[Pool] Coldblood & Dr. Mulberry

[James_Nostack]

I ran my first session of the Pool last night!  We didn't want to continue our regular science-fiction game because we were short a player, so we decided to explore some old dangling plot threads using the Pool.  

The two players whipped up the following characters:

Coldblood the Carnivore - Specialised as the leopard or the pit-viper, nocturnal, reptilian, patient unto a swift unhesitating strike, with his stop-start metabolism he can sit chill as the dead for a week, black-skinned, shut-eyed, before the sound of prey approaches, veins swell warmly, chatoyant gaze flicks out, muscles corded to leap and rend.

Stop-start metabolism +2
Can sit chill as the dead for a week
Reflective eyes +1
Black rubbery skin +1
Leaps and rends +1[/list:u]

and

Dr. Mulberry - An elderly-looking chap with a furious mass of snow-white hair reminiscent of some maniacal nineteenth-century conductor.  Originally a biochemical specialist in the viral nanotech field, nowadays he's a go-between and occasional assassin, the proceeds of which he devotes to his research.  His satchel always contains "samples" and "projects".

Biochemiistry and viral genetics, practical +2
Negotiation +1
Boosted reflexes +1
Knifeman +1
Poisoner +1[/list:u]

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What Happened In Play?
We decided that these two were members of a smuggler crew we'd glimpsed earlier in the regular campaign.  Their spaceship is running a blockade to take a McGuffin to an important scientist.  (This is all relevant in the context of our campaign.)

After a stressful, six week journey to Neptune, your ship the Bodhisattva is attacked by a brace of Phagocytye-class cutters enforcing the blockade.  The port fusion reactor, sliced by x-ray lasers, explodes and takes poor Captain Arjuna with it.  As your robots frantically try to repair the damage, the cutters latch on with cable guns and haul you into the ominous bio-cruiser Hecatomb.  You're the last surviving members of the crew, and you can hear the screech of diamond-tipped chainsaws cutting through your airlock.

What happens next?

The pair tried to hide from the boarders, but Coldblood gambled (and lost) several dice, bringing a pair of soldiers into their hiding spot.  While Coldblood tried (unsuccessfully) to kill 'em all, Mulberry snuck to his lab and placed the McGuffin in a... um... very personal and very safe place.

Mulberry got captured and hauled off to the brig of the Hecatomb, while Coldblood snuck on board by creeping through the ship's (literal) bloodstream.  As Mulberry befriended a fellow prisoner, Coldblood managed to find some shuttles on which to escape, if they were lucky...

and then we ran out of time.  We only got to play for about 30 minutes, alas.
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Commentary
1.  Coldblood started the game with 8 dice in his pool, and within the first 10 minutes was down to 3.  This was must have been enormously discouraging to the player, who played "tight" the rest of the session, setting very cautious goals that wouldn't require rolling.

1A.  I handed out 3 GM dice on both of Coldblood's rolls, simply because I wanted the players to get an early taste of how powerful the Monologue of Victory stuff can be.  Sadly, 3 GM dice isn't always enough.

2.  This initial streak of bad luck didn't go unnoticed by Mulberry's player.  He had several opportunities to avoid getting captured, but didn't want to risk a roll.  (I should have pointed out that he didn't have to gamble anything, which is a fairly "safe" strategy.)

3.  As a result: no players got MOV's, and they slipped into Cautious Play Mode... so we were basically doing a free-form game with Task Resolution, because the players didn't feel confident enough to aim for Conflict Resolution.

4.  The Pool appears to require very strong scene-framing, with sharp "crucial points" or Bangs or whatever they're called for this style of game: something that forces the players to make a roll.  

5.  We had fun imagining crazy details: the Hecatomb has shown up in the campaign several times, so it was neat to "go on board."  And considering how much trouble the McGuffin has caused in the campaign, this particular hiding place is hilarious.  But from a test-out-these-crazy-rules point of view, it wasn't much to write home about.

