[Poison'd] Burning down Cartegena
Matt Snyder:
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on March 05, 2008, 06:00:59 PM
seems to me that the difference between Joe the cook and Joe the governor probably has to do with one being a member of the ship's crew (and, in a larger context, one of the seafaring men), while Cartagena is just some town out there.
But it isn't really different, if a player has "Be revenged upon the Governor of Cartegena" Ambition. And, in that case (or a zillion other we might imagine that are like it), I'm not clear about the articulation. I think "on the ship" and "out in the wide world" is NOT the distinction being made here. It's not geography. It's "closeness" to the guts of the character and the character's fiction (and ambitions and relationships, and so on).
Also, I'm not yet seeing how "Suceed or fail vs. Succeed with advantage" is different from several fortune-in-the-middle games. I'm not trying to say those should be like this one, or vice versa. I'm saying I don't get how this articulation is different from those others, yet that seems to be important here.
I mean, Sorcerer first blew my mind in this regard. "You mean, if I want to, I can actually sorta succeed in the story when the dice go wrong, even though mechanically I'm sucking on a big fat consequence? Awesome! FUCK YOU, WHIFF FACTOR!"
I don't think Sorcerer comments much at all on who gets to "narrate" what happens, whether success or failure or success with "advantage."
I know, I know. Poison'd ain't Sorcerer. Is Poison'd saying something different, though, on this issue? If so, I'm not getting it. If not, totally ok by me! I like those games.
lumpley:
Oh no, not different. I think that Poison'd is procedurally closely related to Sorcerer.
Oh hey, that's a very good question. In Sorcerer, how would you know whether setting fire to the barn meant that Cartegena burned?
My play of Sorcerer is limited, but I think the answer is, well, that's complicated. It depends a lot on what else is going on. In one circumstance, someone says "Cartegena burns down, the fire rages for days and days and the loss of life is tremendous" and everybody else is like, "yep, cool, what's next?" In another circumstance, there's a closely-described hard fight with the guy who owns the barn, then a running battle through the streets with Cartegena's constabulary, and the fire becomes both pressure on and a consequence of all these little small-scale engagements. There's not any one rule for whether Cartegena burns.
-Vincent
Piers:
Quote
In one circumstance, someone says "Cartegena burns down, the fire rages for days and days and the loss of life is tremendous" and everybody else is like, "yep, cool, what's next?" In another circumstance, there's a closely-described hard fight with the guy who owns the barn, then a running battle through the streets with Cartegena's constabulary, and the fire becomes both pressure on and a consequence of all these little small-scale engagements. There's not any one rule for whether Cartegena burns.
Reading the recent threads, I've been struck by how procedurally similar in some ways Poison'd and IAWA are. (I mean, not surprising really.) That is, they have very similar components configured differently:
A rule about whether or not you succeed at actions.
A rule for contests when players disagree about what happens.
A rule for negotiating outcomes.
In IAWA:
Characters always succeed unless someone challenges.
When challenged, there is a contest, which causes damage.
That damage can be negotiated into particular outcomes.
In Poison'd
Characters make rolls to see if they succeed. (This is actually a mechanical check to see if the GM should challenge.)
Players challenge by bringing the fight.
The bargaining rules are decoupled from the contest, but fit with it. ("Bargain with me, or I'll cut your liver out")
While the game doesn't say so procedurally, fictively a fight is a stop on what can happen in the fiction. When someone objects and the game moves towards a fight, the time scale gets smaller. As Vincent suggests in the above example, unless the players deliberately choose otherwise, bringing a fight shrinks the scope of action because it doesn't make sense for the results to extend past the fight. Actions become more and more granular, reducing their scope.
In this context it becomes clear that, when a fight is coming, rolls in the system are exactly what they say they are: a means of negotiating the context of the fight. This is also why flashbacks are important: they give room to set the scene for the fight without pushing the timescale past the moment of the fight.
rafial:
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A rule for contests when players disagree about what happens.
Quote
In Poison'd ... Players challenge by bringing the fight.
Is that truly so? I hard sort of gathered from here and here that when player A says "I do X", player B doesn't even get to start bringing the fight until it is determined if X happens via a success roll on the part of Player A. If Player A succeeds then X happens.
lumpley:
Rafial, that depends on what X is. The Xs for which that's true are pretty limited. Here's a classic Poison'd exchange:
Player A: I hold Young Zeb down and fuck him hard.
GM: Young Zeb, are you fighting back or enduring duress?
Since player A's character isn't enduring duress, going into danger, attacking someone helpless, or using stealth or great care, player A doesn't roll for anything at all.
-Vincent
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