Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal - part II

Originally Posted by Greentongue

As you recall, when did "Plot Armor" show up in games or was there no such thing in the games you played?

Somewhere in time games transitioned from "Wargames with Characters" to "Living the Story" and I wonder if you experienced that.
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"Plot Armor"? In Phil's campaign? You have got to be kidding. We were never, and I do mean never, important enough to Phil's over-arching story about Elara hi Vriddi and Miirusiya hi Tlakotani to be immune from instant, immediate, and very permanent death. From that spring in 1976 to that late fall in 1988, my leaden alter-ego ran the risk of getting killed every game night. Period. We managed to survive everything Phil could throw at us simply because we were cunning, clever, and fast on our feet.

So, no, we never saw this in Phil's games.

I missed the memo on this transition, I think. In our miniatures games, our little personality figures were usually part of "Wargames with Characters" as we kept track of their careers on the table. In our role-playing games, we - from the very beginning, due to (I think) Dave Arneson's 'improv acting' style of gaming - lived with and as our PCs as part of what's been called 'immersion' by some. There was. at least not that I could see, a "the Story" part of the games, mostly because I don't think any of us were sophisticated enough to think about doing story-lines or plot-lines in our games; we did what's become described as 'open sandbox play', where the players took the game where they wanted to, and it was incumbent on the referee / GM to try to stay one step ahead of them.

Both play styles were something we did, and I still do. (You'd be able to see this on June 17th, when I do my open games at the FLGS.) So, no transition that I saw, but I would not at all be surprised if one occurred in the larger hobby. We live in our little pocket universe, here in the Twin Cities, and I think we've always been a little isolated from the rest of the hobby.

I've gotten more information about what I'll be doing at the Free RPG Day at The Source, here in the Twin Cities on June 17th. I will be running an open table from the time the store opens at ten a.m. to the time the store closes at nine p.m. - I'll be allowed to run after that, if there's interest. I will be running an open table, with no set number of players, and pretty much the way I ran my game at Gary Con three years ago.

I will be running what the players choose to have me run; I am offering the settings I like - the 'Lord Meren' Ancient Egyptian, the Barsoom of 'John Carter', Lord Chirine's branch of the Tree of Time in Prof. Barker's Tekumel, and - thanks to Pundit! - The India of myth and legend. It will be up to the players to choose which one, and we'll be off; every three hours, the FLGS will ask for a vote of the players, and they'll be able to select another setting from the menu or keep playing in the one we're currently in. People will be able to join and leave play as they like, and it'll be up to me to keep everything fun, interesting, and moving along.

Dice provided, if you don't have your own.

See The Amazing Chirine Perform Death-defying Pre-School Role-playing! Right Before Your Very Eyes!

Professor Fate would be proud of me; let's see The Great Leslie try this one!

Mighty Hrugga,

Check your email when you get a second.

Shemek

Originally Posted by Dulahan

Finally got our game to happen again! Sadly ended up a shorter session due to one player (Who'd just started a new, earlier in the morning, shift this week) obviously having issues staying awake. But fun was had! And it was a makeup session to boot, so regular game happening next week too. The players witnessed an Execution of a traitor. And ran into that Sarku priestess and her Ito betrothed, bad news too. She recognized them, and has now blackmailed them to go run into the Catacombs to run an errand for them.

the good news is that it's in their interest, they just don't know it yet.

Wonderful!!! Please keep us posted on this as the adventure unfolds...

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

I've gotten more information about what I'll be doing at the Free RPG Day at The Source, here in the Twin Cities on June 17th. I will be running an open table from the time the store opens at ten a.m. to the time the store closes at nine p.m. - I'll be allowed to run after that, if there's interest. I will be running an open table, with no set number of players, and pretty much the way I ran my game at Gary Con three years ago.

I will be running what the players choose to have me run; I am offering the settings I like - the 'Lord Meren' Ancient Egyptian, the Barsoom of 'John Carter', Lord Chirine's branch of the Tree of Time in Prof. Barker's Tekumel, and - thanks to Pundit! - The India of myth and legend. It will be up to the players to choose which one, and we'll be off; every three hours, the FLGS will ask for a vote of the players, and they'll be able to select another setting from the menu or keep playing in the one we're currently in. People will be able to join and leave play as they like, and it'll be up to me to keep everything fun, interesting, and moving along.

I mentioned this event to some very old friends and fellow gamers from Ye Olden Dayes yesterday at a get-together that they host every Third Saturday, and on the spur of the moment we started playing - they were investigating the death of one of the Sacred Crocodiles - and it was wonderfully funny. We had no dice handy, so we rolled Hershey's Kisses in various combinations to generate random numbers - I converted binary to percentile in my head - but we had a problem as the game went on of the random number generators being devoured by the players and GM. Despite this, it was a lot of fun!

May I offer a comment from one of the players, somebody who's been around for a very long time and one of the old Blackmoor / Tekumel people?

"The Source is offering an open role-playing day, and [Chirine] will be there all day running games. [Chirine] runs RPGs like I've never seen anyone else do, free-wheeling and completely open, and if you haven't experienced it it's well worth a try. He'd like some of us old farts / experienced gamers to show up and not identify ourselves."

My idea is to allow people to see and play in the kind of games we did in the late 1970s, and I'm hoping that having these 'complete strangers from out of the crowd' will break the ice for people passing buy and they'll join in the fun. I have no idea what's going to happen, as this is the ultimate in the 'free Kriegspeil' / 'open sandbox' style of play that we seem to like hereabouts.

And that's one heck of a compliment, considering who this gent has played with in the past...

Originally Posted by Luca

Any chance of getting a recording for those of us sitting a few thousands miles too far away to ever get a chance to see it in person?

Hm. Interesting. There's a couple of things involved with this.

First, audio quality isn't going to be all that great. I'm going to be in a big open room with a lot of other activities going on, like a Pokemon tournament from ten to one. I taped my Gary Con game three years ago, in much the same kind of situation, and the tape is basically useless - too much ambient noise for the single mike to cope with.

I have the hardware to get around this, doing this as a multi-mike gig; one tabletop mike in the middle of the table for general audio, and individual lavalier and shotgun mikes for specific areas of the table all running back to the mixer. The downside to this is that I'd need a technician to run the board, tweaking the feeds to pick people up when they were actually talking. Video, if we did that, would be easy; one camera shooting a general wide shot, but we'd still have the same issues with the audio side. I can't run the game and the board at the same time, hence the dedicated tech to run the electronics.

All this hardware has a footprint, though, and the presence of recording equipment tends to really inhibit people and play; quite a few people don't like to be recorded during game sessions for public viewing because they feel that they'll look stupid and say dumb things. Aside from the issue of getting releases, this is going to be a public event, and I think that trying to do a recording of it would largely negate the objective of the organizers. I'll ask, but I am pretty sure that they'll say no to this. People don't seem to object to having still pictures taken, but live recording does get objected to.

In the meantime, may I suggest my YouTube channel? I have four half-hour segments we recorded of a game here at the house, and that may give an idea of the kind of thing I do.