QfG: Social Implications of Class

It’s been a couple of weeks since I bought the full series pack on GOG.com, and I have managed to beat the first three. I beat the third one in about five hours, certainly in one day wherein I was doing plenty of other things. Which is kind of awesome. Although I think it has more than a little to do with the fact that the magic user is one of the most oppressed classes in the series, and that oppression is most palpable in Wages of War.

Not one of the games allows you to cast magic casually about public places. In fact, they tend to forbid it by law or even fear and openly detest it. There is only one faction of people who openly reward you for being a magic user (Kreesha in the liontaur city does not count, as it is illegal to cast anywhere outside of her home), and your interaction with them is almost entirely made up of one-time events. So not  really an actual location, since you cannot freely enter and exit it throughout any significant portion of the game.

Thieves are universally disliked as well, but it seems less like prejudice and more like good sense. They steal stuff. This is not an ingratiating career choice. Other thieves like you because they have similar morals and are in a position to appreciate your roguish skill. In fact, they don’t always like you. But they get you. It’s a gang mentality, I guess.

All of the classes offer a sort of in-group, but whereas the magic-user (and later, wizard) meets others of his ilk in generally isolated surroundings, the thief has a haven pretty much guaranteed to him in every game but four–although part of that is true for every character. Four is meant to be a lonely place for a hero. There is no real guild or group for anyone to take refuge in. No EOF for fighters, no mentor for paladins, no WIT for wizards, and no guild for thieves.

At least, not in the way that there previously was.

Fighters who did not go the paladin route are still left out, but then, it’s really, really easy to become a paladin, and no real reason not to do so. The paladin has one quest in particular that is a shining example of what he is and does, which I take as his alliance refuge. It is a “place” where he can be himself to the very peak of his heroic role. The magic user has a more familiar refuge, a peaceful place made by Erana, who despite never appearing, seems like a friend at this point.  But people hate magic and wizards more than thieves. Thieves still have a guild, of a poor sort, but oddly, this time round you will almost definitely feel bad for breaking and entering about town.

Anywho. I’ve been holding back on burning through Shadows of Darkness for two reasons. One, it was one of my favourites, and I want to savour it. Two, I started playing it with my husband, and so I want him to see as much of the game as possible. But on the other hand, I want him to see all of it pretty quickly, so that we can get to Dragon Fire and I can write about the children of my hero without spoiling anything.

Now that is something I want to blog about today. :D I’ve got about three or four things planned, but my wrists and arm are kind of sore, so I don’t know how much I will actually do. As someone might have noticed, I have been trying to fill out my post count for May. Maths say that I can get 31 posts, one for each day in the month, if I write three or four posts a day up to the end of the month.

Does that sound better or worse than a maximum of one or two a day?

Jess and Aphrodite encounter details

I’m going to have to come up with a new naming system for encounter detail posts.

This one changed a lot in the writing, and I definitely blame the fact that I didn’t feel like writing it. It’s not a bad one, and it was made easier by the fact that instead of making notes on dice rolls, I just wrote my details post alongside the actual encounter. It also had very few rolls, and much more thought.

The first check could have been Jess’s Intimidate skill to browbeat Aphrodite into going to the Watch, but that isn’t the way she rolls. [/pun]

But Aphrodite is a cunning little minx, and not anywhere near the straight and narrow. She tried to charm Jess into forgetting about the incident and following Aphrodite’s pace. At first I thought I would have her roll against Jess’s stats, but after I took a look at the numbers, that didn’t seem plausible.

First of all, there would have to be an opposing stat, and the only thing that could have fit contextually would have had no chance against Aphrodite’s dice pool.

So I decided to just make certain rolls Difficult or Easy. This one to start with. Aphrodite rolled a Difficult Charm 3 + Presence 2. 4 successes on white, 0 black.

Interesting, since I had not initially intended to give her a chance to roll that option. I’d meant for things to go against her wishes.

I know where I want these two to end up, but that doesn’t mean the dice would fall that way. At this point, Aphrodite wanted to shake her off, but she is a little dazzled by the idea of having been rescued. Jess is noble and still wants to see this through, but she isn’t personally attached.

In fact, at this point, I decided to trade out her Paranoia Complication for Stubborn, because it fits her character better. No change in stats, just responding to how I’ve been writing her.

Anyway, for someone else, I would have gone with a Charm roll, but not only does Jess not have any points in that skill, but her approach here was different than a Charming character’s. She’s being kind, reasonable. Playing to emotions that are already there instead of trying to manipulate certain emotions into being.

Empathy 2 + Presence 2 = Pool 4. 4 successes, all of them on sixes. But Aphrodite is cynical. She has to make a Perception check to realise that Jess’s behaviour is sincere, if a little detached. An Easy 5 + Perception 2 + Wits 2. Easy because Jess is not all that hard to read. 2 successes.

I could feel the scene start to play out much more quickly than most of the encounters have done, but that was fine. This scene never really had to accomplish much, and I was trying something a little new–an NPC with a full character sheet.

