Subj : Re: City] To : All From : yl112@cornell.edu Date : Tue Jul 18 2000 06:01 am From: yl112@cornell.edu Subject: Re: City] On 18 Jul 2000, HAROLD GROOT wrote: > | In all the live campaigns I've played in, I have *never* gained > | level (AD&D) or rank (Legend of the Five Rings). And you know what? > | Nobody really cares. The level tells us what our characters are roughly > | capable of, and we wing it from there. > > I haven't participated in LARP, so I can't comment on the difficulties of > gaining level/rank. Your statements suggest to me that even with OTT games > you might be happiest with "diceless" RPGs. Sorry, that's tabletop, not LARP. And I'm happiest with the "most diceless" non-system of all, freeform. > | a rock that could change into > | a bird (roc? but it was pretty small, say large crow-size) > > Sounds like your rock could change into a rook, not a roc. I missed that pun. > | I feel a go set that will "autoplay" against you is much more fun than > | whatever weapon nemuranai (L5R-speak for "magical"). > > Well, I guess that might depend on the situations you find yourself in. > Recently I took a "Thief 6/Mage 5" character into a game. My character > didn't have any magic weapons, and we were facing some really nasty > undead-variant that required magical weapons to hit. The autoplay go set > would not have been much comfort. L5R does have some of those "magical weapons to hit" (that, or jade--which injures Rokugani undead, and the game designers seem to have taken that from some Chinese folklore). In L5R (the game system I was thinking of with this example), if I were worried about coming in contact with undead *and* playing a Crab character, then I'd go for the very-in-character anti-undead stuff. If I were a Crane clan courtier, living far from the Shadowlands, I'd be more likely to have a gossiping fan, autoplay go set, or something else. So yes, it's situational--but all things being equal I *like* the go set. > (It did have a successful ending, however, and I now have a "Thief 7 / Mage > 6" with a +1 dagger. I don't claim that this character is typical in the > amount of magic, just that being TOTALLY without certain types of weaponry > is risky business.) > | Tabletop play around here, > | OTOH, tends to be on the good-humored side, and has this frustrating > | tendency to degenerate into battle after battle. > > | But sitting around and rolling dice and saying "I hit, I > | missed"--blah. > > Well, Sunday's AD&D session here lasted 7 hours. There was a small battle > at the beginning to get things started and a much larger battle at the end > for the climax. In between we had about 5 straight hours of > roleplaying. This is not at all unusual for the groups I am in. > Friday's Champions game, for example, was about 30 minutes of combat > in 3 hours of play. A friend and I GM'd a 5-hour session last Sat. in which no combat happened. The 1st session involved a "demon" (actually a rogue albino elephant), which was a pain to deal with because it wasn't an intelligent adversary, but things will change.... Battle are fun. Even combat with roleplaying and grand speeches (or not) and descriptions of tactics are fun. Rolling dice and saying "I swing" are not. > As for my style in PBEM games, there is only one person in this newsgroup > that could comment (if she's currently around). Diane Hutton and I were both > around for the last 50 or so chapters of the BLOODSTONE campaign, where > I was playing a full elf "Druid 7 / Mage 6" named Firethorn. (Come to > think of it, she was also on the low end of the spectrum for magic. > She came into that game with no magic weapons and just 2 misc. magic > items - and left with the same total.) Anyway - Diane could tell you > that I did NOT skimp on the rollplaying aspects during the game itself. > I often typed as much as the rest of the group put together. Because > she was an already-existing character she had a very full personality. > But she had been changed quite a bit by the adventures she had been on - > she was quite different from the "brand new 0 XP" version. That's the best kind. :-) I've spotted Diane's posts from time to time but don't know if she's still active. YHL -- |Fidonet: yl112@cornell.edu |Internet: scott@conchbbs.com | | Standard disclaimer: The views of this user are strictly his own. --- # Origin: (1:106/357.99) * Origin: ConchGate (1:106/357.0) .