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Re: (TFT) High Level Play ... and "House Rules"

I've been playing with the setup for resources for Easter Island.
This is a surprisingly delicate balance when it comes to creating a relatively stable game-world environment for players where their Figures won't have to deal with radical changes in the structure. These periods can't be avoided over large scale periods of time, but the most comfortable game-world environments are during periods where the players Figures are living much like their grandparents did and can expect the same for their grandchildren. If a culture is like a cell-phone then I'd like my game-world to focus on a operating format that will be around for awhile rather than have to learn an os that is about to go the way of the dodo.
Periods of radical change are somewhat playable but will likely be lacking in any real depth of understanding by the players as to what exactly is being lost in the transition. The glairing exception to this point is the aftermath of the collapse of modern culture scenario. The reason that is playable with subtlety is the fact that players actually live in said culture and don't need a bunch of background to understand the small details. 
Otherwise I come up against stuff like slaves.
Considering that I think that the whole "Rules" idea when playing make-believe is to focus players imagination into a shared experience, a term like slave might as well be a term like god. The term has become too vague and removed from "modern" experience and now has a much stronger subjective rather than objective meaning for a player. About the only constant I can find for slave is 'labor without direct payment in exchangeable trade-goods/monies'. 
In other words no "wage" for their work.
This gets very murky very quickly and I can point to a myriad of situations historically where I'd rather be a fed slave than a "free" Figure w/o support. 

Does anybody take the "Greeks only" rule seriously in AM for pinning a foe?
A Greek slave was in the lowest portion of "society" granted, but they were MEMBERS of the society nonetheless. When one City conquered another the losers surviving population (after the raping and pillaging) had to be dealt with. The best and brightest were taken as slaves meaning that the "owner" was now responsible for their upkeep and yada yada. Everybody else was on their own, and a simple way to think of it in those days was that only citizens got to shelter in the cities. 

Of course that's one "vastly simplified" model.

The European serf system was a bit harsher.
Rather than feeding the slaves, the slaves were now responsible for feeding themselves and taxed on their produce on top of it. 
This is the "tied to the land" phrase.
Your crop doesn't come home and your family starves excepting the grace of the church. (I'll quote medieval records that demonstrate that the catholic church controlled vaguely three quarters of the wealth of england before Henry took it back largely if'n ya want.) 
A grant of land came with the equipment to work it back then.
Colonial slavery was different still and then there are ideas about "wage-slaves" (sprung from the 'company store' setup among other "scams").
My point is that if I drop a word like "slave" into the background setup of my campaign then I'd better be able to backup the term with real "how your Figures grandpa did it" details rather than try to make it up as I go along.
When you are "making it up as you go along" or "judging on the fly" you make the whole game less "ours" and more "yours". We (ours) want the game to be yours, but if you take a bunch of judging on the fly liberties you'll bomb at a meeting of players that have never played with you before. 
Your personality as a GM is FAR from a rule.
SOMEBODY somewhere might not have brought your BS.
What layer do you have to offer AFTER your "brilliant" personality?
Is this a "game" or somekinda ego show?

Then again.
"Rules don't change!"
I call those groups the monistic-guys. they've been hanging there for us all, chanting out the die rolls like a Benedictine and holding the tradition for us. 
Ohoma ohme ohmy ohowhee <roll> "I got a 10!>
It IS your personality as a GM at some point.

Words are an interesting camera.

So are dice.

What are you focusing on, and what do you want to say?

RPG "rules" are a CRAZY camera huh?
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jay Carlisle" 
Subject: Re: (TFT) High Level Play ... and "House Rules"
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Tapley" 
Subject: Re: (TFT) High Level Play ... and "House Rules"




Flexible means both,

1) scales nicely to the size of the party, by referee fiat
on-the-spot if necessary, *and*
2) can be met by any of several techniques (magic-heavy party, sneaky
party, brute-force fighter party .... ) and the party can choose
which technique to apply.

That second measure of "flexibility" is what's crucial in
satisfying the "locus of control" criterion Jay referred to, and
getting that right (neither too scripted nor too open) is an
important part of the art of entertaining the players, in my opinion.




Hi Mark!
uhhh.... here is a quote from me.

"Owing to a need to attempt to "simplify" some of the "downtime" stuff for
example and explanation purposes I've switched effort towards a "sample
game-environment" from the Goblin port to a slightly smaller island.
I'm gonna use Easter Island as a "starter model"."

and this;

"Wikipedia says; "The island is approx 24.6 km (15.3 mi) long by 12.3 km
(7.6 mi) at its widest point - its overall shape has been described as a
triangle. It has an area of 163.6 km2 (63 sq mi), and a maximum altitude of 
507 metres. There are three Rano (freshwater crater lakes), at Rano Kau,
Rano Raraku and Rano Aroi, near the summit of Terevaka, but no permanent
streams or rivers."
At this scale the island roughly fits in a 3-hex triangle on the map of
Southern Elyntia where each hex is 12.5 kilometers sts.
Using my STR-hexes the island is 63 / 16 = ~3.9 STR-hexes in area.
At a total paper size (8x10) of ~35 by 50 hexes for the Elyntia map she's
well over 150 hexes away from anything (3 pages n/s or 5 pages e/w), the
closest being the Pitcairn Island group (4 islands totaling ~16 sq miles (1 
STR-hex) with a modern day population around 50).
This is an area less than one hundred million Melee hexes to describe and
quite isolated as well.
A nice little nursery for examples I'd think.
The real-world history of the island is secondary to the idea that this is a 
sufficient area to support a population large enough, and rich enough in
resources, to do work worthy of monumental status.
What the real-world history does is inform me about what "problem areas"
there are that need to be addressed."
What I'm trying to do is set a "Sim-'community' thing" that can eat and work 
off this area and make monuments with its resources.
If you want to do Melee with the native Figures then you get clubs (ua),
staves('ao), and spears on the weapon list.
Elseif the stuff (like sword metal) comes from someplace... and it's HARD to 
get it there.

The otherside of the "frame" might be stuff like time-limits or control
issues like being an inferior officer in a military setup.
The townsfolk in Blazing Saddles had the time to replicate their town... but the whole concept broke down soon thereafter... cool for Mnoren but how many 
GM's are ready for the basics of a time-travel type campaign?
That's alot of bookkeeping, but a good GM is like Tom Sawyer talking their
'players' into white-washing his campaigns facade...
Maybe we all get a "classic" outta it?

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