[Poison'd] Trying to understand Currency and Reward Systems
lumpley:
There's a medium-term reward cycle in changing your stats - committing new sins, suffering new violence, achieving and/or abandoning your medium-term ambitions. Changing your stats shifts the balances between the various success rolls, fighting, and the consequences of skipping out on a bargain. In the early game, the shift might be in almost any direction, but over the course of play it'll be toward desperate and impulsive violence, away from patience, trust, and perserverence.
That is, the position from which your pirate pursues his ambitions doesn't just change, it decays.
Of course and on the other hand, some ambitions are better achieved from an utterly corrupt position.
-Vincent
lumpley:
Oh, here's kind of a thing about play at the longest term. Do you have Sorcerer, Steve? If you do, it might be interesting to compare the list in Poison'd on page 19 with the list in Sorcerer on page 123.
-Vincent
hix:
Vincent, I'm really pleased you mentioned that list in Sorcerer: it was in the back of my mind when I was thinking about Poison'd's end conditions. I have this theory that the end of long-term Poison'd play is about judging your pirate or positioning them for the closing credits. I'm figuring that because it seems that three of the key variables in the 'This is the final session' conditions are:
[x] you're alive or dead (and possible judged by God/The Devil)
[x] you're either a pirate or you're not
[x] you're either someone the players admire or you're not.
I see how that shares similarities with the four extremes of possible outcomes in Sorcerer (total failure and horror, pyhrric victory, success using sorcery, and success by renouncing sorcery). In Poison'd you could have a range of potential endings for your character including (but definitely not limited to) being: a pirate forever, stuck on the Dagger; a retired pirate, owning land but rejected by society; a noble pirate Captain; a former pirate, redeemed by God and trying to atone, but tempted to take revenge. There's a lot of exciting, interesting ways to finish your character's story (or, in some cases, not finish it but bring the curtains down on it).
For the moment, though, I'm happy to leave the question of figuring out the longest-term reward cycle for Poison'd to one side. I might have to get a game together and figure that one out for myself.
-- -- --
I also like the 'Changing your Stats' medium-term reward cycle you point out. When I first read the following quote, I thought I could see a little bit of authorial judgment about how the game should play out:
Quote
In the early game, the shift might be in almost any direction, but over the course of play it'll be toward desperate and impulsive violence, away from patience, trust, and perserverence.
... but on reflection, it seems like that your choices for ways in which you can change your states are totally designed to continue destabilising the situation (even being redeemed and having your Devil score drop to zero is going to be a pretty provocative action).
-- -- --
Ron, I'm happy that we're on pretty much the same page about this. Our hopes for the character having a good outcome are because we're being the character's advocate, but as authors and audience we can be satisfied by tragedy, catharsis (as well as upbeat happily-ever-after endings). I can think of a couple of Primetime Adventures games I've played where tragedy for a character led to way more satisfying stories and endings (I still feel the moment where my Troll King sadly shuffled down Venice Beach having failed to win the heart of a Californian real estate agent who taught him about self-esteem was a brilliant ending for that character).
... Anyway. That's a tangent.(*)
(*) Also a tangent: I don't really follow your jargon answer yet.
I may ask you some follow-up questions if you think it's
important to clarify its meaning.
Let's talk about Currency
So, the other thing I wanted to figure out in this thread is what Currency means. That's because I don't really understand the definition in the Provisional Glossary:
Quote
The exchange rate within and among Character Components. Currency may or may not be explicit (e.g. "character points"), but it is a universal feature of System, specifically as it relates to Character.
My best guess is that Currency is what we use to measure the changes in characters as they go through the game's reward cycles. Is that accurate?
To use Poison'd as an example, Currency would include Xs, Bargains, changes in stats, Leisure, Brinksmanship, (possibly) whether the character is Captain or not, land ownership and marriage.
Ron Edwards:
Poison'd has the virtue of providing a visible transition between successful rolls and other concrete elements of play. A lot of games have a causal but (unless you know what you're looking for) invisible connection. Consider the relationship between successful rolls and leveling up in any iteration of D&D, for example. It's mediated through concepts like character survival or not, victorious fights or not, various types of teamwork or not (which is an interesting one because if you're a good teammate, you can still get XPs even without successful rolls in an encounter), actions which do not require rolls, and more. Whereas in Poison'd, an X is achieved in a particular way, and it can be expended in particular ways, all out in the open.
I provided that comparison to illustrate what Currency is. It's the way certain game mechanics can be traded off among one another. The most obvious example can be seen in character creation in point-build games. In old-school Champions (3rd ed. and before), I can spend 10 character points, on 20 more Endurance, 5 more Ego, or 1 more Speed. And I only have so many character points. That's very easy because all of those are attributes, but there are sneaky elements and breakpoints, e.g., you have higher base Endurance (a secondary attribute) by buying a high Constitution (a primary attribute). And I have a base value for every skill derived from my attributes, but I can buy up a skill or two cheaply from there too.
So, that's Currency among various numbers on the sheet. The tricky thing is that I consider less point-build games to still have Currency, but with a fair amount of it already "fixed" into certain proportions, like a planned economy, if you will. This can be illustrated by a very common hack of the 1977-79 AD&D, in which GPs and XPs were equivalent, and every item had a cost in GPs, and every magic item had a rating in XPs, as did levels. The hack was to assign a base number of generic points (XP/GP), and then let everyone buy a character as they saw fit from there, to whatever level, armed with whatever equipment and items, that they could afford.
Now add the element of time, and it should become clear that the quantities of system in action are directly linked into the Currency as well. Sometimes it's obvious: in old-school T&T, when you made a saving roll, you added exactly the number you rolled, multiplied by the level (difficulty) of the saving roll, as XPs. Sometimes it's not: in old-school D&D of various sorts, you got so many XPs from defeating a specific monster, but exactly what you did to accomplish this was left wide open ... but often had a great deal to do with what magic items, equipment, and other GP/XP rated things you had with you. And in either case, so many XPs meant you leveled up, i.e., changed stuff on your sheet.
Is this making more sense now? Plus, the realization that improvement mechanics (i.e., gaining more hit points upon leveling up) and damage mechanics (i.e. losing hit points in combat) are all the same thing (and modulated by the intermediate version called healing)?
Best, Ron
David Berg:
I'm enjoying this thread. At this point, I'd find it helpful to see an illustration of Currency in action via changing a stat in Poison'd. The full arc (shortest possible path is fine), from "right after I changed my last stat" to "and now I'm changing this one". Anyone feel like obliging?
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