Mothas the Ominous's page

So, how are the crew bonuses from friendly and helpful NPCs working out? I like the idea of friendly NPCs helping out and making life on the ship a bit easier, but I'm afraid that the bonus from "helpful" might be a bit too good. Looking at it, it seems like there may be danger of a cascading effect, making it almost trivial to bring hostile NPCs into the fold (not to mention the PCs being unbeatable at pirate games). I'm wondering if this is the intention, or if the assumption is GMs will restrict the bonuses to only help occasionally.

Too soon to tell here, but I think that with Scourge and his cronies working against the PC's, that isn't as much of a problem as it looks. I have him actively trying to discredit the PC's with the crew, and his toadies will be doing it too. If I see that my PC's are getting too much influence too fast, then I figure Scourge and his group will notice it too. I'd have Scourge and Plugg split up the friendlies onto different separate work assignments, make sure they're always tired in the evenings, spread the word that being too friendly with the PC's is unhealthy, etc. They'll basically be making opposed influence rolls at that point.

As for the job assists and pirate game bonuses, what I told my group is that while friendly NPC's will help them if they happen to be assigned the same job, and helpful ones will put in a good word for them and let them cheat at the pirate games, there will be real consequences if they get caught at it. Knowing my group, if I stick some friendly NPC's on punitive work assignments, maybe get Sandara beat up for cheating at Heave, that will make them hesitate to ask for too much help.

I'm hoping to have the PC's making progress on influencing the crew, but with the occasional setback to leave things uncertain until near time for the mutiny to happen.

OK - here's my stab at it. It needs tuning, and it's more complex than I like, but it seems to give results close to reality. The crew ends up in varying degrees of drunkedness in the evenings, and the Heave players have a chance of surviving if they don't go more than 3 rounds.

Not to beat a dead horse, but on the rum ration question: how can it knock you out in the Heave game?

Unless I'm missing some fundamental rule here, the rum ration needs to have some kind of variable, cumulative, non-lethal effect for this game to be possible, and as written, it doesn't.

Geeking a bit after reading Wikipedia's article on blood alcohol and playing with washington university's blood alcohol level chart: If a rum ration contains 6oz of alcohol - that's 12 normal drinks - one of them is enough to knock out a fast-drinking low-tolerance character, and would leave a slow-drinking high tolerance character sloppy drunk (fatigued).

Playing Heave essentially means consuming a lethal amount of alcohol and trying to make yourself vomit before the alcohol suppresses your gag reflex or knocks you out and you die. I guess that's why they call it heave - Lovely game!