Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

I'm not sure what you mean. You added a hit die and noted new spells if applicable. "Leveling up" took about 30 seconds.

Or are you using "crunch" in some way other than "fluff/crunch"?

Originally Posted by Old Geezer

I'm not sure what you mean. You added a hit die and noted new spells if applicable. "Leveling up" took about 30 seconds.

Or are you using "crunch" in some way other than "fluff/crunch"?

I'm using the word in that way yes. It's just a minor thing, but I've always wondered which would be actually the better way to call it a night, but it is probably an unaswerable question as it depends on the person, system and what happened in the session.

Edit - I have nearly always given XP at the end of session and let the players do their stuff whenever they feel like doing, even between sessions if desired. I haven't used the training method since the first version of Runequest that was translated to Finnish (don't know which edition it is).

In H+I my players always want to get their XP at the end of the session, but they are usually too tired to figure out what they want to do with it until the beginning of the next session. So we handle increases before the start of the session.

As the GM, I feel almost the reverse. I'm often tired at the end of the session and would rather wait to give out XP (which feels like work for me as the GM) or if I am giving out XP, I'd rather figure out what to do with the XP right away so I know what they have improved before the next session.

Originally Posted by Bren

Certainly not any weirder than the Mars books of Burroughs, Tharks, air plants, flying battle ships, and the beautiful Deja Thoris laying an egg for her and John Carter's child.

I wonder how much of an influence the Ace reprints and the Science Fiction Book Club had on extending the knowledge and influence of the earlier swords and planets and space opera fiction of the 20s, 30s, and 40s? I wonder if there is anything like that today for young people?

Agreed; in the context of what Phil had been reading, there's nothing 'odd' abut Tekumel. However, in the context of the popular fantasy stuff that was in vogue in the 1970s, it's very weird. Things got a little more broadly based with the Frazetta covers for the Conan books, but elves and hobbits 'sold' a lot more easily then strongly-muscled anti-heroes any day. By the time Phil got around to writing EPT, ERB was pretty much a forgotten author - as were many of his favorites, like A. E. Merrit.

I think Ace and later DAW had a huge effect in popularizing the genre, but it didn't last long. My kids - the younger college-age members of my game group - were astounded and enchanted when I introduced them to the pleasures of books; all they'd known up to the time that they started playing with me had been Wiki articles. There is a very 'short take' focus on things with the children of the digital age, with an emphasis on doing everything on-screen; they do not have the time to sit down and read one of those book thingies. Just my own xp, of course; it may very well be different elsewhere...

Originally Posted by Moracai

Thank you kindly chirine!

The answers to my questions were very helpful and not confusing at all

One thing sprang to mind though. When you mention that you always leveled after a training period, one person quite recently told me that he read somewhere (as you see this is all umphteenth hand hearsay) that it was Gary who decided at some point that "fuck this, you can level when you get the XP". In his rules what I've read it was always stated that you need to level up in a town.

Can you confirm or debunk any of this?

Now I'll go read all the posts that have come after that your particular comment...

Edit - oh, oh, oh. That bit about stability/change being changed to good/evil bit was absolutely wonderful

You're welcome!

Hm. Never saw the 'level up in town' thing. It was a custom in the games I played in, as all the good stuff you might have wanted was back in civilization, but I don't recall that there was a specific rule about it with either Dave or Gary. Phil really didn't do anything like it, either; we pretty much did what we needed to do, when and where we needed to do it.

Yep, Gary did ask Phil to simplify few things for players...

Originally Posted by Old Geezer

OD&D, the three little brown books in the woodgrain box, says nothing about "where you level up." I'm not familiar with any later versions of the rules.

In actual play, you got XP when the adventure was over. Since Gary always made sure that a night of playing ended with everybody in some sort of safe haven... town, inn, castle, what have you... we essentially got XP at the end of the night, and if you leveled, you leveled there and then.

I'm not sure where "need to level up in a town" came from, but as I said I have no familiarity with anything after the first printing of OD&D.

Agreed. I don't recall we ever did this, but then all I ever played was the same edition you did.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

My kids - the younger college-age members of my game group - were astounded and enchanted when I introduced them to the pleasures of books; all they'd known up to the time that they started playing with me had been Wiki articles. There is a very 'short take' focus on things with the children of the digital age, with an emphasis on doing everything on-screen; they do not have the time to sit down and read one of those book thingies. Just my own xp, of course; it may very well be different elsewhere...