I suppose none of these are unique observations: others have said the same thing in other Pool threads.  But I thought I'd confirm what others have said.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi James,

Good observations. I thought hard about the ways various players and I seem to have overcome the Cautious tactic in Pool-playing ... in which, basically, the player is saying, "if I don't enter conflict, nothing can hurt me."

1. The Pool rules are silent about exactly how it's determined that the time has come to roll dice. I interpreted that as meaning anyone can call for dice-rolling, which then gets interpreted as meaning that anyone can propose a conflict (otherwise you'd be rolling about nothing). This later got formalized into the scene/conflict rules of Trollbabe.

So all that is a long way to say that no one avoids rolling dice in my Pool games, because I'll slam'em with a roll regularly, unless they get to it first.

2. I've almost always enjoyed the Pool, but the more I think of about all the games (and including The Questing Beast), the more I think that the game calls for lots of people. That way all the successful rolls and unsuccessful ones have a way of interacting with each other, so that no one gets that "here I am, all alone; here's my roll, all I've got; oh shit, it's failed, I shall crawl back into my hole now" feeling.

Best,
Ron

[aplath]

1.  Coldblood started the game with 8 dice in his pool, and within the first 10 minutes was down to 3.  This was must have been enormously discouraging to the player, who played "tight" the rest of the session, setting very cautious goals that wouldn't require rolling.

We ran into that when we started playing the Pool. The solution for our group was to adopt one of the Anti-Pool variants.

The basic idea was that when you fail your roll, you get to keep your dice and actually gain an extra one. And when you succeed, you loose all gambled dice.

What this did to our game was:

1) When a player lost a significant amount of dice, it usually meant that he had acomplished something important so he was cool about it.

2) When a player's pool got depleted he would force conflicts where he could safely fail in order to gain some dice. The player's quickly found out there's no such thing as safe or harmless conflicts but they were cool about it anyway because it only added to the fun.

1A.  I handed out 3 GM dice on both of Coldblood's rolls, simply because I wanted the players to get an early taste of how powerful the Monologue of Victory stuff can be.  Sadly, 3 GM dice isn't always enough.

We didn't use GM dice at all. And we allowed the players a "Monologue of Defeat" whenever he failed but rolled '1'.

5.  We had fun imagining crazy details: the Hecatomb has shown up in the campaign several times, so it was neat to "go on board."  And considering how much trouble the McGuffin has caused in the campaign, this particular hiding place is hilarious.  But from a test-out-these-crazy-rules point of view, it wasn't much to write home about.

Although I've only used the Pool for full-fledged campaigns, I've been contemplating using it to improve setting depth in a current D&D campaign by playing short side-stories.

After reading your post I think I'll give it a try. :-)

Andreas

[James_Nostack]

The solution for our group was to adopt one of the Anti-Pool variants... The basic idea was that when you fail your roll, you get to keep your dice and actually gain an extra one. And when you succeed, you loose all gambled dice.

Yeah, I'm familiar with that version, but prior to play it struck me as less fun because of the lessened risk.  To me, that decision on how many dice to gamble is so elegant and so scary that it's worth preserving.  Of course, now that I've tried the "official" Pool briefly, I can see the pitfalls of that approach.  

(Incidentally, it seems to me that your best bet in regular Pool is to go for a total of 3-4 dice on a typical roll.  That gives you approximately 50% odds.  If you win, narrate aggressively.  If you lose, you've probably got some dice in reserve if something awful happens.  But obviously I haven't tested this in actual play.)

Although I've only used the Pool for full-fledged campaigns, I've been contemplating using it to improve setting depth in a current D&D campaign by playing short side-stories... After reading your post I think I'll give it a try

Cool!  It seems like a great little game for that purpose: you can devise all kinds of imaginative character types who might be unplayable in the regular system, and it's fun to explore those little loose ends.