Pirates — Transcription

Well, no, we've just started year 3 now.

So I'm going to skip the, skip the what the show is about.

So if you what George is referring to, if you haven't heard of it, is that Pirates of the Caribbean, before it was anything else, was just a theme park ride.

I think it was like, I think it was like a roller coaster-esque one, like one of those narrative roller coasters.

But one of my favourite articles about game design isn't actually about game design at all.

And I'll link to this in the show notes.

It's an interview with a roller coaster designer talking about how they think about designing the experience of being on a roller coaster, um, which, and like what people feel at each step.

And there's all these little like design techniques that they can deploy to make people feel certain ways.

And I'm like, it's not the worst metaphor I've ever seen and for being a role-playing game master.

You are the one who gets to design the roller coaster and you have certain tools of the trade at your disposal.

I'll dig that article up because I really, really like it.

Or like, ah, see, now I'm just now now we're just going off the deep end, but now I'm like,

is where your waterslide should be, by the way.

You don't want a water slide landing in the shallow, and that's how you end up with a bruised tailbone.

Um, yeah, like bumper car arena.

I don't know.

Yeah, so I'm assuming you did not, unless the budget for this show has increased way more than I would have thought.

I'm assuming you did not fly to Disney and ride Pirates of the Caribbean to prep for this show.

Our flag means death on the perhaps less, yeah, less serious end of things.

I watched.

For my homework, I watched the pages of the pirate book, which I would argue is perhaps the only pirate story we have ever told, which is Treasure Island.

I've had a copy of Treasure Island on my shelf for 10 plus years and I've never read it.

And I finally got around to reading it.

And it's one of those experiences that you have of like reading the OG thing and being like, ugh, this is so tropy.

It's got it's got Long John Silver.

It's got the ghost of Captain Flint.

It's got old Ben Gunn and his desire for cheese.

What I have seen is 2 things.

I've seen Disney's Treasure Planet, which actually slaps, and I will hear no arguments that it was like not an incredible movie.

And so when I was reading this book.

Um, Captain Smollett was Sam the Eagle, and Ben Gunn was a robot.

Sea of Thieves is like very inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean.

The other entry in the video game space, which, again, I've...

Um, and that was like, if you want to, if you want to think about like, a little bit more of the economics, I guess, um, of like running a pirate ship.

And I feel like that's a good, a good segue into having a bit of a chat about what makes a pirate story, a pirate story.

What are the ingredients that we want to make sure we have prepped in our pockets, on our index cards in our notebooks, like whatever, lined up and ready to like drop at the table.

What are the, what are the like things that we want to identify and pull out of these?

Uh, probably the one difference between the narrative of Treasure Island and the narrative of everything that we kind of see these days is that in Treasure Island, the pirates are the bad guys.

It's a boy zone adventure and Hawkins is like hoisting the Union Jack and like sending the pirates to Davy Jones Locker and threatening to have them all hanged, like he is a capital G, capital B, good boy.

And the pirates are, the pirates are villains, which I think is probably the one thing that you shouldn't steal from Treasure Island.

Everything else is like textbook.

But yeah, I think you want to be the pirates.

You want to feel like you're the good guys.

So I had something similar as my 1st, I'm like, you need to feel like the good guys or the heroes are at least sympathetic.

And yes, I went a little bit more specific than that.

Yeah.

It could be loveable scamps who have like escaped execution for a poultry misunderstanding for stealing some bread for your orphans.

Exactly.

It's like, all of the treasure is split, if not equally, then like fairly, there's like, you know, a number of shares and and people will get treasure according to their share and that's all up for for negotiation.

There's a lot of evidence that, like, women, or at least non, non-men, um, you know, people with diverse sexualities and genders were sometimes, but not always treated better or more equally on board pirate ships than necessarily in broader society.

Um, so yeah, they were these, they were these little bubbles, and I think that for players, for role-playing game players, I think that is the fun space to play in, right, is like, it's this very free-flowing, lots of like fun ways to play with kind of internal power struggles and relationships within the crew, lots of diversity and the kinds of characters you can play.

No one's going to bat an eye, quote unquote, in realism if you want to play it.

A person who's missing a leg or a person who is a woman, a person whose gender and how they present kind of doesn't or sex and how they present doesn't kind of match.

It's a rich playground, the pirate ship, is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah.

That is the classic, again, all of the tropes stem from this one source.

Uh, Jim finds a map uh, in the, the, the sea chest of old Billy Bones who's been staying at the Benbow Inn.

Yeah, it's a classic.

It's a classic for a reason.

