Not Quite-OSSR: Poison'd

[Prak]

Um. Sure, why the fuck not.

...actually, that album came out the same year as this RPG, 2007.

Poison'd: a pirate rpg

This is seriously the format of the book. It is 11" tall, and 4.125" wide. This isn't a book, it's a fucking pamphlet.

Poison'd is an rpg by Vincent D. Baker. It came out after Dogs in the Vineyard, but before Apocalypse World. I'm not sure I've ever seen a more hipsterish thing, and that's purely because of the fucking size of the thing. I just realized what it reminds me off. In the early days of 3.0, during the third party explosion, AEG and Mongoose put out little pamphlet adventures and class writeups-


They were nice in that they cost maybe a couple bucks, and I was young so I didn't spot the mechanics fuckups (though I did recognize the adventures varied wildly in quality). They're all like 16 pages long, and I'm thinking that's a manufacturing limitation since there are two companies and two forms here.

That's what Poison'd reminds me of in form. It's a bit nostalgic, I guess, but it's like a "Oh, wow, I was really dumb at 13" nostalgia. Which seems appropriate to a Vincent D. Baker game.

Anyway.

The book opens with a short In Media Res scene setter. So short that I'm pretty sure reproducing it is fair use-

In the Year of Our Lord 1701, did end the bloody career of the pirate Captain Jonathan Abraham Pallor, called Brimstone Jack.
He did not die on the gallows, nor by the sword, nor shot in two by cannon. He died of poison, administered to him by his cook, an assassin under the King's orders.
This is what happened next.
Poison'd
Drag forward the cook, the assassin Tom Reed, throw him to the deck. He's spitting and proclaiming us dead men all, no captain no more, ship listing and hungry, and His Majesty's Ship The Resolute even now hauls up its anchor over in Kingston Bay.

I'm not sure about all the capitalization in that, but then my writing classes don't cover things like "the year of our lord."

Obviously this is not something I'd consider an RPG. I mean, semantically, sure, it's a role-playing game, in that you're taking a role and playing it. But to me, a role-playing game is one in which you make a character, and play it over a campaign, through a variety of stories written by one player, or bought as a supplement. Any game which is centered on a single story with a definite endpoint, where you are meant to play that story and then you're done, isn't an RPG. It's a story game that might as well be a board game or card game or a fucking novel. RPGs, in my mind, are open ended. If a game has a definite end point, it's a story game, not an RPG. Which is fine, there isn't a problem with story games, per se, but they're not RPGs, and they should be cheap, simple, and maybe not have character creation.

Now, because this is a story game and written by Vincent Baker, it's going to be very pretentious, and have a lot of fapping to various things. I invite you to turn this into a drinking game. Everytime you see this gif:

take a drink.

Character Creation
To make a character, you choose a bunch of traits. Like Mind's Eye Theatre LARPing. Which makes me actually sort of want to LARP Poison'd because running around dressed as a pirate and making people look askance at you is fun. Especially when you're loudly talking about your tender ministrations to the slutty cabin boy and making people blush and drinking large amounts of booze. But at that point, Poison'd is really more of an excuse to dress up like a pirate, and the places that aren't going to throw you out for doing this are already their own excuses for same.

The notable thing here is the use of "fuck" in rules text. It's common. And obviously I'm not one to shy from foul language, but the use of "fuck" in rules text is like typing in all caps online: you're trying way too hard to be "cool" and everyone's just laughing at you.

The first trait you choose is your position on the crew, and it's basically just a list of ship crew positions and short parenthetical explanation of the position- Boatswain/Bosun, Boy, Carpenter, Gunnery, Quartermaster, Sailing Master (navigation), Sailor (basically the common crewman), Surgeon, X's Mate (ie, assistant. I totally want to make a character whose position is Boy's Mate. This seems to have no mechanical impact, it's just fluff.

Stats
Stats aren't rolled, bought with points, or arrayed. You choose as many, or as few, traits as you want, and then get a Stat equal to that number, from 2-6. Each stat is represented by a different sort of trait, except that Soul is the inverse of Devil.

Sins: Devil and Soul
So, first you choose which, if any, sins, your character has committed, because this game is about being nasty evil pirates

You choose one, any, all, or none of the following- Adultery, Blasphemy, Idolatry, Murder, Mutiny, Rape, Robbery, Sodomy. If your commission of a sin has been "prolonged, repeated, excessive, and unremorseful" you can count it twice. If your character is a woman posing as a man, you automatically get Blasphemy. I'm not sure where the Bible specifically condemns woman to man crossdressing, but I'm totally sure the church of the time would consider it such, so apparently the game's christianity is purely defined by its followers, which gives some later parts some very interesting implications that I'm sure aren't intended, because satire requires thought.
If your character is a woman who "has also somehow contrived to fuck women as a man" you get double blasphemy. Because... ok, I can see that one. Also I wonder what you get if you're a woman who has contrived to fuck men as a man. Quadruple blasphemy?
If I were to ever this play this game, I would totally play a woman pirate who "Act's like a man" but dresses and lives how the fuck she pleases, but totally has a strap on in her bunk and is pretty much purely a top who has every sin except rape on her sheet twice. Sins determine your Devil score. So if your pirate is a rampant, unremorseful blasphemous, sodomite idolator, you get max Devil. If your character is a woman who lives, acts, dresses and fucks men and women like a man, and an unrepentant rapist, you get max Devil. If your character is a pious soul devoid of sin who is somehow a pirate (maybe you're a cabin boy?) you still have a Devil of 2. Then you subtract your Devil rating from 8 to get your Soul rating.

