Poison’d Actual Play Session 2
The crew of the Pirate ship the Dagger beaches itself upon Isla Luna to gather much needed water and supplies. Murmurs of discontent can be heard rippling through the crew, as Isla Luna is well known for being the home of a powerful witch. What’s the worst that could happen? Word to the wise: this episode gets pretty rank. “Dirty Dick Wiggins” makes good on his name, among other atrocities.
Roles
Brandon: Dirty Dick Wiggins Ship’s Gunnery Master
CJ: Bloody John Parr Ship’s Surgeon
Kevin: Solomon Cruikshank Ship’s Captain
Relevant Links
- Vincent Baker’s Blog
- Poison’d
- Forum Post About 2x Wear and Breakage
- Last Exile
- Germ Theory of Disease
Crunchy Bits!
- Poison’d Actual Play Session 2: 2 Hours 11 minutes
- Poison’d Actual Play Session 2 Part A: 1 Hour
- Poison’d Actual Play Session 2 Part B: 1 Hour
- Intro Music “Plunder” from Sid Meyer’s Pirates!
- Outro Music “Strike The Bell” by Wylde Nept
Loved the actual play. Here’s the rules for fighting mobs, just in case:
You’ll note that everyone (citizens, pirates, mobs, ships, fortresses, etc.) has a different profile. They step up you move to bigger groups/things. You can fight anything you want, but the rule about 4 difference in profile always counts. So tough individual pirates can fight mobs (at a disadvantage), but the difference between their profile and that of a ship is probably too much. Just check the difference between the profiles and apply x-es or declare automatic winner as appropriate.
Piers,
Thanks for the info! I didn’t see that in the PDF. Where did you find it?
It doesn’t say it explicitly, but it is implicit in the discussion of Profile on page 7. Imagine that Vincent really is talking about all combats between any set of opponents in this section:
Compare the Profiles of both sides.
For fights between players’ pirates, whichever side has the higher
Profile, that player gets additional Xs for the fight, a number
equal to the difference.
For fights between a player’s side and NPCs, the GM rolls 6
dice, plus or minus the difference between their Profile. If, for
instance, the player’s side has a Profile 2 higher than the GM’s,
the GM rolls 4 dice; if the GM’s side’s profile beats the player’s by
1, the GM rolls 7 dice.
If one side’s Profile beats the other’s by 4 or more, it’s not a fight,
it’s suicide. e side with the overwhelmingly higher Profile can
choose to take the side with the lower Profile into their power,
without rolling dice at all.
If you go through the different sorts of opponents (citizens, companies, ships, fortresses), you’ll see that they go up in pretty clear increments. The result is that groups which are too different from each other never need to fight (an ordinary citizen versus a crew of ruthless pirates), but in marginal cases a group lower on the ladder might beat one higher up if they’re lucky (a tough pirate versus a hastily raised militia).
Ok, I getcha, but this doesn’t really address the weirdness that comes from the different kinds of escalation.
If a militia escalates to the 2nd level vs a single person, how do you kill “a few of” 1 person?
It’s–weirdly–like fighting with different weapons: the militia is ‘fighting with’ arms for one person, say swords or guns, the pirate is fighting as a company, irrespective of armaments. That way you get results that seem right in the fiction. Make sense?
Yeah, it does. With just a little bit of clarification in the text this would have worked out fine. I bet this is one of the things he’ll be exploring more fully in the 2nd edition of Poison’d, whenever that happens.
I haven’t quite finished with listening to this episode but I wanted to comment on the bit when the surgeon says something to the effect of “Start respecting me or I won’t treat you in the future.” It gets brought up that this sounds like a bargain, but someone (sorry, I haven’t learned your names yet!) says something like “I’m not sure if I want to take that bargain.”
The way I read the rules, a “bargain” isn’t really a bargain as such and there’s no need or reason to actually negotiate it, because only the person who says the thing is at risk. If I say, “Respect me or I won’t treat you.” This just means that if the other player starts respecting me, I have to either treat him, or he can withhold my Soul. If he doesn’t start respecting me, nothing changes and I can treat him or not as I choose. I’ve never got any hold over HIS soul from saying that.
So as another example, the deal with the witch was really two bargains. The witch made the bargain, “Rape that guy and get your pirates off my island and I’ll revoke the curse” and Dirty Dick made the bargain “I’ll rape this guy and get the pirates off your island.” Until Dick did those things, the witch could have withheld his soul, and if Dick did those things and she didn’t revoke the curse, he could have withheld her soul.
Or at least thats the way I read bargains. I’d probably prefer to call them “oaths” or something myself… and I think the text does call them that sometimes? But whatever. I’ve yet to actually play the game myself, so what do I know?
Brian,
By gum, I think you’re right! I thought the way were were doing it seemed slightly odd, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Thanks for the clarification! As we mention in our review, if there ever is a 2nd edition of Poison’d, I hope Vincent spends a bit more time explaining and clarifying bargains.
P.S. Nope, “Oath” doesn’t appear anywhere in the text, I just checked. You just have oaths on the brain, apparently!