Re: [DL] Crying posse (Black Chip debate)

[Marshal Black <marshal_black@yahoo.com>]

Greetings,

--- Dom Gallegos <stylenz@hotmail.com> wrote:
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> A couple of sessions ago I ran Night Train. We all
> know how that goes. Well 
> my posse earned a Black Chip for 1. Blowin up the
> town folks as the critters 
> were carrying them off. 2. Just giving up cause they
> couldn't kill the 
> critters with their guns.

While your party should have known better it is my
opinion that this was not a black chip offense. Black
chips should be reserved normally for monumental
screwups in my opinion. The text of the rules give
another examples (letting tough bad guys get away,
major public disgraces for the posse and the like)
which mostly seem to base on the posse gaining
notoriety as opposed to fame. While blowing up
civilians is a great way to earn some bad karma there
are some mitigating circumstances in night train.
1)While the posse did wind up killing potentially up
to 14 innocents (and one ornery cuss the name of
Knags) the supernatural evil of the Nosferatu probably
weighs a little more heavily in the minds of the
surviving towns folk. (Though one or two might take it
on themselves to avenge their dead kin if they saw the
posse do it)
2)If the players do nothing, all those people die
anyway so their deaths by themselves do not seem to
constitute a black chip offense.
The Black chips rules state "When the posse royally
screws up an adventure and ends up leaving things
worse than when they started, they earn a 'Black
Chip'." So I think they would have to do something so
that by the end of the module things were worse off
then if they had never been there at all. Now if they
actuallly wound up killing an awful lot of the
civilians not being carried off and blew up most of
the town trying to do it, sure they deserve the kind
of hell a black chip will give them. But for a simple
failure of heroic judgement... I personally wouldn't
have given it to them. (I just would have delighted in
the oppourtunity to make any characters who have the
heroic hinderance MISERABLE afterwards with dreams of
dieing townsfolk, and maybe an angry ghost following
her/him around)


> They didn't know they earned one until they drew it.
> After I explained why 
> they all thought I was wrong. Their arguments were:
> "I made my occult roll, 
> why didn't you tell me how to kill them?" I tried to
> explain that they only 
> got one raise and told them what they believed the
> critters were and how 
> they should die according to normal beliefs. "We as
> players don't know what 
> our characters know so since I made my occult roll I
> should of known how to 
> kill them or at least some weaknesses." So I
> explained that what their 
> beliefs were could kill them or slow them down. "But
> you didn't state it, 
> you just said our characters believed this. How were
> we supposed to know it 
> would work." And it went on like this for about 10
> minutes. 

It sounds like whoever was doing the arguing on the
behalf of his academia occult roll was reacting more
to the black chip then anything else. Your ruling
sounds like a fair one. Nit picking over saying that
they believed something would kill them versus KNOWING
that something would kill them is nothing more then
player bitchiness. If they had reacted to what their
characters "knew" as a result of that roll instead of
using what their players didn't know, more townspeople
might be alive now. Good for you for sticking to your
guns on this.

> I didn't back 
> down. Told them to suck it up, play like a team and
> be heroes. "But if we 
> know we can't stop them, then being a hero is to
> alert the next town and let 
> them go. We couldn't do anything for the town folks
> anyway so why die? 
> Because sometimes it's better to run than die for
> ppl we can't help." etc.
> I hope they got the idea what they need to do. It
> was interesting. Keep in 
> mind that these guys are in their 30's+ with years
> of gaming. Usually a good 
> bunch. Anyway, did I sound out of line or to harsh?
> Does anyone have 
> something similar? Thought, concerns, questions?

You've got my sympathies. Night Train is a very nasty
little module. Playing it and the events that resulted
from it killed all but one member of the posse I play
with, and the night train still got away in the end.
It left my group kind of unhappy about playing
Deadlands for a while because it had gone so terribly
awry and they had lost some really good characters.
These days we joke about how John Goff "Doesn't like
players in his modules" because he seems so intent on
killing them. Your players need to be reminded that
the idea of running away then to die for people they
cannot help is not weird west heroic (it's one of the
defining traits of the templars actually) regardless
of whether or not it's worth a black chip.
That's my 2 cents.

Marshal_Black

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