Sufferances: Brutality
Then you get to choose what you've suffered and I have to look up a word. What the fuck is Accursing? ...why the fuck couldn't they just say "Destruction" or "Misery?" Or just not include it as most of the other sufferances would qualify as accursing? You've got Arrest, Attempted Murder, Beating, Branding, Damnation, Disownment, Impressment (being pressed into public service), Imprisonment, Lashing, Mutilation, Rape, Torture. Again, you can choose as many as you want, though at least 1, and you put an X next to any that the captain inflicted upon you. This determines your Brutality, without and inverse stat.

Ambitions: Ambition
I feel like this could have been less tautological. Like, you choose your Goals and that determines your Ambition. But no, you choose at least one ambition from a list with stuff like "be captain, own land, get revenge against (player character/"man beyond your station"), fuck (player character/daughter or son of player character/man beyond your station)" etc.

What the fuck does it all mean.
Unlike most normal games, the explanation of what your stats means is after you pick them, rather than before. Devil>Ambition means you don't give a shit about personal danger and have no fear. Ambition>Brutality means you're a stealth guy. Brutality>Soul means you're ruthless and violent (like a pirate). Soul>Devil means you're calm and endure punishment and torture without breaking. I don't know how the fuck "I don't care about personal danger and have no fear" means "I will crumble before torture and punishment." The game book says "the greater the difference, the better you'll be at the one thing and the worse you'll be at the other" except you can legitimately make a character with stats Devil 6, Brutality 6, Ambition 6, Soul 2, which means you are casual and fearless of danger, stealthy and violent, and a remorseless sinner, but apparently can be brought to your knees with torture. You can also make a character with 4s all across the board. Then....

"Also, I say 'choose' but sometimes you'll find that your pirate's life up to now has its undeniable logic, quite as though your pirate is choosing for himself."

Urgh.

(Even though as a writer and a gamer who has done "randomly determine your character's life" stuff I know that human gestalting totally finds patterns and shit, but, fuck, that's pretentious)

The game mentions "Souls and Bargains" describing that your character can make a bargain with another player's, and that player can then, once, withhold a number of dice equal to your Soul from a roll you're making, and then the obligation of the bargain is considered fulfilled. But it doesn't say what the bargains are for. So... why? It's in there later. Whatever. This is just a dumb time to mention this.

Brinksmanship: Escalation?
You have a Brinksmanship stat which equals your highest stat, and you roll when you fight or lead others, and it represents your willingness to go further and further to win. It tells you to roll against your enemy's Brinksmanship, but doesn't tell you what the fuck this does. Also, why is this a stat? It could just be "when fighting or leading others in a fight, roll your highest stat against the enemy's."

Profile: Bad Ass Motherfuckers
You then outline your profile by choosing two or fewer weapons you have in addition to the standard "knife, sword, pistol." This is stuff like "another sword," "a pair of pistols," "grenades," and so on, but also includes "not a weapon, but you're a scary motherfucker" stuff like being big and hulking, having tattoos and "a savage demeanor" or "slight, wiry, and vicious." If your pirate has suffered Mutilation, you get a disability from "lost limb, lost eye, split tongue, terrible scars." Then, when you're fully armed, your profile is 2+additional weapons-disabilities. If you're disarmed, your profile is 1. When you fight, the person with the higher profile gets "the advantage." I know I'm "playing this wrong" but clearly my murderous blasphemous genderqueer sodomite would have two weapons and not have been mutilated.

Bargains: Everyone gets one
Finally, everyone introduces their characters, then they go back around the circle and chooses, out loud, a player and an outstanding bargain from "X swore to back me for captain," "X swore to help me fulfill (an ambition)," "X owes me '3 leisure'" (again, no explanation of what the hell Leisure is), "X swore to protect me from ('a violence')," "X owes me his life," and "X swore to fight by my side when all others desert me." My trangressive woman pirate would totally have "X swore to help me fuck his daughter."

Look. I don't hate this. But there's.... nothing preventing a character from being a swaggering, omnicompetent badass, but typically story games don't want characters to be those, and without anything preventing one, there's nothing preventing the entire group from being that. This would benefit from some slightly tighter rules, like "pick an array" with things like "Devil 4, Ambition 6, Brutality 2, Soul 4" and then you select the traits those numbers represent (in that array, 4 sin, 6 ambitions, 2 sufferances) and your profile should be 1 additional weapon/stature, with the allowance to pick two if you took Mutilation as a sufferance and then choose a disability. It leans too heavily on that old "Real Roleplayer vs Munchkin" bullshit.

Ships and Crew
After characters are created and introduced, you create the ship. Because this is a story game, you already have The Dagger, Captain Brimstone's Bermuda sloop with defined characteristics, but the group then chooses two things which are most true about it, like "fast," or "grim reputation" or "has more guns than the default states (gain 4 8-pounder cannons), and then the ship has a profile of 10 (8+2 for the traits), and the group then chooses what tactic the ship is best in- pursuit, cannons, broadsides, or boarding, and this trait gives your ship +1 profile when the scenario comes up, regardless of what side you're on.

You do the same for the company, but you just get two positives and one negative, and it's stuff like "large crew (110)," and "members are, by and large, unreprobate (sic) murderers" or "served together for many years" for positives and "skeleton crew (50)," "no common language," and "badly mistreated by Brimstone Jack" as negatives. I'd totally agitate for "badly mistreated by Brimstone Jack" for the negative, since it means we are more united in the story about the cook assassinating the captain, and PVP games are shit. Your crew profile is 6 (5+positives-negative). It's not outright stated, but the fact that the rules give you a formula for your ship/crew Profile implies that these things can be gained in play.