One last roll for Aphrodite to convince Jess to come inside and have a cup of tea. Etiquette 2 + Wits 2. 1 success. So she’s polite, but apparently too flustered to show off her full repertoire of learned manners.

So, it concluded differently than I expected, and covered less ground, but it made me realise that the other things I wanted to write with these characters need to have a bit more setup.

Edelweiss, Candle, and Anson encounter details

I really want to fuzz over this one and make it as brief as possible. This is unlikely to happen, as not only is the encounter quite long, the dice rolls and game decisions, and all the other behind the scenes stuff is kind of complicated.

Some background information on how and where I wrote this:

I’ve mentioned on my blog before that my regular keyboard experienced battery death. This forced me to find another bit of hardware to write with. My Alphasmart had several drawbacks, the final of which kept me from writing for days. Sometimes I just don’t want to use a particular device I own. I blogged about this before, and it’s kind of boring.

The real point is that using the Alphasmart meant that I could keep two files on the same machine and flip between them. One for the encounter, and the other for the dice rolls I had to keep track of.

Things didn’t start to get really complicated until I got up today, finally transferred all of my text to my PC, and got into writing the rest.

First dice roll was for Edelweiss, a Perception 2 + Wits 2 check to anticipate the arm, which I made Difficult because the room was smoky and she wasn’t paying attention. 1 success each on black and white, which comes out to 0.

After she won a Strength check to push him away, combat began. Neither had a ready weapon, so they each had -3 to Initiative, and -2 to their combat dice pools.

With their initiative crippled like that, it was kind of interesting. Edelweiss had 3 dice, and Jimmy only 2 (in fact, he didn’t get his name until rather later), and they kept on tying for initiative. I don’t really like the game’s tie solution, which is stat-based, so I just re-rolled until someone won. It was Edelweis, with 2 successes to the pirate’s 0. The way that PC and NPC stats work, there’s really no way that the solution in the book is fair.

Edelweiss’s combat roll was Swordplay 4 + Dex 2 + Initiative Bonus 2 – Unready 2, for a pool of 6. She gained 3 successes, while Jimmy only rolled 1.

And oh, our Edelweiss is just that kind of girl. With her degree of success 2 + Collapsible Sword 4 + Strength 3, she rolled 6 successes. Jimmy’s health points were wiped out.

But wait! The fight’s not over. Jimmy rolled a Fortitude + Resolve save (Physical 3 + Mental 2 for the NPC pirate) and succeeded. So he remained conscious and the fight would continue.

Candle stuck his nose in and combat widened. I actually finished rolling Edelweiss/Jimmy combat first, because I had all the numbers in front of me, and went back and wrote everything all in order.

No unready penalties for anyone this time around. Candle won initiative while Pirates 1 and 2 tied. They are statistically sameoids, so I just had them go in number order. We see the return of our old friend the Outnumbered penalty, with 3 black dice for Candle. But, he also decided to attack both of the pirates, so he had to halve his dice pool. Not too much to worry about, I thought. He has Firearms and Dexterity each at 4, plus 2 for winning initiative. That gave him a pool of 5 per pirate–but 3 black dice for each roll as well.

Against Pirate 1, he rolled a success each on the black and white dice. I hate those. 0 successes. But against Pirate 2, he rolled 3 successes on white and none on black. Pirate 1 rolled 2 successes, and Pirate 2 rolled 3 successes.

So, Pirate 1 got to hit. Pirate 2 tied with Candle, but because Candle won initiative, he won the round. However, he could roll weapon damage only. Weapon damage for Candle’s Heat Ray (steam) is 10 dice. Cue my grin.

With his Degree of Success 2 + Cutlass 7 + Physical 3, Pirate 1 ended up with a dice pool of 12, and he whomped Candle. 5 points of damage, and it could have been so much worse.

Left with one pip of health, Candle rolled damage for Pirate 2. Here, I kind of just want to cut and past my notes. (Keep in mind, all three pirates–Jimmy, 1, and 2–have 6 health points)

Candle
(Weapon damage only) Heat Ray (steam) 10
7 successes

Pirate 2, we hardly knew ye. Fortitude + Resolve roll, or shine on, you crazy diamond.

2 successes. You live.

Technically, I’m not sure at what part of the turn characters who are into their grey dice should be making saving rolls, but I liked the drama of doing it right then, and he was going to have to make one soon anyway.

Back up to Edelweiss and Jimmy. I knew he didn’t stand a chance, but he’s just so plucky. I wondered if she would really murder him or not. They both chose to slash at each other with swords–his a cutlass, hers the collapsible sword–and rolled initiative.

This time, they had no penalties–except for Jimmy’s -2, thanks to being in his grey dice. However, that does not affect his initiative. And if it does, too bad, because I didn’t roll it that way. Even if I had done, he could hardly have done worse. Edelweiss rolled 3 successes, and Jimmy rolled 0.

For combat, they both rolled their Swordplay skills and Dexterity. Edelweiss had the initiative bonus, and Jimmy had the “Oh I’m dyin’ here” penalty. Even so, it was a close thing. Edelweiss only rolled 1 success, but Jimmy didn’t roll any.

