[Poison'd] Question about ship combat escalation

[Anna Kreider]

I had some questions after the demo of Poison'd that I played at GenCon about the ship-to-ship combat.

When we played the demo and started out at pursuit, we seemed to wind up going from pursuit to being boarded without really understanding how it happened. I think what we were trying to do was get into canon-to-canon fighting, since we decided that our ship was heavily gunned, and that would have put us at even dice with the Reliant.

So I looked at the rules, and I think what we would have needed to do was to accept the "loss" at the first stage of ship-to-ship pursuit to say that they were in canon range, then say we were going to start shooting at them. Is this impression correct?

Thanks! (And thanks for the demo. It rocked pretty hard. I'm excited about playing this with our group.)

~Anna

[lumpley]

Exactly right.

You don't always have the choice to accept the loss at the opening level. If you win the opening roll, for instance, then (barring spending Xs) I have the choice, not you.

And: my pleasure!

-Vincent

[rafial]

Hmmm... I'm confused.  I've only read the rules so far, but it seems like if your intent is to get into cannon range, but NOT broadside or boarding, then if you lose in pursuit, you'll want to accept that loss (keeping pace) and start another round of pursuit.  Of course that'll give everybody involved time to build up more X's, yes?  Seems decent for handling draw out chases.

However I wonder about the situation with PC's chasing NPCs.  Since the NPCs don't build up Xs it's actually to the PC advantage to extend the pursuit...

Also the statement "For your ship escaping another's pursuit, simply reverse these" doesn't seem to work in practice.  For example, I would conceive the first level of evasion being "Your ship escaping, versus the enemy keeping pace" which really doesn't read as any kind of "reversal" of the first stage of pursuit.