Sample Characters: The Carpenter's Mate is Fucked.
This is followed by some example characters, which actually has some interest. The first is a low Devil/high Soul carpenter's mate who's a murderer and mutineer, and whose Bargain is that another sample character swore to protect him from rape. The only thing notable here is that the Bargain uses a specific sample character, but the ambitions are "to be revenged upon ---," and "to fuck ---'s daughter." But what makes this guy, Young Zeb Harris, is the next two characters, "Pigfuck Dan" a blasphemous rapist, thief, murderer and sodomite, and "Hugh McMinn," a blasphemous thief and unrepentant murderer who is the one that swore to protect Young Zeb from rape. But, most notable is that both these chararacters have the bargain of "Young Zeb swore to back me for captain." So I'm pretty sure Young Zeb is fucked. Literally. But the idea of two characters claiming the same bargain from one other is one that hadn't occurred to me and would actually create a really interesting story.

I'm going to break this into a few posts. Next one is GM characters.

[Darth Rabbitt]

I'm not sure where the Bible specifically condemns woman to man crossdressing

It's in Deuteronomy, which is the book that basically says everything is a sin:

[Prak]

Huh. I'm not really surprised, I just didn't know.

[Prak]

GM Characters

As they have to run so many of them, GM characters are much simpler to generate, and this is the best thing I've seen in this game so far. When making an NPC, you just determine Name, Brinkmanship, and Proile, and pirates need a position. The GM rolls two dice (no mention of what kind...) for Brinksmanship, and chooses up to three traits for profile, but instead of extra weapons the traits are things like "is huge" or "fights dirty," for a profile of 2-5, minus 1 if the NPC is old or mutilated, and the book, thankfully, tells GMs that most NPCs will have a profile of 3 or 4, and to reserve 5s for truly exceptional NPCs. Private people (ie, non-combatants) take the better of the two Brinksmanship dice, and have a base Profile of 1. Being disarmed lowers an NPC profile to 1 for combatants or 0 for civilians.

Companies and Mobs and Ships and Fortresses
NPC companies and mobs get up to three positives and up to three negatives. NPC ships get positives and negatives, and the max number depends on whether it's a warship or merchant ship, and a profile based on it's masts, 8 for 1 or 2 masts, 10 for three masts, and the number of guns and crew size also depends on this. Ships of the Line are, of course, more badass than all others, and have bigger Profiles, crews and guns. This actually is all fine, sort of like Tome NPC classes- "you have too much to do already, just pick a few things and get on with it." Fortresses work exactly like ships, but there's just the one category and it's base profile is different.

Rolling: Finally you will know how to play
The biggest problem with this game is that it tells you to do things before it defines the thing. Dice & Consequences starts by telling you to make a Success Roll whenever there's a question as to whether you can actually do a thing, and that each success gives you an x that you can spend in combat. This is cool. Unfortunately, I still have no clue what die I'm supposed to roll. I had to look ahead to find something which implies, but does not outright state, that you roll d6s. This seems obvious, if you assume this is a game for people who aren't necessarily gamers. But it's a roleplaying game, so it should define what dice it's using, because people who are gamers are left wondering what the fuck they roll.

As to the actual resolution mechanic- I'm sure Baker could describe it more poorly, but I'm not sure how short of using Esperanto. It starts somewhat reasonably, defining rolls as one of your stats vs. another one of your stats. But the way it does this is bad-

Roll Soul vs Devil when your pirate acts despite pain or duress, or presses on in the face of exhaustion, or endure torture or deprivation; also when your pirate practices some skill in bad conditions. You roll your Soul; the GM rolls your Devil.

HOW VINCE? I KNOW WHAT I'M SUPPOSED TO DO, BUT YOU DON'T TELL ME HOW YOU HIPSTER FUCK.

It's like that hipster joke about doing something before it was cool, except it's telling you to do something before it tells you how.

Once you get through the "Roll Stat1 vs Stat2 when (doing things)" paragraphs, it tells you how you actually do that. Apparently Poison'd has a d6 dicepool system. I could never have fucking guessed that, because nothing so far has indicated anything one way or the other (the bargains thing very subtly implies that you're rolling many dice, but that's it). You roll dice equal to your stat, and the GM rolls dice equal to the other stat, and 4+ is a hit. But of course this is explained piss poorly:

Let's use Brutality vs Soul for example: your pirate's standing over the assassin Tom Reed, pistol to his forehead. "I pull the trigger," you say.
You take up dice equal to your Brutality and roll them all. I, your GM, take up dice equal to your Soul and roll them all.
A 4, a 5 or a 6 on a die counts for an effect. Count up all your 4s, 5s and 6s, and I do the same. If you have more, your pirate's action comes off to your advantage, and how many more matters. If you have more, your pirate's action comes off to your advantage, and how many more
matters. If I have the same or more, though, either your pirate’s
action fails, or it succeeds but at no advantage to you.

Sigh. This shit. So the result of a miss is completely ambiguous. Even the actual language doesn't inform, unless Vince actually means that "evens mean you fail, greater GM hits means you succeed but you're fucked." You get "advantage" equal to your hits minus the GM's hits. And of course I'm only saying hits so that the system is comprehensible, because the book doesn't say that, it just says "counts." It doesn't shed any light on what happens if you get no advantage, except to say you get Xs equal to your advantage, and if you get no advantage the GM might bring in a combat that was coming anyway.

That is dumb. Apocalypse World is Quantum Bears, Poison'd is Quantum Brawls. This makes a certain amount of sense for a game about pirates, but not enough to excuse the lack of a real description of consequences.

