I have been playing catch up with my collection of Pathfinder Adventure Paths for a while, and it is a happy coincidence that I happened to begin reading Skull & Shackles a few days ago, mere weeks before the release of the new game.
The foreword for the very first adventure in Skull & Shackles contains this paragraph of advice:
It's important to manage your players' expectations for this Adventure Path right from the start. Most importantly, they should all want to play pirates of one stripe or another. The PCs came to Port Peril to become pirates, to earn fortunes, to be adored by men and women, and live lives of fame—or perhaps infamy—at sea. They could be scurvy knaves who would slit a throat without a second's thought, or they might be dandy swashbucklers with hearts of gold in search of fame and glory on the high seas. Whatever course they choose, piracy should be in their blood. This doesn't mean the players can't play good characters, but they should be scoundrels, more interested in plunder and high-seas adventure than heroics and saving the world.
An indeed, as written, the Skull & Shackles Adventure Path has already made be uncomfortable more times than any other AP published by Paizo (Shattered Star and Reign of Winter are the only ones I haven't read yet), and I'm just at the beginning of the second volume.
I'm currently playing Rise of the Runelords ACG with my wife and the game has a 13+ age recommandation. It is fun to kill monsters, take their loot and play heroes.
Will I feel as comfortable playing Skull & Shackles with my family?
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First, you never really kill anything. You defeat banes. Whether by combat or through some skill check (charisma/diplomacy or intelligence/arcane). How you state what "defeat" means is up to you. Especially in the PACG. Defeat in combat can mean kill or the opponent gives up. You have leeway. Even in RPG.
Interpretation is an interesting thing.
I don't think so. Based on what we've seen in RotR, we aren't really given much info about the motivations of the henchmen or villains or monsters we encounter. And like Theryon said, the game actually talks about you defeating them. What that entails is sort of up to you.
I expect Skull and Shackles to be the same in that regard. I doubt any scenario's flavor text will direct you to "kill" someone.
First, you never really kill anything. You defeat banes. Whether by combat or through some skill check (charisma/diplomacy or intelligence/arcane). How you state what "defeat" means is up to you. Especially in the PACG. Defeat in combat can mean kill or the opponent gives up. You have leeway. Even in RPG.
True! Which is embarrassing because this is exactly what I repeat to my children when they play Star Wars with their LEGO bricks: the bad guys don't need to be killed, they just have to set their blasters to "stun" to knock them out. So you're right: defeating a bane doesn't mean you have to kill it.
But that helps me explain why it makes me uncomfortable reading about boarding ships and plundering villages in the books: if you don't kill the villagers, or the crew and officers of merchant vessels, you keep them alive to sell as slaves!
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Well, you don't keep them on as slaves ... they're helpers.
It really is how you relate the information to your family (kids).
I don't think there will be captured crew, etc. It is more that they are plundering ... defeating ships, etc. and taking items, weapons, armor. And if there are Allies included ... they become allies.
I wouldn't worry so much about S&S. More about how you interpret the story to your kids. I'm sure they love pirates and stuff like that. And talking like pirates. But I'm also sure they don't know what pirates actually did and behaved like. Just the fantasy of pirates.
Think of it as Robin Hood - these ships are full of things stolen from the poor, so now we need to go and rescue it...
What exactly is your moral issue? Is it mostly about playing with your kids? Or do you find it immoral to pretend to do something evil in a game? I'm just asking because many good, moral people play games were they are perfectly fine with doing amoral things (Chaos in the Old World, Grand Theft Auto, etc.). I'm really not trying to criticize. If you feel bad about playing a game, that's your call and you should do what you want. I'm just trying to understand.
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What exactly is your moral issue? Is it mostly about playing with your kids? Or do you find it immoral to pretend to do something evil in a game? I'm just asking because many good, moral people play games were they are perfectly fine with doing amoral things (Chaos in the Old World, Grand Theft Auto, etc.). I'm really not trying to criticize. If you feel bad about playing a game, that's your call and you should do what you want. I'm just trying to understand.
I think it's how to explain piracy and plunder (of S&S) to his kids that are younger but enjoy the RotR set so far.
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An indeed, as written, the Skull & Shackles Adventure Path has already made be uncomfortable more times than any other AP published by Paizo (Shattered Star and Reign of Winter are the only ones I haven't read yet), and I'm just at the beginning of the second volume.
