Celebrim
Legend
So, I decided to take a break from GMing, after a steady 10 years of doing prep week in and week out, and graciously one of my players with only a little bit of prior GMing experience stepped up to the job. After discussing what we wanted to do, the group decide to play a Pathfinder AP, and after discussing which ones I owned (and which were thus off the table) and which ones were well rated, we decided to play "Skull and Shackles".
It's going.... OK... I guess. I mean I'm having a lot of fun playing as a player for the first time in 15 years, but considering this is an adventure path and the amount of supplemental material involved, the green GM is struggling far more than he should have.
I can't really comment on the text, as I haven't read it, but the GM seems continually frustrated by the lack of clarity in the descriptions. Can't tell if this is an actual problem with poor editing organization or just a new GM cutting his teeth.
The other problem I've noticed is that the CR guidelines that they are giving the GM are pretty much ridiculous, and more misleading than helpful. He's struggling to figure out what a balanced encounter should look like, since the numbers that they are labelled with are consistently bad measurements of the challenge.
But what I can tell is the biggest problem is that the mini-game construction is less than ideal. I mean, I can often figure out why the mini-games have been constructed as they are and what constraints the designer felt that they had, but the results feel really unsatisfying anyway. More on that in a bit, but first, a bit of a review of the play thus far:
Chapter 1: I thought the conception of Chapter 1 overall was brilliant. Having the first part of the game be largely around social challenges and winning allies was one of the most novel and interesting scenarios I've seen for a game. Obviously, this section is very linear and railroady and some players may balk at the lack of agency involved in being kidnapped right off the bat and placed in the hands of tormentors well beyond their ability to resist, it felt fine to me given the conceit of the story and is an appropriate start to a Pirate adventure. The minigame around winning friends is reasonably well designed, and it's cool to level up by turning enemies into allies rather than just killing things. The minigame here involving being a member of a crew was decently designed, but overly repetitive in practice and I felt it really didn't have to be. While I have the experience to have made this section really shine, for a novice GM there just didn't seem to be enough suggests for hooks and bangs to drive the action. What they did have worked pretty well, but from talking with the GM, he definitely could have used more fleshed out minor NPCs and more motivations and minor events to propel the role. Lastly the sailor minigame ultimately felt irrelevant, as there was no way to mess up bad enough to actually impact the ship.
Overall, I would give Chapter 1 an A-, good effort marred by some poor balance choices, obvious rails, and a lack of detail that could have been cleared up relatively easily.
Chapter 2: One problem we have hit on early on is that we mutinied successfully before the game expected it - pretty much as soon as we got away from most of the officers - and then immediately ran into the problem that sailing the ship as an officer had no corresponding minigame. Initially, since we were on rails anyway, the fact that we had no real rules for determining how well the ship was being sailed didn't seem to matter, but the further we've advanced the bigger the problem it was. I guess there is an assumption that we just have enough competent crew to control the ship, but it feels like that if you are going to have a redundant sailor game with little impact on the ship, that an officer game of actually sailing well would be worthwhile. I want the experience of being a pirate captain, which I would think would involve the normal zero to hero D&D arc, and yet with no ship sailing game to fail or succeed at there is no real marker of both the struggle and the ultimate victory.
But the biggest problems in chapter two have to do with verisimilitude and playing to simulationist aesthetics and not gamist aesthetics. In particular, we seem to be simultaneously in a sandbox but also expected to handwave the actual mechanics or reality of owning a powerful armed sailing vessel crewed with cutthroats.
a) The scale of the game seems inappropriate to sailing vessels. After a bit of rough math, it turned out that the Shackles were 15th the size of the real Caribbean, and more on par with say Lake Michigan. While the problem is partly smoothed over by the fact that distance per day for sailing vessels seems to be about 1/2 of what is realistic, it still leaves the playing area really too small and cramped, so we are playing deliberately off the map - with the result that our novice GM has to really just wing it.
b) There is this weird expectation that we aren't going to have a crew aiding and abetting our villainy. The boarding action minigame seems to divide combat into PC's versus NPCs, while the crew are entirely in the backdrop. Unfortunately for the GM, we didn't really know that, so we spent 10 days recruiting a crew and are sailing around now with 80 low level characters constituting a small army. The GM has no tools for dealing with this sort of mass combat, and the Paizo mass combat rules are intended to handle an entirely different scenario in details and in scale and as such don't work as a minigame for the crew combat. The situation seems likely to only get worse, as we could easily recruit more if we wanted. The feel of this section is as if they were going entirely for ‘Pirates of the Carribean’, and don’t expect someone to go, “There is no way a 38-gun frigate could be sailed to Tortuga by two people.” The fact that we are ordering our crew to act like pirates and attack things we are supposed to be fighting wrecks the suggested scenarios, something I couldn’t be expected to know until it happened. Again, I get that they are trying to deal with XP awards in a way that favors the PC’s leveling up, but this feels in play like we are supposed to know as players the metagame design and interact act with that, and not interact with the fiction. I’m starting to feel guilty for interacting with the fiction of the game, since the minigames don’t support it, and just mess things up for the novice GM.
