Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Me, too! "Ten Commandments", same thing. Remember when "Johnny Quest" was on ABC in prime time at 9:00 pm Thursdays, as a one-hour episode right after the one-hour "Flintstones". My word, did I have to use all my powers of charm and tact to be allowed to stay up to watch it!!!

I don't remember Jonny Quest from primetime, just from Saturday mornings. I do wish we had seen the adventures that showed up in the opening credits. They were really exciting.

Originally Posted by Bren

Hi Chrine,

The question of intersecting parties came up on another thread. I know you guys experienced some of that in Tekumel, Blackmoor, etc.

How did Phil, Dave, Gary, you, Gronan, et al handle such temporal issues?

In a word, record-keeping. We all treated our campaigns as we did our wargaming campaigns - which makes some of the comments on the thread about what RPGs can learn from wargames seem very odd indeed to me. We usually did calendars, and we'd keep track of how the various parties moved around in order to keep everything straight. It was often very, very difficult to get the opposing forces into the same point in space-time in order to have battles - and we're talking big armies with supply trains, here. What usually happened was that one side would get to the proposed battlefield too late, and wind up mugging the other side's supply column and trains. Which is why it seems that a lot of battles in the historical record feel like they were fought by appointment; since both sides usually wanted to force a decision, you see a lot of feeling your way into contact so you can fight the battle. See also Tony Bath's book on setting up a wargames campaign; Phil used it verbatum, and it bled over into a great many wargame campaigns.

This practice, in turn, bled over into the early RPG campaigns as Dave, Gary and Phil had all gotten their start in classic wargame campaigns. For example, Phil synched what happened in each game session by day, so that if the Monday group did something that happened on a Tuesday, it happened on our Tuesday as well. It was very, very rare to get both groups in the same city at the same time, let alone getting them into the same location at the same point in time. If this did happen, the 'custom of the house' was to have everybody show up on a Friday night or a Saturday afternoon and have one big combined game session.

If we had shown up on Day 3 (in your example of the two parties looting the same tomb), we would have looted the tomb, and gotten away. The other group would have arrived on Day 4, and looted the tomb all over again. And, this being Tekumel the way Phil played it, they then would have gone looking for the party of clerics, guards, and bearers who had just gotten through restocking and resealing the tomb to see what other goodies might be had. We met up with all sorts of parties like this over time, as Phil ran his world as a living entity - he based this on the misadventures of the cadre of priests and guards who looked after the Valley of the Kings, who left us all sorts of rather plaintive records of how many times they had had to deal with parties of tomb-robbers. (Tutankhamun got robbed twice, for example.) Remember that Phil had this meta-game going on all the time in the background, and that the NPCs were just as active as we were.

If I may offer a comment / historical perspective, the question on both of the other threads seems to be that the one about "intersecting parties" is answered by the other one on "what can RPGs' learn"; a lot of the issues discussed in that thread were solved in practice by wargamers quite a while back, but that historical knowledge / experience of game play /game running seems to have gotten lost over time. (I suppose I shouldn't be surprised; stopped in at the FLGS near my house, and nobody there - who were playing D&D - knew who Dave Arneson or Gary Gygax were.) It's why I was a little startled by the comment Pundit made in the "what can RPGs learn thread" that there is nothing that RPGs can learn from wargames; different play styles and different history I would venture to guess...

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

Me too, and The Ten Commandments, and Spartacus. Loved all of them, and if I see that they're on TV I still watch them, eventhough I've seen them a dozen times. These movies, and Wizard of Oz, were also the only ones I could stay up late for when I was a kid. Brings back a tonne of memories. Yul Brenner's "Pharaoh" is the quintessential Tsolyani nobleman for me.

Shemek.

Oh, yes, very true. The legions advancing in "Spartacus" were how we all thought our legions should work in Tekumel, and we actually did it in several battles we fought. When the guard changes in the entry hall of the palace, it's the Winkies at the castle all over again. "Wizard of Oz" is, in my biased opinion, a movie that all RPG players should watch as an example of how a party works when on an adventure.

And Yul Brenner as Rameses is perfect - every Vriddi I've ever met is like him! I even have the figure! Wargods of Aegyptus WGE-114, "Priest of Horus". -140, the Aten Priest, is good as well...

