I have a deal for the Marmot book.

The deal is thus: If you want the Marmot book for me, you must solve a mystery. Maybe that's as simple as googling something you've always wondered about. Maybe it's as complicated as getting some guy on death row exonerated with DNA evidence. Regardless, it's your mystery. You decide whether or not it counts. When you solve it, tell me about it, here or by email to taogames@gmail.com and I'll give you a playbook.

yrs--
--Ben

P.S. Playbook also includes nifty GM notes.

Thanks, dudes!

Figurefour, I'd love to hear what you have to say, even if you're like "Vincent you're wrong you poopyhead." I mean, he just wrote the game. I'm running it. If you've got a good viewpoint I'd like to have access to it.

So, I have this conflict with one of my players who used to run the game. He's pretty confident that if you want to, say, cold shoot a dude that's necessarily Seize By Force, with you wanting to "seize his life by force."

This makes, like, zero sense to me. If he has something you want (the high ground, everyone's attention, moral authority) sure. But sometimes you don't want something ... you just want to plain shoot a dude. For this, I've been not making people roll: if the fiction is set up so that they shoot a dude, they just do it.

Alternatively, sometimes shooting a dude is, like acting under fire. Shooting a dude while he's blasting away with an assault rifle? Isn't that acting under fire? It feels weird to make someone roll anything but for that. Or maybe you shoot a dude in order to threaten violence on others unless they do what you want. Isn't that, basically, manipulate, with shooting the dude as leverage?

Help me out here. Am I missing some important part of the rules?

yrs--
--Ben

Thanks, folks. So, basically, they're an excuse to make shit worse. Like everything else?

So all the details about wants and surpluses and such don't matter after session one?

yrs--
--Ben

I think if you can take the basic attitudes about GMing from apocalypse world (like, letting the fiction lead, doing what it demands) and transport them into your play of Poison'd, that's a big bonus. I think that the specific advice about fronts and stuff is potentially disastrous: poison'd has its own means of handling that (cruel fortunes) and you wouldn't want to screw with those too much.

Did you have trouble the first time you ran Poison'd? I find it's pretty intuitive if you're not acculturated to rules-lead-fiction play.

yrs--
--Ben