Edelweiss’s damage roll was Degree of Success 1 + Collapsible Sword 4 + Strength 3 = pool 8. I thought that would be it for Jimmy.

But she only rolled 3 successes. A pretty heavy toll to take, but he wasn’t dead yet. And he made his saving roll.

All of this not-dying earned him a graphic.

I was starting to wind down, and it was about time Anson came in, so after the saving rolls were taken care of, I had Anson roll a Difficult Empathy 4 + Presence 2 check. No successes on the black dice, but 2 on the white. No one was impressed, but he did make everyone stop goading the fight.

I did actually make a few healing rolls, but doing it made me realise just how pointless they were at this stage of the encounter. It was technically over, so I just wrapped it up and awarded Candle 2 experience points for being awesome. I think at the end of this round of encounters, I’ll give everyone 1 fate, which I’m sure at least one of them will exchange for experience. We’ve got at least two or three trying to improve their attributes.

Anson didn’t really get to do anything, but maybe I can accept this as a good place to set up whatever happens next.

Surinder and Arete encounter details

Writing this encounter took a bizarrely long amount of time. Life interfered quite often and rather heavily, plus, I don’t think it’s as good as the others were.

This is probably because there isn’t a lot going on. It’s a talking head scene, and to make it even harder, I had to really pin down what this Lady Magna’s deal is.

But that’s enough about why it took so long. When I was first writing it, I somehow got into watching something, which my husband joined me in. When I watch stuff by myself while writing, I tend to pause and unpause it, writing in bursts, but that’s annoying for someone else who just wants to enjoy the video.

So, I decided all of my dice rolls and scene directions, and wrote them on the back of an old receipt that was just sitting on my desk. Later, I just wrote from what I had planned and  the noted skill checks and outcomes.

Funny note: The receipt is from changing money in Victoria.

If one is familiar with the skills in Airship Pirates, it should almost always be obvious when I called for a skill check and what skill was used, just by reading. To a lesser or possibly greater degree, the degree of success is also easy to guess by reading.

That said, when Arete implied that Surinder should make her a setting for a gem in return for information, he rolled Craft (wire art) 4 + Wits 3, for a pool of 7, which yielded an impressive 6 successes. So he not only worked very quickly, but he came out with an especially pleasing design.

As he was so successful, Arete provided two significant bits of information. I decided to give him a second chance to repair something and gain the opportunity to ask her to join him in his next Magna-related action.

To fix the clock, he rolled Ad Hoc Repair 4 + Wits 3. He rolled 2 successes. Less impressive, but he got the job done.

With that opportunity open, he had only to roll some kind of skill check to try to get her to join him. Surinder has very little Presence, and not many points expended for charm-type skills. So I let him appeal to her through his Streetwise skill, presuming that he is laying emphasis on the seedy understanding of the situation. Streetwise 3 + Presence 1 gained him 1 success. He barely managed it, and it will cost him in the long run.

Let’s hope it was worth it.

Personally, I think that he will definitely need Arete. She is better equipped for battle, and from what has been seen and said of Lady Magna and her retinue, there will be fighting, and it won’t be an easy encounter.

If I don’t move the characters around into different groups for whatever reason, the next we see from these two will be from Arete’s point of view, “storming the castle”.

Arete encounter details

I fully expected this one to be difficult. It was expected by my audience of one to be the most awesome, so yes, bar was set a bit high. I wasn’t even going to start yesterday. Technically, I finished yesterday, but then I’d have to write something else for today. And we made plans to see a movie.

For some reason, I thought that gambling had its own system. But when I flipped through the book seeking knowledge of gambling, nothing came. So I was at a standstill for a while, until discussion gave us a gambling system of our own.

There are not a lot of rolls in Arete’s encounter, so I’ll spend most of this recap going over my gambling system.

It looks like it’s really just supposed to be a skill check. Which is not what I wanted at all. So we came up with some mechanics for it, which I dressed up with a name and terms. The mechanics are simple–3 black dice for the difficulty level, and Gambling + Wits. Number of successes define the quality of the win. Two successes is the minimum for a good roll.

If the the player has Addiction (Gambling) as a Complication, they must occasionally make a successful Resolve roll to be able to stop playing.

Arete does have that complication, however, she did not play long enough to have to make that check, and the end of her gambling session was due to an external force stronger than her addiction. She did have to roll an Act 3 + Presence 3 to retain her composure after the poor roll, with 3 successes. I find it funny that she rolled quite well in anything not to do with gambling.

Hopefully, Port of Call will come up again later, because I have a couple of different hands named. It’s not a real game, but it’s not hard to make it sound like one.

Both of her Gambling rolls were poor. Her pool was 6, 3 points each in Gambling and Wits, against the 3 black dice. The first roll, she got two successes, but one was cancelled by the black dice. I decided that because the game has a similarity to card games, she can continue gambling to build her chances back up to possibly win.

