[Poison'd] The Resolute's last stance

[Arturo G.]

[Arturo G.]

[lumpley]

Arturo, thanks for playing my game!

Yes, any navy ship will have a second in command to step in when the captain's taken out. Giving him a brinksmanship 1 less than the captain's is fine; I would have created him as an NPC following the usual rules, myself. He might just as well be a better captain.

By coincidence, here's a piece I wrote just yesterday about closing ranges:

Hugh McMinn has seized the Dagger and is charging His Majesty's Ship the Resolute. "The Resolute is firing at us, right?" his player says. "I want to fight at broadsides not at range. So I can endure duress on behalf of the Dagger for sucking up all those cannonballs, right, to close?"

Right, absolutely. Enduring duress instead of fighting back will let the Dagger close to broadsides, sure. But first you'll be going into danger, as you come into range of the Resolute's guns.

"Oh," says Hugh McMinn's player. "That's not great. My devil vs ambition isn't good."

This is always going to end in a fight - he's charging the fucking Resolute, after all. If the players win all their success rolls, that doesn't mean that they can keep making success rolls until they fail one - keep charging the resolute never reaching it. No, it just means that the fight gets to develop naturally within the fiction, and that means that the players get a full hand in setting its terms. It's not a failed success roll that calls for you to use the fighting rules, it's the fact of a fight.

But let's say that, in fact, she blows the roll.

A failed success roll means that you get to bring the fight now. You get to elide or preempt whatever other opportunities the players' pirates might have expected or hoped for. So, fantastic! Poor Hugh McMinn just cares too much about his own hide and his own future. He flinches where the sailing master can see, and the sailing master turns the ship, and the gunnery crew opens up, and now they're fighting at range, where it's the Resolute's fight instead of their own.

If the players want to choose which range to fight at, they need to do things to get into that range. Enduring duress and going into danger as in the example, or using stealth and treachery (disguising themselves as a wounded merchant ship, maybe) and then attacking someone unsuspecting, or making a bargain with the Resolute's captain (if they can figure out a way to do that).

And I've rewritten escalation for pursuit fights, as it happens. Now it specifies who gets to choose the range, instead of specifying the range itself. Later this afternoon I can post the new table.

Question: The Dagger's captain looked for the enemy dying captain and offered him a bargain to save his life. I never thought on that. Is it possible for the pirates to save NPCs from their deadly wounds bargaining? I suppose it is.

The deadly wound rules apply only to PCs. As GM, you can do pretty much anything you want to your NPCs, including exactly what you did.

Question: I decided this was murderous enough for a new sin. But all characters had previous murder sins, one of them even two times. When you say in the rules that Devil goes up one point when they commit a "new" sin, does this kind of repetition count? I said yes, so they increased their devils.

I would have said no. If you've already committed murder, committing more murder doesn't affect your devil.

I decided that the plunder was equivalent to plundering a merchant, and it worth 2 dice, the first two Leisure points obtained were provisions and fresh water enough to eliminate the cruel fortune.

Making the Resolute be worth 2 dice' plunder makes sense to me. I think you may have counted and spent leisure wrong - sum the two dice (don't count successes), and it costs 3 leisure to eliminate want, 3 leisure to eliminate wear & breakage, and so on - but for a single session's play I'm sure it didn't matter.

I'm also sure I missed some of your questions. Point them out to me?

-Vincent

[Arturo G.]

quote author=lumpley link=topic=26520.msg253398#msg253398 date=1217002079]
[quote]I decided that the plunder was equivalent to plundering a merchant, and it worth 2 dice, the first two Leisure points obtained were provisions and fresh water enough to eliminate the cruel fortune.

[lumpley]

Your ship pursuing another
For your ship escaping another's pursuit, turn these around.
1. Falling behind, vs engaging your quarry at its captain's choice of range; to
2. Foundering and losing your quarry, vs engaging your quarry at a range chosen randomly; to
3. Foundering your ship to wear & breakage, vs engaging your quarry at your choice of range.

