Scum Night!
Tonight is our Scum and Villainy game. #7 maybe? Back to back weeks! I’m feeling a little unprepared, because our last several sessions have been broken up with scheduling problems and I’ve gotten lazy about letting myself dream.
What I like about our game at this point is that there are now lots of established relationships tugging at the crew. Their old bosses are now actively hunting them, the Concordiat Knights are now peer competitors (crew is tier 1 now), the Ghosts and Nightspeakers are kind of co-employers. Might be time to bring a Tier 3 into focus, let them loom large on the horizon.
There’s a thing about S&V I’ve never really embraced but I think I need to: using the Fortune Roll. It feels so loose! But there are tiers and ranks and ratings and magnitudes littered all over the place throughout the game that, I guess, I should be paying more attention to. Systems have ratings and I’ve never used them to generate a Fortune roll. Ship systems, honestly, I still can’t tell when to use them or use the Helm skill. Gosh, Lifestyle level could probably be a Fortune roll. I kind of forgot that artifacts have magnitudes. I think a Faction’s tier can be a stand-in for that Faction’s NPCs, kind of a meta-stat.
Maybe I’m not comfortable disclaiming responsibility for all this stuff to dice. It’s not my habit, and it feels like inflicting yet one more round of creative bootstrapping on myself. I could just decide how a faction is proceeding with its plans or I could randomize it, be surprised, try to make it all fit. Dunno what the right answer is, it’s just something I’ve been thinking about. I don’t actually have guidelines for when I do or do not “want to decide the outcome,” per the RAW itself.
Another confession: I just realize I’ve never actually read the entirety of the “Science & The Strange” chapter. There’s a lot of useful stuff jammed in there! No idea why I skipped over it.
I recently had to end an Eberron game after a dozen sessions (for completely expected and organic reasons). We were in such a good spot. Like you mentioned Paul, there were lots of established relationships pulling the party in different directions. In our last session, one of the players casually mentioned a new approach that would have opened another direction for play. It’s such a great time for a group when there’s finally enough momentum that you can see it carrying you a long way. Good luck tonight!
I will house rule ship systems as “assist-rolls” to whatever it is the character is doing (usually helm).
I think if I ran this again I would have a much firmer idea of how to get the characters entangled in the setting for longer term play. The starting situations for each ship are great but they also feel tuned for one shot con play.
I reuse systems for long games so infrequently that I feel like I’m wasting a lot of experience. Gotta keep swimming, I’m a shark.
“I’ve gotten lazy about letting myself dream.” I love that line.
Michael Prescott it’s work! And completely trivial.
This reminds me, once I’m out of drowning at work land (hopefully soon), I need to write up my Blades game that I played with Mo.
Surprise: I have the same issue with fortune rolls, and I think it was a bad thing for me.
Things are getting complex. I may need a nuke to deal with these upcoming problems in the most expedient way.