And for the potentially game design impaired reading this, yes, there is no real description of consequence. I try to do something. If I roll more hits than the GM, I do it, but if he rolls more hits, or we're even, I might do it but get no advantage, or I might fail entirely. It's entirely up to the GM. The logical way to handle it would be to say "Evens=success with no advantage for future combat; Greater GM Hits=equal failure," but that isn't explicitly stated, and so "Evens or Greater GM Hits mean the GM gets to do whatever he wants" is an equally valid interpretation.

When you see a fight coming, your supposed to look for rolls you can make to try to scrounge for advantage. You can do this in the moment, or you can ask for a Flashback. Clearly, every fight gets waylaid by the entire group scrounging for points, because the system gives them benefit if they do, and because they could be tied up and naked in a bare cell with a fight coming, and just say "I want a flashback." And yes, you get to do this, because the system specifically encourages it. So my aforementioned horny transgressive woman pirate will have loads and loads of flashbacks about murdering her paramours, because you roll Brutality vs. Soul whenever you attack a helpless or unsuspecting victim, and her stats are 6/6/6/2, and I'm rolling literally three times as many dice as the GM and am 2.6 times as likely to roll 3+ hits as the GM is to roll 2. Hell, I'd try for multiple flashbacks, or multiple success rolls in a single flashback. Like "hey, remember that time I went through an orphanage and messily slaughtered every sleeping person within? Yeah, that was great. How many Brutality rolls can I make for that?"


Fights
Once again, it's telling you to do shit without telling you how. This is now a new rule in the drinking game. Whenever you see this image:

drink.

When you fight, you and your opponent compare Profiles. If your opponent is another player, the player with the higher Profile gets Xs equal to the difference. If your opponent is the GM, the GM gets a set number of Xs based on the ratio: If Player>GM, 1 X; If Player=GM, 2 X; If GM>Player, 2+difference X. The player brings whatever Xs they've previously earned. If one side's Profile>Other Side+4, then there's no roll, the higher profile just wins and can kill or take into their power the lower side as they choose.

Once you've done this comparison, now you roll your Brinkmanship pool, TN 4, and, in event of ties, reroll the lowest die on both sides. The player with the fewer hits can choose to lose, spend Xs or escalate.

At least there's a direction to the escalation chart, but still.

Skipping ahead to the Escalation "chart" basically it means the stakes of the fight. Fist fights start at "bruised pride" and go up to "broken bones." Knives means "a scar, but not death" to "a deadly wound." Swords start at "First Blood" going up to "outright death" and guns at "standing down," and go up to "deadly wound." Each sort of combat has a mid stage, and while Fist Fights doesn't explicitly say it, it seems escalation might include going up to the next type of combat. Like everything else in the book, this could be streamlined and made much more clear. Especially when considering the rules back on the fight page about how much you can escalate. And there's no clear statement about whether "improvising a weapon" when escalating a fist fight means now you're at a knife fight.

But basically, escalation means rerolling any of your dice, and then your opponent gets to choose to lose or escalate. If you escalate and come up a tie, the escalator wins. But if you escalate from a tie and still tie, then you lose.

a cryptic distinction here on paper but when you see it in play it’ll make perfect sense.

You can escalate up to twice, and if you're still losing after then, then you just lose. It isn't clear whether that's twice per combatant or twice total. There is no statement as to whether or how you can go from one kind of fight to another, and that's a big thing to miss. Hell, even Pirates of the Caribbean has the fight between Will and Jack go from swords to a gun.

Losing a fight means you suffer the stakes it was raised to, and winning means suffering just the bare harm of engagement (with seemingly no indication of what that is) and getting advantage (Xs) equal to the amount by which your roll beat your opponent's, but if you win on a tie, you get no Xs.

Fighting under the direction of a captain is similar, but the Captain starts with their Brinkmanship, then hands a die to each player fighting under them (no indication as to what happens if you have more players than Brinkmanship). The players get one more die, and then the captain and players roll at the same time, but players can choose to disobey, which gives them 2 Xs, and the captain doesn't get those dice.

It finally tells you what to do with Xs after it's just explained combat.


Basically, you can kill an NPC before combat by spending 3 Xs. In a one on one fight, each side can spend Xs to roll additional dice, 1:1. In a mob fight, you can spend 1-3 Xs to damage a named character on the other side and remove their dice from the combat. 1 is nonlasting harm, 2 is disfiguring or disabling, and 3 is a deadly wound. And... apparently if you're winning a fight, you can spend Xs to inflict the level of harm for the current escalation state (1 or 2 only) on your opponent, but what makes that worth it is that it'll stick even if your opponent then goes on to win. But your opponent can match it to cancel. But you're not supposed to do this with guns or pursuit, I guess because the consequences there is giving up, not harm. Once the fight is done, you lose any unspent Xs that didn't come from the fight.

It then gives an example of play that has people way more invested in the game than I've ever seen people be in the first five minutes of play. I might play that way after a couple sessions, but, damn.

But. After all of that, it tells you that you face consequences for escalation based on the weapon your opponent is using. Which means you know have to reconsider what you read, and the escalation chart, ON THE SAME PAGE, needlessly says "X to X" for each scenario when it could just say "Opponent armed with X."


The ship combat escalation charts explicitly says that you can escalate from pursuit to cannon, broadside, or boarding range, but the chart is still phrased poorly. Instead of "Pursuit- 1: Pursuing ship keeps pace v. drawing near enough to engage with cannons" it says "Your ship pursuing another- 1: Your ship keeping pace, vs drawing near enough to engage your enemy’s with cannonfire;" Goddamnit, Baker.

