Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

There's an old theater saying "Perfection is the enemy of good enough", and that's what I do in my own campaign.

Even though it took me years to learn that, I'm grateful to you for exposing me to theater people enough for it to sink in. Painting buckles on the greaves of 25mm figures is all well and good, but if they can't be seen without a magnifier I need to ask myself why I'm doing it and if it's the most effective use of ever-scarcer time.

Having a wife with a BA in theater has been good for my model railroading, too.

I've taken the theater analogy a step further in gaming. You know how sometimes there's a central action, and one player will wander off and start a conversation with a random NPC? I ask the PC why they're doing that. If they have a plan, I'll help. But if they're just bored and poking at the edge of the stage flat, the conversation goes more like this:

PC: Hi, I'm (character name.)
NPC: I'm Bob.
PC: What brings you here?
NPC: A day at scale and a catered lunch, luv.
PC: What are you doing?
NPC: The director said "go get a costume and stand over there and look like a soldier," so that's what I'm doing.

Et cetera.

Originally Posted by Bren

Regarding the Professor's style of play changing a bit over time, it would be more surprising if it never changed one bit over 20+ years of play.

Yep. Phil was pretty consistent, once he felt confident; the Tekumel we lived in endured for a decade of game play. Phil was never worried about the world-setting; he was not an RPG gamer - very few of us were, back then - and was terrified that gamers would laugh at him for not getting the game 'right'. Once he realized that we, both as a group and as individuals, didn't really care about game mechanics or rules per se - heresy, I know! - he was a much happier GM.

Originally Posted by AsenRG

+1, and I'm not surprised at him getting the hang of it in 4 years, roughly.

Agreed. It took a while, and we had to hold his hand a bit, but it all came together after a while. And lasted for a long time, I'm happy to say.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

...he was not an RPG gamer - very few of us were, back then - and was terrified that gamers would laugh at him for not getting the game 'right'. Once he realized that we, both as a group and as individuals, didn't really care about game mechanics or rules per se - heresy, I know! - he was a much happier GM.

One of my favorite GMs doesn't much care about the game mechanics. Me, I like some mechanics. In large part so that the world maintains consistency.

In popular media you often see inconsistent threat and power levels. The thing that was a threat last week or at the start of the episode ends up easy to defeat at the end of the episode even though little has changed in the intervening 45 minutes of show. Too much of that and I stop watching. Too much of that in an RPG and I no longer want to make sense of the world since it clearly doesn't really make sense. It just makes drama. Its probably one of many reasons why drama driven mechanics like Fate sound just awful to me.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Yep. Phil was pretty consistent, once he felt confident; the Tekumel we lived in endured for a decade of game play. Phil was never worried about the world-setting; he was not an RPG gamer - very few of us were, back then - and was terrified that gamers would laugh at him for not getting the game 'right'. Once he realized that we, both as a group and as individuals, didn't really care about game mechanics or rules per se - heresy, I know! - he was a much happier GM.

In retrospect, I think part of it was the whole vibe of the 1975-1985 era. This crappily produced dumb little game made bucketloads of money, and a LOT of us were convinced that we could make a BETTER game and make even MORE bucketloads of money.

What we didn't realize back then was that sometimes, lightning strikes. Just like George Lucas' silly little space movie made buckets of money, D&D just happened to hit the right nerve at the right time. Much like Star Wars it really was a one-time phenomenon.

But we didn't know that back then, and everybody wanted to write "the BETTER D&D that will make all that money."

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Even though it took me years to learn that, I'm grateful to you for exposing me to theater people enough for it to sink in. Painting buckles on the greaves of 25mm figures is all well and good, but if they can't be seen without a magnifier I need to ask myself why I'm doing it and if it's the most effective use of ever-scarcer time.

Having a wife with a BA in theater has been good for my model railroading, too.

I've taken the theater analogy a step further in gaming. You know how sometimes there's a central action, and one player will wander off and start a conversation with a random NPC? I ask the PC why they're doing that. If they have a plan, I'll help. But if they're just bored and poking at the edge of the stage flat, the conversation goes more like this:

PC: Hi, I'm (character name.)
NPC: I'm Bob.
PC: What brings you here?
NPC: A day at scale and a catered lunch, luv.
PC: What are you doing?
NPC: The director said "go get a costume and stand over there and look like a soldier," so that's what I'm doing.

Et cetera.

And there we are. One of the reasons that I am so hated in some 'serious gaming' circles is that I approach my games - of all genres - as little 'mini theatrical productions'. I do the very best I can, within the budget constraints I have to work with, to put on the very best 'show' that I can. See also my videos and photos, especially from Gary Con. I put in the details where they are needed for the players, and keep the rest of the 'props', 'scenery', and 'extras' off out of their way. For me, it's all about game play - the 'audience experience', if you will, continuing the theater analogy.

"I've got some dice!"
"Dad's got a table!!"
"Let's put on a game!!!"



I find it to be a lot of fun, and so do players in my games, but it seems to make some folks' pee-pees fall off...

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

But we didn't know that back then, and everybody wanted to write "the BETTER D&D that will make all that money."

Interesting. I never thought of the motivation for improved design as financial.

I remember a phase where I and everyone I knew who was interested in systems searched for or tried to create a "perfect" system. I became a lot more satisfied with systems in the 1980s when I realized that the quest for a perfect system was provably impossible. (Thanks Kurt Gödel!)

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

...but it seems to make some folks' pee-pees fall off.

Well that's never a good thing.

Originally Posted by Bren

Well that's never a good thing.

Much like a failed morale check, if it happens to you it's an atrocity, if it happens to somebody else, it's frickin' hilarious.

Originally Posted by Bren

Interesting. I never thought of the motivation for improved design as financial.

It's really hard to describe that era. D&D just fucking exploded. At Origins in 76 the D&D tournament had 250 people, and that was just the beginning of the phenomenon; over the next five years it only got bigger.

It's the same phenomenon you see in fantasy & sf books... "Hell, ** I ** can do better than THIS piece of shit, and it got published!"