This was a one-shoot session of around 2 hours and a half. One of the players was leaving on vacation the day after. Thus, the intention was only to show them the game and get an idea of how it works.

There were three players:

Pablo's character: Clermont Toussant, a.k.a. "The Black" (but he is not black).
    A bald giant. Boarding fighter.
    Sins: Sodomyx2, Blasphemy, Murder
    Suffered: Beating, Arrest, Imprisonment, Rape, Branding, Mutilation
    Ambitions: To own land, To spit in the eye of God, To live forever
    Profile: Fists like big stones, Tattoos and savage demeanor
    Bargain: Ponzoña-Will swore to back me for ship's captain

Jokin's character: Commodore John B. McKenna
    Gunnery Master
    Sins: Murderx2, Blasphemy, Robbery, Mutiny
    Suffered: Arrest, Imprisonment, Lashing
    Ambitions: To be revenged upon Captain J.S.Smithson, To be pardoned, To own land
    Profile: Second sword, Long musket
    Bargain: Ponzoña-Will also swore to back me for ship's captain

Jorge's character: Ponzoña Will
    Sailing Master
    Sins: Rapex2, Adultery, Murder
    Suffered: Accursing (impotence), Torture, Beating, Attempted murder, Lashing
    Ambitions: Spit in the eye of God, Spit in the eye of Devil, To be remembered forever, To fuck with the daugther of the Royal Navy Captain
    Profile: Fists like big stones; Slight, quick and vicious
    Bargain: Commodore John B. McKeena owns me his life

The Dagger:
    Frightening to see
    Heavily gunned
    Best Strength: Broadside

The Crew:
    It's large (110 souls)
    Unreprobated murders
    Drunkards and maligners

In the first scenes they will trying some small things to get Xs. The first ones a little lame. And they were consistently failing the rolls. For example, "The Black" was trying to quickly climb some ropes to shout loudly and bring the attention of the crew (do risky things). He wanted to be announced captain immediately. But he failed. I was not seeing a reasonable way to bring a fight. Thus, he landed on the deck (Endure duress) to fail again and shout with pain. Still not seeing a good opportunity for a fight I changed the focus to another player character.

They got very fast the idea of using flashback scenes. The first one was by Jokin, presenting a scene where he was being lashed (one of the things he suffered) while he was trying to endure duress. They liked the idea,
because all the players were, sooner or later, asking for flashbacks to introduce scenes to detail their sufferings.

I noticed (after the session) that they were consistently doing the scene-framing of the flashbacks themselves. A quick and simple framing, going directly to the resolution. Perhaps I was forcing them to go immediately for it, I'm not sure. The effect was that these scenes were a little fuzzy and we were not really role-playing or developing them so much. Our fault. Except in a couple of situations were they the player failed the roll and asked for a follow-up conflict. For example, Pablo started a scene portraying "The Black" leading the assault to a merchant ship. There was a giant Dutch blond-man holding a terrifying scythe among the merchant's crew (Pablo asked for doing risky things jumping alone in the other ship to fight the blond). He failed and he was beaten badly by
the Dutch man (endure duress). Success. We narrated how "The Black" saved his reputation, managing to crawl away from the Dutch before he needed the help of the crew to be rescued.

Ponzoña Will discovered in his first scene the very easy thing to do: Attack the helpless Tom Reed. It was a humorous collection of mini-scenes. He failed and I did as the example in the book. Bring the fight with Tom Reed getting a hidden knife. Ponzoña won the fight, hurting Tom badly. But then, he decided to kill the poor bastard throwing him over the board (attack helpless). He failed and I narrated that Tom grasped him in the last moment to bring Ponzoña with him to the water. The others stopped the ship quickly. A very successful Endure duress for Ponzoña to get to the surface and swim (he got 3 or 4 Xs). I narrated Tom trying to swim after him crying a lot. Jorge was so angry that he spent three Xs to shoot in Tom's face with a pistol (Jorge's visceral reaction was so funny that we forgot about watered gunpowder or whatever). Thus, the last thing we saw from Tom was a growing spot of blood in the water. Someone said... blood in the water means sharks. Ponzoña neede to do a risky things roll to climb up the rope that the crew threw at him before the sharks were approaching.

After a couple of situations like that the players were still discussing about who should be the captain, and "The Black" and the Commodore were starting to look at each other badly. But they were clearly not wanting to start a fight among them.

As the situation was stalling I decided to press them a little to decide. I said they were loosing time, and The Resolute may be approaching. I rolled the Urgent die, and I got the number on the card. I was not really wanting it
to appear so early, but ... who cares.

They inmmediately decided that "The Black" was the captain (for the moment) and he ordered the crew to flee. The rest of the session was mainly the fight with The Resolute. I will use another post for it.

(continue...)

They were trying to flee from The Resolute. But they got a very bad dice roll (partially because the Commodore was a little angry for not being elected as captain and Jokin decided to skip the captain's orders and kept his dice for Xs). Seeing the bad roll, the captain changed orders and maneuvered to try to start a broadside to broadside fight (thats was the best strength of The Dagger).
This was a little confusing. They were playing with the system to try to give-up in the second level of escalation. Very weird. I think the rules for pursuing/fleeing are not suitable for this kind of situations. They wanted to turn the ship at a certain distance, not another.
Another example coming soon, could be two captains trying to get close, but one of them wanting to do some broadside gunnery and the other trying to avoid it to get into closer contact to board. It is a complete different kind of conflict, and I don't see a mechanic to deal with it.

Indeed, after the first broadside conflict, The Resolute captain would have prefered to board with his well trained crew to avoid The Dagger's best strength. But The Dagger's captain wanted to keep on a braodside fight.  We were just narrating and resolving by common sense. See below.

