GM Confidence: 4.25/5. I felt a lot better about this session, compared to the ones that preceded it. We finally got past the “crunchy outer shell” into the “meat” of the campaign, and it showed. Not perfect, but much improved.

24 Hours Earlier…

As a response to some grumbling over the excessive crunchiness last week, I decided to establish some personal Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) during the week for the PCs, specifically with regard to things like what they do to unwind at port, and where they’ll be spending the night. The purpose: by establishing this information, I don’t have to waste time asking the question during the game, especially for something so repetitive and, seemingly, unimportant (though the information can certainly become important). Unfortunately, as has always been the case, participation was not 100%, so I suppose this will have to be part of an ongoing effort. As a result, though, it became clear to me that it can be a difficult question to answer, and might benefit from a “multiple choice list” of suggestions—very much like my Activities In Town list, which serves a similar purpose. But then I need to create a list…

I had to wrap things up quickly last time, and Rogers’ player’s decisions resulted in advancing to the next day before we had even dealt with the first, so a “rewind” was inevitable. (I hate the “24 Hours Earlier…” trope, generally.) Therefore, we started the session by finishing up the crunchy bits from last week. Fortunately it didn’t take too long. One benefit to the early cutoff, however, was that I had all week to weave the search-roll results and whatnot into the narrative. I decided I want to make that the norm from now on, and pre-roll as much of that sort of thing as possible, allowing us to get to the good part sooner. In this case, it worked out nicely.

It is of some interest to me that, lately, I find myself “backing out” of mechanics I had previously determined to use—case-in-point: my intention to use the “Actual Price” tables to randomize currency conversion rates, which, in the moment, I decided to throw out. I usually like crunchy mechanics, but it felt like too much when it came time to execute—you need to sense when you’re about to cross the un-fun boundary, and be able to stop yourself.

Never Split the Party

Havana is a (in this context) big city, and I want it to feel big. Everybody had something to do, and (mostly) they all split off to do whatever-it-is on their own. I would usually advise against having the PCs split up like this, but there are cases like this where it is inevitable. When you do so, it becomes, primarily, about “time management”: you mustn’t linger too long on any one character’s perspective at the expense of the others. I think I did alright, here, but there were still some elements that needed to be broken into smaller chunks. The average ended up around fifteen minutes, which isn’t too bad.

Incidentally, during the week, I realized some of the characters didn’t really have anything going on for this or that reason, so I ended up reassigning some things, to make sure they all had their own plot-thread. In one case, an event got (partially) reassigned to another character, and in another, events intended for a later part of the adventure got moved up. It all worked out, though.

Social Engineering

This session was all about the social encounters, and I got to make full(er) use of some elements of GURPS Social Engineering I hadn’t before—specifically, the “Search” (“for an individual,” “for information,” “for a government office,” etc.). While I’ve grown more accustomed to the mechanics therein, I still feel like I don’t have a fully-functional understanding of how best to use them. That is, behind-the-scenes, at least, social encounters still often feel a bit clunky to me. It’s something about how the die-rolls and modifiers translate to a narrative-in-miniature, I think. I’m still not satisfied with this.

Regarding the “Search,” though: It might be of interest to other GMs what I did here. The book says that the GM should make the search rolls in secret—which I (effectively) did—but rather than a binary go/no-go, I applied what I call the “Take the Clock” concept—that is, failure just takes longer, according to the Time Spent mechanics (B346). The effect is that the player doesn’t know how long it will actually take to find what they’re looking for, and they may assume failure and leave before it happens, or decide “maybe just one more day…”

Set Pieces

There are a lot of player elements—Enemy, Treasure Map, etc.—firing off here in Havana. But the primary impetus for the PCs’ arrival here is Rogers’ search for Pickford Rodney, the first step in finding his Treasure. I planned for the situation at the graveyard to be a combat encounter, or chase, or possibly be short-circuited by some social shenaniganry. I really didn’t expect the combination of Rogers, Spenser and Dora, though. The Chase itself dragged on a little—I think the images were helpful, but I needed a little more “tactical” variety there to make it interesting. It might be useful for the future to think of particular advantages one party might have over the other, and provide opportunities to showcase them along the way. I’ll admit the ending was a bit of an ass-pull to keep the Chase from going on indefinitely.

The introduction of Lady Amira Mercedes de Luna is a big element, too, but I won’t go into detail on it just yet, not until it’s played out. I put a lot of thought into getting this one “just right.” As it happens, though, I really hadn’t delved into the “high society” stuff before, for which Payne is especially fitted-out, and this was a perfect chance to fix that.

