Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

I think Phil enjoyed playing through the various levels of social interaction at least partially because some of the early players were mostly interested in their own greed, and in going out of their way to flout social convention as much as possible.

To once again quote Bill Hoyt, "Don't play with psychopaths."

I think such players seem really popular on your side of the Ocean (doesn't matter which ocean, you must pass at least one from here to your place, no matter which direction you go).
I'm proud that I've managed to reform a few of those. I suspect I might have done the local roleplaying community a favour.

Or, to quote myself, "sure, you can be a psychopath, but even societies that don't have the word have well-established means of dealing with the likes, and the guy coming to kill you is just the last line of defence".

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Test Your Alignment:

A small child is making a sand castle on a beach. Do you

a) help them (Lawful)
b) sit down and watch and applaud (Neutral)
c) knock it down (Chaotic)

Or, as Michael Caine said in one movie playing Batman's butler Alfred, "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

Squarely Neutral, Lawful if it's my kid, and might be Chaotic if the kid is building the castle as a way to be obnoxious.

Originally Posted by Greentongue

The "Legend of the Five Rings Collectible Card Game" may be a good example of how Tekumel could have been done.
=

I think we have a winner!

I don't think doing anything as difficult as inventing collectable card games in 1983 would have been necessary. Simply understanding more about marketing, production costs, and pricing would have been a huge help.

We used to sell out of miniatures at conventions. I now realize that does NOT mean we needed to increase production, it means we needed to raise prices.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

I don't think doing anything as difficult as inventing collectable card games in 1983 would have been necessary. Simply understanding more about marketing, production costs, and pricing would have been a huge help.

We used to sell out of miniatures at conventions. I now realize that does NOT mean we needed to increase production, it means we needed to raise prices.

To clarify, I don't mean you should have invented CCGs in 1983. I mean that's a very good avenue for getting people into Tekumel today.

It might also get me to play a CCG again, but that's collateral damage.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

We used to sell out of miniatures at conventions. I now realize that does NOT mean we needed to increase production, it means we needed to raise prices.

Think bigger. Do both.

Originally Posted by Bren

Think bigger. Do both.

Only effective if time to produce miniatures is not at a premium. When the same guys are pouring lead, collating modules, and typing catalogs, time is at a premium.

It really was a great example of "work harder not smarter." Oh, had I but known.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

I don't think doing anything as difficult as inventing collectable card games in 1983 would have been necessary. Simply understanding more about marketing, production costs, and pricing would have been a huge help.

We used to sell out of miniatures at conventions. I now realize that does NOT mean we needed to increase production, it means we needed to raise prices.

True, but when I suggested this Arneson reamed me a new asshole. Dave believed in low retail prices, bless him, but he sometimes ignored the actual production costs in order to keep the cover prices down. And he went to Phil, and that was that; I was told to shut up and get on with the Akbar and Jeff Show. I never could get Dave to understand that every copy of a Tekumel product that he sold to Balboa Distributing at their required 65% discount was a net loss to Adventure Games - I think we lost something like $1.20 on each army list book, for example.

Looking back on it, I think it was the triumph of sentiment and revenge over cool, rational thought. AGI was so wrapped up in the campaign to ruin TSR that it often got forgotten that Dave's D&D royalties were what were paying all the bills - it sure wasn't product sales.

Interestingly, I've heard the Ral Partha side of the story about the old 25mm Tekumel miniatures line. I gather that I, and a couple of other people, were the major source of sales for the line; it just didn't sell at all, after TSR stopped doing anything with EPT.

And now, a short rant:

The Akbar and Jeff show sold out of figures - the very same ones! - at conventions because Akbar and Jeff busted their butts to market, promote, and merchandise the little lead people. You, as I recall, sat at the sales table for something like 12 hours a day, flogging the merchandise, while I stood there in 38 pounds of steel armor running miniatures and RPG games for fourteen hours a day.

Gosh! Weren't those Gen Con and Origins trips fun? Didn't we have a great time? And all that packing and loading? Wasn't that great? Don't we both miss those days? Don't we long for the prestige and glory of being Big Wheels in the game business?

And then we'd come home to the bitching and whining from the people who would not help us, but were more then happy to badmouth us and what we were trying to do for Tekumel.

It got old, after a while.

End of rant. Thank you for your time and patience. I shall now have my sushi dinner.

More tomorrow. I'm off to bed. G'night, everyone!

Let me just start by saying I'm really enjoying this thread!

I do have a couple questions for Chirine:

Did Phil ever a player in anyone's game, or was he exclusively a game master?

Along with all the local adventures you came across as you traveled, did you ever stumble on world-changing plots? Like an insane wizard/AI/god that wanted to move Tekumel back to Humanspace? Or were your adventures more in working within the status quo (which it seems like from your descriptions)?

Lastly, when you run Tekumel, do you do anything different from Phil to "put your own spin on it?"

Thanks!