In this case, if she were to roll a single success again, that would be the pairing “spread” (like a hand in cards) to the first roll, which would be a rare/difficult way to win. She ended up getting two successes, but both of them were cancelled out by the black dice. I didn’t actually explain this when I first wrote it, but when it ended up too short, I went back and put it in. So that’s probably why I still feel compelled to explain it here.

I had decided from the outset that she would only roll two rounds of gambling, and then get into a fight. Only the reason for the fight was up to the dice. If she’d done well, she would have been accused of cheating. We got to see the awesome alternative because her gamble rolls sucked.

Combat is something I’m pretty used to now, but it always brings some surprises into the way I write each scene. In Arete’s case, she had made some pretty unlucky rolls, when I’d rather wanted her to win so that I could have her get jumped by angry gamblers. But with this one guy… She just smashed him.

I used the Pirate/Marine NPC stats from the book, which gave him 5 dice to roll against Arete’s 7. He rolled 3 successes, while she rolled 5, granting her the initiative bonus.

This gave her a combat dice pool of 8, from which she rolled an unbelievable 10 successes. It was even cooler than Anson’s 10 from a pool of 11. She rolled a one and 4 sixes, which she re-rolled to gain another six. That six re-rolled four more sixes, before ending on a three.

To make it even more spectacular, the antagonist gambler rolled a measly 2 out of his pool of 5.

Arete’s damage pool was Degree of Success 8 + Revolver 5 = 13. She rolled 8 successes, and murdered the guy. To death. His health points went from 6 to negative 2. I probably could have explored the world of saving rolls and grey dice, but this was too good not to just give her a straight, clean kill.

No idea what they’re all in for next. Probably meeting up or furthering their individual goals. Technically, Anson and Arete already know each other, and it’s not infeasible for Jess, Candle, or even Edelweiss to meet either of them or even one another. Surinder already knows Arete, so he may meet with her.

Who knows. We’ll see. I’m just glad I finally have all of these done, and kind of amazed that I finished Arete’s so quickly.

Anson encounter details

This one is not one of my favourites. I’m not entirely sure of why. True, it’s too long, but they have gotten progressively longer, and Candle was proof that when an encounter focuses on social interaction and is actually missing combat, it tends to take more writing to get from one thing to another. But Anson’s encounter also took me quite a while to write. I just couldn’t get into it.

I actually rewrote the beginning a couple of times. Not from scratch, just very significant details changed. The initial plan did not change much–I wanted to use the game’s Perils system, which is actually just a guideline. I decided to explode something. At first, that was going to be his office, but then I realised what a deterrent that would be to the story. His office is the home of his Family, and anything affecting them all so greatly should not come before the party is all together.

Anyway, once he got to the place it was safe to blow up, I ran through the Peril guidelines. The first question one must ask oneself when directing a peril, is if it can be avoided. Airship pirates are firing on the port, which is near Anson’s location. So no. Cannot avoid. Next question is how much damage does it cause? An explosion is a moderate peril, which would give it a damage dice pool of 3-6.

I decided to give him a bit of a chance and give him a kind of pseudo-avoidance roll. He can’t avoid the peril, but he can avoid the damage. He rolled Wits 2 + Perception 3, for a pool of 5, and got 1 success. So he was able to hide under the table and avoid damage, but he was still in a dangerous building.

While I could have made more checks on the stability of the structure or other things, it would have made for an even longer post, and it was already pretty long by that point.

Dice rolls started sliding into place at this point, so it was a simple check of Leadership 3 + Presence 2 every time he tried to comfort or direct the NPCs. He tended to roll low for interactions with Morgan, while he rolled a 3 when interacting with Cass, which is why she trusted him enough to hand him her baby.

Healing was one of the systems I hadn’t gotten to use yet, and was pretty much saving for Anson, because duh, he’s the doctor. His first roll, healing Morgan, was actually a regular skill check, as I did not specify stats or health point loss for Morgan. Which was lucky, as with a pool of 11, Anson managed to fumble out a single success. He gets 5 dice for using a doctor’s bag/medical kit (this basically makes it an Easy roll), to go with his Medicine 4 and Wits 2. I found it funny that his Skill Speciality for Medicine is OB-Gyn.

I like accrediting his magnificently low success to that. But I did throw in another tremor just in case, and it gave Morgan a chance to explain the explosion. It’s not supposed to be a big deal. Everyone’s encounters give them something to follow up on in their personal lives, but they aren’t always big things. In this case, Anson may choose to check up on the Teech family in future, which for his character, is just as pressing as Edelweiss’s enemy-making repercussions, Surinder’s involvement with Lady Magna, Candle’s accidental “regulars”, and Jess’s rescued charge.

When it came to governing Cass’s healing, I did not make up stats, but I did give her an average amount of health points (6) and decided that her injury had knocked her down to 2 health points. Anson would have to roll 4 successes out of his healing pool of 11 to heal her completely.

He rolled 10 successes.

