Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

The thing is solid gold, with bronze, copper, silver, and enameled inlay. Weighs a ton when worn, and makes a good breastplate.

Holy chlen crap that is one big honking medal. I was expecting the Glorious General wore it on his chest, not that it was as big as his chest. I retract my quibble about polishing.

I like the picture. Reminds me of the artwork I commissioned for our Star Wars games and a few of the RPG props I've created in the past. (Nothing quite as elaborate as you guys though.)

Originally Posted by AsenRG

BTW, Gronan, wasn't "playing fair" assumed in those early days in the 70ies? Or is Chirine an outlier by always playing fair?

That was the expectation and assumption in our 1970s era groups. It's why we sometimes called the DM the Referee.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

"Changing the location" is, at least to me cheating of a sort. It's my job as your GM to plan my strategy just as carefully as you plan yours - we're trying to outwit each other, more then anything else. I have always told my players that "the rules are fixed and immutable; I will not change them just to get my own way." To me, that's being dishonest with my players, and with myself.

I get what you are saying. Though I backed off trying to outwit the players some decades ago after killing way too many PCs. Now I play the NPCs based on their personality and stats. The clever, tactically minded NPCs are tough to outwit, the dumb or tactically poor NPCs are…well they are like dumb and tactically idiotic people in history. Pretty easy to outwit. I enjoy playing the differences and the players enjoy getting to be smarter than some of the NPCs so everybody is happy.

Changing location if not done to beat the players doesn’t quite strike me as cheating. To me it comes across as laziness on my part as the GM. It is also aesthetically distasteful to me as a style of play. I enjoy the players making choices I didn’t anticipate. If I didn’t, I’d just go play solitaire.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

I find this discussion fascinating. I have been accused by some players of running a 'railroady' campaign because I have this over-arching 'meta game' running in the background. I have been told by these folks that unless I have something called 'complete player agency', they will not play in my games. I will confess to being very confused by this, as in both Phil's and my games I allow the players to do literally anything they want. I do not 'script' adventures; I let them grow organically from the players' actions and how these affect their interactions with the world-setting. This seems to be a bizarre notion, in some places.

Near as I can tell the objections are not about player agency, they are about PC power. Some people have a notion that the PCs should be the most important or powerful characters in the setting and that the game revolves solely around the PCs. (I’m guessing you’ll have a hard time grokking this as well because it is the antithesis of the way you played and run Tekumel.

I also had to chuckle to myself as I am running Honor+Intrigue in 1624 France. Absent almost inconceivably massive player based activity, the French are going to lay siege to La Rochelle in three years. Plot doesn’t get much more meta than playing through real history. The players have agency. They chose their patrons from the people they helped or impressed and who then offered them positions. Those choices weren’t up to me as the GM. They decide whether they want to follow their orders and succeed at their missions or desert and they decide whether to betray their current patron to some possibly more important future patron. And when I planned for them to climb up the donjon tower to free a prisoner from the dungeon inside, they decided to ask – “So where do they hold the hangings? Are they in town or out at the prison?” And then change from breaking the prisoner out of prison to freeing the prisoner on the way to the hanging. Which was a much easier task actually and one that for some reason I had not anticipated. To me that is agency.

For Phil, Tekumel was a living, breathing thing that kept right on going no matter what we might or might do in the game sessions. Every month, he'd sit down with his copy of Tony Bath's book, and roll for what was happening in the world of his 1,800 NPCs. We'd then get to hear about their adventures through the marketplace rumors, dispatches, and other 'media' at our disposal. I do the same thing; my campaign keeps rolling right along, and my players drop in and out as they are able to.

Now that is an impressive amount of background activity going on and it’s way more NPCs than the sometimes ludicrous number I have in my H+I game. Kudos to both of you.

Originally Posted by Greentongue

In the EPT rules there is a section on intelligent weapons.
(I gather this was an Arneson innovation that was included.)
How frequent were these found and what impact did they have?

For that matter, how much "special loot" was normal to be found in your early adventures?
=

Yeah, this was a section that Phil tossed in for Dave; Gary got some pet sections, too.

They were very, very, very rare in Phil's campaign. We got exactly one, in over a decade of gaming. It was the intelligent sword that Vrisa got, before we marched off to the Northwest Frontier; we never did figure out if the damn thing was an AI or an imprisoned demon. The former was favored as a theory, but nobody wanted to get close to the thing to find out. It bonded with her, she bonded with it, and we all avoided it like the plague, as it did have a mind of it's own. It was made of the ceramet material of the ancients, and had a energy field as an edge; it would cut through just about anything, and with Kathy's close-to-max S&G stats it made her a real threat to anything that annoyed us. Saved my bacon a few times, too.

