“Edge of the World,” Session #3: Escape From Queenston
Want to see the GMGenie method in action? This post is a “how it went in my head vs. how it went on game night” rundown of a session from my latest campaign – click here for the complete series. Watch for new Monday posts about my prep tools, ad-lib techniques, and mistakes.
Breaking the Stagmate
…That’s one of my own words.
It’s when the players talk about a plot element so much that it becomes
a feedback loop where they end up talking about it for way longer than their
characters probably would. And it’s not
really a stalemate because that would be where they can’t make a move. This is
where the action has stagnated because no-one will make a move. So
Stagmate.
Anyway. We open with
the party standing on the dock, just like we left off, wondering how to get on
board the Elusive now that there are
two big Order of Osiris galleons moored on either side of her.
They start kicking a lot of ideas around – too many to think
that they’d realistically stand in the open talking that long – so I decided to
give them a shove. I roleplayed MacDuff
a little. While everyone was talking, he’s
taken the maps out of his pack and found that they’ve fused into a single parchment.
They’re now giving off an aura that Sylvienne can sense without even
trying – probably the same kind of energy that attracted the necromancer-thieves
to MacDuff’s shop in the first place. So
the party decides that they’re too detectable here and they better make a move.
…I mean, they should have thought that they were too
detectable just standing there in the open for so long, but they didn’t. So I prompted them, and we got an added plot
device out of it. The downside is, of
course, that I had to remember to do something with it later.
Stealing the ship: critical
failure
The party decided the best course of action would be to run
right on board and try to sail away. Of
course, everything the players do shows you something about what they want out
of the game, but I think this is particularly true with their unreasonable or
unrealistic actions, since these have to be thins the players really want to do. Noted: more ridiculous daredevil assaults.
The party lays low while Bo sneaks aboard the enemy galleons
to lay powder trains in their magazines.
He critical-fails the second one, so I ruled that the explosion still
happened, just immediately – alerting all their enemies what was up. Bo also lost his clothes.
Stealing the ship: the
battle
The others have already stealthily climbed aboard. The Order sends some hideous Dog Things on
board and the crew cleverly dispatches them.
This was an instance where I realized it’s more important to
have a combat encounter match the genre for it to be realistically hard. Bo said, “I use my knowledge of ships to
slash a rope near me – and inevitably whatever weight it’s connected to hauls me
up into the rigging while at the same time smashing the enemy I was fighting
with.” Was it giving away too much to
let him resolve all this with a simple Acrobatics roll? No, I was rewarding a player – if no for good
roleplay, per se, for understanding the genre of the story and bringing it into
gameplay.
Our proverb for whether an action will work became: “because
that’s how it works in pirate movies.”
Dealing with
“Action-Scene Slowdown”
Last week we had a problem with an action scene that took all night. Tonight I decided to try a new theory of
rounds.
I declared the standing rule that combat encounters were
going to be three rounds (or “phases”) only – whatever the PCs did in the first
phase of the scene would be resolved by a single roll, same with the second
phase, and the third phase. So:
Phase 1) get on board/rig the enemy ships to blow
Phase 2) pull out of port
Phase 3) escape the harbor.
This plan had to be modified though, because in phase 2 they
got attacked and we had to do a small action scene within it:
…Phase 2) pull out of port
Phase 2.a) Dog Things leap aboard
and attack
Phase 2.b) New situation arises
according to what PCs did
Phase 2.c) The PCs either clear off
the Dog Things or they get slowed down enough that the galleons are on them,
and they’ve failed phase 2, making phase 3 much harder.
There’s probably a way to flowchart what’s at stake for each
phase, without railroading the players’ options. For now, I just re-evaluate what the stakes
are after each roll changes the situation.
One last thin: the way this affected roleplay was
interesting. For them it meant scaling a
lot more action into one roll. For me,
it meant giving much bigger consequences to each roll. Ultimately this made their actions more
creative and action-advancing, and it made my rulings more high-stakes and exciting.
Resolution to
“Russel’s Map” the cartographer’s information
When they went back and examined those maps, I told them
more…
When the parchments fused – obviously they were originally
parts of a larger whole – more details appeared in the writing. The additional details allowed MacDuff to
recognize it for what it was – a map of the coastline of Lasthaven.
Now, this was impressive, but didn’t help them navigate to Lasthaven since it lies across a
dimensional barrier. However. One of the things that also appeared was the
emblem of the Mad Captain – notated so as to indicate he’d made a landing.