It was amazing. I only had 9 white dice, as usual, so I rolled all nine and came up with 5 ones right off the bat, as well as 2 sixes. I re-rolled the sixes and got nothing, but then rolled the remaining 2 dice to complete the pool. They both came up six, bringing him to 9 successes. I re-rolled those sixes one last time, and one of them came up one. 10 successes.

This was too cool not to make a hybrid of the success scale and healing process. On the success scale, 10 is an “amazing performance”, and 10 was more than enough to heal her lost 4 points. Most of that was spent in the quiet, underlook-able awesomeness of pulling a splintery piece of wood out of a person. Smoothly. It may be hard to notice, but he actually pulled it out in exactly the right way to avoid causing further damage.

Winding down was a bit difficult, but I managed it all right, I think. Now I need to go back and make a timestamped entry for why I did not post yesterday. This was part of it, but not the whole reason.

It’s kind of funny though. I miss one day, and my views go down to zero immediately.

Jess encounter details

Wow. This is a pretty big one. Seriously, something awesome happened in this one, I swear.

I think that since most of the explaining about the game mechanics has been done in the earlier ones, I should fall into a more summarising narrative for these details posts. As before, the circumstances are more interesting–but this time, the dice had a lot more to do with it.

This was another encounter that I had trouble setting down to write. I didn’t get much chance before getting home, and once I did, I wanted to do other things. But once I got started, everything just slid into place.

Technical issues arose with this one as well. I tried to make the draft on my PC first, and access it on my tablet, only to find that it needed a constant connection to access and update it. I do not have that at work, so I made an Evernote file. Screw you, WordPress App. Die in a fire.

I was already using Evernote to keep track of encounter details anyway, so instead of making a separate file for those, I just made all detail notes in-line with the text. This made me very paranoid of leaving them in the final post, but I think I checked it enough times. I think. It was a lot easier to do it this way, so I might just write everything in Evernote and then just put it in Yarny or Dropbox for sake of saving.

I tried to use the dice to do some more menial things this time, like checking if she’s afraid of being up so high with a Wits 2 roll (1 success). I was told that the scenes should try to cover more time, so I did a bit of a time jump as practise. Good thing, or she wouldn’t have gotten to the combat.

Jess’s character is not the easiest to explain or write, but she is essentially a straightforward person. She has quite a few flaws in her makeup, but she’s a good person, and she is able to make good suggestions to cover up her weaknesses by playing to her strengths.

For example, when she heard the bang on the door, I wanted her to be able to figure out it needed attention, but I still wanted to at least gauge her success. However, she has no skill points in Perception, as well as a low score in the related attribute. This is something she has in common with other characters, so I came up with a way to patch it. Instead of an Easy 5 Perception 0 + Wits 1, she rolled an Easy 5 Survival 2 + Wits 1 for 3 successes. Two dice make a difference, and she played to her traits instead of rote checks. It still amounts to an awareness check, she simply used a different skill to the same end.

Three successes means that she accomplished the task with some flair, so her instincts told her to get out her weapons before breaking down the door. What I was going to mention in my first post today was that I found another thing in the mechanics I haven’t gotten to do yet, which is breaking objects. Wooden doors have 4 structure points (like health).  I assumed that when attempting to break an object, damage is rolled against the object’s structure points, and so she rolled 8 for the Arm Blades and 1 for Strength. Door got splintered.

Combat was… bizarre.

In my first post about Jess, I basically detailed exactly what would happen in this encounter. But I didn’t end with whether she saved the girl or not. So when I started writing combat, I decided that she didn’t need to kill the baddies, but if she didn’t do damage by the second round, they would kill the girl and she would have to make an Empathy 2 + Presence 1 check. A success in that check would allow her to chase them down and attack and/or acquire information. Failure would mean collapsing with guilt and sadness.

Two rather awesome things happened here. It’s all a little complicated, but I’ll try to unravel it.

The death condition existed because I had a contingency plan I was fairly fond of. No matter what happened, Jess would end up with a contact called “Aphrodite”. Either the woman here, or her twin sister. No concrete name left that much in the air. Should Jess fail, she would have to contact the girl’s family and then find herself in an obviously haunting situation, which the sister would have misinterpreted to comedic effect. I was eager to play it that way, but… when the combat started, and the odds looked so obviously against the woman surviving, I felt absolutely awful.

I hoped quite hard that the dice would roll in Jess’s favour. Only one man could attack anyway, as the other had to hold the hostage. The first round of combat, the pistol-wielder rolled 3 successes to Jess’s 1. With that, he brought his combat dice pool up to 9 (Physical 5 + Firearms 2 + Initiative Bonus 2) and rolled 3 successes. Jess’s combat roll was Beast Dancing (martial art) 4 + Dexterity 3, for a dice pool of 7. I knew I wasn’t eager for the death condition when I started calculating if I should let her reneg the declared action and Dodge. I even went back and made another personalised awareness check to give her a chance to notice the pistol. But 7 to 9 didn’t seem too bad, so I rolled the fight.

Jess got 1 success. My heart actually sank.

