[Steal Away Jordan] Brutality in all its forms
Parthenia:
This sounds like a cool game. Thanks for playing and posting the AP!
Here are my first two questions: Was this a one shot and the characters' stories were told start to finish in one session or will you play these characters again?
And I'd like to hear more about how the re-rolls with Major Conflicts went. (It's one of the "hope" mechanics).
Julia
Ron Edwards:
Hi Julia!
Because Ralph was visiting from out of town, we probably won't get a chance to play with exactly all four characters again. The original intention was to play just with one Motive for each character for purposes of that particular day.
However, I am inclined to suggest continuing with the three other characters anyway, using Julie's suggestion of beginning each session with a GM-not-invited confab about the Motives, Tasks, and Goals. I think all three of them offer extremely rich opportunities, and even Tod's character, who achieved the most of the three, is more at an end-chapter-one stage than a finished-story stage, as I mentioned.
Another reason to keep going is that Steal Away Jordan requires a little practice as people become used to the mechanics and the overall story-structure ... and we haven't even seen my favorite part yet, player-character death and the ensuing options.
Therefore if the others are willing, I'll probably brush up on the history myself and we'll keep going.
Regarding the re-rolls and the Major Conflicts, let's see if I can remember. The other people will probably chime in with multiple corrections of whatever mistakes I make.
OK, let's do the one with Cain and Captain Worthington. The scene had begun with Coal suggesting they sabotage this shed they were working on at the shipyard, and Cain won a Minor Bargain and got Coal to agree to the opposite, making it the best shed ever instead. Along comes Captain Worthington, asshole extraordinaire, who is irritated to see them "loafing around" - as it happens, they were done for the day and were just getting ready to leave. Worthington felt like seeing a slave beaten, so singled out Cain on a trumped-up claim that their work must be worthless.
So there was a Major Conflict with a risk of punishment, based on Worthington's inspection of the shed. It was kind of a nailbiter not just because of the the risk, but of consequences for the friendship and the implied slight disparity of values within it. As I recall, the results of the first round of rolling put Worthington only a little ahead, to our surprise given the difference in dice, and also because a lot of Cain's dice were neither 1's nor Lucky Sevens. I think Worthington's dice had turned up a lot of 1's. Then all the non-1's and non-Lucky Sevens were re-rolled, and Cain gained a bit, and it ended up tied. So we followed the rules for what to do when that happens - was it the Skull die? I think so ... Anyway, that turned out in Cain's favor after all. Pretty intense!
(I may be mixing up mechanics from different conflicts. I do know we saw a tie at a major crux-point, though.)
Another big one came in at the end of Buck's story, in which he'd ended up in a pretty disadvantaged position out at sea. Harry had managed to subvert his reputation and get in charge of supervising him doing a lot of scut-work, and I decided to pull out the stops and have Harry try to beat him to death. Ralph did not take this lying down and had Buck (or "Bloody Tom" as he saw himself) pull the knife given to him by his friend earlier. I won this roll, big-time, throughout the initial and the re-roll steps of the conflict. Ralph then used the helping rules, to bring Captain Worthington into the situation, and said that the two of them were set against each other in classic rag-in-teeth knife combat. This time Buck's roll came out decisively on top, and Harry was killed upon the appearance of the skull. (The skull killed at least two NPCs, maybe more, so it was plain lucky that none of the player-characters bought it when they rolled it against themselves.)
Best, Ron
Valamir:
Since Bloody Tom's story is pretty much done, having achieved his one and only goal, playing without him shouldn't be a problem. Especially since he is now away at sea happily carrying out Captain Worthington's dirty work by continually pursuing his motivation of "Killing proves I'm better".
In terms of the mechanics for those two scenes. Both involved a key minor conflict leading up to the major...which both happened nearly identically. In Cain's minor conflict he wound up with two 7s and you wound up with two 7s with a tied total. You rolled a 2 on the tie breaker and Cain won, claiming four 7s to help with the shed inspection conflict. In mine, I wound up with two 7s and you wound up with two 7s with a tied total (this was the "get the drop on Harry" conflict.) You again rolled a 2 on the tie breaker, but this time I rolled...a 1, and Harry got the four 7s to add to his 18 worth to pit against my 9 worth +1 Task die in a fight to the death.
In our conflict I wound up with a total after reroll of -1 and Harry wound up with something like 7 or 8. I was all prepared to see Tom's story end in tragedy having fulfilled only one of my Tasks ("get a job at the docks"). That was when Julie reminded us of the Push your Luck rule with the Skull die, which I ,of course, siezed and rolled. The result was the aid from an ally which caused the Major Conflict to be refought and gave +3 dice to me.
So we narrated that the result of the major conflict was that Harry had beat the ever loving crap out of me and just as he was about to finish me off, my new master Captain Worthington showed up (story note: I had connived to get bought by Captain Worthington so as to fullfill my task of getting to the docks, the Captain had bought me to use as his weapon of fear and punishment. Harry was my enemy, a sailor who recognized that I had been a pirate before being recaptured and resold. He'd won an earlier minor conflict in which he had convinced the rest of the crew to laugh at me whereever I went, thus undermining my use to the captain as a weapon of fear and leading to my being assigned labor duty under Harry's supervision).
Captain W, seeing one of his crew fighting with his property, had us bound together Indian wrestling style and we went at it with knives. This time I rolled insanely well (getting like 4-5 points on 13 dice). Harry, with his 22 dice was ahead by 1 point after the first roll, but the reroll of unmatched dice came up nearly all 1s and hosed him badly. Tom won!
Ron decided that since this was a fight to the death, that Harry should roll the skull die for his injury and it came up...a Skull! Tom totally killed Harry dead. I asked Ron if that fight put me back in Worthington's good graces and he said absolutely, I was now Worthington's pet killer aboard ship.
I promptly checked off my last two tasks which were "Kill my Supervisor" (having nicely maneuvered to make my enemy Harry my supervisor) and "get a ship to accept me as crew"...both the last two parts of my Goal "Escape to Sea"
Tom was a totally not nice person who revealed in the brutality of his time as a pirate and longed to get back to the sea where he was free to kill and butcher. Far from seeing Captain Worthington as a horrible villain, I imagine he's just about the only white person he has any actual respect...even admiration...for. I suspect he sees Worthington as being "Worthy" of his loyalty...them both being cruel and ruthless killers.
Parthenia:
[Squeals with joy] Ralph, that sounds so frickin' awesome! Thank you all! I may come back with more questions about the game, once I climb off this cloud of happiness.
Julia
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