Quote from: chirine ba kal;1024848Agreed; this dance scene is even more wonderful and poigant, if you see the two scenes right before it and know the story. The Hero has fallen in love with the Rajput Princess, but the old fogies in his court have banished her to the concubines' quarters. The Hero's wife is very unhappy with this, as she's not at all adverse to being Senior Wife with a Junior Wife to help run things, and takes the Princess a set of her own clothes and invites her to the party:

The Princess arrives (in some style!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6lHUn20J5g

The Wife invites the Princess (also in quite some style!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sODGwaDk1VI

It's all like a night with Phil...

The first one is lovely.  I do like the Princess' major-domo announcing her at the beginning:  "Here comes my lady, and boy howdy, she's a cupcake!"

I wish the second one had subtitles; the acting was quite good.  "Relax, kid, I like your style."

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1024849I'd agree with this; they feel like those really great game sessions we'd have, back in the day, where it was all about the ROLE-playing and not about the ROLL-playing. These days, all I ever overhear at the FLGS is number-crunching, Authorized League play, optimized builds, intricate game mechanics, and Getting It Right 'cause this is Serious Gaming. Well, okay fine, I do not begrudge anyone their preferred styles of gaming, but what I want in my games is something like this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeIL2H_ODPc

You show me a modern game, OSR or otherwise, that lets me be The Hero and my friends at the game table be just as damn Heroic, and I'll buy it and play the living daylights out of it. We had those game sessions with Dave and Gary and Phil - why can't we do that today?

Well, I don't think you LITERALLY mean launching our troops off catapults.    Though if we'd tried, Phil would have laughed himself sick, and then splattered our innards all over the landscape.

Knowing you as I do, I suspect what you mean is gritting your teeth and taking the chance.  And yeah, that seems to be unpopular in a lot of places.  Somebody around here just recently said "one person wins, one person loses, how is that fun?"  You mean, like most games throughout history?

What seems to me to be missing any more is "dicing with Fate."  You know, the soldier's gamble; you train, you make your battle plans, and then it is in the laps of the Gods.  Lots of people seem to want the dice to be loaded; they don't want it to be possible to lose their ante into the pot.

Or to use a different metaphor, "reward is proportional to risk" seems to have gone out of fashion.  I've seen an astounding number of people say that they want guaranteed success.  There is a group that frankly says the referee cannot kill their character.  The notion that "the more dangerous the battle, the sweeter the victory" is "old fashioned" or "grognardism" or whateverthehell.  It's not your imagination, and yeah, it's kind of disheartening.

The obsession with numbers is a subject for a bit later.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1024850Yep; seems to work every time, doesn't it?

Honestly, that one was mandatory in English class.  Probably too dark for today's safe schools.  Makes me worry for the modern generation.

For all that, in my Hogwarts campaign the Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers were, Kent Neilson (Doctor Fate), John Constantine (Hellblazer), Miss Marple (Agatha Christie), Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendtta, Chaos Magician), and adult Wednesday Adams.  They didn't get any of them.

Quote from: Hermes Serpent;1024884I suspect that it's down to people who DM not having enough imagination (and short attention spans). Look at the reduction in reading book length material. Most younger folks seem to require anything be in video or small bite-sized chunks that match their limited attention spans.

The lack of imagination was one of the points made by Gary and Dave in print back in the day. And if you have no imagination you have to rely on someone else's imagination leading to crappy adventures being pushed out to suit the need for material by a time limited bunch of people who'd like to be heroic and adventurous but don't have the time to prep or the experience and imagination to come up with stuff on-the-fly.

I hate to say it, but I think you're right. I've seen too many games where the GM simply reads from the adventure path / module to the players, and they have to generate the right response to advance to the next paragraph. Last year, at Free RPG day at the local FLGS, somebody asked one of my players what rules or adventure I was using for my Lord Meren and Barsoom game sessions, and the player told them "None. It's all in his head." The questioner looked baffled.

Quote from: AsenRG;1024885They performed adequately. Which reminds me, how much is known for the magic of Niesel of the Pinnacle:)?

Thank you, Uncle! You saying that means a lot to me!

...do you mean you might consider writing a primer for the blog? If so, feel free to, I'm sure people that run Tekumel would be interested:D!

Amusingly, sounds like stuff that's happened more than once in our home games:p!