With the degree of success and the damage dice for his pistol, the pistol-wielder had a damage dice pool of 7. He didn’t roll a single success. This brought me to the weird experience of having to write a hit with a gunshot that did no damage. So he hit her in the hair.

The second round was even cooler. Jess won initiative by 1 success, and so the combat dice pools were switched–9 for Jess, 7 for Pistolman. Again, Jess won the combat  roll by a single success. At that point, I just felt relief whoosh through me. Jess has a contact, similar to Candle’s but hers will be around more often and under (probably) more varying circumstances.

I started rolling damage almost as an afterthought. Degree of success 1 + Arm Blades 8 + Strength 1 for a pool of 10. Those weapons are crazy awesome. She got 5 successes and gutted the guy for all but one of his health points.

Those dice rolling the way they did is kind of cool. Maybe creepy. I gave her 2 experience points for that, which she’s saving for an attribute fix.

The last roll was when Aphrodite hugged Jess. Our Jess is not a very touchy-feely person, and she has the Paranoia complication, so I made her make an Empathy 2 + Presence 1 check to prevent pushing the woman away. It yielded one success, which was enough to let her awkwardly sit and take it a moment.

Wow, that was a lot of writing. But that was the coolest thing that’s happened so far. This is totally why I wanted to write with dice in the decision-making. Governing the story by my feelings doesn’t always produce the best result. I was honestly excited to write the Haunted by the Death of an Innocent and Faced with Identical Twin thing.

Candlewick encounter details

Listening to: Alex Goot

This one I may do a little differently. Most of the dice rolls were the same, and the behind the scenes stuff that’s probably the most interesting are the technical problems and multiple places I had to try and write the bloody thing.

First of all, as I mentioned yesterday, I started it but didn’t work terrifically hard as it was the end of my weekend and I didn’t want to spend it isolating myself and rolling dice. I did write a bit while watching Harry Potter, but mostly because I just do things like that. I also wrote some at the kids’ house, and then a bit more at our house while Thing 2 and I hung out watching Duck Tales.

Because most of the encounters have had combat rolls, this time I wanted to use a system I haven’t used yet–the drinking system. Every time a character drinks, they must make an Easy Fortitude roll. (In Candle’s case, 1 plus the Easy bonus 5) They also get 1-3 black dice according to the strength of the alcohol they are consuming. (At first, Candle was at 1 die for beer, and then 2 for the “stronger stuff”) If they get less than two successes, they move to the next level of drunkenness.

At the first level, Tipsy, which was the only one that Candle reached, he had to make a Resolve (1) roll to resist taking another drink, with black dice equal to his level of drunkenness (1). He never managed any successes on that, which makes me wonder if he should save experience (when he starts earning it) for an additional Resolve point.

It’s very easy to tell how the rolls went, and it honestly started to feel a little tedious after a while. He tended not to roll poorly, and I had already discussed with Dither that the drinking table needed a little extra depth, so he received an extra black die for every other consecutive drink.

I could list each success and failure, but it’s so unremarkable and slow that I’m going to just skip it. It’s obvious when each roll was necessary and what each outcome was from reading the narrative.

One interesting thing from the drunk table is that I set the Woman (random stats NPC, my make) at the second level, Merry. This means that she had to make her own Reserve roll to resist laughing at everything said to her. I kind of like that she failed consistently. However, she did manage to resist taking a drink, so cheers.

Another thing I wanted to use was the Seduction skill. I wanted to do it more in depth, but it was already running long, and I felt awkward going on so much longer for Candle. When he said his smooth line, he rolled Seduction 2 + Presence 1. I decided on Average difficulty because she’s drunk and interested in company, but not easy. Two successes, and she was his for a night.

The original idea was for Candle to get drunk and sleep with someone, get paid for it, and decide that prostitution might be a better way to pay the bills. But when I started writing the beginning, I fell upon some inner turmoil and ended up playing it up to comedic effect, in an idea that I’m pretty sure was either mostly or all my husband’s idea. <3 I think I may have come up with the order of lovers, but it was his idea to just “conquer” both.

My week looks to be a bit lighter than I expected, but I may take a bit of time off from writing this as well. I have half of the party’s intros done, and it may be nice to spend time reading, gaming, or if I do work on PaPW more, then making a separate blog. They’ve stopped me being lazy on this regular blog, but I feel weird mashing several posts when I feel like writing about other things.

Surinder encounter details

This one took me almost two days, both because I had a hard time starting, and also because there were some more important things to take care of at home.

Anyway, as I said, difficulty choosing a rough idea for the scene. But I persevered and bothered hubby to get help. After some thrown-out ideas, we decided on having an attempted robbery en route to the landlord’s place. This, in turn, eventually became a group of thugs that attempt to coerce Surinder to do something for their boss.

The first roll was Surinder’s, an Average Perception + Wits roll to see if he would notice the thugs. Our Suri is pretty sharp, so that gave him a dice pool of 7. He rolled two successes on a one, and a third on a six. Six can reroll to hope for another success. He rolled another six, and then a three. Four successes total.

