Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal - part II

The reason I said you're using rapier techniques is that the left hand in front of the chest is part of rapier manuals but doesn't appear much earler, and you were doing a lot of thrusts. Dark Ages swords weren't meant for thrusting... look at Oakeshott's X - XII or so. The tips are often nearly rounded.

I'm more familiar with XI - XIII century combat, and by all information available they used very different stances and poses. The vast majority of cuts were in the vertical plane, for instance.

From AsenRG: Judging by what I can see, you were right.

I hate being right, too. I've been right far too many times, over the decades.

The (combat) encounters should be such that the DM should know how many the party can take on, right? Therefore, there is a system to create encounters that are appropriate to the party's average level, and scaling the encounters when they level up - i.e. encounter level.

Wow. Color me astonished. Completely different from the games I used to play in. What we got was what we got, and we had to deal with it on the spot.

Sorry to hear that, Uncle!

I was very sorry, too; cast a pall over what had been a quite lovely weekend. I suspect that this will mark my 'swan song' as a gamer, and I'll be more and more of a resource then anything else. Surprised that I'm being quoted on various forums re Braunsteins, but if that what people want it's what people want.

Sure, Uncle. If I give you Blade and Crown, will you play with me?
(That's a serious question, too).

Let me think about it; I have a copy. The author is somebody I know, and they were kind enough to autograph it for me.

Nothing wrong with knowing Klingon, in my book. It's when someone starts speaking it and expects me to understand it, that I get the urge to follow the advice of the Glorious General regarding the "backing away slowly, making soothing noises and no sudden motions".

Same here!

Originally Posted by Greentongue

The implication being that every encounter should be one that the party can defeat if they "play correctly".
There is no need for the players to evaluate the situation and flee if the odds are against them.
"Heroes don't flee and we are the Heroes."
If the players lose a conflict it is often considered the GM's fault for not setting the challenge correctly.

Great for emulating heroic movies and literature I suppose.

With the original rules having a lot of "Save or Die" situations it is not surprising that modern players avoid it.
=

Wow. We never saw that, as I recall; it was always 'save or die', with the party having to think and act in the moment. We thought our way out of a lot of fatal situations, and sometimes we simply ran for our lives.

I am baffled, to be honest. In all the 'heroic' stuff I've read and watched, the Hero(ine) always had to think or act to get out of what was a deadly situation. Especially with Phil, death was a constant companion.

I wonder what Fafherd and the Grey Mouser, or Conan for that matter, would have thought of all this.

Originally Posted by bconsidine

Dealing with it on the spot also includes the option to run away or "not engage", something it seems today's players don't really ever do. It gets back to the video game mindset.

Blaise

Agreed! We always kept that as an option, on the theory that we could always come back with bigger rocks in hand...

Originally Posted by bconsidine

Dealing with it on the spot also includes the option to run away or "not engage", something it seems today's players don't really ever do. It gets back to the video game mindset.

Blaise

In his last few years of his life Gary described running OD&D Greyhawk at modern gaming cons. He said time after time players charged in, failed to watch the side passages, and got flanked, enveloped, and wiped out. Sometimes they'd die fast enough to wipe out three or four parties in a single session. He said he couldn't believe how most groups never changed their approach, including ignoring the same side passages where the enemy emerged from time after time.

Originally Posted by Greentongue

The implication being that every encounter should be one that the party can defeat if they "play correctly".
There is no need for the players to evaluate the situation and flee if the odds are against them.
"Heroes don't flee and we are the Heroes."
If the players lose a conflict it is often considered the GM's fault for not setting the challenge correctly.

Great for emulating heroic movies and literature I suppose.

With the original rules having a lot of "Save or Die" situations it is not surprising that modern players avoid it.
=

Honorable Uncles and cousins, I think you may to some extent be missing the forest for the trees. Rules aren't made for people who already know how to play - they are designed for people who don't. When you've got decades of experience, you don't need rules - you usually have a fairly good idea who to approximate something and how to bending and existing rule to fit a situation. When you are novice it's tough to figure out what 'reasonable' even is - the 'rules' give you a basis for figuring that all out.

How can a novice GM design an encounter designed to be 'tough' or 'easy' if they lack the experience to know what a 'balanced' encounter would even look like? Other than being a devices to sell more books, most rules revisions and re-writes are created to make it easier for 'new' people to play. "Old school" players pretty much all learned from someone else of course - but mainly because trying to learn how to play the original games simply by reading the rules was exceedingly difficult - if not impossible.

Books like the 1st edition AD&D DM's Guide was simply a big collections of lists and references. The latest edition has all this - but also a lot of information on how to actually play and how to run a campaign - everything from how to keep notes to listing and giving examples for different styles and flavor of campaigns.

Adding 'training wheels' for newbies isn't a bad thing - nothing forces you to keep using them once you've got your balance.

The problem usually goes back to pedantic rules lawyers who never seem to get that the rules are there to help - not to get in the way...