There are many, Uncle. My players certainly never felt in want for being Big Heroes And Heroines.
I'd recommend Barbarians of Lemuria for your style. Roll 2d6+stat+Career (or Combat skill). Did you get 9 or higher (or more than the opposed roll)? You succeed. (BTW, Careers are stuff like Assassin, Priest, Duellist and Noble, encompassing all skills necessary).
You might want to wait for BoL: Everwhen, though, because it should make it really easy to run Barsoom with it;).

Nothing more then what's in the brief mention in the text, as far as I know. Sorry.

You're welcome!

Yep. Phil loved to do stuff like this, and it made for some of the very best nights in his campaign.

I'll take a look. Thanks!

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1024942The first one is lovely.  I do like the Princess' major-domo announcing her at the beginning:  "Here comes my lady, and boy howdy, she's a cupcake!"

I wish the second one had subtitles; the acting was quite good.  "Relax, kid, I like your style."

Agreed. It all felt like those nights when Phil was really 'on', and we were exploring the culture and society rather then running for our lives (again) which usually happened after we'd hit the buffet.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1024949Well, I don't think you LITERALLY mean launching our troops off catapults.    Though if we'd tried, Phil would have laughed himself sick, and then splattered our innards all over the landscape.

Knowing you as I do, I suspect what you mean is gritting your teeth and taking the chance.  And yeah, that seems to be unpopular in a lot of places.  Somebody around here just recently said "one person wins, one person loses, how is that fun?"  You mean, like most games throughout history?

What seems to me to be missing any more is "dicing with Fate."  You know, the soldier's gamble; you train, you make your battle plans, and then it is in the laps of the Gods.  Lots of people seem to want the dice to be loaded; they don't want it to be possible to lose their ante into the pot.

Or to use a different metaphor, "reward is proportional to risk" seems to have gone out of fashion.  I've seen an astounding number of people say that they want guaranteed success.  There is a group that frankly says the referee cannot kill their character.  The notion that "the more dangerous the battle, the sweeter the victory" is "old fashioned" or "grognardism" or whateverthehell.  It's not your imagination, and yeah, it's kind of disheartening.

The obsession with numbers is a subject for a bit later.

If we'd tried that stunt, Phil would have had us roll for the slight chance that it might just work - he was always fair about things like that, as we found out.

I agree with your points. One of the players in the 5e group lost three PCs dead in a row during one game session, and was - to his credit, I think - not all that worried about it. He had alternate PCs, which the GM sequenced in, and then gritted his teeth and waded right in on the foes yet again. I thought that was good form, and that 5e is pretty lethal for beginning PCs. Everybody is a lot more careful now, and anyone getting killed is a Very Bad Thing; I have no idea if I've been part of that, or what.

We always did things knowing full well that we were risking everything, all the time. That seems to be an obsolete concept in gaming.

Quote from: David Johansen;1024957Honestly, that one was mandatory in English class.  Probably too dark for today's safe schools.  Makes me worry for the modern generation.

For all that, in my Hogwarts campaign the Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers were, Kent Neilson (Doctor Fate), John Constantine (Hellblazer), Miss Marple (Agatha Christie), Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendtta, Chaos Magician), and adult Wednesday Adams.  They didn't get any of them.

Dear God. Now I know I'm in the wrong hobby.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1024949Well, I don't think you LITERALLY mean launching our troops off catapults.    Though if we'd tried, Phil would have laughed himself sick, and then splattered our innards all over the landscape.

Knowing you as I do, I suspect what you mean is gritting your teeth and taking the chance.  And yeah, that seems to be unpopular in a lot of places.  Somebody around here just recently said "one person wins, one person loses, how is that fun?"  You mean, like most games throughout history?

What seems to me to be missing any more is "dicing with Fate."  You know, the soldier's gamble; you train, you make your battle plans, and then it is in the laps of the Gods.  Lots of people seem to want the dice to be loaded; they don't want it to be possible to lose their ante into the pot.

Or to use a different metaphor, "reward is proportional to risk" seems to have gone out of fashion.  I've seen an astounding number of people say that they want guaranteed success.  There is a group that frankly says the referee cannot kill their character.  The notion that "the more dangerous the battle, the sweeter the victory" is "old fashioned" or "grognardism" or whateverthehell.  It's not your imagination, and yeah, it's kind of disheartening.

The obsession with numbers is a subject for a bit later.