There's a really interesting dynamic that happens around the treasure map in a lot of these things, which is that, yes, it is a, I guess, a literal clue.

There's a puzzle element to it, in universe, because they were often deliberately kind of, I guess, encrypted, right?

absolutely.

Like everyone has a reason that they want to stay flying and stay out of the, the rest of society.

Um, there's there's something sort of pushing them out, but there's also a pull.

There's also something that they want and whether that's like, you know, usually, I think, that's going to be money or treasure or fortune or luxury or comfort.

Like there's a pool factor as well.

There's a reason that they're not just begging on the streets as a reason they've joined up.

So yeah, back to our map.

I think I think there's 2 really great elements.

stories.

One is that they are a puzzle to solve, and that is a super great thing to have as a game master.

The other thing that the treasure map is, is a McGuffin, right?

It is an object that having it and knowing its secrets is power and leverage, which is almost entirely how it's used in Treasure Island, and, you know, that's how the compass is used in Pirates of the Caribbean, like holding the map, knowing what is on the map, being able to hand the map over as part of an exchange, bargain for the map, lose the map, find the map.

On top of being a fun puzzle to solve.

There's also a whole game of like the map is moving around.

So, again, Treasure Island, they keep the contents of the map, and even in the existence of the map secret from the crew, because they suspect, you know, they don't want the crew to mutiny.

Um, and then at the end, once they've like moved the treasure, spoilers with his like 200-year-old books book.

You have the information on the map, you have the solves to each of the clues that are on the map, and each one of those is also something that can be kind of traded and bartered.

And I think there's kind of 2 broad boxes here.

One is the competing parties for the treasure, some of whom could be other pirates who are pirates but bad, some of whom could be the authorities who you're trying to, you know, get out from under the thumb of.

But then I think there is, there are the broader kind of environmental hazards of going to sea.

And that is a huge part of these stories.

You know, there are storms and shipwrecks.

Um, you get becalmed and and, you know, run out of rations.

There are jagged reefs and unknowns out there in this uncharted, literally uncharted territory.

So there's this huge sort of swath of environment.

I think those are both.

Start to think about as you, as you put a story together, because you want to have some of both, right?

And I think the other hazards are, I guess, you're, if we're thinking about this as a bit of a race for the treasure,

The other hazards are your speed bumps, right?

Like they're the things you have to get past on the way that the challenges that are in between you and the treasure.

Um, which is, you know, are more up to your skill versus the world than a sort of battle of wits.

The other big one, now that I think about it, which is kind of its own 3rd box, I think we talked a bit about mutiny before.

I think if you're not constantly facing the threat of mutiny from within your own crew, I don't think you really have a pirate story.

Yep.

Um, but yeah, that's that's like, that's the risk, right?

is you're always, every, every move you make, and again, because I literally finished reading the book yesterday.

Like, every move that like Long John Silver makes, he is spending a little bit of like capital with his crew and he's like, I know we have to do this.

It's just around the next corner, like, and they just get the longer it takes to get to the treasure, um, the, the less, like, sway he has over them and the closer they get to mutiny. And crew morale is a very real thing that you should have to contend with in these stories.

And I don't think it necessarily has to be a quote unquote bad thing or an unfun thing, right?

Treasure Island does not have a supernatural.

Anything actually supernatural in it.

There is a bit, there's heaps of bits where like things are bad luck or bad omens.

Yeah, you're right.

Because the world is not explored or explained, we don't know.

There was a really fun thing in Treasure Island, which is that Hawkins, our young protagonist is like, there were fucking monsters on that island.

And then because it's written kind of as a retrospective, he adds in brackets.

I later learned that they're called sea lions.

grew up in Bristol.

Yeah, whether you choose in your particular story to make it real or not is definitely something that your character should be afraid of.

So there's one more thing that I had.

It's something that we kind of touched on when we talked about Mad Max.

It's this idea of this like veneer of civility, right?

Of gentlemanliness.

And it is tied into these ideas about, you know, the pirate's code and all of this stuff.

And I think that's that's kind of a perfect metaphor for it, right?

right?

Like Barbosa wears finery, but it's dirty.

And and poorly kept, but he, you know, he's very attached to his very big hat and his like finery and his like ruffles.

Yeah, he sits Elizabeth down for dinner and is like, you know, join me for dinner.

It's, you know, bad manners if you don't, and she is like, no one tries to run away and like that's when things become kind of uncivil.

But there's this, yeah, there's this like playing at civility and playing it honour, even though you know they'll stab you in the back or turn foul as soon as it suits them.

And so you can start to see how start to see how it all starts to fit together, right?

You have these people who have this, live in this bubble and have this code and aren't necessarily kind of morally absolute.