Both of these will probably wrap next week, if not bleed a little into the week after. I’m definitely looking forward to it.

Miscellaneous

• This was week two absent Davino’s player. He’ll be out one more (at least.)
• I found it amusing that the bookish Spenser was paired with Rogers to go pub-crawling, looking for Rodney, while Sir Randel was paired with Captain Hayden to comb through boring naval records. Not sure how that happened 😛
• There is remarkably little I could find regarding Treasure Fleet voyages (that didn’t end in catastrophe), but I did find some stuff about a fellow called Gemelli Careri, who traveled with the Fleet in the 1690s, and wrote about his experience—very helpful. I also found some records regarding the South Sea Company “annual ships,” through which I was able to determine that the Fleet did in fact sail in 1725, though I had to extrapolate some of the specifics. The arrival at Havana and departure of the South Sea Company ship, Elizabeth, is historical, though. The Fleet does not sail in 1726, however, due to war with Britain.
• The random crew events were the result of tarot card draws. There was also the “crash” event at the docks as a result of tarot, which I should have made into something the PCs needed to actually do—decision, die-roll, or whatever. Oh, well.
• There was some grumbling from (one of) the players about the (in)Stability gained from the voyage at sea. Though I don’t entirely agree with the grumbling, some valid argument was made. But actually, I had already decided that the gaining of Long-Term Stability Points as rolled up on their last stint at sea might have been a bit much. So, I took the opportunity to rethink it a little, and there will be some adjustment for next time.

GM Confidence: 3.75/5. I felt pretty bad about this one immediately after it was over, but when I rewatched the stream the next day (while adding the chapters in Youtube), I decided it wasn’t quite that bad. It actually got off to a decent start, and then started to unravel for me in the last 30-45 minutes. Having two weeks off (for various absences) both helped and hurt: I had plenty of extra prep time, but lacked any “earned” momentum.

Improvements over last time

There were some missteps in the previous session, which I discussed previously. I took corrective measures. For starters, I rearranged my notes, and added colors and redundant references that reduced the need to scroll around the document, and made it easier to keep my bearings when I had to scroll anyway. This worked pretty well, though I’m sure it will improve—there is a noticeable “evolution” in the arrangement of my GM notes over the years.

To combat the problem of the “interrupted narrative” problem I previously identified, I decided to try something new(ish): breaking out and front-loading the mechanics—all the die-rolling and modifiers, and critical decisions, etc.— to get them “out of the way” ahead of the narrative segment, which should then flow together, ideally, incorporating the results. This actually felt pretty good to me, through the sailing parts, at least—better than the past attempts. (But read on for the “bad.”)

I completely revamped (actually a third time) the travel/navigation spreadsheet I was using, and all that blood, sweat, and voluminous cursing did pay off. It was easy for me to use and modify on-the-fly. Unfortunately, it was also the source of the first big failure of the night: I had assumed that any sensible sailors would shorten sail to slow down through the Great Bahama Bank, so as not to risk running aground, so that’s how I set up the spreadsheet. I never asked myself the necessary “what if they’re not sensible?” question, and at least investigated how that would change the situation. There was a ripple-effect to that failure, though it was easily corrected, for the most part. The second failure was realizing, too late in the process, that I had been applying the modifiers for the PCs’ in-game performance in reverse—I forgot to add the “minus” (-) to their daily mileage total, so it actually increased instead of decreased. Oops. I’ll get it right next time.

The Chase

There’s not much to tell, really, except that (a) it was the first time they’ve gotten a proper (sea) Chase, and (b) it went about like I expected. For whatever reason, I didn’t include the extended Range Bands, and I really should have—I’ll fix that for next time. I did have a plan for their possible failure, though I didn’t really expect that to include ship-to-ship combat, if needed at all. I wanted to give them a good scare, not sink the whole campaign right there.

Because I had front-loaded the crunchy bits, I could work the Chase into the narrative without much fuss. That actually felt pretty good, too.

The real problem came later, when I realized that the PCs’ brazen full-sail charge across the shoals meant this event actually shouldn’t have occurred before they exited the shoals, but some time afterward. This would have changed the conditions quite a bit. With the Chase ending at sundown, there was no way to move it “temporally,” and as exiting through the reefs in the middle of the chase was not something I had considered in advance, I really didn’t have a quick fix for it. Ultimately, the geography was ambiguous enough that, at the time, it wasn’t so noticeable to the players without it being pointed out—unless they read this, they may never know—but I consider it “bad GMing” to rely on the fog-of-play(?) to hide the seams.