Not quite, Glorious General! I'm happy to report that in the Traveller game I'm playing online, that is exactly how it works:)!
Currently, we're fighting against superior forces. More numerous, maybe slightly better armed. They intended to kill us later, after we dug out a cache of very precious minerals a former prospecting crew had found before suffering an unfortunate accident.
We found out the satellites they used to spy on us, tracked the signals and realized these are some guys we know for being ruthless criminals. Now we're attacking them with the repurposed mining lasers and copious amounts of firepower we had amassed from previous jobs.
But one lucky shot, and a PC can easily die. Not that we're not suppressing them, but you never know;).
So dicing with Fate is almost literally what we're doing. And we're stacking the deck as much as we can, yes, but we simply had no time for too much of it-so we're betting on them only having several minutes of warning (in the form of losing signal from the spy satellites).

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1024990Nothing more then what's in the brief mention in the text, as far as I know. Sorry.

Actually, that works for me, Uncle:D! I'd decided to make their magic radically different.

QuoteYep. Phil loved to do stuff like this, and it made for some of the very best nights in his campaign.

I'm glad to know I'm following an exalted example!

QuoteI'll take a look. Thanks!

You are welcome!

I think a return to shorter novels might help.  Fantasy got really bloated in the last twenty years.  A Conan or Dumarst yarn wasn't so self indulgent or long winded as stuff like The Wheel of Time or Recluse.  Like science fiction fantasy got too full of itself and too busy trying to be a valid adult form of entertainment and forgot that the entertainment part.

Following up on David's post and Chirine's response to my original post I think that despite the reissue of older material - I  have a collected set of all Clark Ashton Smith's prose works for example - the fact that these older works, and Lovecraft as well, use convoluted sentences and antique but apposite English words and phrases that aren't taught or aren't in common usage. It's rare that students except at undergraduate level or more likely graduate level ever read Shakespear in the original Elizabethan English. I know I read Chaucer in a version that had both the original text and a modern translation side by side. It's like the Bible being altered from the King James version with it's Jacobean prose that is a wonder of the English language being reduced to a Good News Bible using modern phrasing so as to appeal to semi-literate modern people.

Rant over.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1024993If we'd tried that stunt, Phil would have had us roll for the slight chance that it might just work - he was always fair about things like that, as we found out.

I agree with your points. One of the players in the 5e group lost three PCs dead in a row during one game session, and was - to his credit, I think - not all that worried about it. He had alternate PCs, which the GM sequenced in, and then gritted his teeth and waded right in on the foes yet again. I thought that was good form, and that 5e is pretty lethal for beginning PCs. Everybody is a lot more careful now, and anyone getting killed is a Very Bad Thing; I have no idea if I've been part of that, or what.

We always did things knowing full well that we were risking everything, all the time. That seems to be an obsolete concept in gaming.

Isn't pretty much any system fairly lethal for new characters - especially the older systems?  I remember Basic D&D - if they were lucky a fighter or a dwarf would probably survive a single hit from a monster - but any other character would be dropped by a single sword blow.  The poor first level cleric didn't even get a single spell - so no healing for anyway either!

I wonder if the increased complexity in games - which translates to increased time to build a character is a factor. In the really simple games the hardest and longest part of character creation was usually choosing a name!  

Dying sucks - not always because it means that you 'lost' - but because often times this means you aren't doing anything for several hours - maybe more.  It's not so bad if there is an NPC or henchmen you can take over, but that's not always the case.  There isn't always a feasible way to 'drop in' a new character - especially if the old one is likely to be raised (or returned from some otherwise indisposed state) in the near future.  

In general though - no guts, no glory - the toughest fights are always the ones you remember - where you somehow managed to survive despite all odds.  

I wonder if many players have more of a 'video game' view - they are so used to being able to save and reload, that *not* advancing the story with the same protagonist is alien to them.  The rise in popularity of video games (especially RPG ones) has definitely influenced game design - the entire 3rd edition of D&D seems to be geared towards making rules that worked well for video games.   With a 'fixed' set of challenges - building a character around how to best exploit the system becomes part of the game.  That doesn't hold true for 'live' game playing - but the mindset continues.  Hence why forums are full of people posting ridiculous builds that no one would ever want to role play - but that get some crazy multiplicative bonus due to rules exploits.