We didn't see a lot of 'special loot', ever. Yes, there was some pretty cool stuff, but Phil tended not to hand out the goodies unless you really ran some pretty severe risks. I got a +4 +5 mace off some dead Bednjallan guy, which I still keep around for unwelcome guests, but I had to kill a heap of nasty critters to get it. It was one of the few game sessions where I used all of my spells, as there was a heap of killing that needed to be done.

Wholesale slaughter, that's me!

Originally Posted by Bren

Holy chlen crap that is one big honking medal. I was expecting the Glorious General wore it on his chest, not that it was as big as his chest. I retract my quibble about polishing.

I like the picture. Reminds me of the artwork I commissioned for our Star Wars games and a few of the RPG props I've created in the past. (Nothing quite as elaborate as you guys though.)

That was the expectation and assumption in our 1970s era groups. It's why we sometimes called the DM the Referee.

I get what you are saying. Though I backed off trying to outwit the players some decades ago after killing way too many PCs. Now I play the NPCs based on their personality and stats. The clever, tactically minded NPCs are tough to outwit, the dumb or tactically poor NPCs are�well they are like dumb and tactically idiotic people in history. Pretty easy to outwit. I enjoy playing the differences and the players enjoy getting to be smarter than some of the NPCs so everybody is happy.

Changing location if not done to beat the players doesn�t quite strike me as cheating. To me it comes across as laziness on my part as the GM. It is also aesthetically distasteful to me as a style of play. I enjoy the players making choices I didn�t anticipate. If I didn�t, I�d just go play solitaire.

Near as I can tell the objections are not about player agency, they are about PC power. Some people have a notion that the PCs should be the most important or powerful characters in the setting and that the game revolves solely around the PCs. (I�m guessing you�ll have a hard time grokking this as well because it is the antithesis of the way you played and run Tekumel.

I also had to chuckle to myself as I am running Honor+Intrigue in 1624 France. Absent almost inconceivably massive player based activity, the French are going to lay siege to La Rochelle in three years. Plot doesn�t get much more meta than playing through real history. The players have agency. They chose their patrons from the people they helped or impressed and who then offered them positions. Those choices weren�t up to me as the GM. They decide whether they want to follow their orders and succeed at their missions or desert and they decide whether to betray their current patron to some possibly more important future patron. And when I planned for them to climb up the donjon tower to free a prisoner from the dungeon inside, they decided to ask � �So where do they hold the hangings? Are they in town or out at the prison?� And then change from breaking the prisoner out of prison to freeing the prisoner on the way to the hanging. Which was a much easier task actually and one that for some reason I had not anticipated. To me that is agency.

Now that is an impressive amount of background activity going on and it�s way more NPCs than the sometimes ludicrous number I have in my H+I game. Kudos to both of you.

Heh! Thought you might think so...

The art is a redraw I did from Phil's original that he did for the Glorious General - the GG asked Phil what the thing looked liked, ans phil wihipped this off for him.

I like and agree with your points about 'agency'. Very good, and very well put.

Yeah, Phil really put a lot of work into his 'meta-game', but it made a real difference in how the place felt. Once you set the thing in motion, it runs itself; Dave Arneson created a 'sub-routine' for this, with sea captains and their ships moving about between ports; very easy to use, and I have a lot fo fun with it. 'Course, I made models of all the ships, too...

I love reading this thread!

Let me ask you a question, and please keep in mind this is coming from someone who's not very well-versed in T�kumel lore:

What's the relationship between Church (Churches? Cults? Sects?) and State?

I know about the very basics about the Gods of Stability and Change, but how does all that exist on an institutional level? Is there a "Unified" Church which comprises all worship in a single social institution? Are the churches/cults of the various gods independent of each other and sometime even hostile? To what extent is insitutionalised (or private) religion a part of the political machine? Is religion subservient to the Imperium in all ways, or do they lie outside secular jurisdiction in some way? Could a god's church, or a god's priest, or a god him/herself prosecute the Emperor or a high-ranking state official for violating religious tenets?

I would be grateful for any details you fine gentlemen would care to share.

Originally Posted by AsenRG

The GM is Referee in Traveler as well. I'd say it was expected in early gaming styles. (Which reminds me of the "somewhere along the path something went wrong" t-shirts).

It's a matter of taste. Some people like blueberry or elderberry flavored beer. Some like story games.

That would make sense for a culture that isn't anywhere near as individually focused as are most modern industrialized societies.

The attitude of being part of a group and really seeing and believing that the group is more important then the individual is something I find difficult to grasp emotionally. Intellectually I know that was the case in many socieities, but personally I just don't feel it the way I expect the vast majority of people in those cultures felt it.