Crew to Crew melee has its own chart which Fleet to Fleet combat refers to. You can have a consort ship, which is really just an ally ship, which ups your Brinkmanship and gives 2 Xs. Again, the rules could have been phrased better, such that you don't have to "creatively read the rules for creating companies" for fleet to fleet combat. This was Vince's fifth game, how is his design this fucking amateur?


Next section is "Changing Your Pirate," ie, advancement. It'll be another post, and the book has less than a dozen pages left, so that should be the last.

[Prak]

Changing Your Pirate
Character Advancement Development

The first thing it says is to remind you that your Profile drops if you're unarmed. When the rest of the first section is development, and this is already stated, this is unnecessary and misplaced.

When you commit new sins, you add them to your list and your Devil goes up and your Soul goes down. The 2-6 range was just for CharGen, and my transgressive libertine piratess would have a Sin List that she checked shit off on to get her Devil as high as possible. Soul has a minimum of 0, so, no, seriously, I'd do that.

Brutality goes up when you suffer new violence, and you add the violence to your list.

You can fulfill ambitions, mark them with an X, and choose a new ambition if you want, gaining 1 Ambition. You can also give up on an ambition, or pass by the opportunity to fulfill it, or accept that someone else did, and lose 1 Ambition. Fuck that. If your Ambition drops to 0, you can't gain more.

You can reduce your Devil to 0 by making a confession and becoming a faithful servant of god, but this won't raise your Soul. However, if you backslide, you get your prior Devil rating back and raise it by 1.

This can all change your Brinkmanship.

Deadly Wounds
If you'd suffer a deadly wound, you can bargain to escape it- with a Surgeon and get a normal bargain, with a non-Surgeon and get a bargain and a disfigurement, with GOD and get a bargain and lose an ambition, with THE DEVIL and get a normal bargain and a new sin, or with A GUARDIAN GHOST and get a bargain and lose 1 Devil. Yes, seriously. It'd be nice if the supernatural elements had rated mention before page 16.

Death
When you die, roll Ambition vs. Soul. Winning means your can choose to be a ghost or be judged. Judgement is a simple "Devil>0?" evaluation, and if it is 0, you go to Heaven, and if it's greater you roll Soul v. Devil, getting silent eternal rest if you win and going to Hell if you lose.

Becoming a Ghost
You get bound to another pirate or ship. It does specify player's pirate, or the group's ship, so you can't haunt enemies. Damnit.
As a ghost, you can be a Guardian or a Curse. Guardians get Xs equal to Soul when their charge is in combat, and can bargain for pirates' lives, losing 1 Devil, to a minimum of 1. You can choose to go on to final judgement when your Devil is 1, but why would you do that? You can just continue to hang out and save your crews' lives and get bargains.
As a Curse, "you become a mini-GM" and have an "accursing card." Ah, this is why the Brutality traits includes Accursing.


The accursing card apparently has Xs, and you can spend them as you like. You can be exorcised, but your potency is proportional to your Devil, a 3 is exorcisable by any priest or wise woman, a 6 requires the Pope or the most ancient witch, and my sin maiden sodomite would require God himself.

Leaving Play and Ending the Game
This is straight bullshit.

If your pirate dies and goes to final jusgement, he leaves the game. Fine.
If he retires, he leaves the game. Fine.
If he renounces all ties to the other characters, or fulfills/abandons enough motivations that you don't know what to do with anymore, he leaves the game (how is this not retirement?). Fine.
If your pirate becomes so foul and ruthless that you no longer want to play him, he leaves the game. This is good.

The first time a player's pirate leaves play, they can choose to make a new pirate, become a co-GM and take over some Cruel Fortunes and NPCs, or END THE GAME.

Yes. One player gets to decide the session will be the last just because their character died. I would continue playing without them.

The second time a player's pirate leaves play THE END OF GAME IS FORCED.

Fuck that. If you're going to put a definitive lose state in the game, why is this a fucking RPG? Make it a fucking card game or board game.

Cruel Fortune
Basically, these are a bunch of events that you write on index cards. A lot of them have conditions as to when they come into play, like Accursing coming in when a player's pirate is cursed. The GM gets 2 Xs in all fights, and can bring in becalmment, debauchery, malcontentment, the storm or want once per session or two. You can get rid of it by having the original curse revoked, or finding someone to remove it for you. A lot of these are pure happenstance and present the players with a situation to deal with.


But. Because this is a Vincent D. Baker game and I swear that fucker is trying to tell us something, one of them is Hell. This doesn't mean you sail into Hell, or the Devil pops up, or something cool, no, it means your crew of people who objected to the oppressive rule of the crown... wait, that's real pirates, sorry. Your crew of hardened criminal psychotics fall into "frenzied berserk violence: killing, torture, cannibalism and rape." You get to resist, thankfully, but you have to roll Soul vs Devil. If you lose your join in. Because that's what people love- having their characters become rapists because the dice said so. It may be a bit incongruous that I'm fine with murder, torture and cannibalism, but I get my panties in a bunch over rape, but honestly rape is in an entirely different category. Murder and even torture and cannibalism are things you sort of expect to come up in an RPG, rape isn't, and shouldn't be.

Most of these are fine, if more evidence this should have been a card or board game rather than an RPG. It's a good way to handle this sort of thing. I just think the card that compels players' character to become rapists is inappropriate and vile. Even in a game about pirates.