So, this map, which was inserted into the game by a player,
ended up telling them what they needed to know.
To recap the plot-relevance of Russell’s Map as my ideas about it
evolved:
·
The party has a map, I want it to enable them to
get somewhere they’re interested in.
·
They can’t decide where they’re interested in
going (seeking out the Mad Captain and attempting to follow the route Balboa
took are both suggested) so I rule that the map is unreadable without an
expert.
·
The party rustles up an expert.
·
By this time they’ve been talking more about the
Mad Captain than about following Balboa.
·
Expert-information appears on it to reveal that
the Mad Captain has been where they want to go and is therefore the option they
“should” pursue. (In the meantime, the
map has done something magical that makes it a liability (twist!) and serves to
kick them into gear)
Rewriting an NPC’s
plot arc to have him come in anyway
At this point, the party had only had one conversation with
Simon Pors – and that was just a waste of a good NPC. Trying to sneak onto the ship might have
included hiding out at Simon’s or ask him to help out, but they just blasted
their way out. So after the escape, I told them they found
him tied and gagged in the cabin. It
seems he had been overseeing the loading of the party’s supplies and been taken
hostage – told them his place had been shut down for helping them, too. NPC the group likes x personal vendetta against the party’s main
enemy, check.
Summoned to the Captain’s
Cabin
With their local troubles out of the way for the moment, the
party is called to the captain’s cabin to plan their next move.
I discovered that “the captain calls a meeting” is a great
way to facilitate player discussion; there’s a nominal leader, everyone has a
voice, and unlike most times in an rpg, the characters are doing exactly what
the players are doing (discussing something around a table) so the roleplay
tends to be more focused.
Convenient NPC Info
The PCs were talking about chasing down the Mad Captain, but
obviously didn’t know any way to go about it.
One of them said he’d heard a legend about a man at the edge
of civilized waters, who knew how to find the Mad Captain. I’ve come to recognize this kind of thing as
a player making a suggestion to me about what kind of plot arc to write
next. So I responded with Simon Pors,
who knew the backstory to the legend.
Pors demystified it a little, saying that the man was called
Jacob Jones, and claimed to have been a sailor on the Mad Captain’s vessel, the
Jester’s Throe. Everyone knews the Mad Captain’s just a fairy
tale/ghost story, so Jones was locked up in the notorious madhouse on (and here
was my quick ad-lib that somehow they took kind of seriuosly) Shudder
Island. …and ever since then, the horror
stories about Shudder have multiplied, as if reality itself is going mad there.
I find that making connections like this is a great use for
NPCs – and you’ll see it in movies, too; the supporting characters don’t have
the skills to frontline the aciton and change the world, but they often know
where the main characters need to go next.
Similarly, it’s like NPCs have access to the GM’s knowledge, on a
need-to-know basis – except it’s when the PCs need to know, and once they need
to know it, it’s something that NPC has known about all along.
Making plans, telling stories
Then Savio went into a reverie and told the crew how he had
once been an inmate on Shudder Island.
This was not part of his stated backstory – it was just a plot
connection he thought would be interesting and went for it. I allowed it because the story itself was pretty cool, and being able to contribute to the gameworld is one of the things that player is really there for.
You surrender a lot of control when you let a player create
something in your gameworld. But it
makes your job very simple: the group’s focused on a location/idea they all
like, and you only have to implement it. Savio's story provided a lot of detail about what
the island is like (that doors and walls constantly shift, as if the building itself is insane) – detail I'd build on in my prep. A few other players mentioned ghost stories
their PCs had “heard” about Shudder, so that put even more detail on the
table. So this week I prepped using notes on
everything the players had said, so I could be sure to hit the “this is
everything I hoped for!” angle, and created a lot of twists of my own to make sure
there were still a lot of surprises. All
around very exciting, because our next session was going to be in a location we
all created together!
Streetwise at Sea
The party then sailed around to various ports, looking for
information about Shudder Island. This
at first seemed like there should be roleplay at each new city, maybe some
random encounters on the way to each – but I realized that sea travel is just a
common part of this genre and therefore not important in itself. We just glossed over the actual travel so I
could tell them some bullet point info of what they found out. Whenever they wanted to take this in the
direction of NPC-interaction, we were able to morph seamlessly from me dramatically
reading my bullte points and us talking it through with someone who’d been
there/seen it.
