[Poison'd] average booty...?
agony:
Steve. In another thread Vincent suggested that if your crew take over a bigger ship and leave the Dagger behind he'd probably make them a skeleton crew. He also stated he'd allow you to hire more crew at port.
I know I haven't played yet, but I would think that it would be a judgment call on the GM's part whether they could crew both ships with two skeleton crews or not.
Vincent, one more question for you. Is the GM within his right to bring Cruel Fortunes into play whenever he feels appropriate? A couple of them don't really list how to bring them into play (while others explicitly do).
lumpley:
Steve, I like your solution a lot.
Agony, your question gets at the heart of why I like Poison'd so much as rpg design. Check this out: the cruel fortunes in Poison'd are to a point-based GM budget (like in Primetime Adventures) as character creation in Poison'd is to a point-based character creation mechanism (like in GURPS or whatever).
There are two things a GM budget does. The first is, it limits what the GM can do, so the players and the GM are on a mechanically even footing. The second is, it thereby makes whatever the GM does fair, because the budget is known and fair and the players agreed to it when they sat down to play. If the GM sticks to the budget, she can't hose the players, and accordingly, whatever she DOES do, she isn't hosing the players.
Cruel fortunes do the same two things, but without points to spend.
For the most part, they rely on the game's fiction instead of points: in order to bring the cruel fortune "a ship" into play, there has to be a ship already established in the game's fiction. Even the ones that say, like, "bring the constabulary into play" actually take a jaunt through the fiction to do it: the reason you bring the constabulary into play is because when you get arrested there are invariably constables around.
But Urgency is an important exception. You can pretty much always put Urgency into play, specifying pretty much whatever subsequent cruel fortune you like. The primary purpose of Urgency is to bring other, unjustified, cruel fortunes into play. (It has secondary uses.) Try it when you play: a third of the way into session 2 plunk down "Urgency: the Storm" or "Urgency: Malcontentment" (with appropriate description, of course: the darkening sky, the muttering crew).
You'll find that setting a cruel fortune up with urgency turns it into fair play, where putting the Storm or Malcontentment directly into play without warning will piss your players off. Or, to put it another way, in order to get Malcontentment into play, you can either start with the crew muttering, then escalate gradually - they're muttering worse, they're sullen, they're talking back, they're shirking their duties - using the fiction solely to eventually justify pitting Malcontentment into play; or else you can start with the crew muttering and put Urgency: Malcontentment into play right then.
So yeah, putting cruel fortunes into play is a topic that I'm delighted has come up. As you look over the list, are there any that jump out at you in that regard?
-Vincent
agony:
Vincent, thanks. Upon reflection I only half-understood the currency aspect on first read-through but in retrospect it makes absolute sense and is completely awesome.
However, are there not certain elements that will be established in the fiction and the card immediately comes into play (besides the cards which explicitly tell you to do so)? Such as a ship appearing on the horizon previously unestablished? This does seem like a somewhat rare event and I do foresee obvious ways to weave most of the Cruel Fortunes into the fiction so perhaps I'm worrying about something which is unimportant and too infrequent to waste time contemplating.
agony:
Ok. Actual play made some things clear and proved very insightful.
I have just one question after my first session of Poison'd; is it intentional that if all of the PC's are with their company that they will almost always surely win?
With a company profile of 6 and a Captain with Brinksmanship 6 (all of the PC's have Brinksmanship 6), they are rolling 9 dice among 4 Players. At most I have 6 dice and perhaps 3 X's if I have a profile 7 company. Of course all of the PC's will have more X's so that doesn't help either. When they will always have 50% more dice than me...how can I possibly win? The only resort I see is taking a PC out of it and inflicting harm but that still isn't a real threat.
It seems to me that giving each extra Player in the fight only 1 die would be much more balanced. Their extra X's already prove mighty helpful without the bonus die a piece and this would make it so danger was actually present company to company.
GB Steve:
Taking named PCs out of a fight is a big threat in our experience, and something the players complained about no end. It also gets rid of their dice.
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