Opportunities
Election is mentioned, though it should be called voting, but, fuck, at this point terminology is the least of this game's problems. Apparently the captain who may have cruelly mistreated the crew ran everything by vote. Sure. But, the first historically accurate detail is mentioned- that this is how period pirates did things. I'm glad that something accurate made it in.
The book admonishes the GM to abide by anything the captain decides without a vote, but tells players they don't have to do so. Players basically represent equal shares of the crew, and the GM is told to not participate in votes. Holy shit, a good passage. It's a miracle.

Prizes are ships the captain may decide to be hunting when the crew is at sea. The captain names a number 2-6, and the GM spends that many points to generate the prize's protection. If your ship takes the prize, you get to roll that many dice for plunder which can be spent to remove the Malcontentment, Want or Wear and Breakage Cruel Fortunes from play (3), give any player Leisure, or give the captain an X, and the captain and quartermaster decide how to split things, with the captain getting the final say. Any unspent plunder goes to the ship's stores. The captain alone has access to these stores, but any play can roll Ambition v Brutality to sneak in, or win a fight with whoever guards it.

Leisure is the currency for individual players on shore leave. When on leisure, you have to spend 2 Leisure for the labor lost to the ship(1), and a bath, room, and cash(1). This gives you a single social engagement to play, and then you can spend more Leisure to get more social engagement, clothing, grooming, a meal for a others, "a night of spectacular debauchery," a "suitable gift," entry into social engagement above your station, improved engagements, or anonymity. Multiple pirates can go on leisure together, and must pay their own minimums, but then get to benefit equally from any Leisure expenditure. So the crew can all go to the same inn, opium den, brothel, whatever.

A mention of betraying the crew to the King is made. I... don't know why you'd do this? I guess it's not automatic game over (one of the Cruel Fortunes is arrest), and sure it has a certain verisimilitude, but... eh. I could see the GM bringing it in if Tom Reed is allowed to go. Which brings us to "Urgent Considerations," reminding the reader that the crew needs a new captain, positions might change, the assassin needs to be dealt with, an English warship is coming, and your ship needs repair and provisions.

The book closes with a few pages about historical pirates. Some of these are reasonably accurate to my knowledge- ship democracy, shares, hazard pay, and so on. Others are easily proven false with a quick search, like the idea that we only know of two female pirates. I may only know of two as a fact, but wikipedia gives a lot more, five times as many in even just the period of Mary Read and Anne Bonney. It gives some good numbers for other ships in the period's seas, about 25 pirate ships and only 4 or 5 English men-of-war. I don't know the accuracy of this, but it wouldn't surprise me. Vince gets points for being willing to admit to ignorance on chances of survival for wounds suffered in combat, and for admitting that most of his knowledge comes from Under the Black Flag, which I haven't read, but understand is reasonably accurate, at least to the knowledge of the time it was written (late 90s, I believe, but I could be wrong).

And that's the book. I'll do an after thoughts in another post.

[Prak]

After Thoughts

To be fair, this game is an ashcan. The term originates from golden age comics, where publishers would print a comic purely to establish copyright. It required two copies, one for the Library of Congress and one for their own records. Poison'd is intended "for purposes of playtesting, development and review." It's not really a finished product.

However, I've written unfinished works that were better first drafts than Poison'd. There's a compelling simplicity there, and pirates are cool, but there are several things I'd consider serious missteps here, like the predefined game start point--yes, you can write your own start, but that doesn't excuse an RPG having one baked in. It'd be like if D&D was printed with an assumed Tavern Meeting start. The other misstep is the predefined end condition. In a game as violence focused as this (and, seriously, this is more combat focused than D&D), deaths will happen, especially without anything like HP and healing being non-existent. I get why the lethality is so high, but when you're including God and The Devil and hypothetical witches, there's really no reason to not have some manner of healing.

Vincent couldn't decide whether the game was gritty realism or supernatural low fantasy, and he couldn't decide whether it was grimy snuff fiction or historically accurate.

There's a workable thesis here, and I'm curious to see what the forum (indie-rpgs.com) has for it, but a functioning game just isn't there. I don't mean it's unplayable. I'm sure you can play it, and things are way more defined than White Wolf ever was, but the book desperately needs an editor. I want to cut Baker some slack because it's obvious this was a small thought experiment, not something for the mass market, but it's also his fifth RPG. He can do better. Or he should be able to. I can do better, and I haven't written a full game before. ...on the other hand, I might steal some of the concept here to make a prototype Midgard to get my feet wet.

[Princess]

Murder and even torture and cannibalism are things you sort of expect to come up in an RPG, rape isn't, and shouldn't be.

Wait what?
Rape is ths most grievous crime, way over torture, murder and cannibalism?
WTF is with modern internets?

[nockermensch]

Murder and even torture and cannibalism are things you sort of expect to come up in an RPG, rape isn't, and shouldn't be.

Wait what?
Rape is ths most grievous crime, way over torture, murder and cannibalism?
WTF is with modern internets?

Because most people playing RPGs don't have personal experiences with those things, but rape is still disgustingly present in modern society. So dealing with it in game can cause personal discomfort and suffering on a scale that's impossible when other crimes are mentioned.

[Prak]

Murder and even torture and cannibalism are things you sort of expect to come up in an RPG, rape isn't, and shouldn't be.

Wait what?
Rape is ths most grievous crime, way over torture, murder and cannibalism?
WTF is with modern internets?

Because most people playing RPGs don't have personal experiences with those things, but rape is still disgustingly present in modern society. So dealing with it in game can cause personal discomfort and suffering on a scale that's impossible when other crimes are mentioned.