Quote from: Arturo G. on July 24, 2008, 11:47:04 AM

We were discussing after playing about the no-fight scenes. We think that there is some disconnection from the sins,ambitions,sufferings and the fiction. There are two layers in between: They are transformed in scores, then the scores are transformed in opposed rolls for the four types of conflicts.

If it's the disconnect I think you mean, it's on purpose - essential to the design, in fact. It's quite possible that committing more sins, suffering more violence, fulfilling or abandoning your ambitions, will have absolutely no effect on the game's fiction. It's also quite possible that those will be the only thing that really matters. The disconnect allows the rules to leave it up to the game in play, a product of both randomness and the group's human creativity, to determine which.

This is intimately related to the rules for leaving play, by the way, and follows Sorcerer's lead very closely.

It happen also with the ship and crew descriptors. Their impact on the fiction can be recreated retroactively. The mechanics are easy and cute, but at the end a little disconnected from the nice descriptors. I was using them in the fiction during and after the fight, but there is no help in the rules about how to use them.

This one though, yeah, it's kind of too bad. I just couldn't figure out a way for the size of a crew (for instance) to matter differently than its relatively bloodthirstiness (for instance).

Another somehow related question. We were having troubles to remember which stats to roll for each of the four types of conflicts to get Xs. I don't know why, but during play they were not so obvious. We think that it would be much easier to derive some kind of single score for each of the four types of conflicts, which may be used directly. It will also help the new players to remember what can they do (e.g. the four types of things for which you have a score in this part of the sheet).

I agree that the four things need to be on the character sheet. I'm not going to make a single score for each, but a well-designed character sheet will make it just as easy.

The escalation mechanism seem a little confusing at certain points. Sometimes the outcomes you want from a fight are not exactly what the fight seems to provide in the escalation levels. Like in The Dagger's flight. The winning side should have the opportunity to give-up if the other side is escalating to a level they don't like.

That's why it's called Brinksmanship! Winning is the more dangerous position. I love that effect with all my little heart.

I was also surprised that during the play there was no deadly wounds for player characters. Thus, no bargains.

You know that any and every bargain a PC makes counts as a bargain, right? Not just the deadly wound ones. Even implied bargains, like threats, you should jump in as GM and make sure the players in question write them down. If Hugh McMinn says "row faster or I'll beat you bloody," and the rower rows faster (which might be an enduring duress roll), it goes onto the rower's character sheet as "Hugh McMinn swore not to beat me bloody."

-Vincent

[Arturo G.]

About the new rules for pursuit, they look nice and they solve the problems we were finding.

Question: What are the real (not fiction) consequences of "falling behind". I have a discussion about if that means that another pursuit may be engaged immediately, or only if properly justified by the characters actions in the middle.

As the rules say, losing a roll means action fails "or else succeeds to no advantage". Yes. I'm forgetting that option too often. In my example I was only realizing that there were other options I was not previously considering.
And, of course, we never force a character (neither due to rules or due to fiction) do something that the player feels inconsistent with the character logic. This is a lesson we learned the hard way long ago.

Anyway, I think I have now a better understanding of the rules, and I can see better how they are really covering all possibilities for developing from/to the fiction.

A minor observation. In the escalation sidebars: Sword and gun fights say that the loser is under the power (or submitted to the will) of the winner. Is it not also true for Fist and Knife fights? Or does the loser of fist/knife fights  have the possibility to draw a sword or get a pistol and "escalated" to the really dangerous kind of fights?

I mention it because I would say it is an important rule of the fight. You always fight for something. At least one of my players was worry about not finding the consequences of the different levels of escalation really relevant for many possible situations, because he was missing the "submitted to the winner will" point.