And so yes, they're not going to kill people straight away.

Not just because it's maybe morally questionable, but also because they might be useful, and you also have this dynamic going on where everyone is after the treasure, and so people are useful not just as hostages, but also because of what they might know, they're useful because of what the clues they might have.

And so you just have this beautiful set of pieces of people and agendas and and McGuffins and objects and some, and information, and sometimes things are all three, um, and they're all kind of swirling around and being traded and and bartered and leveraged to try and get the treasure at the end.

So I think it's really interesting how, yeah, all of that stuff that we have kind of word vomited out.

It's like, ah, yeah, they often take hostages.

There's got to be a map.

Like, they've got this veneer of civility.

Yeah, I think swinging from a chandelier is a massive cliche, and I'm pretty sure it also happens in the 1st 10 minutes of Curse of the Black Pearl.

It's 2 things.

And I'm sure as we get to prep.

You can figure out exactly how to incorporate them into the game.

But I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna do them rapid fire.

one of them is rum.

Um, which I love about uh, Tortuga because it just jumps into this like, Irish like hornpipe, essentially, um, and it's just the the best fight scene music.

Maybe in all of cinema, it's just this like, it's music that you want to get into a bar brawl too. And so that is, there's a very particular type of music that comes with these, these pirate things.

is kind of essential to setting the vibe and it's not difficult to find.

I think your ship should feel like your home base, but Tortuga should feel, I guess, like a pit stop, right?

Mm-hmm.

And we also have environmental hazards that are going to come between us and them, our classic storms and shipwrecks and becomings, which aren't necessarily bad for the story, even though they might be bad for the characters, because they are opportunities to live out that pirate story more and sort of be marooned or be shipwrecked or be becalmed.

Um, so yeah, we've got essentially a race kind of structure, um, with uh, that McGuffin and those clues and, you know, sometimes people changing hands and changing sides, um, and these,

Yeah, very classic obstacles in the way to kind of deal with.

If I sat down to play a pirate game and there wasn't at least graph paper dunked in tea bags.

And so you know that they're not going to wander off away from the treasure because that's not what this story is about.

I think you can choose whether to, I guess, toggle challenges at locations on or off or up or down.

There can be a shoal that you had planned to be treacherous that if you're running close to time.

It's like you can just narrate that they pass through the shoal with some, you know, a steely hand.

I think there's, or, you know, it's the kind of thing where this could be a whole scene, navigating the, we'll say, navigating the shoals, navigating the maelstrom.

Or it could be like one role that you narrate around in a minute or two, right?

Yeah.

So how are you kind of picking how much goes on the map?

Wow, that's a god tier throwback.

Well done.

So yeah, even though we look at other pirate games, you look at things like Sea of Thieves, you look at things like pirates and, yeah, as a player, those are really open world, their sandbox, you can kind of pick and choose what you're working on right now.

I think if you're a game master picking a session or building a session, you've got to imagine that you, as the player of those computer games, have already sort of decided what you want to do for this session of play and now you're working your way towards it and trying not to get distracted along the way.

So because once we have that, like we know that they're going to visit a certain number of points, um, and all of the points are going to lead them to one end, we can start to spread challenges across that, whether they are things like uh, encounters with other rival groups, um, or whether they are environmental hazards.

I don't know that you necessarily need to prep them super differently or whether those are, I guess, internal triggers for things like mutiny and shipwrecking or marooning.

But make sure that the players are getting a little bit of all of those things.

They're getting a little bit of ship to ship combat.

They're getting some like sailing through storms, they're getting some like traipsing across islands so that the texture of the story, which is kind of set by those challenges.

Um, and likewise, I don't want to be, if we're doing, you know, you'll be calmed and you've run out of rations.

I don't want to be tracking rations.

It's like, okay, let's roll rations and see if you've run out of salted pork.

That's a great thing to put on the map and put in front of the players as a thing they need to think about making their decision, right?

Are we going to go hard and fast again and push our luck or are we going to, you know, put into port?

Like, you want something that is going to ratchet the tension up as they make these decisions.

And on the other end of that balance, right?

You've got, you've got Yeah, the ship is accruing damage or the rations are depleting or the morales going down.

Your counterbalance to that is a similar clock or track that is constantly ticking up as their estimation of where the rival crews are at increases and kind of pushes them forwards.

Oh, no, we haven't seen anyone for like months.

You find a like a marooned sailor from one of the other crews, you know?

Yeah.

So I think that's, I think that's really key.

So you need to have an idea of where they are kind of relative to the players, but I don't think you need to be getting out the measuring tape and tracking their movement.