c) There are some weird assumptions in the ship operations minigame. First and most obviously, the amount of pay you need to give the crew doesn't seem to scale with the size of the crew, which is something we had to patch right away. Beyond that, the game seems to have made some wildly unrealistic assumptions about how pirate ships would distribute shares, entirely at odds with anything believable. As best as I can tell, the game expects us to pay our crew far worse than they were paid working for the cruel masters we induced them to mutiny against and kill. I know it’s trying to deal with wealth by level issues in a relatively simple manner, but still, it’s weird and counterintuitive and basically doesn’t expect that the players will proactive engage with wages as an in-game issue. Beyond that, the plunder point system which is intended to simplify things, has some weird issues as well. Ships don’t really have the ability to store many plunder points, and so far plunder points have proven pretty scarce. The result is that the most valuable thing on the sea is ‘prizes’ – that is, captured ships – but this works against what would be desirable for play, because splitting the party across multiple ships just makes for a headache for the GM and reduces RP, however economically efficient it is. It seems like a combination of ships being fat with plunder and higher costs to operate crews would have resulted in better gameplay.
c) The ship vehicle rules are both unrealistic and poorly serving the games intended tropes. It seems all sailing vessels regardless of size are intended to be simulated with a single stat block. The party has inherited a standard stat block ship, which seems to represent a sort of typical mid-sized three-masted pirate ship like you might expect to find in a movie. But the technology of the setting is all over the place, with everything from 4th century BC ships to ships which appear to be 16th or 17th century in conception and possibly later in some cases. The integration of these different technologies is haphazard at best, and there are many reasons to think that the most powerful ships in the game are oared galleys of various sorts. But who really wants to be a pirate commanding an oared galley? And if rowed galleys really are important to the setting, why is the expectation that we’ll have such a tiny crew? Many galley’s had hundreds of rowers and marines on them. If we really tried to seize such a behemoth by boarding it, we ought to be just overwhelmed by the numbers even with our 80 crew, and yet the expectation by the designer seem to be that a crew of 80 is a large number. Why go for Pirate tropes in the art and story direction, and yet have physical mechanics that prioritize playing like this is Ben Hur or Cleopatra?
d) The ship to ship ranged battle rules are mix of good ideas with bad ones, and seem to come down to a poor mix of abstraction with granularity. Since the ability to close the range is based entirely on generating large differences in the sailing skill check, owing to the fact that most ships move the same speed, closing takes a long time. (Galley’s, continuing the trend of being superior in just about every fashion to other sorts of ships, are faster, but again, few are going to want to play pirates and then end up with mental images for Carthage and Rome (and certainly the book art doesn’t provoke those images)). But since the designer didn’t want players to play out the tedious process of closing to the grapple (where the action is), ships are placed so close together at the start of the minigame that the range of the ship’s weapons are ultimately irrelevant. The game really doesn’t provide for any sort of ‘artillery duel’, and reinforces this by making the cost of ammunition for ship’s weapons prohibitively expensive. Ship’s have 1000’s of hit points, but ammunition does less than 1 hit point of damage per gold piece spent. The result of all that collectively is to make you wonder why they even bothered to have ship to ship rules given that they seem to want you to just handwave that away and treat the combat as if the ship’s could just as easily be dry land.
Also, as a small note, shooting the ship’s control device is so easy and such a winning strategy for both prey and predator, that there is hardly any reason to shoot anything else. The situation is so unrealistic, that were this an actual thing that could be done in the fiction, you’d expect ships in the setting to be constructed with armored barbicans around the control device (as the bridges of battleships were) so as to make them relatively invulnerable to assault. One session after hitting on that strategy, we are having to patch the rules because it’s so degenerate.
e) I love the idea of the Infamy/Disrepute minigame, as it feels very much how I thought Birthright should have played, with the PC’s gradually gaining authority over the setting and the ability to assert their will over it. But gaining Infamy seems too easy, while gaining Disrepute seems too hard. It’s left up I think a lot to the GM, but again, with a novice GM this isn’t the best, and we have yet another system that is just not really living up to its potential. Additionally, Disrepute feels like one of those video game consumables where you never spend it because you feel you ought to save it until you really need it, and so you never spend it because you never really need it. Cool idea just feels like a little more polish would make it even cooler.