The Unraveling

For starters, the failure with the navigation plan resulted in the PCs’ arrival ahead of schedule—by a full day. This screwed up planned events. This screwed up the weather conditions. Not an insurmountable problem, but I did have to take a break to process all the consequences. Also, it was later in the session than I had expected—pacing failure, again. The arrival went well enough on its own, though.

Then we started getting into the now front-loaded crunchy bits of entering port and getting about their expected business. Things got out of order. And it took too long. And it was confusing. And it was kinda boring—even I, who usually like this sort of thing, really just wanted to get on with it. And I found issues with the situations I had planned there as we were navigating them. And then Rogers’ player had to leave in fifteen minutes, and I really needed to interrupt the process to wrap things up in time. Ultimately, it ended on one of the cliffhangers I really wanted to use, but not in the way I wanted, and it felt rushed and weird.

I’m not sure how this could have been handled any better, given the situation. But I do have some ideas to make things run a bit more smoothly in the future, that I will undoubtedly discuss next time.

Miscellaneous

• I almost tossed out the Pyramid 3/103 Setbacks “Mad as Bones” concept before this season started as it wasn’t amounting to much in the previous one. But I only just now realized how I’d misunderstood it, due to some problematic editing/writing of the article. Now that I’ve corrected, it may end up needing some fine-tuning—I may end up giving everyone a bonus to resist gaining Long-Term Stability Points during the voyage, or maybe change how often they accrue, depending on how it goes.
• Davino’s player announced he would be missing this session a bit late in the week, and I now know he will miss at least two more. So, anything I had in mind for that character will have to be put off. Such is the unfortunate lot of the GM.
• I put off creating any sort of random tables for generating age-of-sail ship malfunctions due to its being a large and complicated task, but it’s clear that was a mistake: it requires far too much mental processing to come up with something “truly suitable on-the-fly. But the most common hull problem, to my knowledge, is a “leak,” so I copped-out and went with that in the heat-of-the-moment. It might have been more interesting if they weren’t just pulling into port at that moment (like they were meant to 😛 )
• The mystery-ship was, in fact, a guardacosta, the San Antonio y Animas of Havana, Cpt. Bartolomé Diaz; a 45 ton sloop of six guns (plus a bunch of swivel guns) and a crew of 20 or so. It would have been a tough fight, if the PCs had given one, and they would undoubtedly have lost men in the process.
• The Old Man’s “riddle” is taken directly from the TV series 12 Monkeys, first introduced in S1E6 “Red Forest”—I always really liked it, and had been looking for a good place to use it. I almost used it for Spenser instead, but Claude seemed to fit a little better.

GM Confidence: 3/5. Once again, after a solid first session, the second session that followed was frustratingly sloppy, from my perspective, at least. I felt kinda dirty afterward. As with the previous session-2, maybe the players didn’t really notice…

The Bounty hunter

We got off to a good enough start. Mel got to tell her story. As soon as I started on wrapping up the bounty hunter story, I started to realize how I’d forgotten to really process the situation, having, instead, focused entirely on other, farther-out issues.

I had not actually worked out what item Friendly might have had of Matthew’s, except a passing thought about the letters—I had meant to come up with something a little more dramatic. I had not fully processed how Mikkel should interact with the people/situation, and how he might start to break down a little upon discovery of his runestones being missing. I had also meant for the local townies to make a bit of a fuss over the kidnapping, and completely missed that—more on that note, later. I didn’t really process Friendly’s reactions, either. Overall, “it happened.” It wasn’t terrible, it just could/should have been a little more.

The Interrogation

Just like in the Season 1 Episode 2, I had planned to interrupt an ongoing complex process (the PCs’ shore business) with an “event,” and just like the previous, it screwed up the narrative flow. In retrospect, I think it would have made more sense to go ahead and get the business die-rolling out of the way, and better establish who was where before interrupting, but I had made the stupid mistake of assuming everyone would be in one place—which could easily have occurred if the event had happened before everyone broke off, but in the heat of the moment, I couldn’t course-correct for some reason.