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

True, but when I suggested this Arneson reamed me a new asshole. Dave believed in low retail prices, bless him, but he sometimes ignored the actual production costs in order to keep the cover prices down. And he went to Phil, and that was that; I was told to shut up and get on with the Akbar and Jeff Show. I never could get Dave to understand that every copy of a Tekumel product that he sold to Balboa Distributing at their required 65% discount was a net loss to Adventure Games - I think we lost something like $1.20 on each army list book, for example.

So you mean, he was trying to gain by selling in bulk?

Yeah, there is a point where selling physical product is too cheap. But it seems a common mistake.

Originally Posted by Atsuku Nare

Let me just start by saying I'm really enjoying this thread!

I do have a couple questions for Chirine:

Did Phil ever a player in anyone's game, or was he exclusively a game master?

Along with all the local adventures you came across as you traveled, did you ever stumble on world-changing plots? Like an insane wizard/AI/god that wanted to move Tekumel back to Humanspace? Or were your adventures more in working within the status quo (which it seems like from your descriptions)?

Lastly, when you run Tekumel, do you do anything different from Phil to "put your own spin on it?"

Thanks!

Phil played for about a year in my D&D game. He was a lot of fun.

A few words on Akbar and Jeff's Traveling Tekumel Show:

First... Dave Arneson was a dear, sweet man, I miss him greatly, and I would truly describe him as "a gentle soul". However, he had all the business acumen of a colony of cherrystone clams. He had cover art and boxes produced for at least a couple of games that never got written. By the way, boxes are a shockingly expensive proposition; having a thousand full color boxes sitting empty in inventory is a huge drag.

I'd forgotten about the Balboa stuff.

And let me say this: In my opinion, nobody, and I mean nobody, has done more to promote Tekumel than Chrinie. Not create, enhance, enrich... I mean promote. Without his efforts I truly believe Tekumel would have slipped into obscurity in the middle 90s and never been heard from again. No single person has worked harder to make and keep the gaming world aware of Tekumel.

And yes, we worked our bloody asses off as Akbar and Jeff's Traveling Tekumel Show (AAJTTS). (By the way, 100XP for the first person besides Chirine who can identify "Akbar and Jeff" without Google.) It was every bit as thankless as Chirine's description above makes it sound. The real reward was that we met people at cons who absolutely loved it, and that is what kept us going. When I finally gave it up I dropped out of gaming as a hobby for 15 years. They say "Do what you love and you'll never work a day of your life." They lie. This is why I've never tried to get involved with anything about model railroading in any commercial sense.

And Chrine is, if anything, understating the flurry that went on around his miniatures demo games. Very early on, an eager player who just lost a unit said "If I buy more figures can I use them in the battle?" Chirine, not having just fallen off the Mash-fruit Chlen cart, said "Sure." At which point our young lad ran to the table to buy more figures.

I sidled over and prison-yard whispered "I'd think some tactics would help, but I'm not telling him that," to which Chirine grinned and replied "Ixnay on the actics-tay when the ustomer-cay has ash-cay."

It reached the point that we were not only selling miniatures, we were selling Exacto knives, tubes of glue, and sheets of cardboard as well. (All miniatures must be assembled and based.) Sometimes each team had one guy just gluing figures to bases full time.

This is when I realized Chirine is one of the greatest natural marketers in the world. He'd be running the miniatures demo all day long, with players/customers running to our dealer table to buy more minis and throw them into the carnage (think of a volcanic subduction zone -- figures just marched into the center and disappeared), and I'd be taking money and handing out miniatures so fast there were scorch marks on them. Sometimes we'd have a helper or two (Aaron P. and Perfect Mikey), in which case I could stand there with my jaw hanging open watching Chirine work.

So why, ultimately, did it fail? Well, the single biggest reason is that we're talking the 1981-1985 time period. 1982 was the peak year for D&D, and 1983 saw sales decline sharply, and keep falling. And "as goes D&D, so goes the market." We were trying to turn Tekumel into "the new D&D" at exactly the time that D&D stopped being "the new D&D." Alas, as my dear grandfather used to say, "Hindsight is always 20/20." By 1985 GAMA meetings were mostly on the subject of "how to turn the market around," and in 1986 I got the contract to write a Star Trek module for FASA that included a board game, to "get RPG players playing wargames."

If I had it all to do over again, as the saying goes, assuming that I knew then what I knew now (including that business degree) I would try to become a great little spare time business instead of trying to turn Tekumel into the world's most popular RPG, and I would have spent a lot less time "doing the same old thing harder than before" and more time figuring what the new thing should be.

Sports writers talk about boxers having "heart." "The kid's got heart." Well, AAJTTS had plenty of heart, but in retrospect I see that, sadly, we were pretty much trying to accomplish the impossible. We weren't alone; the late 80s took a huge toll in the adventure game industry as it slowly sunk in that we weren't seeing a downward hiccup in the market, we were seeing the collapse of a bubble after the Gold Rush. Things had changed and were not coming back, but nobody realized that at the time.

And people far more trained and experienced then we were have fallen prey to such circumstances... the early 2000s housing bubble being the most recent example. It happens.