I’ve been reading the book over the past couple of days and I really like what I see. However I do have some questions about the Incarceration section:
1) Do you only make an Incarceration Roll when a PC does a stint in jail, or also when a cohort or crewmember does? (Obviously a friend or enemy taking the fall doesn’t seem like it can generate Prison Claims for the crew).
2) What is the purpose of the Smuggling Prison Claim? What does one do with gear on the inside? The rest of the section makes it seem like you gloss over the time in jail with just the Incarceration Roll, not more fine grained scenes.
3) I’m confused about the timing of incarceration. Everything else in the book works on a Score/Downtime cycle with no mention of how long that takes. So for some games that might be running a Score every week, others may have a month or longer between notable Scores. Incarceration is measured in time though, so it isn’t clear to me how that interacts with Scores/Downtime. Is the expectation that you sit out of some number of scores if you are arrested and the player just plays a different character then? If the assumption is that we gloss over the jail time, what happens to the Downtimes of that character?
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I made an incarceration roll for a cohort to see whether or not they’d survive the encounter. They did not.
1. The npcs that are a part of your crew do count as one of yours so it would make sense they could start making claims for your crew. (They do die instead of take trauma so there is that to watch out for) 2. You can carry extra contraband/weapons/money to just generally make it more convenient. While it is something that can be glossed over, you do have the opportunity to do things on the inside to help various factions. The spider ability Jailbird kinda shows this. Besides if you say have a violent gang of thugs with a constant rotation of people in and out of prison, it would make sense you would turn it into a sort of safe haven for your crew. 3. It is abstract on purpose. You can say roll up another crew member to use while your main guy is in prison, or your crew could wait for you to come back and roll out when you get out. As far as downtime goes that is abstract as well. Satisfying vice or gathering info/stuff can take as long or as short as you want really. Its up to you.
I would say you have the flexibility to play out the prison scenes if you wish. I had one of my characters who got put in prison and we are planning on doing a one shot to play out some of my stay in Ironhook. But you could just as easily do a time skip forward to when the character gets out. Or play another character until you and your crew feel like the required time has passed. How much time passes between scores is intentionally left arbitrary​ I think to allow for this kind of flexibility. If it’s a cohort I would probably just do a fortune roll to see if they survive.
3. On the subject of Downtime
Those Downtimes are simply lost. You get no “downtime”, figuratively or mechanically, in prison. You’re engaged in a constant struggle for survival against rival gangs, the Ironhook guards, and random individual jerks just looking to hurt you recreationally. That’s why a bad stay in prison is traumatic, and even a productive stay in prison is a Bad Time. There is no place in prison for you to find true privacy and security, and even the most powerful prison-crime-lord is still, ultimately, a prisoner.
Now, obviously, that’s only so long as you’re playing in the default “zoomed-out” mode with the prison stay abstracted. If you wanted to run a game (or series of sessions at least) set entirely in Ironhook, with the player characters as prisoners, you’d need to build the downtime back in, of course. It wouldn’t be a HUGE hack and most competent GMs could probably just wing it. But you’d need probably a new set of score “types”, and certainly a new set of entanglement rolls and prison-specific vice purveyors. Prison scores aren’t likely to earn the same sort of Coin, either, or will earn an alternate form of currency only of real use in prison.
Prison is sort of a separate world in and of itself. Some stuff leaks over in either direction (I’d find it hard to differentiate between Prison Rep and Real World Rep, for example) but other things won’t. Bluecoats aren’t going to give a damn how you behave in prison and Ironhook staff aren’t going to much care how you behave outside, so Heat won’t translate over, for example.
But that’s all a bit of a tangent to your questions and only worth thinking about if you want to go into REALLY fine detail on a prison stay. In it’s default mode as presented it’s all conveniently abstract. The character is absent for whatever FEELS like an appropriate number of sessions (anywhere from 0 to whatever) Only a truly nutty GM would keep a game calendar to directly track the passage of time in play, I say as I tuck my own game calendar out of sight. If it feels like a cohort should get a roll, give them a roll. Maybe ask your players what their opinion is.
As for the smuggling – in the abstract zoomed-out version I haven’t thought of a real use for that either, but I’ll bet that if you don’t, one of your players eventually will.