Pretty much this, along with perversion of the act of sex from something that should be pleasurable into a horrific memory, and a ton of other stuff. Law and Order isn't a great show or anything, but note that murder cases in regular L&O are "whatever" and rape cases in SVU are all high drama affairs.

Killing someone is wrong. Raping someone will get even hardened criminals to hate you.

Cannibalism is just socially disapproved of.

[Longes]

Alternate theory: we've been hardened against fictional murder. Since the dawn of time dudes going on an adventure and killing people for reasons has been a thing. The first adventure in Epic of Gilgamesh is Gilgamesh and Enkidu going to kill Humbaba. Rape and detailed sex on the other hand are rarely the focus of the story, unless you are reading Song of Fire and Ice.

[Prak]

That too. Even the "rape of persephone" is, one, not graphic, and, two, using the older meaning of the term, which was more along the lines of "kidnap."

[Shady314]

I don't really see rape as being different from torture. It's just a specific kind of torture.

noun:
1. the action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or to force them to do or say something, or for the pleasure of the person inflicting the pain.

I find a graphic depiction of torture is just as hard to watch as a graphic depiction of rape and both are things I would skip to black (ie the interrogation droid advances on you menacingly, a syringe extended... and next scene) if they even came up in a game I was running.

[Longes]

Personally, I don't think that rape is worst kind of crime possible, but I'm absolutely not interested in bringing it up in a RPG, just as I'm not interested in bringing up sex in a RPG.

[Prak]

Personally, I don't think that rape is worst kind of crime possible, but I'm absolutely not interested in bringing it up in a RPG, just as I'm not interested in bringing up sex in a RPG.

Yeah, this is my feeling, more or less. I'm fine playing a character who is a murderer, thief, and even torturer, but I draw the line at sex crimes. It's not a character I have any interest in being in the head of, and it's not a topic I want coming up in game beyond "the evil Fangclaw Orc Tribe rapes its captives, let go kill them."

[Whipstitch]

As I've said before, a lot of it comes down to perceived utility. Self-defense, war-time killings or survival cannibalism are all awful but there's situations where you can plausibly argue that virtuous people might do those things and that the circumstances in which you'd do so are obvious. By contrast, raping people just makes you a skeezy pervert.

[Princess]

Because most people playing RPGs don't have personal experiences with those things, but rape is still disgustingly present in modern society. So dealing with it in game can cause personal discomfort and suffering on a scale that's impossible when other crimes are mentioned.

Aaand again wait what?
You mean that many RPG players have personal experience with rape? And that murder is clearly not disgustingly present in the modern society?

BTW, I just checked criminal statistics. Murders are about three times more often in a country I live than rape.

Personally, I don't think that rape is worst kind of crime possible, but I'm absolutely not interested in bringing it up in a RPG, just as I'm not interested in bringing up sex in a RPG.

Well, in RPG games I played sex always was in a "screen darkens, skip" mode.
And I'd prefer to avoid to play games where rape, sex or some other things are roleplayed in a detial.

As I've said before, a lot of it comes down to perceived utility. Self-defense, war-time killings or survival cannibalism are all awful but there's situations where you can plausibly argue that virtuous people might do those things and that the circumstances in which you'd do so are obvious. By contrast, raping people just makes you a skeezy pervert.

I meant not justifiable cases of murder and cannibalism which happens because someone is utterly evil or utterly evil psycho. Killing in self-defence is not a murder by a dictionary.



PS: I derailed a thread, shame on me. Soo.. to get it back on topic. Do I get it right that Poison'd is another Vencent Baker's attempt to make game about sex, now with a pirates?

[Omegonthesane]

Because most people playing RPGs don't have personal experiences with those things, but rape is still disgustingly present in modern society. So dealing with it in game can cause personal discomfort and suffering on a scale that's impossible when other crimes are mentioned.

Aaand again wait what?
You mean that many RPG players have personal experience with rape? And that murder is clearly not disgustingly present in the modern society?

BTW, I just checked criminal statistics. Murders are about three times more often in a country I live than rape.

Current statistics will significantly underestimate rape, because only a fraction of victims come forward and not all of those are believed. Murders, by contrast, leave an undeniable Dead Person.

For years, the undeniably most popular RPG was one in which the basic format is to break into people's dwellings in order to murder them and steal their things. Indeed, Pathfinder continues that legacy to this day with depressing success. So, there's a degree of selection involved - anyone sitting down at the table who even vaguely understands what they're in for is probably OK with discussion of "and then X was murdered", which really doesn't hold for "and then X was raped".

See also the posts between what you quoted and when you posted, about how people are conditioned to have fewer issues with fantasies of murder than with fantasies of rape.

[Prak]

Because most people playing RPGs don't have personal experiences with those things, but rape is still disgustingly present in modern society. So dealing with it in game can cause personal discomfort and suffering on a scale that's impossible when other crimes are mentioned.

Aaand again wait what?
You mean that many RPG players have personal experience with rape? And that murder is clearly not disgustingly present in the modern society?

BTW, I just checked criminal statistics. Murders are about three times more often in a country I live than rape.

Nearly every woman I know has been raped or molested in their lives. Failing that, they've been subjected to harassment that was very close, or seemed like the beginning of same. And I live in the capital city of Califronia, Sacramento, not Hell's Kitchen. Hardly anyone I know has been murdered in their lives.

PS: I derailed a thread, shame on me. Soo.. to get it back on topic. Do I get it right that Poison'd is another Vencent Baker's attempt to make game about sex, now with a pirates?

