“Mustering Out Blues” is an homage to classic Traveller I made by hacking the Pool, James V. West’s decades-old rules system (today we’d call it a “game engine,” I suppose). I’ve run a bunch of one-shots with it, but today I ran the second session of a campaign game, and I don’t want to brag but I think it’s purring.

Back in the day, the Pool instigated a spate of variations—the Anti-Pool, the Puddle, the Snowball—prompted by the gut feeling among indie designers at the Forge that there was no way the game could work right as written: players and GM say what happens in the traditional RPG play loop until there’s uncertainty, and then the player rolls some number of six-sided dice based on the relevant freeform traits on your character sheet as well as “bonus dice” they pull out of a fluctuating “pool” as a sort of wager on the roll. If any die comes up a ‘1’, they win! They keep any pool dice they’ve wagered, first of all, and they can either (a) let the GM say what happens next (“narrate your success”) and take a bonus die, or (b) forego the bonus die and themselves say what happens next (take a “Monologue of Victory,” or MOV). Otherwise, they lose: the GM narrates failure and complications and they lose whatever dice they’d wagered from your pool. Boom! Simple! You add new traits based on what happens to your character, and use pool dice to “buy them up” so that they’re more than just color.

One of the big objections about this way of doing business is that, while it seems like as the designer you’d want the incentives to be such that pulling in more pool dice would raise both the risk and the reward, in practice it doesn’t: it lowers the risk and leaves the reward pretty much alone. Your best bet on any given roll is to throw in all your pool dice, full stop.

In actual play, of course, it’s not so easy. Risking all your dice is in fact risking all your dice, and the probabilities of success with a lot of dice are high but never really a sure thing: at nine dice, the maximum you can pull out of your pool, success is just over 80%. You edge over 90% at 13 dice, and you reach 94% at 15 dice, the by-the-book maximum you can roll. So while, statistically, you’re better off dumping your whole pool into every roll, your real-life pool at any given moment is a data point, not an average. Or, as Ron puts it in a 2010 essay on the Pool, since “all conflicts are not equal in … relevance to your current Character Story…choosing whether to gamble Pool dice, and also whether to increase their number, may be less about your chances of success at this very moment and more about whether you want to risk having less Pool dice available for another conflict later.” So, as a GM, make them roll often, make the stakes matter, and keep the engine revving.

After I posted about hacking the Pool for Mustering Out Blues on Adept Play, Ron invited me to take his course “Playing with the Pool,” saying, “I really think this will be of value to you.” When I told him I had a scheduling conflict, he said, okay, that’s fine, but this is really important so I tell you what I will let you and a couple of other guys in the same boat audit the course via video, because I think it’s that important. I was flattered!

I had to laugh at myself when I learned that, from Ron’s perspective, the Pool is a tool for self-diagnosing one’s own role-playing hang-ups or dysfunctions. “PLAYING WITH THE POOL uses James V. West’s The Pool as a means to go very deep into how speaking and procedures actually work,” the course description says. “It draws upon the game’s disturbing feature to expose things which you personally are bad at and manage to elide in any other game.” Thing is, he’s right! I’d say the thing I learned about my own GMing is to make sure failure matters, that consequences are consequential. That was definitely a helpful insight, particularly in getting back to Mustering Out Blues after a month or more since the first session.

We began in media res. I transcribe here one player’s verbal recap of the first session: “We are now on our way to be trained in animal handling in order to be able to pick up one of these giant space megafauna critters and we want to be able to deliver one…[checks notes]…but the most recent thing that happened had very little to with that because we got sidetracked by [an asteroid miner] who Vox ran into, so there’s a missing ship and we headed out there to salvage it, but the hold was full of radioactive cargo, but then everything went wrong. A rival merchant house showed up loaded for bear and we managed to get Vox and Lev back to the ship and then we finally managed to get out of there with Severin pulling his classic torch-you-with-his-drive move. Then Udrus Mattix [an NPC ‘patron’ who was an old service buddy of one of the PCs with a harebrained get-rich-quick scheme] shows up with a body rolled up in a carpet.”

