Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Greentongue

Everyone (that hasn't read any good books on it) KNOWS history is boring. They all took years of it in high school and barely stayed awake!


I think the rather involved "back story" that people create for their characters now is supposed to substitute for Play Time.
That way they can play a "fully realized" character in a short game or One Shot.
=

I'd agree with that; history, as taught in my high school, was agonizingly boring. I hate every minute of it, as I was pretty widely read, and knew better. I also knew a lot more about the subject then the athletics coaches who were made to teach the subject - due to the rules on 'amateur athletics' - and they hated it just as much as I did.

I think you're right about the back stories - we developed ours over a very long time of play...

Fascinating!

Originally Posted by Hermes Serpent

The veering off into wargaming in recent posts has me reminescensing over past glories. Here in the UK there is a group that does Megagames which are basically large scale wargames, mostly without figures as they are based at a higher command level.

They usually accommodate 50 plus gamers spread across multiple command levels with the newer, less experienced gamers taking lower level command positions. There are a large number of umpires to handle all the interactions.

I've played in a Battle of Britain game, a Capt Morgan Attack on Panama game, a Great War game in the past and they were extreme fun and very different from the usual one-on-one miniatures wargame.

http://www.megagame-makers.org.uk/

They are a lot like a one day Braunstein game it seems.

Nigel

I'm sorry not to have replied to you earlier this afternoon; First Granddaughter Naomi was just coming into the world, and we were a bit distracted.

What you're describing is the kind of gaming that we did on a regular basis. Our miniatures games were very rarely 'one-on-one', and there were normally as many people on a side as wanted to play. 'Mr. Trigger-happy', in the game we've been talking about, was an exception; he felt that as he was such a clever, smart, intelligent stud-muffin of a gamer, he never needed mere minions such as the rest of us to help him run his side in a game. He lost a lot of games that way, as he simply could not keep track of everything in the games we played and usually had 'lost the picture' about game turn two.

We did the exact same thing - the less experienced players would play subordinate commanders, and if they did well they'd get 'promoted' / 'go up a level' to a higher command. We did the same for our RPGs; less experienced players would be helped by the more experienced ones, until they learned enough about the world setting to be survivable.

For a lot of Chirine's career, he was not the 'party leader'; he was 'the designated expert' that the party relied on to advise them and give them pointers. There were several instances, like Vrisa's lineage, where Phil very specifically told me to keep quiet and let the players figure it out for themselves. To Phil's credit, he never did this when the 'secret' would be fatal to any of the players - it was always a droll surprise or recondite in-joke that he wanted to spring on people.

The only times that I was 'in charge' was normally in a military or naval situation, where it was pretty obvious to the party that I should be in command - and they should shut up and listen.

From the beginning, Phil always went around the table to make sure that everybody got some 'face time' with him; I normally kept my mouth shut and 'yielded my time' to somebody less experienced then I was.

Great comments - thank you!!!

I hope that the 'veering off' isn't discouraging people from asking questions, though. We simply didn't see much - if any - difference between that now seem to be very separate genres and types of gaming.

Originally Posted by Greentongue

Everyone (that hasn't read any good books on it) KNOWS history is boring. They all took years of it in high school and barely stayed awake!


I think the rather involved "back story" that people create for their characters now is supposed to substitute for Play Time.
That way they can play a "fully realized" character in a short game or One Shot.
=

They should have tried to learn something, instead. Or maybe I was blessed with better history teachers.

Actually, many of the one-shot games don't assume a big backstory.
The way to go

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Ask away! Let me think - there's the Circle Dance in the Nyemesel Isles, and a lot more, so I'll look.

I'll talk to Dave...

The Circle Dance sounds good, indeed, and I think I remember having read something about it.

Anything from the mountain clans, though? And/or from the Tsolei isles? Jakalla? Those are the three locations I can see myself delving in most readily.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

I'd agree with that; history, as taught in my high school, was agonizingly boring. I hate every minute of it, as I was pretty widely read, and knew better. I also knew a lot more about the subject then the athletics coaches who were made to teach the subject - due to the rules on 'amateur athletics' - and they hated it just as much as I did.

I think you're right about the back stories - we developed ours over a very long time of play...

Fascinating!

Athletics coaches?
That would be unthinkable around here. There are enough professional historians going around...
That might explain some of the dislike some US gamers seem to have for history in RPGs, then!

Not really.
More often, the way they do that is by skipping details that connect scenes. The scenes during the session can be some time apart, during which what you did in the previous scene comes to fruition.
Think of it as writing a session report for several sessions at once. You'd hit the points of interest, right?
Now imagine the GM makes you play out only those scenes.
That's, in a nutshell, how you should play, for example, Tenra Bansho Zero (a Japanese game which assumes one-shot games).
Next session, you can play another set of scenes with them, or get new characters and explore how what you did reflected on the lives of people 1000 km from there. You did play big, right?
Granted, there are other differences, but this is actually one of the most important, and most neglected ones, IMO.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

I'm sorry not to have replied to you earlier this afternoon; First Granddaughter Naomi was just coming into the world, and we were a bit distracted.

What you're describing is the kind of gaming that we did on a regular basis. Our miniatures games were very rarely 'one-on-one', and there were normally as many people on a side as wanted to play. 'Mr. Trigger-happy', in the game we've been talking about, was an exception; he felt that as he was such a clever, smart, intelligent stud-muffin of a gamer, he never needed mere minions such as the rest of us to help him run his side in a game. He lost a lot of games that way, as he simply could not keep track of everything in the games we played and usually had 'lost the picture' about game turn two.