Quote from: Hermes Serpent;1025027Following up on David's post and Chirine's response to my original post I think that despite the reissue of older material - I  have a collected set of all Clark Ashton Smith's prose works for example - the fact that these older works, and Lovecraft as well, use convoluted sentences and antique but apposite English words and phrases that aren't taught or aren't in common usage. It's rare that students except at undergraduate level or more likely graduate level ever read Shakespear in the original Elizabethan English. I know I read Chaucer in a version that had both the original text and a modern translation side by side. It's like the Bible being altered from the King James version with it's Jacobean prose that is a wonder of the English language being reduced to a Good News Bible using modern phrasing so as to appeal to semi-literate modern people.

Rant over.

This exactly! I also remember reading Shakespeare in Elizabethan English in High School, and Lovecraft, CAS, REH, Manly Wade Wellman, and a host of other authors whose prose was "convoluted," and cumbersome, and archaic, but so evocative. I have used many elements from these author's works in my games over the years.  The last current fantasy that I read was George RR Martin's stuff, which was so repetitive and hackneyed that I had to struggle in order to finish it. I know that MAR Barker's novels have been criticised  as being written in a prose that is too scholarly, and dry, but I much prefer his works to 99% of current the mainstream fantasy and SF books out today, and AFAIC his stuff was better written than Martin's .  

My two cents worth.

Shemek.

Quote from: David Johansen;1025003I think a return to shorter novels might help.  Fantasy got really bloated in the last twenty years.  A Conan or Dumarst yarn wasn't so self indulgent or long winded as stuff like The Wheel of Time or Recluse.  Like science fiction fantasy got too full of itself and too busy trying to be a valid adult form of entertainment and forgot that the entertainment part.

Exactly my feelings as well. This is why I tend to re-read a lot stuff. There simply isn't anything current that grabs me or holds my attention.

Shemek

Quote from: Horu hiFa'asu;1025076Isn't pretty much any system fairly lethal for new characters - especially the older systems?  I remember Basic D&D - if they were lucky a fighter or a dwarf would probably survive a single hit from a monster - but any other character would be dropped by a single sword blow.  The poor first level cleric didn't even get a single spell - so no healing for anyway either!

I wonder if the increased complexity in games - which translates to increased time to build a character is a factor. In the really simple games the hardest and longest part of character creation was usually choosing a name!  

Depends on what you mean by 'older systems' (and also 'really simple games'). TFT, RQ, and Champion are hardly new, and character creation is... well pretty varied but a lot more complex than BD&D or EPT. Just from a practical perspective, yes--games with larger character creation burden are almost by necessity less brutal at the beginning (although expected level of caution is also a factor. Starting GURPS fantasy characters are both more durable than starting TSR-era D&D characters, but you are also expected to play relatively cautious with them).

QuoteDying sucks - not always because it means that you 'lost' - but because often times this means you aren't doing anything for several hours - maybe more.  It's not so bad if there is an NPC or henchmen you can take over, but that's not always the case.  There isn't always a feasible way to 'drop in' a new character - especially if the old one is likely to be raised (or returned from some otherwise indisposed state) in the near future.  

In general, I don't find that happens IRL. Groups tend to gravitate towards game systems (and play styles) that support their preferences. In other words, you are unlikely to play a scenario where you can't introduce a new PC (or take over an NPC/henchman) if you are playing a game where the characters can drop like flies.

QuoteI wonder if many players have more of a 'video game' view - they are so used to being able to save and reload, that *not* advancing the story with the same protagonist is alien to them.  The rise in popularity of video games (especially RPG ones) has definitely influenced game design - the entire 3rd edition of D&D seems to be geared towards making rules that worked well for video games.   With a 'fixed' set of challenges - building a character around how to best exploit the system becomes part of the game.  That doesn't hold true for 'live' game playing - but the mindset continues.  Hence why forums are full of people posting ridiculous builds that no one would ever want to role play - but that get some crazy multiplicative bonus due to rules exploits.

I've heard the critique that the game is becoming more video-gamey since I started playing in '83. Video games are not inherently significantly different from the number-crunching part of TTRPGs. There is literally no reason why any of the things you mentioned are remotely more video-gamey than they are TTRPG-ey. Video games could have fixed challenges, or (to the limits of their pseudorandom number generators) random sandbox challenges. Video games can have massively unbalanced builds, or have all characters roughly the same. 3rd edition D&D is no more specifically a video game than any other (and, in fact, one of the most famous video games of all time, Final Fantasy, is as close to 1st edition AD&D as the creators could legally make it).