The Continuing Adventures of the Gaffers
Session 3: Demon Spit Can’t Melt Ironborn!
previous adventures of the Gaffers can be found here:
Session 1: Red Sash Rumble
https://plus.google.com/105179574276953345976/posts/LjfcRMS3bBw
Session 2: “Wait, we spent all of it?”
https://plus.google.com/105179574276953345976/posts/bjYfpCrAsvm
With the Cutter and Slide back we started out the session updating them to the new rules and doing their downtime. The Cutter woke up happy and stress-free (but without his pants), but he failed to recruit any more thugs for the gang. (The Sashes and Lampblacks have been hiring everyone of that sort.) Meanwhile, the Slide has been working his ass off at the Bucket setting up for a traveling troupe, which he told me was a Skovlander skald and actors. He’s also trying to get an “in” with the other local merchant types to increase his influence there.
Last time on the Entanglement table I had rolled that someone was muscling in on their territory, and they did mess up the negotiations between the Red Sashes and Ulf. Unknown to the Gaffers, the Sashes had ceded a couple of blocks to Ulf in exchange for his help, the tavern was in the area, and Ulf came to collect his protection money.
Well, the Gaffers weren’t about to let that happen. The Slide cast aspersions on the Skovlander’s manhood (and got a broken nose for his trouble), the Whisper used her new channel ability to borrow power from her demon friend to spit fire and set Ulf’s face aflame (“Beard braids look stupid.”) and the Cutter (who is Not To Be Trifled With) led the gang in routing Ulf’s minions. Ulf tried to flee, but the Hound’s fine shooting dropped a chandelier on him (and set the bar on fire a little bit, but what are you gonna do?)
While Hound and Lurk put out the fire, the Slide slit Ulf’s throat. The body was disposed of with more demonic flame.
Advancement-wise, the crew leveled up and took Expertise, since everyone has two dots in their particular specialties and is feeling constrained. Slide and Hound took extra Effect, Cutter took Battleborn, Lurk took Shadowed, and the Whisper was obviously showing off her new Channel.
Dangling plot threads:
* Everyone remembers the Whisper, the Lurk, and the Hound being involved in the massive fight. (Everyone’s keeping quiet about the Cutter, though. That guy is scary.)
* The Whisper owes a favor to her demon friend, Setarra.
* Nyryx has a new body thanks to the Whisper and Lord Scurlock. Who did it belong to before?
* What’s going on with the alchemist? They still don’t know.
Rules:
The rules are going more smoothly now. I think one of the biggest rough spots is the background – maybe it’s just our setup, but taking Underground as a background seems like a lot of free dice if you’re going into a gang war situation, while stuff like Labor comes up far more rarely. Also, my players have a tendency to want to play it similarly to background in other games, like “I should be better at this because I have Bluecoat background”
I think the PCs absolutely need ways to get dice but I’m not sold on that one.
Should long-term projects get the background die? The Slide was schmoozing with merchants as part of his long-term projects, and he has Merchant background…but the LTP roll doesn’t have Background die as adding anything.
Hey, it was only a little fire 🙂
Cool report! How long did the session take?
This one was fairly short, only a couple of hours.
As far as background; yeah, “criminal” background had lots and lots of use in my first game, but the other player took “military” and that was used for fighting and intimidation, so they balanced out.
My second game had a “bluecoat” background and a “whaler” background. The bluecoat didn’t come up much, but the whaler did since I based a mission around infiltrating a whaling ship.
One way that would make the backgrounds less overpowering is to make them work in two circumstances; dealing with others from that culture socially, and dealing with tasks you have no dice pools for otherwise.
So if you trained something enough to have dice in it already, the background doesn’t help. But if you have not, then maybe you picked up enough odds and ends for an advantage. And the social one wouldn’t get out of hand, I don’t think.
Background and Heritage are handled differently in the next iteration. In brief, they each give you an action dot at character creation, to reflect what you’ve learned from your past. Background no longer gives a bonus die to rolls, but there are other ways to get them.
That seems better to me. I felt like I was trying to twist things to give my players a bonus die by warping their heritage to a given situation, and if I wasn’t, they were.
Yep. The devil’s bargain is an interesting pause in play, but assessing background never was. Just an annoying hiccup that people felt they had to do to get a die. So it’s gone.
I forgot that heritage even had a mechanical effect. Probably because I just don’t know enough about the heritages to apply it.
Using Heritage to grant a point you can put anywhere doesn’t seem to have any flavor to it, and flavor tied to heritage seems it would slow character generation down and potentially set up at least an appearance of racism. Most players won’t know the world well enough to make any sort of decision about heritage when they sit down to the table, and if it is presented in broadest stereotypes that may not be lots better.
I would be reluctant to attach system to heritage at all; it can be a bit of color and that’s okay.
I do feel like something is lost by reducing background’s mechanics to an action die. Not a huge loss, it’s survivable for sure, but this is an opportunity to have a modest mechanic dropped in to represent their life before now.
Another possibility is you could re-roll one die if you can tie the action to your background.
I expect the players to bother to learn about their heritage (or invent it a bit) during character creation. Establishing that stuff is kind of the point of character creation.
And the option to apply your specific heritage detail to any action is exact the opposite of racism, in fact. You’re not saying, “All Skovlanders are good at Stitch.” You’re saying, “My sister taught me how to bind wounds so I’d be useful in the mines.”
John Harper I guess for me the higher priority is to make characters and get stuck in, get right to the playing. Let that stuff unfold once you’re at the table.
I would not want to say to a potential player that they are welcome to come, but to really understand their character they have to read up on heritages. Nor would I want to have to pitch heritages fast while making characters, because only a few details can go along with that unless you slow way down to unpack the world. (That’s antithetical to the low prep quick start style of the game as I see it.)
You can also run into a problem with a new person coming to your group, and they start making up details for a heritage, but your group has already been making up details for that heritage that don’t fit. So either you go with it even if it doesn’t fit, or you tell the new person to create then retrofit their creativity with fences they couldn’t see until they hit them. That tends to make new people less comfortable.
Of course, my own personal preference and play style is to start with a sketch, and embellish the details of the character through play. I have come to really dislike detailed backgrounds for characters who have not yet been played, because they so seldom mesh with other players and the world the way they do when they happen in games played together.
When I’m going through fast streamlined character creation, I could see having to explain heritages to get at a mechanical bonus as being a real hiccup, for little return.
Of course it can also be as simple as saying “You get a point in an action from your heritage” and pointing them to a single sheet that runs down the available heritages so they can pick one to interpret.
This may come as a surprise, but I tend to overthink things. =)
I think you’re over thinking this one, yeah. 🙂
They have to pick a heritage anyway. So they have to know something about them to do so. And that’s also enough to assign a dot. Since there’s no wrong way to assign one, I can’t imagine it being an issue.
Also Andrew, I like to pitch chargen AS play. So if a question of heritage comes up and the players all start unpacking it and asking deeper questions, great!
I’ve even had a ‘flashback’ or two during chargen: this establishes mechanics and embeds the players choices into the fiction (often with consequences).
There is no play before play when we sit down to blades.
Will these action dots be arbitrary? ie: pick Skovlander and get a bonus point for Stitch or dots that can be assigned to any action providing the player provides a narrative explanation for their expertise? My whisper player is the exiled scion of a Tycherosi noble house. Would he get, say, a bonus to Attune because everyone in Tycheros is weird, or could he pick a Mask action to buff to represent his upbringing in a courtly environment?
You can choose any action dots for your heritage and background, and you say why you picked them.
That’s cool, and a lot easier to explain to my players who are routinely dragged through so many systems their poor heads spin.