You might need to read Rise of the Runelords again, especially The Skinsaw Murders and The Hook Mountain Massacre, to refresh your memory. Serial killers and backwoods rapists, for me at least, trump piracy.
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Ummm ... he's talking about the S&S set for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, not the S&S Adventure Path. Yeah, Rise of the Runelords had some fairly adult content but the PACG set doesn't reflect that as much. And even if there is piracy and plundering (and related subjects) that it can be toned down as well.
LazarX (and CrazyGnomes, in case you didn't notice) we're talking specifically about how the Card Game will handle the elements of the AP. So RotR is the only one out right now, and S&S will drop at GenCon, to be followed by WotR in Feb.
CrazyGnomes, it's not your character that's doing those acts; you as the PC are putting a stop to them.
What exactly is your moral issue? Is it mostly about playing with your kids? Or do you find it immoral to pretend to do something evil in a game? I'm just asking because many good, moral people play games were they are perfectly fine with doing amoral things (Chaos in the Old World, Grand Theft Auto, etc.). I'm really not trying to criticize. If you feel bad about playing a game, that's your call and you should do what you want. I'm just trying to understand.
In short, my moral issue when reading the beginning of the Adventure Path is about killing or enslaving random human people that have a name (such as the captains in the 2nd volume) and an illustration (such as the Rahadoumi officer in the 1st volume). I'm not sure why but I identify to these people a lot more than if they were random monsters.
I would like to know how this translates in the Adventure Card Game because reading the books this week, I was not feeling like sharing this with my wife (the kids are too young to play yet, so it's not really the issue here). These are things I like to challenge myself with from time to time when I'm reading or playing for myself: as you say, I have no qualms about playing Assassin's Creed (though ironically, I haven't played the piracy-themed Black Flag yet) and I enjoy reading George R.R. Martin's or Joe Abercrombie's dark fantasy. But that's when accorded the privacy of my own mind; I would not like to be playing this with someone else.
The Skull & Shackles Adventure Path, at the moment, gives me the impression of an Adventure Path for players that want to be the bad guys. I think it is partly acknowledged by some of the very first words of the AP that I quoted in the original post. I would like to know if this has been altered for the card game or if I should expect more morally ambiguous (and if "morally" is difficult to define, let's just say "legally") content than in the Rise of the Runelords game.
If you are troubled by Skull & Shackles, just wait 6 months for the next adventure path.
I am sure Fayries is open to doing that, but the point is that he is not sure if he will be troubled by S&S in the card game and is asking for advice on how much the card game is like the RPG adventure path to make that determination.
Fayries - If you go the S&S page over on Boardgame Geek, there are a couple of preview videos that you can take a look at. The two by Greyelephant are very good as is the full demo from Mylantus. While these are not a complete answer to the tone of the entire S&S experience, perhaps they will at least give you some idea of the flavor.
Good luck!
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Well...maybe if you read a lot of the flavor (or "flavour," depending upon your Britishosity) text, then maybe it's an issue. The gameplay is so abstracted, though, from "real" things (e.g., killing, enslaving, stealing, etc.) that I highly doubt it'll be all that bothersome.
Out of curiosity, would you have the same objection to, say, Sid Meier's "Pirates!"?
As someone in the process of playing the adventure path, I don't think there's going to be anything overly bad in the Card Game. Spoilering further notes below:
In the second adventure, there is a lot more potential piracy occurring, as you have to build up your reputation and infamy. That being said, a good portion of the ships you have the opportunity to pirate are evil, and you could easily see yourself in a more robin hood role (again, that's what my group tended toward, though we actually were more con artists).
Tidewater Rock is probably the last major event (that I've seen, I'm only part-way through adventure 5) where you are opposing a non-evil force. Even in that case, there is a peaceful solution provided, so you don't actually have to murder and pillage.
In the end, as with most RPG adventures, it is what you make of it. Skull and Shackles was designed in such a way that, if you wanted, you could be greedy selfish pirates only out for personal gains. However, it also allows you to be heroes who want to be pirates for altruistic reasons (One character inmy group becomes a pirate to make sure that the other pirates show common decency and don't attack helpless villages, another is a druid trying to get labor protections for rats on ships), and I imagine the card game will be ambiguous, leaning towards altruism.