I think it's just a vibe of like, are they ahead?

Are they behind?

I think you can also, this is a good place to dig into players' pasts or characters pasts, I should say, and dig out some rivalries, some older nemeses.

Um, you know, the pirate stories are filled with revenge because people keep mutinying on each other.

So weird.

Maybe they ask a favour of you.

Maybe you don't want to fire on that ship because your brother is in the Navy.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so I feel like we've kind of got a bit of a prep structure here.

It's, it's built around a map.

We've populated it with interesting places, interesting obstacles, interesting rivals and characters, and we are essentially over the course of a session, we're asking our players to navigate their way across that and make calls about which way to go based on their current state and what their current knowledge is about rivals and their own needs and what they need to get to the endpoint.

I think there's a couple of just proppy things that I would add, like super concrete things.

One is obviously, we talked about music.

I think you need to have a banging soundtrack for this.

One is, I think, you need to just really, like, it's so oak, it's not okay to do many accents these days, but it's so okay to do a pirate voice, so you need to be leaning into your pirate voice.

If you could do like a candle flicker.

I feel like I want something with, yeah, a stress track or push your luck mechanic and some like nice ways to interact with that built-in.

Um, I feel like I want something with a bit of a metacurrency so that I can, look, 2 reasons.

One, that's just such an easy way to remind players to make interesting choices instead of safe choices.

It's when we were talking about like, oh, your brother's on that boat and, you know, offering them some metacurrency to pursue it is and take the dangerous option.

Like, that's such an easy shortcut to doing that, that I think I would want that.

The 2nd reason I want a metacurrency is because you can get some like sick like doubloons or something.

And like hand over the pieces of eight.

Yeah, buckle some squash.

Look, my, I'm just gonna,

going to put it out there.

Um, and I think it's pretty, it's pretty clear.

Fate has, I would have to go back to the rule book because I haven't read it for a while.

I don't know what the rules are for stress tracks that don't sit on a character is the only thing I would have to check.

But I think it would be pretty easy to sort of hack that on.

Um, but yeah, really easy to just, uh, have a, a bunch of environmental, you know, setting aspects really easy to, like, have players create links between each other and with the world.

Um, really makes interesting combat doable because that's what the sort of core actions are.

Only one of them is attack and then there's like, defend and retreat and create obstacle, like, create an advantage, there's all these things that aren't just like, default things that aren't just like, I fire my,

I almost said I fire my cutlass.

It's an interesting thing that I saw on, I think the Alexandrian recently, where I was like, uh, D&D does this thing where like a player will indicate that they care about doing a particular thing and the game will anti-reward them by trivialising that thing.

Like a pirate arc.

Um, I think it would be fun.

I think it could be really fun to pull some existing characters into that, which kind of obviates that problem and it means that if they do have something that's relevant, it's cool that they have something relevant instead of being designed that they have something relevant. But yeah, I wouldn't set out to run a pirate game in 5E.

All right, so that's a no to running it in 5E.

This has been Platonics.

Thank you to everyone who wrote in over our break and requested episodes of which this was one.

If you have some suggestions,

We're still taking them.

You can get in touch with us at halloaplatonics.net.

But the place we would love to see you is on our discord where we are still sort of hashing out what we're going to do this season.

So if you do have suggestions, jump on Discord, and let us know.

We're also in all the usual places, you can find us on Blue Sky, Macedon, and threads.

We are on Reddit.

So if you see you slash platonics, post an interesting take, please Fangerson up vote.

But really the biggest thing that you can do to help the show keep happening is to send it to your friends if you have someone who you reckon would enjoy listening to us.

Pick the thing that they like.

Don't just send them a link to the show, pick an episode out for them, be like, I think you should listen to this one.

I think you would really enjoy doing this.

Send it to your friends who are game masters.

Also send it to your friends who aren't game masters but might want to give it a go.

Send it to your friends who are players.

And just maybe what I get, get some perspective from the other side of the screen about how they can, you know, bring more adventure and pacing and vibes to the table.

Um, yeah, that's the best thing you can do is to share, not just the show, but send an episode to somebody who you think will enjoy it, um, because that's, that's why we do all these different topics.

We don't expect everyone to listen to every ep, although we'd love it if you did.

But the idea is to sort of bring these ideas about running tight vibes, heavy sessions, uh, to as many people as possible, and I don't know if you've noticed, but sometimes the genre is just like the excuse that we need to talk about facilitating Great Session.

So, yeah, pick an app, send it to a friend.

That's your mission for 2026.

I think that's everything.

Why am I asking you?

You don't know how to do the outro.