As to the interrogation itself: I decided to roll Reaction for Lt. Brace’s “baseline” and rolled high: 14 (which I lowered by two, ultimately). It caused a little cognitive-dissonance with my prior imagining of the scene, and I didn’t fully process what these results should look like, before the game. I should certainly know better by now, but I also did not make any plans for what might happen if one of the PCs were to fail, much less deliberately antagonize him. (Rogers’ behavior appears to have been somewhat of a misunderstanding, but that’s another matter.) I also didn’t think too hard about his line-of-questioning, which could have been a lot more challenging and sensible—other than “What’s your side of the story?” and “That’s good enough for me!” I could kinda feel the whole thing tilting off-balance as we progressed through it. There are so many good resources for this sort of situation, and I used none of them.

One thing I realized after the game was that I should have had some “cumulative” effect for everyone’s level of success or failure that would result in a “final tally” of guilt or innocence. But then “guilty” wasn’t really an option here, and it should have been. For shame. That’s just bad GMing. Never, ever do that.

Another thing I realized after the session was over was that, once again, I had a situation where the players weren’t asking the questions I expected them to, and once again, I find myself wondering what is the right way to coax those questions out of them? There’s no way to say, “So, are you going to ask Lt. Brace the identity of your accuser?” without giving away that it is important information, or essentially, “playing their character for them,” which is always bad form. Every time I consider it, I feel myself drifting away from GMing “propriety” toward “pragmatism”—just give them a list of knowns and unknowns beforehand so they don’t forget. Maybe next time. In this case, I’m going to have to do a little cleanup next time.

Shore Business

When it came to wrapping things up ashore, I quickly found that my notes were badly ordered, parts missing, mechanics either not fleshed out or not recorded in their final incarnation, etc. There were big chunks of my rules on Speculative Cargo missing. I kept having to scroll miles up and down my notes to get to that other thing I needed. I desperately needed to do a thorough read-through, to grasp the narrative flow, and find the gaps in my information to-hand. It could’ve been worse, though.

I had a bunch of character stuff planned, for crew ashore and whatnot, that I just skipped completely past, for no reason I can think of, except that those notes weren’t where they needed to be in the flow. There was a whole thing about pineapple being a cash-crop on Eleuthera that the PCs might have been interested in; completely missed. I really wanted to do more with Friendly; just dropped away. The townies were supposed to be trying to get to the bottom of the kidnapping, and I wanted to force the PCs to answer for his release (or lie about it).

Some of my issues with the above stemmed from a small amount of “panic” regarding the PCs’ decision to cut things short. I hadn’t planned for them to leave in the evening of the 13th. Not at all. I was far too lenient in twisting conditions to allow it to actually happen—maybe, in some way, I was afraid that if they were delayed after dark, they would attempt it anyway, and I didn’t have a plan for it. I also had specific routes worked out that did not include things like “stopping in Nassau for any reason”—I could’ve managed with that, I think, but I found myself “steering” the players a bit. Once again, bad form.

Pacing

My pacing expectations for this campaign—early, though it is—has been a bit off. I expected them to be at Havana at the beginning of this session. I expected them to be at Havana at the end of this session, too. I’m not sure where I went wrong; not yet, anyway. I expect this to improve as we go, though. It did result in an awkward ending/cliffhanger, which I hate. Such is life.

Miscellaneous

• I did a lot of spreadsheet cleanup over the week. This needed to happen, but it did take time away from the other stuff, and that didn’t help matters.
• I realized afterward that, with regard to Area Knowledge, it might benefit from using a “Group Roll” rather than individual—since everyone will normally be communicating, and can pool their knowledge. There are probably some other instances of this I can use. (I may discuss the concept in a later post.)
• When the PCs were departing, I pointed them to the wrong island for where the Hazard was anchored. It was much farther north. Not sure why I got that wrong.
• After the session, I discovered a number of things in (or adjacent to) Social Engineering. The big ones are using Savoir-Faire to “impress one’s status on another,” and that to get the Reaction bonus for Talent, one must be observed using a skill covered by the Talent.
• Mikkel “the Hound” Skaarup not only lives, and is still “in play,” but is actively looking for Hayden’s son, now, as well. I look forward to bring him in again later.
• Regarding “Handsome” Ned Long: I finally figured out what’s going on with him. It’s gonna be fun to reveal this one. 😉

GM Confidence: 4.5/5. I’m finally back at this one, only two years later than originally predicted. 😛 Despite the usual pre-run jitters, I felt pretty good about this one. I honestly can’t think of anything in particular that went “wrong” in this session, with an admittedly-minor exception.