If you are troubled by Skull & Shackles, just wait 6 months for the next adventure path.
It's funny you should say that, because judging from the Adventure Path, the cards should contain more than the usual share of graphic images. But I think I'm OK with that because the players will be heroes with a clearly defined agenda: saving the world.
Fayries - If you go the S&S page over on Boardgame Geek, there are a couple of preview videos that you can take a look at. The two by Greyelephant are very good as is the full demo from Mylantus. While these are not a complete answer to the tone of the entire S&S experience, perhaps they will at least give you some idea of the flavor.
I'll check that, thanks!
Well...maybe if you read a lot of the flavor (or "flavour," depending upon your Britishosity) text, then maybe it's an issue. The gameplay is so abstracted, though, from "real" things (e.g., killing, enslaving, stealing, etc.) that I highly doubt it'll be all that bothersome.
I'm French and we French like to use English words. But we tend to mis-use them; so here, we'd use "background"… If the level of abstraction is high enough to let the game keep the Rise of the Runelords' 13+ age recommandation, it will be fine for me.
Out of curiosity, would you have the same objection to, say, Sid Meier's "Pirates!"?
I don't know that game and the plot summary from Wikipedia isn't enough to forge an opinion. But I noticed that Sid Meier's Pirates! uses Fame and Notoriety where Skull & Shackles uses Infamy and Disrepute.
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The RPG AP was essentially the AP where you could be evil without much alteration, but it wasn't required.
Since RotR basically left most everything out from a RP perspective, I imagine it will come down to how you explain it to your kids. For my part, I have to explain most everything in RotR to my sixteen year old and his friend (my play group) because even the flavor text is just vague enough that you can't really get anything from it. I would imagine S&S will be materially the same.
Chief Technical Officer
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If the level of abstraction is high enough to let the game keep the Rise of the Runelords' 13+ age recommandation, it will be fine for me.
The "13+" age notice doesn't have anything to do with thematic content—it's there because producing games for an audience that includes children under 13 triggers a bunch of legal stuff that we just don't need to deal with.
My suggestion for you, Fayres, would be to go find OP running locally and ask to take a look at some of the cards. I'm sure that whoever is running it wouldn't mind if you explained your concerns, and you would have a definitive answer one way or the other.
I'm currently playing Rise of the Runelords ACG with my wife and the game has a 13+ age recommandation. It is fun to kill monsters, take their loot and play heroes.
Will I feel as comfortable playing Skull & Shackles with my family?
Yes.
I know that you are for the most part talking about the card game version of Skull & Shackles, but now you have renewed my curiosity about the AP itself. Has anyone tried rewriting the AP so that truly good PCs have a valid reason to be in the AP and NOT want to be pirates? (Not sure how this would or even could work with the card game version.) I posted this question elsewhere on the Paizo boards, but the relevant threads had all died, and my efforts at thread necromancy were unsuccessful. I am glad to have found a recent thread on this, and will try to dig up what I wrote before (too hard to rewrite when posting on a phone). Back in a few minutes . . .
Okay, I'm back -- original post follows:
Are any PBP campaigns going on now (or about to start) in which somebody tried to rewrite Skull & Shackles into an serious adventure good for Good characters (as described in the start of this thread) instead of whatever it is?
Here is my idea for this, which also aims to provide a more sensible way for the player characters to get into the Adventure Path: Rewrite it into an undercover mission for Andoran agents to infiltrate the Free Captains. Problem is: Cheliax (and possibly some other Inner Sea powers) has gotten the same idea, and so has Nidal, but Nidal is further along with it than either Andoran or Cheliax, since they actually trade semi-openly with the Free Captains. The plan of the Eagle Knights (or related Andoren commanders) of the player characters' group was to slip them quietly into the Free Captains fleet, but things go horribly wrong when the ship they are on runs afoul of a ship working for one of the above-mentioned enemies, and then The Wormwood comes along and captures the crippled combatant ships. From this point the Adventure Path plays out with more mild modifications that others have posted. To help with the problem of (potential lack of) infamy, the Andoren spymasters could work behind the scenes to set up fake financial transactions that get passed off as the player characters' loot being fenced.
(On a larger scale, this could work for faction play as well -- multiple Inner Sea nations have the idea of infiltrating the Free Captains, and the player character groups could be in any of the factions, although obviously not all of the factions are particularly compatible with Good characters.)