The first time I dictated something to a scribe, and he responded "So it is written, so it shall be!" I nearly fell out of my chair...

Originally Posted by Bren

I don't remember Jonny Quest from primetime, just from Saturday mornings. I do wish we had seen the adventures that showed up in the opening credits. They were really exciting.

Some of them were from the never-shown pilot, but a lot of them were in the one-hour episodes. The half-hour Saturday episodes were just butchered!!!

Originally Posted by Greentongue

Acting like it is a generic fantasy European setting, with the usual Kings and Knights, just without Elves and Dwarves.
=

Oh; gotcha. I was thinking of the 'euro games' genre, which was not what you meant; I've never heard this use of the word, but it does make sense.

I never saw or heard of it, back in the day; everybody seemed to go with a modified feudal Japan style, or a Meso-American style. Very, very rarely, an Ancient Egyptian style. No horses on Tekumel, so I think that these made the most sense to people. Although we do have elf and dwarf types - Pe Choi and Tinaliya. I know people who played them that way, along with Ahoggya as orc-equivalents and Shen as dragon-born or lizard-men. Hlutrgu as sahagun, of course.

Originally Posted by Greentongue

Do/did you "punish" your player's characters when the player didn't conform to your vision of the setting, or do/did you warp the world to accommodate the player's vision.

By "punish" I mean to have the world "push back" when their character didn't do what would be expected by the setting.

Considering that when EPT was first released there were few if any examples, how much "euro" is acceptable in a game played as if it was The 1st Time?
=

As Chirine said; the world is the world. You are told in advance what to watch out for. If you wander out of the foreigners' quarters and start spitting on well dressed people, you will be quickly impaled. That's not "punishing" or "pushing back," that's "consistency."

I don't play with people who want to act like utter rampaging fuckmortons.

And I don't understand your third sentence at all.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Oh; gotcha. I was thinking of the 'euro games' genre, which was not what you meant; I've never heard this use of the word, but it does make sense.

...(snipped)Although we do have elf and dwarf types - Pe Choi and Tinaliya. I know people who played them that way, along with Ahoggya as orc-equivalents and Shen as dragon-born or lizard-men. Hlutrgu as sahagun, of course.

Until this post I really did not make the above connections, and I've been gaming on Tekumel for decades! Wow, you learn something new everyday. Amazing

Shemek

Originally Posted by Bren

Hi Chrine,

The question of intersecting parties came up on another thread. I know you guys experienced some of that in Tekumel, Blackmoor, etc.

How did Phil, Dave, Gary, you, Gronan, et al handle such temporal issues?

Remember all the heckling Gary has taken over his "IT IS VITAL TO KEEP STRICT TRACK OF TIME"? This is why he made that assertion.

And if you really DID both get there at the same time, I'd get both groups together and make THEM work it out. I'm just the referee.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

If I may offer a comment / historical perspective, the question on both of the other threads seems to be that the one about "intersecting parties" is answered by the other one on "what can RPGs' learn"; a lot of the issues discussed in that thread were solved in practice by wargamers quite a while back, but that historical knowledge / experience of game play /game running seems to have gotten lost over time. (I suppose I shouldn't be surprised; stopped in at the FLGS near my house, and nobody there - who were playing D&D - knew who Dave Arneson or Gary Gygax were.) It's why I was a little startled by the comment Pundit made in the "what can RPGs learn thread" that there is nothing that RPGs can learn from wargames; different play styles and different history I would venture to guess...

As I've commented elsewhere, RPG groups are now "ONE BAND OF HEROES TRIED AND TRUE WELDED TOGETHER AT THE HIPS" rather than "A motley assortment of sellswords, treasure hunters, opportunists, minor nobility, and mad wizards who occasionally band together in an infinite variety of combinations to combine their strengths for a nut too tough to crack alone."

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

As Chirine said; the world is the world. You are told in advance what to watch out for. If you wander out of the foreigners' quarters and start spitting on well dressed people, you will be quickly impaled. That's not "punishing" or "pushing back," that's "consistency."

I don't play with people who want to act like utter rampaging fuckmortons.

And I don't understand your third sentence at all.

This. I've always explained the world to players in advance, often long before they get to the actual game session. If they are going to me miserable, I am going to be miserable, and I don't like that.

I didn't get it either; see the succeeding messages...