That many successes signifies flair in the accomplishment. It’s a little hard to notice things with flair. (what would you do, pose?) So I made them very noticeable while completely unaware that he’s seen them.

However, he is Shy (a complication taken in the character creation process to make his life harder), so he responds by trying to avoid them. This was when I decided on the idea of the men being thugs sent by someone. It has a for more interesting consequences than a mugging. Thankfully, Thugs are pre-created NPCs in the AP sourcebook, and have stats that provide two things: significant toughness and no making me have to make them. It’s a fairly quick process, but I’m lazy and I do not quite have a handle on the numbers.

When they approached him, they had to roll Intimidate + Mental, with a dice pool of 4. Because Suri is Shy, the roll for the Thugs was Easy, adding 5 dice to the pool for a total of 9.

Good thing, too. Having only 4 white dice on hand, the initial roll yielded no successes. Neither did the second group of four, nor the last single die. So I decided that despite their scary looks, the environment just did not allow them to utilise it effectively.

Then, after I went back to writing and decided someone needed a stupidity check, I realised that I should have had each Thug roll to Intimidate. However, I already like the way it turned out. Seemed a shame to waste such a perfect failure. I didn’t end up making him roll against stupid. He just acted stupid.

After they started their pitch, Surinder’s refusal to hear more brought us to another roll. Suri is fairly Streetwise and as Perceptive as a Level 1 character can be, so he couldn’t be unaware that they would attack him at this point. Therefore, they had to roll initiative and enter combat.

However, there was some thinking to be done. Three guys with these stats would thoroughly cheese him. Also, they would need to keep the coppers away, even in such a relaxed part of the city. I made one remain outside the combat, while the others double-teamed Surinder. Because there are penalties this in the rules. Insert grin of evil.

Just kidding. I’m not one of those lame writers who thinks their characters have actual feelings. I just wanted to use a couple of the mechanics of the game that I have not gotten to use. Narrative imperative demanded that the two fighting thugs be the leader and the weasel, because they had descriptors and personalities.

Both of them have the same stats, so they got the same dice pool for Initiative, which was 8. The weasel got 4 successes, the leader got 3. Surinder’s Initiative is 9, he rolled 6 successes.

There is a little wrangling to be done when two people attack the same target. They go in their turn order, attacking and defending. Surinder won initiative, with Weasel second, so they declared their actions and made their combat rolls. Surinder decided to try to Kick Weasel, while Weasel intended to knock Surinder down.

Surinder rolled Fisticuffs 3 + Dexteriry 2 + the bonus he earned for Initiative, giving him a pool of 7 dice. However, since he was outnumbered, he had to take 3 Black dice. He rolled 2 successes, but the Black dice rolled a success to cancel out one of his, leaving him with just one. Weasel’s combat roll was Fisticuffs 3 + Physical 6, with no bonuses or penalties, a dice pool of 9. He rolled 3 successes, and so got to deal damage. I probably should have had Surinder make his attack in the narrative, but I didn’t. Oh well. This took me a long time to write, and it had a lot of interruptions and low points.

Time for Weasel to roll damage. Something else I totally forgot when Edelweiss was fighting Thrimble was that when calculating the dice pool for damage, she would have gotten dice equal to the difference between her success and his. Which means I actually cheated her out of 4 dice rather than 1. She could have definitely killed the guy.

Anyway. The difference between Weasel’s combat successes and Surinder’s was 2, so he had that 2, plus 1 for using Punch as a “weapon” and 6 for Physical because Punching is a melee weapon. Yeah. Dice pool 9. Only rolled 2 successes, which is not bad for pushing someone to the ground. Taking 2 of Surinder’s health points brought him down from his maximum of 8 to 6.

Then, the Leader got to take a whack at him. Surinder’s intention was to try and Kick the Leader, while the Leader wanted to do the same to him. With Suri on the ground, he had to roll the same Fisticuffs 3 + Dexterity 2 + Initiative Bonus, but I increased the black dice pool to 5 to reflect his prone condition. There doesn’t seem to be a penalty for being knocked down, but I thought there should be, so I made one. I got approval. He rolled 2 successes on white, and 1 on black, bringing him to just 1 success.

As he has the same stats as Weasel (I wonder if I should have changed them), Leader had the same dice pool. He rolled 4 successes. This gave him a damage roll of DoS (degree of success) 3 + Kick 2 + Physical 6, for a dice pool of 11. He rolled 3 successes, which halved Surinder’s remaining health points.

Poor Suri, lying on the ground, in severe pain. 3 health points left. The thugs did not want to kill him, so they just decided their job was done, and left to report.

He did not distinguish himself in any particular way, so I didn’t break my initial decision not to reward experience points. I think I’ll keep that rule of thumb throughout these intro encounters. I also noticed that so far I have not used characters I blogged about before starting. Interesting, but maybe irrelevant.

Edelweiss encounter details

Listening to: “You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid” – The Offspring

My Edelweiss post is actually my second attempt to write a Petticoats and Pipe Wrenches snippet. The first was too wordy and took too long to get to dice-rolling. I managed to find a better rhythm this time, as well as figuring out the game mechanics.

