Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

This was before your medal; they were trying out Gary Rudolph's WRG 6th modifications.

Ah.

As far as the nitpicking, the other Phil Barker from England visited the Little Tin once, and then went to Winnipeg. He said in Winnipeg "those chaps in Minneapolis would rather argue than play the game."

And yeah, Gary was a rules lawyer's rules lawyer.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Ah.

As far as the nitpicking, the other Phil Barker from England visited the Little Tin once, and then went to Winnipeg. He said in Winnipeg "those chaps in Minneapolis would rather argue than play the game."

And yeah, Gary was a rules lawyer's rules lawyer.

What still strikes me, even after all these years, is that we didn't have this kind of rules-lawyering either at CSA meetings or on Thursday night - or in any of our games, come to think of it; while games at the Fifth Precinct or the Little Tin were always the scene of such.

Remember the night we tried to play his "Missum" out at Phil's? His combat resolution table had results out to two decimal places, so you had to keep track of percentages of a figure for casualties, and he had individual stats for the individual cohorts in a legion. You had to do twenty die rolls for your twenty cohorts to attack, and the other side had to make as many dies rolls to defend themselves. Net result was that we moved into combat on turn one, and then spent the next four hours watching the author of the game roll dice, punch numbers into a calculator, take notes, and mumble arcane incantations to himself. Eventually, Phil told me to put all the figures away and lock the place up as he was going upstairs to bed. Never played "Missum" out at Phil's again. Ever.

Geez, I'd forgotten about that.

More than ever I appreciate Gary Gygax's maxim that "First and foremost, it is a GAME."

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Going to be a very busy weekend; mounted infantry and light cavalry vs. player-characters this afternoon, and ships of the line tomorrow.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Just now back in - 1145 local time - from a wonderful day. The short form is that I won, they won, and nobody got hurt; they did learn many, many valuable lessons about how to think tactically, how to manages large groups of PCs and NPCs, and - most importantly - to ask the vital question of "what do those people over there have in mind?"

I had a really wonderful time; I did a lot of teaching, both about mounted tactics - putting out vedettes, and protecting your baggage; think Arsuf, here - and telling stories about how we gamed all those years ago at Coffmann as learning aids for the players. What I loved to see the most was the looks of comprehension on people's faces as they were able to apply the lessons I was teaching them to their situation - these are very quick, very clever, and very smart people, and I think they did a wonderful job of dealing with the threat I was posing them.

A number of very valuable lessons were learned, and they got an insight into how we managed to survive the best that Phil (and Dave, and Gary) could throw at us. It was, in short, as good a game session as the one we had at Gary Con, last year...

Glad to hear the weekend was fun for you, Uncle! Here, it is all about swords, history, glory, learning and getting enough sleep.
I'm just glad I skipped the stomach bug some people got, or it would have been a bit too much like your campaigns, but in real life.
Hope your lessonsshall be put to good use soon!

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Damn straight. The really powerful ones are almost undistinguishable from living humans except for their dryness and grey skin tone, and the bastards keep the skills they had in life.

Try fighting somebody who's had 300 years to practice Arruche.

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

Exactly. This is why I have always played the "greater" undead as super tough PC's, and why my players tend to give such creatures a very, very wide berth. 300 years of Arruche is bad enough, but what about 300 years of spell casting experience and research?

Shemek

OK, how do you beat someone who has had 300 years of practice?
Beating the 300 years sorcerer should be easy. The law of averagesbeing the way it is, in 300 years he's bound to botch a ritual and be destroyed!

Originally Posted by AsenRG

OK, how do you beat someone who has had 300 years of practice?

The way you should try to defeat anybody else, really. Preparation, surprise, overwhelming force locally applied, and never giving the sucker an even break.

Originally Posted by Bren

The way you should try to defeat anybody else, really. Preparation, surprise, overwhelming force locally applied, and never giving the sucker an even break.

Other than that.

Originally Posted by AsenRG

Glad

1. OK, how do you beat someone who has had 300 years of practice?
2. Beating the 300 years sorcerer should be easy. The law of averagesbeing the way it is, in 300 years he's bound to botch a ritual and be destroyed!

1. Very deliberately and methodically, preferably with a mace, but barring that a hefty club should do the trick.
2. You hope!

Shemek.

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

1. Very deliberately and methodically, preferably with a mace, but barring that a hefty club should do the trick.
2. You hope!

Shemek.

1. That works.
2. No, I count on statistics! It's not just hoping if you can attach a more-than-two-syllables word to it!

I hope so, too. The biggest lesson they learned was to ask the question "What do these people want?"

I sat there at the table for some three hours, watching some half-dozen players trying to organize some forty-five PCs and NPCs into some semblance of a marching order. The discussion was intelligent and very good, and was kinda going in circles, and I finally simply asked the GM is I could act as the party's tactical advisor. One player, who was convinced that I was out to kill hem all, asked why I would give them my best advice, and I made the point about being intellectually honest in games - what they were talking about was something that their PCs would know, so I would be happy to simply stipulate it as a given.

What was mesmerizing them was that that about a third of their force was injured or wounded, and effectively non-combatants. They also had two people mounted on oxen, which caused me to simply stare in astonishment; oxen are both slow and hard to care for, and they should have had a barbeque. So anyway, I set them up with a van (lights), a center for a reserve (heavies and mediums), the main body of 'baggage' and then two flanking rear guards (lights) to cover the baggage. All very simple cavalry tactics when moving in a steppe, like we were; it's open and flat, so I did what several historical commanders actually did. All through this, as it was getting to be dawn local time, my lights continued to make a lot of noise and demonstrations off at the edge of their vision. I'd already pre-set my battle plan, so all the GM had to do was set the thing in motion - I would be functioning as a dice tower, more then anything else.

My giving them my best advice seemed to precipitate a discussion about negotiation; the biggest issue seemed to be that the players assumed that all my bandits were out to do was kill them off - which, you'll remember, was what they did to my people. After some time spent by my continually suggesting (with the GM's permission, of course) that they needed to think outside the box, they finally sent out a messenger to talk to us. I was delighted - after we came to a nicely profitable agreement for me and the lads, I let them go on their way...

And then pointed out that what I was doing was what Sir John Hawkwood and his White Company, or any body of Cossacks, or what Saladin would have done - avoided a pitched battle with a heavier force, which would have gotten a lot of my people killed and wounded, and thus been very counter-productive and unprofitable for the workings of the firm. Don Corleone made did exactly what I had told them I would do, and made them a very attractive offer that was in both of our best interests. I got to make all sorts of historical references, and pointed them in the direction of all the on-line reprints of all of the manuals that I had read over the years - a Victorian cavalry officer would have instantly recognized what I was doing, and so would have Richard I (the Arsuf reference).

"Duffer's Drift" was invoked, too.

Did I win? I thought so; none of my people got hurt, they all got some nice money, and the day went well for our little business enterprise. It was wonderfully fun, I thought.