Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Yes, I'm sorry - I should have been more clear!

I was the Deputy Governor of the province at the time, and so had a lot of say in the process. I did clear everything with my Governor, of course, who thought that the idea of arresting the noble Lady was about as dumb an idea as you can get. We were also on campaign with our little army, demonstrating the benefits of civilization to the locals, which also meant that we had a lot of leeway in the process.

Very interesting comment on your players! Can you tell me more?

Deputy Governor office makes it all different, doesn't it?
I was assuming a low-level official, whose only options would be to destroy the document or follow it.


And in what concerns my players, I must preface that with an explanation. At least some of them are exactly those that have as major influence anime, comics, and CRPGs. At least some of them, often the same people, also recognize older SF works if I throw a reference.
Still, when some of them were starting, their major influence was CRPGs, including MMORPGs. Metagaming was rampant, communicating with NPCs wasn't the easiest task.
It was made easier by the fact that I had a whole group like that, with only a couple more experienced players, including my wife and myself. They didn't feel like someone was doing much better, and had an example.
Still, I had to make them stop metagaming (which would have been fine if we were playing the kind of game where you have author's view over the events... but we were playing a variation of the One-Roll Engine, and that's a traditional game).
So, what did I do? I told them the truth.
"You can meta-game or not. I'm going to act like you're not, even if you tell me otherwise. The trick is, my NPCs react to what you were doing 0 you've noticed it already - and are never going to get the message that you "just metagamed". As far as they're concerned, you screw them over to protect the interests of some dubious types...meaning that you're not to be trusted and they can screw you back even if they were indebted to you before. Or you're just behaving strangely for no obvious reasons, meaning you're not to be trusted. In short, your best option is to treat the world as a real, living, breathing world, consisting of living, breathing characters...because I'm doing my best to ensure it's true, and you'll need lots of time before you can even spot my mistakes.
Or you can choose to disregard this warning, and metagame to your heart's content. Like the warning that characters can die or be maimed, and there's no resurrection spells, while healing them back is a one-off deal... it's a warning you'll only get once."
Then I went and did what I warned them about. "Just play the NPCs" is the summary of my style of GMing anyway (which I call Lazy GMing). I couldn't run it otherwise even if I wanted - not without switching my GMing style mid-campaign, which I'm loathe to do.
And then, of course, it was rampant metagaming time. Then they noticed the results were exactly as I told them.
The rest was just playing the game, as they say.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Well, I guess you could have called it that. We played the same player-characters for over a dozen years, 'growing' them from your basic entry-level people to pretty high ranking ones in that time. Some also 'went up in level', as they invested time in the various temple schools to learn new skills - which was how we dealt with people having to drop in and out of the campaign over time.

By the middle 1980s, we were well into what I think people refer to as 'the domain game' as we tried to manage the affairs of the province that I was assigned to. Phil had handed out fiefs to two players back at the beginning of the campaign in 1974, but it just didn't work out - the players involved were just too 'footloose' to stay and manage the fiefs. I will freely admit that I loved the challenge of running the government; Phil was worried that we would not have enough to do, but I used to send out the other players on 'missions' and 'quests' that were generated by the problems we faced in governing a frontier province.

Over the years, we played against the backdrop of a dozen major story arcs, and we heard about them through the usual rumors in the market place - Phil would then add our adventures into his novels, as rumors that the characters in his books would hear from their sources...

It was all great fun - we had immense amounts of what I think is called 'immersion', these days, and being in the main all F/SF fans we did a lot of 'non-gamer' things like artwork and the costumes our characters would have worn.

I don't think one could run a campaign like that, any more. My perception is that people don't have the time to devote to something like that, and I get the impression that there's a desire for 'rules turnover' amongst players these days.

I've run things that were quite similar. Not on the same scale, probably, but similar.
I think I'm going to run my next campaign in this style and see how long I can make it last. So no, I doubt it can't be done. You just need to pick the right people, and teach them that no, the NPCs actually have characters, and they're organised in a society - unlike having pixels on a screen in a MMORPG and "areas closest to the spawning grounds for XP-bringing monsters".

Well, if I run it over 5 years, I don't promise we'd be using the same system as the one we began with. But even if we change them, we're just going to "translate" the PCs and carry on, so does it even matter?

Originally Posted by Bren

We still play the long game. We still play the Call of Cthulhu characters we started in the 1980s and the Star Wars characters we started in the 1990s. Our current game of Honor+Intrigue has run 165 sessions with each PC having run on between 1 and 137 sessions.

But judging by what I read online there are a lot of folks who don't play long campaigns. I suspect that people who play short campaigns or who switch systems a lot are more likely to post online than folks like you or me.

There are people that don't play long campaigns. There are those that do. There are those that alternate between years-long and one-shots. We actually put long campaigns on hold sometimes in order to try a one-shot or two, or three.
Then we continue. It's not about "modern people", it's about us today having much more choice. Of course we want to sample everything.
Doesn't mean we can't also stay with one setting for years.