I know that you are for the most part talking about the card game version of Skull & Shackles, but now you have renewed my curiosity about the AP itself. Has anyone tried rewriting the AP so that truly good PCs have a valid reason to be in the AP and NOT want to be pirates? (Not sure how this would or even could work with the card game version.) I posted this question elsewhere on the Paizo boards, but the relevant threads had all died, and my efforts at thread necromancy were unsuccessful. I am glad to have found a recent thread on this, and will try to dig up what I wrote before (too hard to rewrite when posting on a phone). Back in a few minutes . . .
Okay, I'm back -- original post follows:
Are any PBP campaigns going on now (or about to start) in which somebody tried to rewrite Skull & Shackles into an serious adventure good for Good characters (as described in the start of this thread) instead of whatever it is?
Here is my idea for this, which also aims to provide a more sensible way for the player characters to get into the Adventure Path: Rewrite it into an undercover mission for Andoran agents to infiltrate the Free Captains. Problem is: Cheliax (and possibly some other Inner Sea powers) has gotten the same idea, and so has Nidal, but Nidal is further along with it than either Andoran or Cheliax, since they actually trade semi-openly with the Free Captains. The plan of the Eagle Knights (or related Andoren commanders) of the player characters' group was to slip them quietly into the Free Captains fleet, but things go horribly wrong when the ship they are on runs afoul of a ship working for one of the above-mentioned enemies, and then The Wormwood comes along and captures the crippled combatant ships. From this point the Adventure Path plays out with more mild modifications that others have posted. To help with the problem of (potential lack of) infamy, the Andoren spymasters could work behind the scenes to set up fake financial transactions that get passed off as the player characters'...
I think you can absolutely do it with a good character. But they do have to be pirates, I don't think you can get around that.
What about characters that didn't want to be pirates, but we're tasked with an infiltration mission that has gone horribly wrong, and that offers no practical mechanism for extraction? (And worse, they have already been instructed from the start that the Secretary will deny all knowledge of their actions.)
And yes, you would need to toss out and rewrite the introductory part of the AP, which seems awfully cheesy and railroadish anyway (a quality shared with Wrath of the Righteous, although in a different style).
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Pirating and ethics... interesting topic. Read Skinwalkers for a look at how pirates and generally goodish characters blend if the topic in the setting of Golarion interests you. More neutral and certainly more chaotically aligned would be many of the characters in Pirate's Honor, but they are still "heroes". I should note, I am recommending these books for you, not necessarily for your children, only you know their reading maturity, I don't want to make that decision for you :)
As for the card game... If you have read book three of Rise of the Runelords, and found that translation into something that was suitable in card format for your family, then I can't imagine that the translation of Skull and Shackles will be any worse. Book three of RotRL was epic in it's not safe for kids content. Additionally there is that sidebar warning for GM's in the first book about violence whilst the Swallowtail Festival is playing out. They glossed that portion for the card game as well.
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What about characters that didn't want to be pirates, but we're tasked with an infiltration mission that has gone horribly wrong, and that offers no practical mechanism for extraction? (And worse, they have already been instructed from the start that the Secretary will deny all knowledge of their actions.)
And yes, you would need to toss out and rewrite the introductory part of the AP, which seems awfully cheesy and railroadish anyway (a quality shared with Wrath of the Righteous, although in a different style).
Simply put, S&S is just not an AP where people are not wanting to be pirates really. I can tell you from running the AP myself right now, no matter what scenario you come up with for why you are there, it will fall apart in the second or third adventure. But without massive changes, you aren't going to get more than halfway through before it all unravels.
What about characters that didn't want to be pirates, but we're tasked with an infiltration mission that has gone horribly wrong, and that offers no practical mechanism for extraction? (And worse, they have already been instructed from the start that the Secretary will deny all knowledge of their actions.)
And yes, you would need to toss out and rewrite the introductory part of the AP, which seems awfully cheesy and railroadish anyway (a quality shared with Wrath of the Righteous, although in a different style).
Well, in a way, trying to infiltrate the pirate council would be a reason to be a pirate. The big reason I say that is you will have dozens of chances to just walk away from the campaign, so if you aren't committed to rise through the pirate ranks, your immersion will have serious issues.