Anyway, that was a bit rambling, but the tl;dr version of this is, if you have run S&S before, how did you deal with the disconnects between the minigames and the fiction they are intended to support? Was it something that bothered you at all?
It's going.... OK... I guess. I mean I'm having a lot of fun playing as a player for the first time in 15 years, but considering this is an adventure path and the amount of supplemental material involved, the green GM is struggling far more than he should have.
I can't really comment on the text, as I haven't read it, but the GM seems continually frustrated by the lack of clarity in the descriptions. Can't tell if this is an actual problem with poor editing organization or just a new GM cutting his teeth.
The other problem I've noticed is that the CR guidelines that they are giving the GM are pretty much ridiculous, and more misleading than helpful. He's struggling to figure out what a balanced encounter should look like, since the numbers that they are labelled with are consistently bad measurements of the challenge.
But what I can tell is the biggest problem is that the mini-game construction is less than ideal. I mean, I can often figure out why the mini-games have been constructed as they are and what constraints the designer felt that they had, but the results feel really unsatisfying anyway. More on that in a bit, but first, a bit of a review of the play thus far:
Chapter 1: I thought the conception of Chapter 1 overall was brilliant. Having the first part of the game be largely around social challenges and winning allies was one of the most novel and interesting scenarios I've seen for a game. Obviously, this section is very linear and railroady and some players may balk at the lack of agency involved in being kidnapped right off the bat and placed in the hands of tormentors well beyond their ability to resist, it felt fine to me given the conceit of the story and is an appropriate start to a Pirate adventure. The minigame around winning friends is reasonably well designed, and it's cool to level up by turning enemies into allies rather than just killing things. The minigame here involving being a member of a crew was decently designed, but overly repetitive in practice and I felt it really didn't have to be. While I have the experience to have made this section really shine, for a novice GM there just didn't seem to be enough suggests for hooks and bangs to drive the action. What they did have worked pretty well, but from talking with the GM, he definitely could have used more fleshed out minor NPCs and more motivations and minor events to propel the role. Lastly the sailor minigame ultimately felt irrelevant, as there was no way to mess up bad enough to actually impact the ship.
Overall, I would give Chapter 1 an A-, good effort marred by some poor balance choices, obvious rails, and a lack of detail that could have been cleared up relatively easily.
Chapter 2: One problem we have hit on early on is that we mutinied successfully before the game expected it - pretty much as soon as we got away from most of the officers - and then immediately ran into the problem that sailing the ship as an officer had no corresponding minigame. Initially, since we were on rails anyway, the fact that we had no real rules for determining how well the ship was being sailed didn't seem to matter, but the further we've advanced the bigger the problem it was. I guess there is an assumption that we just have enough competent crew to control the ship, but it feels like that if you are going to have a redundant sailor game with little impact on the ship, that an officer game of actually sailing well would be worthwhile. I want the experience of being a pirate captain, which I would think would involve the normal zero to hero D&D arc, and yet with no ship sailing game to fail or succeed at there is no real marker of both the struggle and the ultimate victory.
But the biggest problems in chapter two have to do with verisimilitude and playing to simulationist aesthetics and not gamist aesthetics. In particular, we seem to be simultaneously in a sandbox but also expected to handwave the actual mechanics or reality of owning a powerful armed sailing vessel crewed with cutthroats.
a) The scale of the game seems inappropriate to sailing vessels. After a bit of rough math, it turned out that the Shackles were 15th the size of the real Caribbean, and more on par with say Lake Michigan. While the problem is partly smoothed over by the fact that distance per day for sailing vessels seems to be about 1/2 of what is realistic, it still leaves the playing area really too small and cramped, so we are playing deliberately off the map - with the result that our novice GM has to really just wing it.
b) There is this weird expectation that we aren't going to have a crew aiding and abetting our villainy. The boarding action minigame seems to divide combat into PC's versus NPCs, while the crew are entirely in the backdrop. Unfortunately for the GM, we didn't really know that, so we spent 10 days recruiting a crew and are sailing around now with 80 low level characters constituting a small army. The GM has no tools for dealing with this sort of mass combat, and the Paizo mass combat rules are intended to handle an entirely different scenario in details and in scale and as such don't work as a minigame for the crew combat. The situation seems likely to only get worse, as we could easily recruit more if we wanted. The feel of this section is as if they were going entirely for ‘Pirates of the Carribean’, and don’t expect someone to go, “There is no way a 38-gun frigate could be sailed to Tortuga by two people.” The fact that we are ordering our crew to act like pirates and attack things we are supposed to be fighting wrecks the suggested scenarios, something I couldn’t be expected to know until it happened. Again, I get that they are trying to deal with XP awards in a way that favors the PC’s leveling up, but this feels in play like we are supposed to know as players the metagame design and interact act with that, and not interact with the fiction. I’m starting to feel guilty for interacting with the fiction of the game, since the minigames don’t support it, and just mess things up for the novice GM.