That's kind of what it feels like, though... I don't know. Rape is mentioned as something your pirate might have done, and then there's the event where everyone on the ship starts a-raping. The fact that it's mentioned at all is jarring, as nearly every RPG I know of has managed to not bring it up, or at most, only bring it up as "there's this enemy group, they rape whatever they get their hands on" or the like, not as something PCs are expected to have done or do. And then there's the fact that the RPG is only 28 pages long as a pdf. The print booklet is probably 24 or so. On the one hand, it's a historical detail, and it could be a lot worse. On the other hand, it's in there at-fucking-all.

Current statistics will significantly underestimate rape, because only a fraction of victims come forward and not all of those are believed. Murders, by contrast, leave an undeniable Dead Person.

No matter how much police might deny their culpability in the Dead Person...

[hyzmarca]

Murder and even torture and cannibalism are things you sort of expect to come up in an RPG, rape isn't, and shouldn't be.

Wait what?
Rape is ths most grievous crime, way over torture, murder and cannibalism?
WTF is with modern internets?

Murder, torture, and cannibalism aren't sexual. Rape is. Bringing sex to your table is uncomfortable.

[OgreBattle]

If I were to ever this play this game, I would totally play a woman pirate who "Act's like a man" but dresses and lives how the fuck she pleases, but totally has a strap on in her bunk and is pretty much purely a top who has every sin except

A thread from rpg dot net from two of Poison'd's first playtesters at Gencon '02 shows that they did just that and more:

Another character sodomized one of the prisoners in order to make himself a tougher pirate.

Don't sugar-coat! I think we sodomized a boy's esophagus (after decapitating him). Just to make sure we had a virgin orifice.

Due to a tragic misunderstanding about the "X"s, I snuck around the ship suck-punching fellow pirates and telling them to take it like a man. This then became my "thing," and when Ian was unable to lash me due to an excess of Soul, I sucker-punched him and told him to take it like a man.

I was, of course, playing a woman disguised as a man. This automatically gave me one level of blasphamy. The extra level came from fucking women as a "man."

Yeah, it's kind of like that.

The mechanical justification was that it crammed three sins into one action for lots of devil points.... as the same atrocity happens in a completely different game run at Gaelcon in Dublin:

Well there was definite throat rape of a dead cabin boy. I presume it happened because the GM was basically going on about how we were bastards and would do anything to get what we wanted. I think I threatened to keel-haul someone. Another person wore a dead cabin boys skin as a coat. I believe that someone was burned with a cigarette in a torture. There was a lot of fighting between player characters, I think one of them was killed by another. It was basically us being bastards to each other and trying to kill each other off because we were, "bastard pirates." In the end I negotiated with another pirate PC that we'd share the captaincy.

The GM, i.e. the guy demoing the game was clapping and smiling all through the thing. And said at the end of the game the guy demoing said well, "I hope you all had fun, and if anyone wants to buy the game I can give you a link to the website." No-one took the website.

[Smirnoffico]

Alternate theory: we've been hardened against fictional murder. Since the dawn of time dudes going on an adventure and killing people for reasons has been a thing. The first adventure in Epic of Gilgamesh is Gilgamesh and Enkidu going to kill Humbaba. Rape and detailed sex on the other hand are rarely the focus of the story, unless you are reading Song of Fire and Ice.

There's plenty of rape in ancient myths. Greece, India, whatever. And Persephone wasn't the only one. Even in Romeo and Juliet on the very first page Sampson and Gregory discuss how they are going to rape Montague's servants.

I'm pretty sure viewing rape as the worst offense is modern thing. And it's not even universal - here in Russia you get up to five years for rape and from six years for murder. (By no means I'm justifying rape or molestation or something)

And to add meaningful commentary, Poison'd indeed seems to have some salvageable stuff in it, but the value of the product is far less than the sum of it's parts.

[Starmaker]

I'm pretty sure viewing rape as the worst offense is modern thing. And it's not even universal - here in Russia you get up to five years for rape and from six years for murder.

Punishing rape less severely than murder is (near-)universal, and Russia is no exception.

The difference between artistic portrayals of murder and rape is that in real life, as well as in stories, there are problems that can be theoretically resolved by magically killing the right people. It honestly shouldn't be a controversial statement. The reason we don't encourage killing people is that we, as a society, don't have, and most likely will never have, a way to determine whom to kill and a way of killing them. Having killed a school shooter before he started shooting would've been good, but if you declare open season on future school shooters, you'll end up with dead black teenagers (even though school shooters are mostly white).

However, story protagonists have the advantages of certainty and author fiat. So there's nothing particularly hypocritical about, say, cheering on a succesful fictional vigilante while adhering to the social contract that you won't go vigilante IRL, in exchange for people not going vigilante on you.

But there's no way whatsoever the world could be improved by magically raping the right people. And because fiction is mostly sensationalist, beneficial murder is way overrepresented in it, so "in this story, Alice murdered Bob" isn't an automatic damnation of Alice's character that "in this story, Alice raped Bob" is.

[silva]

Murder and even torture and cannibalism are things you sort of expect to come up in an RPG, rape isn't, and shouldn't be.

Wait what?
Rape is ths most grievous crime, way over torture, murder and cannibalism?
WTF is with modern internets?

Its not a problem of modern internets. Its a problem of christianity and abrahamic cultures. The lesser the degree of (abrahamic) influence and fanaticism, the more open and natural to sex such a culture is. See Europe vs America in this regard.

[Longes]

But there's no way whatsoever the world could be improved by magically raping the right people.

Wraeththu disagrees.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

D&D World is stocked full of green mushrooms for when you get murdered. Getting unraped is a trickier proposition.