Out of the Joint (Inspired by The Wire, The Corner and Oz)

Inspirations: The Wire and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood and Oz will probably be in there too.

You only ever role-play two days in the joint, the day you go in and the day you leave. The rest of the time you are out in the world, trying to make ends meet, getting what's there to be got.

Demons are: drug habits, objects that hold some violent history for you, people you are attached to in some way who want to use you and drag you down to where they're at.

Humanity = staying one step ahead of the law so you won't get locked up.

Humanity gain when you pull a caper off without getting caught or leaving ANY witnesses any chance of getting put back in the joint or when you do something legit that means something in the real world.

Humanity loss when you are a sloppy criminal who does something that allows the five-oh to put a finger on you.

Humanity 0 means that you are in the stir. The entire game stops and you play your first day, vs. the Power of the prison you are in to see how rough the time is for ya.

The game only resumes when you get out, the rest of the drama is left unsaid. Play at the table revolves around when all players aren't in jail and it stops while they are in jail and is left unplayed. Shit happened but it didn't happen on-screen.

Players and the GM decide what happened through play, during the session in conversation or in action. While the other player is in the stir, the other players may try to roll their Humanity vs. a stat in order to raise it or they may change any one Descriptor.

When you first get to jail, each of the other players and the GM get 3 dice. They each narrate a challenge of some kind that comes at you while you are on your way in, giving you action dice as they see fit. The players can punk you, give you no dice for no reason but the GM should award good role-playing with the usual 1-3 dice but at a higher and more brutal standard. Then the GM narrates the big conflict at the end, in which you get to use any bonus dice earned in the previous encounters or take minuses for any losses.

When a player get's out of jail, they get an extra Price added to their character sheet. A player can always give up a PC and that PC becomes their next character's demon.

A person is only a demon when you drag them into crime and ask them to do dirty shit for you. People can be pacted with.

Stamina

Golden Gloves: You know the sweet science and your body's hard.

Soldja: You do violence for a living.

Scarred: You are a hard mutha.

Bitch: If it comes down to fists, you in trouble.

Will

Kool-aid for Blood: Your mind is weak, son, not made for this life.

Cunning: You're a keen, sharp bastard, no doubt.

Educated: Yeah, big man been to school.

Addicted: Something drives you, whether it goes in your vein, into your wallet, your self-esteem or into your pants.

Lore

Nothing: The man don't even have a picture of you yet.

Rap Sheet: They got a sheet on ya but haven't made anything stick.

White Collar: You call that jail? More like a country club.

Some Time in County: Shit, I coulda done that time standing on my head.

State Lock-up: This ain't summer camp.

Federal Maximum Security: Hard people up in here and the sentences are no joke.

Note: This idea makes me really uncomfortable. I see white people sitting around a table, rolling dice and imitating the speech they hear on rap videos, talking like they think inner city gangstas are supposed to speak. Shit, I did it while writing this fucking thing, imitating the West Baltimore slang and grammar I hear in The Wire. I feel odd about this one.

When I was working in a hobby store as an undergrad, a guy came in and sheepishly asked me if he knew where he could sell his game. I asked him about it and he told me about this game he wrote while in jail.

"Its an RPG about jail. I don't think there's anything like it out there."

I told him how much I'd love to see it but I never saw him again. I hope his manuscript is still out there somewhere, ready to be shown to someone. He seemed to damned scared to show it.

When I worked as a fry cook in Tampa, one of the cooks had just gotten out of jail. He'd tell stories about prison over the grill when things were slow.

"It ain't summer camp," he told me.