Mostly I play with old geezers like myself or the rare youngster who has been exposed to the works of dead authors. It does seem like the major influence on a lot of newer gamers comes from anime, comics, and CRPGs. Undoubtedly that influences what they think of or find interesting in their gaming.

Re: leveling up. The way we played way back in the day it was very rare for anyone to level up except after multiple sessions.* Since most dungeon exploration tended to end up back in town leveling de facto occurred in town, though it was not a de jure requirement.

* The exception would be a low level PC tagging along with a group of higher level PCs. That sort of coattail riding did occur (sometimes) and that was the only way PCs leveled really fast.

Originally Posted by Moracai

Two more.

You say that your character was very well aware that Tekumel was in a dimension bubble and all the magicy stuff happening was actually channeling power to these archaic things. But how aware of that fact was the laymen people on average?


Second one is about the interconsistency of things in this world. I have full confidence that there is, but again reading from a review, one guy wrote about a field of towers, or some such. Where there were ancient rocket propelled grenades, or rockets, I forget which (These types of forums RPG is the only thing that cannot be abbreviated to a flying explody thingy), and complained how they would have been functioning after tens of thousands of years.

I kinda have the answer already (it's magic Well ancient tech is beyond our comprehension), but did you personally ever had moments of *what* that does not make any sense to me?

First, we were all *educated* people; we all had very good educations through our temples and positions, and so we 'knew' things right off the mark. Phil didn't worry about this in the game - he assumed that we'd pick this stuff up as we got our education. 'Ordinary' 'lay people', on the other hand, didn't know and didn't care as it was completely outside their lives. They were generally much more interested in the daily and seasonal round of their lives, and we learned not to interfere with that very quickly.

"Well, yes, Lord. that' a really nice Eye thing you have there. Won't get the crops in the ground, though."

Secondly, the time spans in Tekumel are and have always been a sticking point for gamers. Most gamers, in my personal experience, have no sense of history or of the passage of time. Everything is 'right now'. Back when Phil was in F/SF fandom, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, 'eternal engines' and such were very common. In a modern sense, this technology is both sentient and self-repairing - we had all sorts of run ins with the self-aware machines that run the south polar station, for example.

Two samples: Phil once regaled us with his 'dungeon crawl' in real life, where he spent a day wandering through the Red Fort in Dehli. He got lost in all the casemates and buried chambers, and kept tripping over people's trash and abandoned stuff - from the 1700s! This stuff had been dropped and left behind literally two centuries before he's stumbled across it, and it looked like it had just been left there a moment ago. Phil always kept that with him, and passed it along to us.

Another example is that Phil created Tekumel before DNA had been discovered. The Lords of Humanspace didn't use DNA to create their life forms; instead they bred them or cooked them in in the 'life vats' so familiar to readers of pulp fiction. The tall and powerful Nylss warriors, for instance, are the descendants of the original garrison of Space Marines of Tekumel; the Nom are another variety of humans that were bred to be the deckhands of the starships.

The Plain of Towers is the ancient landing field where a number of starships are still sitting. Some still work, as they do have self-repair capability - ask Old Geezer about the trash collector machines, or my players about the matter-converters that the trash collectors 'feed'. Nobody knows how this stuff works; all we know is that sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. If we're really, really lucky, we can sometimes meet up with the ancient guardians of these technological items, and get some advice on what not to do.

Originally Posted by Moracai

So in essence OD&D sessions ended with crunch, but Tekumel sessions began with crunch?

Edit - if someone leveled that is.

We did our number crunching in Phil's games as needed, before/during/after game sessions.

Originally Posted by Moracai

OK, one more then I'll call it a night.

Chirine, do you speak Tsoylani?

Yes, but not fluently. I am a much better scribe then I am a linguist; one of the very best compliments I ever got from Phil was after he'd looked over a Tsolyani document I'd written, and then he said to Dave Arneson:

"Chirine has a fine scribal hand."

This, from the guy who'd created the language. He told people that I had better 'penmanship' then he did in Tsolyani, and that may have been true; I used to do up documents as we needed them in the game, and it always seemed to amuse him. His 'cursive' approach to writing Tsolyani was always faster then my 'printing' approach, but my documents usually looked better. Now, when Phil really got going, his Tsolyani documents were exquisite!

We didn't need to do this as a game mechanic, I should add. We just did it for the fun of it, like our costumes, as part of the 'immersion' we had in the game. I still do it, and so do my players - they tend to pass 'secret messages' around in various languages, just to confuse me. We've done citizenship papers, writs, maps, and all sorts of 'props' for our game play; it's just part of the fun, for us.