They’re aboard their scout ship sitting on the starport tarmac. Mattix unrolls the carpet, and they recognize a groggy but alive Tine Perkins, a culturemonger (sort of combination space-influencer and investigative journalist) they had encountered in the first session, when she was asking questions about what they had done back in the Imperial Navy on an alien planet (using words like “the massacre on Pethea”) and to whom Mattix had a very hostile reaction. “We’ve got to get out of here!” Mattix says. “They’re after us!”

Are there any signs of hot pursuit? Roll for it; you fail, so yes, there are sirens headed your way. Oh, shit. Okay, says Lev the scout, Severin you get to the bridge and take off, Vox you take Perkins to sick bay, and I’ll escort Mattix to a stateroom and lock him in. Lev rolls, fails, gets locked in the stateroom and Mattix is on the loose! Vox rolls, fails, and Mattix is right there with a machete he’s picked up somewhere. “We’ve got to kill her!” he says. Severin in the cockpit hears the ruckus, comes back with a fire extinguisher and tries to beat Mattix upside the head! Rolls, fails, gets kicked in the junk for his trouble and is doubled up on the deck. Mattix hacks into Perkins’ clavicle with the machete he’s found and now she’s bleeding out. Vox says fuck and unlimbers his plasma rifle and shoots Mattix—we gotta kill this guy!—and succeeds; nothing left of him between the knees and thorax. If he’d failed, Mattix would have stabbed him in the guts; activate Pool last-chance-or-die rules. They free Lev, who’d been locked in the stateroom, and he practices some emergency trauma medicine on her that he’d learned in the Scouts, using his monologue of victory to make no sudden moves as the local police come aboard to take control of the situation.

After that, it was just a matter of seeing whether the investigation cleared them; I let them all contribute pool dice with the maximum capped at 9 dice from all sources (that 80% is for me low enough to keep things interesting) and they succeeded. If they’d failed, I would have impounded their ship. As it was, I had them declared persona non grata in the system. Where to next, shipmates?

Even though Mattix was dead and he was the guy who claimed he knew how to wrangle pickup truck-sized alien “schiffebeest” into their cargo hold for transport to a distant world for sale to a posh planetary noble (the hare-brained scheme), they decided to carry on with the job. Roll for jump, during which time Lev conducted emergency medical procedures training with the whole crew. They pop out at their destination and encounter a diplomatic yacht with an unfriendly reaction roll. And that’s where we’ll pick up next time!

So most of this is pure Pool. My hack does a couple of things. First, since character creation gives you a mix of positive and negative traits as well as skills, I had to figure out what to do with negative traits. I decided that they give you “risky dice.” I made it so that both normal dice and risky dice give you a success on a 6, but risky dice also fail on a 1, reducing your number of successes. That does mean you have to roll two pools of dice, normal and risky, but in Roll20 I’ve automated it so that you tell it where your dice are coming from and it sorts them into the two pools.

The other change is adding money rules to the game. You can spend cash for more dice, on a power-of-ten basis (1,000 credits gets you one die, 10,000 gets you two, and so forth) and you can take a payout on a success as a function of 10 to the power of the number of sixes you roll—so four sixes gets a million credit payout, for example. It made me super happy when after paying 5,000 credits to pay the cost of running his ship, a player took his success as a 1,000-credit payout to defray the expense. Voila; c’est Traveller!

The other Traveller elements come from liberal use of random encounter and rumor tables to populate the space cluster they’re traveling through. The thing that I will have to be careful of, of course, is ignoring the story development tools that the Pool gives me—the PC backstories and the consequences of their actions. Mattix emerged from that, and now I’ve got the injured culturemonger as well as the rival merchant family whose goons they torched out in an asteroid belt. Plus there’s their old CO from their military days, who now that the culturemonger is pursuing the story will definitely have them on his radar. Space radar. Sensor screen. Whatever.