Poison'd: Why, now?

We ended up playing a very gamist game. Poison'd for us became an excercise in collecting Xes in preparation for fights, against a backdrop of horrible, wicked pirates. And it was a blast! We laughed and shuddered at the horrible things our pirates did (which ranged from forced amputations to rape and good old fashioned violence), we were right there, right now in the fight scenes, cheering each other on, making each other laugh and having an awesome time the whole evening.

The themes of the game that Id hoped to explore kind of took a back seat to us playing the system, exploring its limits and having fun with it. I wasnt disappointed, though I was certainly surprised. I had imagined that the players would latch on to the deeper aspects of the game, the way they did with DitV, but the game seemed to take centre stage on its own. That may be my own inexperience with story games (I was the GM), but as I said it seemed naturalfor all of us to play the game like that.