We did the exact same thing - the less experienced players would play subordinate commanders, and if they did well they'd get 'promoted' / 'go up a level' to a higher command. We did the same for our RPGs; less experienced players would be helped by the more experienced ones, until they learned enough about the world setting to be survivable.

For a lot of Chirine's career, he was not the 'party leader'; he was 'the designated expert' that the party relied on to advise them and give them pointers. There were several instances, like Vrisa's lineage, where Phil very specifically told me to keep quiet and let the players figure it out for themselves. To Phil's credit, he never did this when the 'secret' would be fatal to any of the players - it was always a droll surprise or recondite in-joke that he wanted to spring on people.

The only times that I was 'in charge' was normally in a military or naval situation, where it was pretty obvious to the party that I should be in command - and they should shut up and listen.

From the beginning, Phil always went around the table to make sure that everybody got some 'face time' with him; I normally kept my mouth shut and 'yielded my time' to somebody less experienced then I was.

I wonder - are those Mega-games a separate invention, or have people running them heard about MAR Barker's group, or a similar one?

[From AsenRG:]
The Circle Dance sounds good, indeed, and I think I remember having read something about it.

Anything from the mountain clans, though? And/or from the Tsolei isles? Jakalla? Those are the three locations I can see myself delving in most readily.

Right. Here's where the Sourcebook is so handy; Phil did a huge multi-page list of festivals all over the Known World, and I'd go there. Let me see what I can do for you.

Athletics coaches?
That would be unthinkable around here. There are enough professional historians going around...
That might explain some of the dislike some US gamers seem to have for history in RPGs, then!

Yep. The rules for high school athletics , at that time, stated that all coaches had to be teachers and not paid professionals. They were to 'volunteer' their time coaching. Of course, the schools then hired professional coaches - who were very good, actually - and got them teachers' credentials. They were then placed as history teachers, where they could do no harm and get on with their coaching duties.

Not really.
More often, the way they do that is by skipping details that connect scenes. The scenes during the session can be some time apart, during which what you did in the previous scene comes to fruition.
Think of it as writing a session report for several sessions at once. You'd hit the points of interest, right?
Now imagine the GM makes you play out only those scenes.
That's, in a nutshell, how you should play, for example, Tenra Bansho Zero (a Japanese game which assumes one-shot games).
Next session, you can play another set of scenes with them, or get new characters and explore how what you did reflected on the lives of people 1000 km from there. You did play big, right?
Granted, there are other differences, but this is actually one of the most important, and most neglected ones, IMO.

Oh, okay; understood.


I wonder - are those Mega-games a separate invention, or have people running them heard about MAR Barker's group, or a similar one?

They are a much older tradition, dating back as far as the invention of Free Kriegspiel, and got started with the beginnings of military simulations - what the UK called TEWT, Tactical Exercises Without Troops. It cost a huge pile of money to run live exercises on the ground, and running the same exercise on a game table was both cheaper and easier. Much the same level of simulation, but minus the cost.

Phil's gaming had very little influence on the mainstream of gaming, I suspect. While he was a founding member of the Society of Ancients, he was far too much over on what became the RPG side of things and got sort of sidelined.

Originally Posted by Hermes Serpent

I was playing those Megagames originally in the early eighties so I doubt that the style of the Professor's home games had been heard of on the other side of the Atlantic by that time. The games are more in line with military wargames that have been going since the early nineteenth century and games played by a lot of the wargamers in the fifties.

I suspect that if anything the Braunstein style games being mentioned in the early wargame fanzines by folks like Jack Scruby might have influenced some of the early MegaGamers, but the use of these games by military officers and possibly the influence of some of the professional staff at Sandhurst may be more influential.

I played in a weekend game of the 1812 Russian Campaign just after the film of Waterloo (around 1971 or 1972) was released with David Chandler and some of the other staff from Sandhurst and, although this wasn't a Braunstein style game, it did have some of the features of that style of game so that's why I don't think the style of the Professor's games have anything to do with the Megagames.

Agreed; see my reply to AsenRG, above. The British Army has always been right up in the front of simulation-running, and this is part of that tradition. The US Army was a lot slower to catch on, but for a while every unit had a set of rules and miniatures for modern combat to use in training exercises.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Agreed; see my reply to AsenRG, above. The British Army has always been right up in the front of simulation-running, and this is part of that tradition. The US Army was a lot slower to catch on, but for a while every unit had a set of rules and miniatures for modern combat to use in training exercises.

Now if we could only teach a good chunk of gamers that the correct response to an ambush is NOT "That's not fair!"

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Now if we could only teach a good chunk of gamers that the correct response to an ambush is NOT "That's not fair!"

Oh, yeah. How many times have we heard that line, before? Remember the first Minnesota Campaign, where I ran that big Tekumel siege game using Phil's wonderful modular city wall set, and one of the defending players whined and moaned that the game "wasn't fair" because he didn't have as many figures to defend the town walls as the attacking army had...

And he was still whining about it some thirty years later, too...

Originally Posted by Greentongue

Especially when they had to push aside the "warning flags" to get into the trap.
=

Oh, mercy me, yes! The players approach a sealed door liberally festooned with signs in half the known languages of Tekumel, all saying "DANGER! KEEP OUT! YOU WILL ALL DIE!"

So, of course, they crash the door; no precautions, no posting a sentry, no nothing. And the usually cheesy half-dozen undead behind the door slaughter the first four players through the rubble, and manage to seriously maim the rest. Never mind the undead magic-user they were guarding; she never got a shot in...