Originally Posted by Old Geezer

I would like to add my voice to those asking Chirine to stick around.

+1 to that.

Why is it, you suppose, that the "Free Kriegspiel" philosophy has gone out of favor? I personally think the demographic shift in the early 80s to a much younger target audience was a big part of it. Take a bunch of 13 year old boys, give one of them some vestigial authority, remove adult supervision, and voila, Lord of the Flies. Hence the drive for "more concrete rules to protect players from the arbitrary whims of referees."

Plus, a lot of people seem to love to hang on to old resentments. I've seen forum posts complaining about things that happened in games back in the 90s. So the Lord of the Flies aspect is never forgiven or forgotten.

I call that phenomenon "bad GMs make players give up on RPGs", and it was one of the first issues I set on solving once I decided to expand the pool of RPG players in my city.
So yeah, I think there's something to it. I can definitely point to another point of view, though.
My brainpower, albeit immense*, is in the end more or less a finite number. I can devote it to resolving everything...or I can use a proto-wargame/boardgame for the domain stuff, Stress Meters for the reactions of NPCs and PCs alike under stress, and a combat system in case of, well, combat. Possibly a different system for spellcasting and research, too. (And of course, I can always choose not to bother, if the result is obvious). All of this would be almost the opposite of Frei Kriegspiel, right?
Still, if I do that, then I can get to decide just on the consequences of whatever results the systems outputted. You routed the army nobody expected you to even slow down? Well, I've already got the consequences ready. Let's continue with the session!


*Every single one of us has immense brainpower, the brain is a supercomputer. That's besides the point, even supecomputers are limited in the end.

Originally Posted by Moracai

Oh, not a question, but an observation. It must be because of a system and marketing thing that the gameplay has diverged from long term having fun to "must-collect-all-the-levels". My first introduction to RPGs was through the ever-popular Red-Box. By reading it here in Finland, where we didn't have any DMs then, the impression I got was vastly different from your and OGs experiences.

This must have been the same world-over. Consequently when people started creating their own games, their style differed very much from the intended.

My experience from Bulgaria confirms that your observation is valid. And I know how the first two RPGs in Bulgaria have been developed, although I wasn't part of it.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Let's hear from my leaden alter ego, eh?

"Well, let's see; I should mention at the start that I am a Tenth Circle Military Sorcerer of the Temple of Vimuhla, Lord of Flame and War. I was rolled up in early 1976, using EPT as the rules. In EPT, I am off the charts as these only go to Ninth Circle - I got the impression that the Professor didn't expect any of us to live long enough to go any higher."

"I hate to be the one to have to say this, but there is none of what you'd call 'magic' on Tekumel. There is no divine or arcane magic; it's all technology of the Ancients. When I 'cast a spell', I reach through the Skin of Reality to tap the energies of the Planes Beyond; what I do with my vocables and gestures, glyphs and incense, etc., or with my concentrations is to replicate the 'circuit boards' of the Ancient technology that is used in devices like the Eyes or the tubeway cars."

"Likewise, 'summoning a demon' is nothing like what the mages of your world try to do; in my world, I reach through the Planes of Reality to contact other beings, and bring them to my bubble universe to get something done. I myself, for example, regularly got 'summoned as a demon' to the odd world of Blackmoor by the Elven mages I knew in order to get things done for them. (I wish they'd called first; I was in the bathtub.)"

"When I use my skills, I serve as the 'software' / 'hardware' / 'wetware' for using the energies I draw upon. Eyes do the very same thing, but in a much more handy form for non-priests."

I think my players would love that.
But does that mean that carefully disassembling an Eye can teach you more magic?
(I'm asking because I'm thinking of a game that does more or less exactly this - Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk)!

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Right, then. I'll let you in on one of The Big Secrets Of The Game Industry: Tekumel, at least as practiced by one Firu ba Yeker / M. A. R. Barker, is not a 'fantasy role-playing game'. It's a game setting in a 'Sword and Planet Romance' universe, and the technology is what is doing all the work. No divine (the 'gods' are simply more advanced beings then we are), no arcane, no Vancian magic - it's all Sir Arthur's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The Lords of Humanspace were absolute masters of energy and matter, and could control anything.

The 'magic' description in EPT came from Gary, who felt that the gamers of the time (1975) would not be able to deal with a 'pure' SF RPG; he felt that calling it 'magic' would make it more accessible to the gamer audience. In effect, EPT paved the way for Metamorphosis Alpha at TSR. (Likewise, Gary asked that the Stability/Change thing be changed to Good/Evil, as he thought that the former was going to be too subtle for gamers to handle.)

When technic civilization on Tekumel collapsed, the various sages figured out ways to continue to tap other-planar energy through rituals and such; simpler 'spells' are those called 'psychic', and can be done by simply thinking about them; more elaborate ones are 'ritual', because you need to have 'ingredients' to make them work.

