28 February 2011

Review: Seized

Seized: A Sea Captain’s Adventures Battling Soundrels and Pirates While Recovering Stolen Ships in the World’s Most Troubled Waters — with a subtitle like that, do I really need to say more?

This is in fact a first-person account of an honest captain’s dealings with the seamier side of the modern shipping business. In some ports around the world, people abuse local law and make fraudulent claims against ships. The crew (and owner) often have little recourse. Captain Max hated the idea of his ship being stolen by a bogus claim, and managed to get it out of port. He was later called on to do the same.

At other times in his career, he acts as a ship broker, again dealing with locals who may not have quite the same respect for law as he does. In fact, he even uses the law as a weapon in one case.

As a book, I found Seized well-written and interesting. As a gamer, I immediately wanted to make use of it in a game. Surely the players’s spaceship should dock at an outlaw port! And Captain Max might have made a Climb roll or two, but typically he solved problems with his wide array of contacts, his ability to judge people, and his broad knowledge of ships.

It’s the last one that makes me reconsider game scenarios based on Seized. While any reasonable game doesn’t require a player to have the same knowledge as his character, there’s a difference between not knowing what a MacGregor hatch cover is, and knowing that your character knows about their pros and cons of one, and how they may impact his actions. Without sea-going experience, I think it would just be too hard to have a game that revolved around the intricacies of JB Weld.

But again, that sort of thing works fine in a book. Hardberger always explains things so us landlubbers can understand. And the events in the book are always dramatic, because there is always a very real chance of failure (indeed, he recounts stories when things did not end up going well).

Another issue with game scenarios is that I’d been running a Diaspora game, where a spaceship visits a small number of ports. Many of the outlaw ports in Seized can get away with it because a ship may only visit once even if all goes well. In a smaller cluster, ports have a much greater interest in ships returning — there won’t always be another sucker.

A recommended read, and even if I can’t easily duplicate Captain Max’s adventures, there probably will be corrupt judges in one of my future games.

2 comments:

Erik said...

David - I realize that this post is nearly a year old, but I came across it while doing research for my KoDP/EBZ inspired game.

One way I think that you could weave this kind of specific knowledge into a game would be when a character succeeded in a challenge. You do this in KoDP all the time, actually. The clan ring is presented with a challenge that may turn on knowing a lot about Orlanthi mythology, but the player may not know much about Glorantha yet. But the game will teach him by how it responds to his actions.

An example would be the scenes involving the bandit women who kidnap men of the tribe. Say you pardon them - no matter how the clan reacts, you will learn a little about Orlanthi law. You can even describe the success within your clan by saying the ring executed the law well, and were respected.

Later, when the bandit women return with children, the player may get all clever and think "We have already pardoned these children, and so the children are innocent, it would be wrong to cast them out." When the clan responds positively to taking the children in for that very reason, the player feels all clever, it feels very in-universe. But the player who is playing for the first time, or isn't picking up on the background richness of the setting can still make successful decisions just by matching ring member stats to the challenge at hand.

Am I being clear here, or just babbling?

David Dunham said...

Erik, I guess my concern was for a tabletop RPG, where you don’t have a bunch of possible options spelled out for you. What you describe would certainly work for a different style of game, such as King of Dragon Pass.