Next time I’ll take more detailed notes, but it’s still fresh in my mind, so I can point out sections and explain how the system works. It’s not quite an explanation of how Airship Pirates works, but here and there that will come up. It would probably make more sense to people who know how to play, but I tried to at least translate jargon instead of using more or less fluent AP cant.

The first point in the story where I decided to bring the dice into play was when Edelweiss attempted to lull the enemy captain into a false sense of security. With the idea of being a GM, I asked her for an  Act + Presence roll of an Easy difficulty. I chose Easy because the captain was already predisposed to think of her as defenceless, and she was basically supporting that belief. Easy rolls add 5 dice to the pool. With her 3 points of Act and 3 in Presence, this gave her a dice pool of 11.

She rolled four successes, which I used to justify the purple prose attached to her way of speaking. Then, on a lark, I decided that that many successes warranted a skillcheck for the captain to prevent an attack of stupid. I used the NPC stat-making system to give him Mental 1 in a Difficult roll. Difficult rolls add 3 black dice, which would cancel any of his successes should the black dice roll any successes.

He rolled one success, with two successes on the black dice. This constitutes a “foul failure”, which occurs any time there are more  successes on the black dice than on the white dice. The meaning of the term is pretty obvious, and I hope I illustrated the outcome of his roll sufficiently. Checking her teeth indeed.

By this time, I was having a lot of fun with the dice, and I wanted to see how much of the story-telling I could just give over to chance and numbers. When Edelweiss chose to bite him, I asked for an Average Strength roll. Average difficulty does not add white or black dice. Edelweiss’s strength is 3, as she is supposed to be a robot built for fighting. But she didn’t score any successes, and so I wrote the miss. Thrimble’s NPC stats could have allowed him to make an Average Dodge roll, but I decided against it because he shouldn’t have been able to see it coming, thanks to her great performance and his own foul failure to spot it as such.

Up to this point, I had not done any straight, by-the-book combat rolls. Combat in AP is duel-based, so they would have to both be attacking and aware of the situation’s status as a fight. I had to fudge it a little to have Edelweiss make a move not strictly combative, while Thrimble tried to hit her. I still rolled initiative, which Edelweiss won, but rolled a skill check for her, and a combat check for Thrimble.

She rolled Average Athletics + Dexterity to steal his cutlass, and he rolled Physical + Fisticuffs (also Average) to hit her. I probably should have given her a penalty for the ropes, but she only rolled two successes anyway, so I just wrote them in as a result of the minor success. Thrimble rolled a couple of successes as well. It took me a little while to figure out how to roll damage, because of the duel system, but eventually he  rolled one damage. However, Edelweiss is equipped with an armoured corset, which gives her 2 points of damage resistance. I gave her the action of drawing the cutlass as a free action to bring them to a proper combat.

At this point, I had been writing and rolling for a while, and I had to do a little housework before the day got away from me. So I considered what each of them would do next. I knew I didn’t want Edelweiss to kill Thrimble, so I decided that if she could hit him for two dice of health, he would give in.

When I went back and rolled my first proper combat, I got some fun surprises. Edelweiss won initiative again, which, in proper combat, means that she is the one who gets to deal damage. Both declare their actions after initiative–in a session, Edelweiss would say, “I want to attack him with the stolen cutlass,” and Thrimble would say, “I’m going to punch her”–and then roll whatever combat skill the player is using plus Dexterity. The combat + Dex roll is the one that determines who does damage.

In this case, Thrimble’s Physical + Fisticuffs gave him a measly one success, while Edelweiss’s Swordplay+ Dex got her four. Therefore, according to his intention, he got into a fighting stance, but she struck before he could get a hit in. The four successes means that she accomplished the move with some flair, so more purple prose. When she rolled for damage, I had to get up and get more dice.

I started playing with six each of white and black dice. Whenever a roll required seven dice, I just rolled a non-success again. But for Edelweiss’s stolen cutlass slash, I needed 7 for the cutlass, and 3 for her Strength, because it’s a melee weapon. She ended up doing 5 damage. I realised later that I had actually only used 9 dice rather than 10, but things turned out perfectly with the 9.

I had thought to have Thrimble concede after a prolonged drubbing, possibly dealing out some damage of his own, but the dice characterised Edelweiss exactly as I would have done without the game mechanics. She dominated the fight from start to finish, and with his 6 total health points, five brought Thrimble scared to his knees.

Rewarding experience is something I have been thinking about since I realised she might need to dodge. Without any points in that skill, she seems incomplete as a machine built to fight. So I decided to reward her just one point of experience (it sounds stingy, but points are spent to increase skills) because I didn’t intend to reward any for this encounter. I think I’ll also give her two fate points, because she did get an awesome near-lethal attack in.

In the encounter, she realised the importance of dodging, and so she will use her experience point to increase her Dodge skill to 1.

Tomorrow, I want to spend time with mums, but I’ll try to find some time to write or plan the next encounter.