph's point about Gift dice also seems like a perfectly good solution, if you really can't put aside the "but helping is different!" standard.

For both this and for player-character opposition, I wrote the rather thorough breakdown in the final version of Trollbabe based on experiences with both Trollbabe and The Pool, so I'm pretty sure the logic I applied there will work fine. The key point in opposition is that the rolls are not opposing one another, but rather are orthogonal, even if what the characters in the fiction are doing is directly oppositional. Primetime Adventures used the same logic, influenced by the original Trollbabe.

Seeing how the dice rolled, I think that this "everything goes well for the heroes, until everything goes wrong" is a normal pattern for this game: am I right?

It's exactly like Trollbabe, or more accurately, Trollbabe's strong roots in The Pool can be seen here. It can go any way. Sometimes it begins with a drastic failure which sets up the adversity that really shines in the adventure, sometimes it goes the way you describe, rarely it's a nice bad-ass-hero sequence with no failures, and sometimes, it's a mix of successes and failures all the way through. The good news is that any of these are excellent.

Something I was rather unsure about was how much I had to "go against the players wishes" when they did choose the added die instead of the MOV. They had won the roll after all, but by the other hand I wanted them to really want to choose the MOV instead of taking the die every time. After a while I think I got a good middle ground, giving them exactly the result they wanted (avoiding cheating them of that victory) but no more than that, and always adding something bad to the narration (for example: the unicorn wanted to use his badly controlled powers to escape from the circus owner that still believed him a human boy, so when the player did choose the bonus die after winning the roll, I narrated that his powers created a blinding ball of light on his front, that pushed everybody away from him... but that turned him back into an unicorn in front of the entire village). In the second half of the session (before the catastrophic roll) they did choose the MOV almost every time.

Oh my God, Moreno, when are you going to get over this?! Where's my stick? Whack, whack, whack, whack, whack!

If you would quit thinking ever ever about "the players' wishes," your whole life at the table would change. First you run roughshod over them because you're the DM for twenty years, then you go into this flipped but equally nuts mode about ... argh, sputter ... not wanting to tell them what to do, but inserting controlling little incentive games ... gah! (runs out of steam) Whack, whack!

My advice is from my essay: when you as GM narrate, stick exactly to the conflict as it was understood at the time, narrate their success in very basic terms, add nothing (NO! NOT A BAD THING TOO! ARGGH!), and that's it. Also, what is all this about "want them to take an MOV?" It's not your place to want this or not to want it.  (Oh look, I'd built up more steam than I thought.)

Well, that's enough of playing Pool Authority, either today or any more. The fact is that I'm merely another person who likes the document(s) James posted, and I don't have any authority, so I should probably not be talking about it this way at all. But God damn, Moreno, stop that!

Best, Ron