What’s New

The most drastic change for Season 2 is that I’m now using Fantasy Grounds Unity. I’ve been playing it for quite a while now, but this was my first time running. I’ve gotten used to the quirks, and I still have a problem with some of the changes, all of which made me reluctant to switch. Anyway, I spent some time getting proficient with the new features, and I plan on getting the most out of them. In this session, the combat was certainly enhanced by the lighting features, at least.

The second biggest change is that, once again, I have a couple of PCs with new players: Claudia and Rogers. Claudia was only played once by her original player. Her storyline lapsed during her tenure as NPC, and I’m getting her caught up. Also, Mel has already started writing some prose to flesh out her background. Regarding Buck, I feel that Nosh is a pretty good replacement for his original player, but I’ve also not run with him before, so there’s some uncertainty there. But these aren’t “worries” for me—I expect good things.

Outside of those changes, I mostly just picked up where I left off. I had a long run-up from my initial announcement to the start of the campaign run (including some delays), which gave me plenty of time to research. I managed to get some answers to some questions that had nagged me throughout the previous run—things like the dollar-amount of import/export tariffs, the nature of smuggling, pilotage costs and operations, etc.—and I made more improvements to the spreadsheets (and discovered yet more that were needed).

The Fight

Kicking off with a fight is a great way to let everyone get acclimated. The combat in this session was a set-piece that had, ultimately, been in the works since the end of the previous run. It’s always worrying to me when I find myself stacking the deck against the PCs so strongly. The weather conditions and such were the result of the real-world weather I’ve been using, as was the “new moon”—that is, not something I had deliberately decided to inflict upon the characters. I struggled a bit with how the PCs would actually arrive at the proper location, much less be able to conduct the rescue at all in those conditions, but I obviously found a way. I made certain to spell out all the adverse conditions in much detail well prior to the engagement, so the players had time to fully process and come to terms with them. It didn’t make sense for the bad guys to have a small (PCs-sized) crew, but turning half of them into “non-combatants” kept that from turning into a disaster.

The scenario made a good showcase of some of the new FGU features, and I feel like the novelty of it may have helped make the combat “fun,” rather than tedious. It lasted for a little over an hour; roughly what I had anticipated. I didn’t think about the “Bad Footing” for the beach sand until the last minute, and as such, I held back on enforcing it, having not fully established that condition beforehand—players don’t like that sort of “surprise,” I’ve found. It was similarly late in the process when I remembered Disasters – Hurricane as a source, so I didn’t have time to wrap my head around those mechanics. But I think we all had fun with the results.

The Prisoner

It was the previous run of this campaign where I had identified a problem I had with managing social interactions, and had begun figuring out a solution. Here I made use of the latest iteration: the “Lock & Key”—identifying factors or lines-of-questioning/approach that will cause the NPC to open-up or shut-down. In the case of the county hunter, both were “control”—as long as he feels he can complete his mission, whatever the detour, he will hold fast (bonus to resist Influence); if he feels he is losing control of the situation, he would begin to lose control of himself (penalty to resist Influence). In practice, it seemed to work, but I don’t think the players really pushed the limits. I should have come up with some specific success/fail responses for him beforehand, though, instead of improvising. That said, my “big fail” of the session was not actually knowing the circumstances of the delivery of his prize—a dumb mistake on my part. So I had to come up with something plausible on-the-fly. If I change my mind later: maybe he was lying? 😛 Regardless, this segment took more time than I had anticipated, and is probably the main reason I ended up, story-wise, coming up shorter for the session than I had intended (aside from the delayed start).

Miscellaneous

• I completely forgot to hand out Bennies at the start. I’ll have to make up for that next time.
• Post Season 1 research uncovered a lot of little “errors” I needed to correct at the beginning of the session. The good part: The time taken to issue the corrections gave me some time to ease in behind-the-screen.
• I had actually not prepared for the PCs to end up getting lost or going the entirely wrong direction—another dumb mistake. Always ask yourself: What’s the worst logical result of player involvement, and be prepared for it. 😉
• I was particularly happy with how all the PCs managed to find a little way to “contribute” during the fight, even if it wasn’t dealing damage, that served to highlight their characters’…character.
• Hayden’s “commission” of the bounty hunter in his own search was a complete surprise to me—the idea had never occurred to me at all—but I can certainly make use of it!
• I was fortunate the players didn’t settle on some of their other ideas about what to do with the bounty hunter—there were quite a few I hadn’t even considered (and probably should have).

On top of everything else, I have to get used to writing these things again… 😛