Well, in a way, trying to infiltrate the pirate council would be a reason to be a pirate. The big reason I say that is you will have dozens of chances to just walk away from the campaign, so if you aren't committed to rise through the pirate ranks, your immersion will have serious issues.
I guess the way to go with this would be to make the consequences seem increasingly severe if the PCs decide to bail. Ideally, the worst consequences should be dire international implications more than direct threats to the PCs health, although threats to the well being of the PCs families could also be useful. In other words, if they don't get their hands dirty, something even worse happens.
Instead of a romanticized pirate flick, the rewritten AP would be a hard-boiled spy thriller.
Has anyone tried this?
Okay, I'm confused... I guess I've never played the ACGs... thought this discussion was in the wrong forum... but apparently it's not...
Yes.I'm currently playing Rise of the Runelords ACG with my wife and the game has a 13+ age recommandation. It is fun to kill monsters, take their loot and play heroes.
Will I feel as comfortable playing Skull & Shackles with my family?
Excellent! Watching the demos and previews available on BoardGameGeek made me think there was probably no reason to be afraid, but having an official confirmation is just perfect.
About the moral issues of being a pirate (and I can only speak from the AP, not the ACG here), I am really of the persuasion that while you CAN be good, it's more likely that you are neutral. That's what I made my character for when I was going to play it, and the first time I ran it I had two good players who very much were of the "I am GOOD I don't want to be a pirate" ideal, even though they both had agreed and so I thought understood this was a pirate campaign. Maybe I should have noticed that the player was a Lawful Good Samurai, but when the player in question is older than me and has been playing RPGs from a younger age than I, I wrongly trusted he would not make a character so blatantly anti-thesis to the campaign, but he did... including that his sense of honor meant that he had to stand up and FIGHT the Captain at the first sign of disrespect to him or the female members of the party. Then the other player was a Kitsune princess (her father was a famous pirate, that's the campaign trait she had) but he (male player) just played her as a super-finicky refusal to even give these filthy pirates the time of day. We didn't even get past the first 14 days before it all fell apart because it was just to a point of how do I not outright kill them because they are wanting to attack Captain Harrigan.
Yup. Seelah and Kyra are not in this adventure path for that reason, nor is Hayato the samurai. But that doesn't mean the characters are evil pirates.
I am getting ready to play it with my 7-year old (as long as she embraces it), and I do not necessarily see any moral issues with it. All depends on how you present it to the child. After all, this is just a game...
Now HERE'S what I'm talking about. And it's awesome! Finally, a Skull & Shackles that doesn't have the seedy railroad start or cheesy pirate tale . . . .
(Performing Thread Necromancy on 2 threads about this -- maybe 1 will revive.)
I suppose it's fair also to point out that most fantasy themed settings don't really deal with morality all that well. Even some of the deepest fantasy, like Tolkien for example, brushes truly moral considerations aside by boiling things down to what is essentially "good vs evil", ignoring virtually all of what morality is actually about. I never remember any of Tolkien's characters being all that worried about the moral issues of killing Orcs, Goblins, Dragons, "evil men", etc.
From what I've seen of Pathfinder, it isn't that different, and in PACG it's pretty fair to say the context is not so far from "the player characters are the good guys, any allies are good/neutral and banes are evil." Even the idea of "random monster" avoids moral complexity by pretty clearly identifying it as a "monster" (i.e something bad). While the RPG campaigns may involve more moral complexity (or not, I can't say from experience) not much of that really seeps into PACG unless you go out of your way to include it.
In short, if you really want to help your kids learn about the moral complexities of the real world, PACG is not designed to be a vessel to do that. That being said, if you don't mind the simplistic moralistic approach of "good vs evil" then PACG (and specifically S&S) should not involve anything too objectionable. Yes, you'll occasionally kill things: animals, creatures, other humans; but the context is generally that these things are attacking you, so by defeating/killing them you're doing so in self defense (which is actually something that often the real world paragons of morality, such as Christ, Ghandi, MLK, etc. were unwilling to do). Whether self defense is enough morally is something only you can decide.
There is never any mention of actually "killing" anything or anyone in this game. You "defeat" things, but what you do to defeat them is left up to you. It could be anything from outright killing them to punching them in the face to jello wrestling (I'm going to start using that one).