c) There are some weird assumptions in the ship operations minigame. First and most obviously, the amount of pay you need to give the crew doesn't seem to scale with the size of the crew, which is something we had to patch right away. Beyond that, the game seems to have made some wildly unrealistic assumptions about how pirate ships would distribute shares, entirely at odds with anything believable. As best as I can tell, the game expects us to pay our crew far worse than they were paid working for the cruel masters we induced them to mutiny against and kill. I know it’s trying to deal with wealth by level issues in a relatively simple manner, but still, it’s weird and counterintuitive and basically doesn’t expect that the players will proactive engage with wages as an in-game issue. Beyond that, the plunder point system which is intended to simplify things, has some weird issues as well. Ships don’t really have the ability to store many plunder points, and so far plunder points have proven pretty scarce. The result is that the most valuable thing on the sea is ‘prizes’ – that is, captured ships – but this works against what would be desirable for play, because splitting the party across multiple ships just makes for a headache for the GM and reduces RP, however economically efficient it is. It seems like a combination of ships being fat with plunder and higher costs to operate crews would have resulted in better gameplay.
c) The ship vehicle rules are both unrealistic and poorly serving the games intended tropes. It seems all sailing vessels regardless of size are intended to be simulated with a single stat block. The party has inherited a standard stat block ship, which seems to represent a sort of typical mid-sized three-masted pirate ship like you might expect to find in a movie. But the technology of the setting is all over the place, with everything from 4th century BC ships to ships which appear to be 16th or 17th century in conception and possibly later in some cases. The integration of these different technologies is haphazard at best, and there are many reasons to think that the most powerful ships in the game are oared galleys of various sorts. But who really wants to be a pirate commanding an oared galley? And if rowed galleys really are important to the setting, why is the expectation that we’ll have such a tiny crew? Many galley’s had hundreds of rowers and marines on them. If we really tried to seize such a behemoth by boarding it, we ought to be just overwhelmed by the numbers even with our 80 crew, and yet the expectation by the designer seem to be that a crew of 80 is a large number. Why go for Pirate tropes in the art and story direction, and yet have physical mechanics that prioritize playing like this is Ben Hur or Cleopatra?
d) The ship to ship ranged battle rules are mix of good ideas with bad ones, and seem to come down to a poor mix of abstraction with granularity. Since the ability to close the range is based entirely on generating large differences in the sailing skill check, owing to the fact that most ships move the same speed, closing takes a long time. (Galley’s, continuing the trend of being superior in just about every fashion to other sorts of ships, are faster, but again, few are going to want to play pirates and then end up with mental images for Carthage and Rome (and certainly the book art doesn’t provoke those images)). But since the designer didn’t want players to play out the tedious process of closing to the grapple (where the action is), ships are placed so close together at the start of the minigame that the range of the ship’s weapons are ultimately irrelevant. The game really doesn’t provide for any sort of ‘artillery duel’, and reinforces this by making the cost of ammunition for ship’s weapons prohibitively expensive. Ship’s have 1000’s of hit points, but ammunition does less than 1 hit point of damage per gold piece spent. The result of all that collectively is to make you wonder why they even bothered to have ship to ship rules given that they seem to want you to just handwave that away and treat the combat as if the ship’s could just as easily be dry land.
Also, as a small note, shooting the ship’s control device is so easy and such a winning strategy for both prey and predator, that there is hardly any reason to shoot anything else. The situation is so unrealistic, that were this an actual thing that could be done in the fiction, you’d expect ships in the setting to be constructed with armored barbicans around the control device (as the bridges of battleships were) so as to make them relatively invulnerable to assault. One session after hitting on that strategy, we are having to patch the rules because it’s so degenerate.
e) I love the idea of the Infamy/Disrepute minigame, as it feels very much how I thought Birthright should have played, with the PC’s gradually gaining authority over the setting and the ability to assert their will over it. But gaining Infamy seems too easy, while gaining Disrepute seems too hard. It’s left up I think a lot to the GM, but again, with a novice GM this isn’t the best, and we have yet another system that is just not really living up to its potential. Additionally, Disrepute feels like one of those video game consumables where you never spend it because you feel you ought to save it until you really need it, and so you never spend it because you never really need it. Cool idea just feels like a little more polish would make it even cooler.
Anyway, that was a bit rambling, but the tl;dr version of this is, if you have run S&S before, how did you deal with the disconnects between the minigames and the fiction they are intended to support? Was it something that bothered you at all?
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