And it is also related to the consequences of ship fights. Cannon and Broadside fights are really a meaning of diminishing the other ship power before boarding, which is the only real way to submit it to your will. However, the mechanic that allows the loser to inflict the same damage on the winner with the use of one/two Xs makes it very very dangerous to use that approach. I'm not saying it is not consistent in the fiction, because it really is. I was just noticing it and comparing to the personal fights.

If it's the disconnect I think you mean, it's on purpose - essential to the design, in fact. It's quite possible that committing more sins, suffering more violence, fulfilling or abandoning your ambitions, will have absolutely no effect on the game's fiction. It's also quite possible that those will be the only thing that really matters. The disconnect allows the rules to leave it up to the game in play, a product of both randomness and the group's human creativity, to determine which.

This is intimately related to the rules for leaving play, by the way, and follows Sorcerer's lead very closely.

I see. Now I think that even if we were using them for some flashbacks, we were somehow preventing ourselves to exploit them in other circumstances. This is the reason we were feeling it like a lack. I think I read a nice example of actual play in your blog talking about how the sufferings coming from Brimstone Jack were naturally creating an idea of who was him during play. I would say it is related. The players are the ones that choose the relevance of those details in the fiction and they introduce them in the way they prefer.

This one though, yeah, it's kind of too bad. I just couldn't figure out a way for the size of a crew (for instance) to matter differently than its relatively bloodthirstiness (for instance).

Well, we were using it to justify fictional events and also creating some ad-hoc rules. After the casualties, The Dagger's crew could not keep the other ship, and they were very near to lose so many people to be even unable to sail their own ship. I was playing with the idea that each time that the crew suffered losses I was decreasing the crew size by one "range". Then, spending Leisure to get new crew members and increase the crew range again.
I can also imagine a penalty or a bonus brinkmanship dice for pursuits or non-fight maneuvers depending on the size and readiness of the crew. It is more or less implicit in some bits of the text.

I was also thinking on what I would have done if they were able to keep the other ship. There are consort and fleet rules. But, how many Leisure points may award to sell a damaged royal navy ship to other pirates?

That's why it's called Brinksmanship! Winning is the more dangerous position. I love that effect with all my little heart.

I'm not sure. I will need to think and reconsider it (surely in actual play again).
I cannot see all the implications on the resolution and on the relation between resolution mechanics and fiction. But I really like to be pushed forward.
BTW, brinkmanship is one of those words that broke my head. I was not finding any translation in my usual English-to-Spanish dictionaries. Thanks a lot to the English on-line dictionaries.

And finally, about bargains... yes, yes, yes. More options we were not considering.

This game is really a nice piece. My expectations to play it again (and enjoy it better) have increased.

[lumpley]

Fantastic, thank you.

A minor observation. In the escalation sidebars: Sword and gun fights say that the loser is under the power (or submitted to the will) of the winner. Is it not also true for Fist and Knife fights? Or does the loser of fist/knife fights  have the possibility to draw a sword or get a pistol and "escalated" to the really dangerous kind of fights?

I mention it because I would say it is an important rule of the fight. You always fight for something. At least one of my players was worry about not finding the consequences of the different levels of escalation really relevant for many possible situations, because he was missing the "submitted to the winner will" point.

Oh no, your friend's quite right. Even sword and gun fights - standing over someone with your sword at their throat or your gun to their head STILL doesn't reliably mean you get what you want. Fighting for something is overall a bad way to get it. If you want something from someone, but you get into a fight with them, you'll usually find that at the end you've beaten them up instead of getting what you want.

The solution is bargains. Use fighting as a threat and a punishment, and use bargains to get what you want.

The sword-at-their-throat or gun-to-their-head is really just a strong bargaining position anyway.

-Vincent

[Arturo G.]

The solution is bargains. Use fighting as a threat and a punishment, and use bargains to get what you want.

The sword-at-their-throat or gun-to-their-head is really just a strong bargaining position anyway.

I see. Could we say it is like negotiating the bargain "with a stick"?

[lumpley]

We might, at that.

-Vincent