Poison'd: cooperative pirates, and fleshing out NPCs?
Joel P. Shempert:
Well, this took me a long time to get back to, but i'd like to dig into the issues you brought up, Ron. I know Forge Midwest is around the corner, but hopefully we can get a bit of dialog in before then.
You said you're unsure whether "balls to the wall Narrativist play" is even on my radar. I'd say that this play IS on my radar, but it keeps eluding me--disappearing into the Bermuda triangle, if you will. I think I have a strong signal, and when I close in on it, it vanishes.
I'm steadily improving, though. You referenced my struggles with the Sorcerer Cascadiapunk game. While you're right to draw parallels to my GM shortcomings in both games, I've grown a lot in GMing, hardcore Narr or otherwise, and see Cascadiapunk and the Poison'd game as points on a continuum. Cascadiapunk was a first effort, Poison'd more of an off night.
But just why and how it was off is fruitful to explore! A lot of what you say is apt.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on March 24, 2011, 07:04:21 AM
I am frankly unsure whether this kind of play is even on your radar. I saw the same issue in your Cascadia Sorcerer game: as GM, you sought to nurture the characters in what might be thought of as a "story cocoon," and simply did not bring any of the Kickers to bear upon them in terms of raw threat, either emotionally or physically. There was a lot of running 'round the landscape and skirmishing without information or confrontation.
...
GMing Poison'd is not a skill I have developed. I don't know the game all that well, and have some trouble understanding how to keep the whole laundry-list of "if then" circumstances in my head at all times. The one time we tried to play it, I wasn't GMing, and play sank like a stone before a single resolution was managed. Going strictly off what I can glean from the rules, and from threads like [Poison'd] Trying to understand Currency and Reward Systems, my current call is that Poison'd is exceptionally directed toward this adverse-GM technique - if the GM isn't literally and constantly threatening the very existence of opportunities to fulfill Ambitions, then he or she is falling down on the job.
I actually think we're in the same boat as far as Poison'd goes. I have a solid head-understanding of the "adversity, adversity, adversity" approach, but I often lack the gut-instinct for it and struggle to apply it in practice, and Poison'd is fairly opaque to me in that regard. Failing to grasp the if-then chains means that much of the adversity the GM should bring is simply unavailable, because the conditions are unfulfilled or the poor GM is missing some opportunity or other in the sea of Cruel Fortunes text. Without robust Cruel Fortune action, I find myself lacking in material for adversity--the crew are all stuck on the ship together, and the NPC Pirates deliberately backgrounded by the procedures, so most of the adversity is up to the players to bring to themselves, or so it seems to me. If the pirates get to shore, or confront the Resolute, or what have you, then there's more fictional grist for adversity, but we never made it there.
Which is not to say, "It's all the rules' fault, waaah waaah waaah!" It's just to say, that yes, I have a skill deficiency as GM, and Poison'd particularly stymies me just where I'm weakest. The softballing you postulate is right on the money, at least in the vocal cords example. I was trying to avoid the boring old "you miss" interpretation of failure rolls that sometimes renders RPGs tedious and silly, so seeing "succeeds but to no advantage to you" as an option, I sought to make the failure roll interesting, by having him succeed in the snip, but literally not be able to silence him. And I thought if I brought in some spooky hell-and-damnation color into the game it might open up some of the appropriate Cruel Fortunes, but I wasn't able to make that work. Ultimately, though, I didn't know how to make my failure narration truly interesting, that is, consequential.
Incidentally, though, regarding the Malconentment example, A) voting IS a mechanical thing, central to the game, and B) the Malcontentment rules state that you have to give the players fair warning that the crew is growing malcontent, giving them a chance to address the patter. If they fail to address the matter, THEN Malcontentment comes into play with its mechanical effects. SO given that the crew was malcontent for lack of a Captain, voting and giving them a Captain, would seem to nix the Malcontentment by the rules.
Regarding the theory of "people-pleasing"...I'm unsure. My first impulse was that no, that's not what's going on here. But further reflection leads me to speculate that maybe there's a specific species of that impulse at play here, which is: for so much of my GMing career, the "adversity" I provided was bullshit arbitrary fuckery (see, frex my Over the Edge threads), which didn't spur the players fruitfully and meaningfully to action, it just gave them a pain in the neck. the kind of stuff that negates PC success or simply makes them jum;p through dreary hoops. I caught enough eye-rolling, grumbling looks and comments from said fuckery that now I shy away from any whiff of "just because I can" type adversity...and end up with nothing. The really stupid thing is, when i slip into this I still end up fucking the players around (like in Cascadiapunk), just more weakly.
Now, all that said: I did run Poison'd again, a few days after your post, and it was much stronger, not least because I went into it with this conversation in mind. Other factors I credit: me explaining the game's adversarial nature more clearly, the crew getting ashore so they could stir up trouble in town, and willingness on everybody's part to drive toward human wickedness and human suffering--"I worship the Kraken! Bow before the Kraken!" is, for example, silly and unreal, whereas "I've heard the mayor's daughter is comely, let's storm the manor in the middle of the night so I can fuck her!" is very, painfully, down to earth.
I'll admit I still didn't do much to bring adversity whilst aboard ship, but I didn't have to; we had one flat-out traitor pirate (because I assigned that Ambition in setup this time) and plenty of minor squabbles. What I did do was flesh out a few NPC pirates, pulling names from the example PCs list in the booklet. This gave me a small cast of "personalities" to draw from when an opportunity presented itself. And once ashore, I was able to pour things on more steadily with the new influx of adversity-ready NPCs. These all synergized--The traitor Pirate escaped the ship and bargained with the Constable, his pardon for the Dagger's crew. And the aforementioned Mayor and his family became the targets of terrible brutality led by the PC Captain, but also instigated by one of the NPCs I'd fleshed out (Pigfuck Dan, of course!), prompting the young innocent PC to stand up to him and kill him, then get killed himself by the Captain, while the other half the crew, led by the remaining PC, got decimated and arrested in a tavern shootout with the constabulary.
So, all in all, I'm confident that adversity-bringing is a skill that I do have, and can continue to strengthen by developing the muscle, as it were. I'm grateful to you for highlighting the issue, and pointing me to your Rustbelt thread--it was helpfully illustrative. Since reading all this stuff, I've had several great games where I saw my adversity-GMing markedly improve!
Peace,
-Joel
I'll probably do a post about the Dreaming Crucible soon, or else start a new thread, based on how the conversation progresses.
Ron Edwards:
Hey Joel,
Wow, I have nothing to add. That is an amazing post, and all the more important given your experiences with the recent session. I'd like to point out that you did, indeed, bring adversity when you decided to use the Traitor Pirate during prep. The skills we're talking about are involved in both prep and play.
But my only real reply is going to be the frequency of linking to this thread in the course of later discussions.
Best, Ron
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