As a military sorcerer, I was unique amongst Phil's players - I have a very limited spell corpora. I do not have many of the usual spells that most players have. On the other hand, I do have what would have been the 'M series' spells in S&G if Phil had included them - the very powerful battlefield spells that mean that I am a pretty potent weapon in a one person package. It also means that I am a very high-value target for foes, and I tend to attract a lot of incoming attention. Hence the steel armor, which is a weapon in it's own right.

As a player-character, I am actually pretty useless in most adventuring parties. In effect, I am what I think is called a 'tank' in the RPG setting, and I am pretty good at melee combat. Give me a little fighting room, and some energy to manipulate, and I can do some pretty Big Things...

Does this help, or have I made things worse?

Funny, I reacted with "Swords and Planet for the win" the first time I read a summary of Tekumel's history. I mean, isn't it obvious by the different dimensions and relics of a more technologically advanced era?
At the same time, Tekumel is brilliant for allowing Referees more used to fantasy to run it as a fantasy setting. I just don't know why more people aren't playing it!
(It might be because a lot of people are looking for the One Right Way to play Tekumel. But there isn't one, and they get frustrated).

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

I would agree with this. It's like the way GW marketed their "Warhammer" game series. Businesses are in business to stay in business; in the industry, you do this by selling rules and accessories to people. See also Gary's famous comment: "We have to keep the players from finding out that they don't need the rules..."

The freeform RPG players have found it out without much help, it seems.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

I should note that I'm breaking these answers up into separate posts to make them a little easier to answer...

After about the first year of play, once we'd gotten away from the Jakalla Underworld 'dungeon crawls', Phil stopped handing out XP; he didn't like doing the book-keeping in a really big way, as he felt that it got in the way of the plot lines. We'd have to keep track of the numbers ourselves, and Phil expected us to be fair about it.

When we'd do something noble and heroic, getting a job done for the Imperium or somebody with pull, we'd get a promotion and some rewards. We could then spend the money on a tutor or something similar, with the idea that we could then 'go up a level'; Phil would have us deduct the costs of the 'classroom work' from our piles of loot, and then we'd have to go back into the rules and do the number-crunching to get the game mechanics taken care of.

(In the game group, this was a handy way to allow for people to drop in and out over time; if you had to take a leave of absence, you were assumed to be off at the Temple academy learning some new spells, or in the army doing a tour of duty with the troops. When you got back, Phil would tell you you'd gone up a level and do the math.)

So, basically we'd work on our skills when we could, and add them up after a couple of months in the game. As an example of this, I taught classes in specialized melee combat to some of the PCs while we were on our various sea journeys - there wasn't much else to do except watch the ocean go by - and so several PCs picked up levels in 'mace' and 'dagger' along the way.

Once we'd done the number-crunching, we'd get on with the adventure. It seemed to have worked fine for us.

Again, am I helping or confusing?

Funny, that. I remember a similar advancement mechanic being much reviled. I just can't find links right now, but the really funny part is that the arguments against it seemed to boil down to "depends on the Referee's cooperation" and "isn't traditional" (whatever traditional was supposed to mean).
Life is ironic.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Thank you! I hope I'm helping, here.

This is, I think, why Tekumel is a difficult thing for people to get their heads around - "impenetrable", as one reviewer described it.

We all came out of F/SF fandom at the time, and we 'got' the many references that Phil included in his world - the Grey Lensmen, Barsoom, Conan, and the Lovecraftian mythos. Phil had been very active in fandom in the 1940s and 1950s, and it really showed.

Have a look at "A Princess of Mars"; I think you'll see some fun stuff...

Well, the references to Barsoom were what made me interested in Tekumel... I've read John Carter stories long before I got to see an RPG.
Admittedly, I tend to inject more "science" into settings than they're probably meant to. It's due to one of my past groups being the kind of guys who would make experiments for the quotient of energy transfer of magic missiles.
And then they find a way to use that in the game, so I love playing with them.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

I believe you are right - it'd be in the historical introduction section in EPT. Phil also expanded on this in S&G I, too.

Yep, those three features are Tekumel's unique 'signature items'. In the context of the fantasy literature of the time, they were really odd; in the context of space opera or sword and planet, they're kinda par for the course...

Interesting enough, Reimond Feist's stories feature an invasion from a clan-based world with no steel and no riding animals, situated in another dimension...

Originally Posted by Bren

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.

I've achieved a compromise with them.
"How much did we gain?"
"I'll tell you over Skype".
We always have a Skype group.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

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.

I'll bite.
Tell us, oh Old Geezer, about trash collector machines, and the matter-converters!

Originally Posted by Bren

To which my players would respond, "We're on Skype now. Tell us now." Ours is a Skype group.

Of course I could email them later, but they seem to really enjoy knowing right away. So I indulge them so they can have their fun.

Would "I'll tell you over ICQ later" change anything?

Well, whatever works for your group. Obviously, different approaches might work better or worse with different people, but we share what we do just in case there's something someone else can use.