[Poison'd] Some fight questions and a remark about brinkmanship

[Arturo G.]

Hi,

I had a very fun starting session of Poison'd the other day. One player was not coming for our regular TSoY game, and I brought Poison'd with me. There was also a new gamer. It was a really frenetic session with almost no effort from my part.

It is the first time I try Poison'd since the final rules were published. Previously I was using the ashcan. I read the rules again before the session, but I was anyway forgetting some things. Nonetheless, it worked pretty well.

I had a couple of situations I was not considering before. I'm not sure if someone has already asked similar questions, I'm not finding them with a quick search of the forum.

* When you are fighting mob to mob, and the captain is not there, I assume any player may take the lead. We can even make a real deal about who takes it before starting the mob fight.

* When fighting mob to mob, are the player's character really in danger? I assume it may depend on what do  they exactly do in the fiction. For example, they lose the first roll. They want to escalate. To do it, one player starts a personal sword fight with the captain of the other party. Is sounds like a good way to do it. If they finally lose the conflict, I assume he could suffer the consequences of losing that sword fight in the middle of the mob. Consequences like in a sword fight at the final escalation level of the mob fight? Not sure. If he is not the captain he was even not using his own dice. Perhaps it is better to start a personal fight?

* When fighting mob to mob, may all the players involved spend Xs for dice? Only the captain? After the fight, are they losing the already accumulated and not spent Xs like in any other personal fight? Who gains Xs if they win the fight?

* This is not related to mobs. If it starts with knifes, but in the second level of escalation someone produces a sword, simply, the consequences are going to be like sword to sword for the other poor bastard (if he finally loses). Isn't it? My players have a tendency to start fights with punches, but if they are losing, they get easily frenzy and try to "escalate" moving to another type of conflict instead of escalating in the same type.


A final remark about Brinkmanship,

There were some posts, long time ago, where Graham was complaining about the Brinkmanship use in the new rules. And I was also saying on those posts that I always prefer to decide when the NPCs escalate or not, based on the fiction.

But I trusted Vincent and played by the rules to see how it was. And it worked like a charm for me. It was a real relief not to take that decisions. I was forgetting about anything and playing that poor bastards as hard as possible. The only time I was skipping the brinkmanship roll was when the players had more successes than the NPC's dice and there was no chance to win. But even in crazy situations, with only one die to reroll and the players having so many Xs, I was not thinking and rolling brinkmanship. And the results were always unexpected and nice.