Problems with Poisn'd
lumpley:
On page 16: "If your pirate suffers a deadly wound, strike a bargain or die," with a list of possible bargains you can strike to avoid dying. With a surgeon, with God, etc.
You can prevent Dirty Pete from striking a bargain with a surgeon, easily, just by not letting any surgeon near. Harder to keep him from striking a bargain with God, of course, but on the other hand, if he and God can come to an arrangement, it probably should trump your stabbing him. I mean, it's God, after all.
I don't know where you got the idea that being stabbed was inconsequential. It wasn't from the game text!
Now, there's some interesting play around whether your stabbing him in the kidneys constitutes a deadly wound, but it's interesting play, not an IIEE crisis. I'm willing to talk about it, but only once you're solid that the rules actually work. For now: whether he fights back or not, if you stab Dirty Pete in the kidneys he's well and truly fucked.
-Vincent
rafial:
Okay I had gotten as far as: If the system is handing back results to the fiction, then if Dirty Pete doesn't fight back, Dirty Pete ain't walking away, because he's just gotten a long knife in the kidney and is down on the deck bleeding his life out. The fiction sad he was stabbed, the success roll was made, and stabbed he was.
But I also thought, if Dirty Pete doesn't want to accept being stabbed in the kidney, then he must bring the fight. But based on Vincent's last post, maybe that doesn't help either?
lumpley:
Like I say there's some interesting play there, but talking about it should wait, I think.
Frankly though, if Dirty Pete's been so bad to our unnamed hero that he WILL KILL HIM and nothing else will satisfy, Dirty Pete's fucked.
Oh - this is all supposing that Dirty Pete's a PC. If he's an NPC, pff. He's so past fucked it's not even a thing.
-Vincent
lumpley:
Hey Ralph -
Quote from: lumpley on February 27, 2008, 02:17:01 PM
I don't know where you got the idea that being stabbed was inconsequential. It wasn't from the game text!
That was more gleeful than I needed to be, I'm sorry. I don't need to play gotcha with you.
What I think's going on is what I said upfront - you figured that "suffers a deadly wound" was a game-mechanical term, so you were looking for which other subsystems created it. The fighting subsystem mentions it explicitly, and no others do, so you figured that's how it happens.
In reality, "if your pirate suffers a deadly wound" is there to receive the handoff from the fiction, without caring how your pirate came to suffer a deadly wound. Receiving one in a fight is only one way to suffer one.
-Vincent
Valamir:
Ok, good. Progress, one more piece is clicking into place. This was actually an important question I asked (#3 on the list) that you hadn't answered yet...whether the things narrated in a success roll actually happen upon rolling a success, so good to get that clarified. Does scope matter? If I had said "I sink the Dagger" and succeed, does the Dagger sink? If I had said "I light off the gunpowder in the powder room and destroy the ship and everyone on board"...is everyone dead"? If I had said, "I set fire to a barn in Cartegena and the entire city burns to the ground"...does the city burn? If I say "I build a rocket ship and fly to the moon"... Who gets to set the parameters for what is acceptable and accomplishable with the narration leading to a success roll?
Definitely (IMO) you want to spend some ink explaining this in the text, in more than just a sentence or two. Generally when I read the rules and read "here is how you do this thing" and it explicitly describes 1 situation and there is no reference anywhere else to any other situations also letting me do that thing...I'm going to conclude 100% of the time...that that's the one and only way of doing that thing. Maybe that's the board game rules reader in me...but my mantra is precision, precision, precision. So if its possible to inflict a deadly wound on someone simply by saying "I inflict a deadly wound on Pete...here's my roll...success, Pete has suffered a deadly wound" that needs to be spelled out pretty explicitly I think.
You're right in your impression of what's going on with my understanding...in my own defense I'll just say, I read the rules as rules and did everything they said to do and nothing they didn't say to do...because that's how rules are supposed to work IMO. I'd love to see everything you're saying in this thread make it into the next version of the text.
So circling back to item three from the original post...essentially, Dirty Pete is just furniture for my narration.
He has no recourse, he can't counter, he can't stop me, he can't use any of his game stats or Xs in any way...if I'm a brutal SOB...he's taking a deadly wound anytime I say he takes a deadly wound, right? So when do bargains come in timing-wise? Lets say I'm not sneaking and Pete see's it coming. I say "I stab Pete, here's my roll"...Pete's player says "hold up, let's make a bargain..."I promise to support you for Captain if you promise to keep me from harm"...I say "cool, sounds good" and then don't make the success roll I was about to make? What if I've already rolled, can I pretend the roll didn't happen, or is Pete stabbed and now I need to help save him to keep the bargain?
I'm certainly now seeing why you've focused on the importance of bargains in earlier threads. Also a part of the text that could use a bit of spotlighting, because they didn't seem as centrally important as they are seeming as a result of this discussion.
Yeah, this has been a pretty bizarre thread. I went from thinking this is a pretty mechanical game where everything is regimented and orchestrated mechanically, board game style...but has a lot of holes and assumptions that haven't made it into the text and need to -- to now thinking this is a pretty open, freeform, hardly regulated game...but has a lot of holes and assumptions that haven't made it into the text and need to. They're just very different holes than I thought they were.
Cool...I'm a little disappointed to learn that, because I was grooving on the plays-like-a-boardgame vibe I got from the text, so I'll have to adjust my expectations for the next time I play; but I'm at least starting to feel like I could play it and get it to work better than it did this time.
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