It was easy for the players to win all conflicts with The Resolute. Her captain had brinkmanship 5, the same as The Dagger's captain. But the pirates had a total of 7 dice (the other two players wanted to help in this situation as it was dangerous for all of them), plus some Xs they were getting between conflicts with nice fighting narration and flashbacks. Too easy indeed.
Two broadside conflicts were lost by The Resolute badly. But her captain was using his last Xs to inflict the same damage to The Dagger.

The first one ended in the first level. As The Dagger was already in Wear&Breakage condition, I wrote x2 on the Cruel Fortune card and substracted another point from The Dagger's profile. As the ships were still operative they went to a second broadside pass.

The second one ended in the second level. My escalation re-roll was a disaster. I knew I was not having good chances to win. Thus, I did the same, using the last Xs to do damage. Ships were now broken and the crews diminished (I substracted one from the profiles of the crews to reflect it).

With broken ships in broadside position I decided to allow the players to board The Resolute after some flashbacks and small scenes of risky boarding to get Xs.

But then I got a problem. The Resolute captains had a name. The first thing Jorge wanted to do was to spend Xs to eliminate the captain of The Resolute. I cannot remember if he was finally him or Jokin's character with his musket but the captain got a deadly wound. Without a captain, I introduced an unnamed official to take the place with one less brinkmanship point than the captain.

I can imagine this may happend systematically, as far as the players have Xs, on each mob to mob, or crew to crew conflict where the leader has a name. It is a great advantage to get rid of him. It is difficult to imagine a good ship-fight with an old enemy captain who does not have a name. Thus, the old enemy captain is going
to be systematically eliminated before the first roll (or immediately afterwards). It is not clear in the rules if you may apply the elimination even before the first roll.

So far so good, it was a nice narration: the boarding, the captain elimination, how the soldiers grouped around him and fought desperately (to the second level of escalation), and how they fight desperately (using againg the last two Xs which were not enough to give an opportunity to win to punish the pirates with the same result) and how they finally surrended. As a few of both crews were killed, I subtracted another point from the profiles of both crews.
At the end The Dagger has two wear&breakage penalties and the crew two profile penalties. I don't know if this is the expected procedure, but it made sense.

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.

Anyway, they didn't manage to make a deal and Pablo's character brought him to the deck and ordered Ponzoña to kill him. As he tried (hurt helpless) he failed and I brought the fight again. An official run to him getting a pistol in the way before anyone reacted. It was a very very nice and tense pistol to pistol conflict. Jorge had no Xs and he won in third level of escalation by a tie. The official's bullet brushed Ponzoñas's ear, but his head was blown out a second after.

The Pirates were so angry for the resistance of the soldiers and the casualties that they decided to kill all the surrendered crew, except one man. They put the survivor in a boat and let him come back to tell everybody about the massacre.

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.

With a shortened crew I decided they could not keep two ships. It was a good thing that they started with a big crew. They plunder The Resolute and sank it. They wanted mainly provisions to take away the Need cruel fortune. 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.

As we were short of time, I didn't threw to them more cruel fortunes in the hard way back to a beach with their broken ship, using boats to pull it. I wanted to explain them the Leisure rules a little before ending.

With the two plunder dice they got points enough to repair the ship and get more crew. I made them spend one Leisure point for each Profile point lost for the ship (repairing), and for the crew (finding new members in near villages and convincing them to join). Thus, they spent 4 points to bring the ship and crew to a good condition. There was not enough Leisure points for anyone to enjoy.

After playing discussion:

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

Conclusion:
We enjoyed playing and we liked the game. It is a real pirates game. Very fun. Little preparation is needed thanks to the cruel fortunes that seems to work pretty well. The rules need some rewrite to tell the players how to use them properly. I was reading some threads before playing that were really helpful.

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.

Arturo wrote:
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.

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 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.

Hi, Vincent!

About how to approach the other ship, what you wrote perfectly makes sense to me. And it is of course the way this game works. Always playing from the fiction.

This also reminds me another thing that I did not know how to solve during the play. When they finally killed the enemy captain, Ponzoña failed again the "hurt helpless" roll. At that moment I didn't know what to do. It was too stupid to bring another fight again, or to ask for a reroll. Thus, I decided to transform it (with all the players approval) in an automatic action.
But now I think it was a mistake. The rules work perfectly for this case. If he fails, he is not brutal enough to kill the helpless captain. Thus, he can not do it (hesitates, looks for an excuse to avoid doing it himself, whatever). What do you think? Does it makes sense?

The new rules for pursuit sounds nice. Waiting for your post.

About repeated murder, I was confused by the character creation rules, that offer the possibility of choosing the same sin twice, counting it twice for devil. But in the text it is explained under which conditions (prolonged, unremorseful, etc.). Just doing it two times does not count.
It makes perfectly sense to need new sins to make the Devil grow. I also think that. otherwise, the sins may become a kind of policy mechanism.

lumpley wrote:

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.

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

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.

Arturo wrote:
This also reminds me another thing that I did not know how to solve during the play. When they finally killed the enemy captain, Ponzoña failed again the "hurt helpless" roll. At that moment I didn't know what to do. It was too stupid to bring another fight again, or to ask for a reroll. Thus, I decided to transform it (with all the players approval) in an automatic action.
But now I think it was a mistake. The rules work perfectly for this case. If he fails, he is not brutal enough to kill the helpless captain. Thus, he can not do it (hesitates, looks for an excuse to avoid doing it himself, whatever). What do you think? Does it makes sense?

Arturo wrote:
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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

lumpley wrote:
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.

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).

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

Fantastic, thank you.

Arturo wrote:
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.

lumpley wrote:
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.

We might, at that.

-Vincent