Q&A with Chirine

[rayotus]

First of all, cool mention on Bad Squiddo Games. That's not one I had heard of or seen before but I looked them up and will go down that rabbit hole of looking through all their minis at my next real opportunity. Looks like some cool stuff there.

Second, thank you for making yourself available! What a resource! I sort of have a million questions and none, if that makes sense. I hardly know where to start.

Let's go here first. I'm pretty intensely interested in Dave Megarry and the Dungeons of Pasha Cada (did I get that right?). My understanding is that dave made up the game to play on Blackmoor breaks. So ... did you ever see that or participate in it? Was it just Megarry and a few friends (always the same) who played it or did it make the rounds of different groups? What was the early "kit" of minis/map/etc. like?

[rayotus]

(My oldest son just moved out for good - age 24 - and I took over his room. The first thing I hung on the wall was my vintage copy of the Dungeon! board, framed, as decoration. The next was my near-mint Holmes box in a shadow frame. Dungeon! is hanging over my computer as I type and I would throw a picture in here if I knew how. )

[chirinebakal]

Sept 2, 2023 9:24:10 GMT -6 rayotus said:

First of all, cool mention on Bad Squiddo Games. That's not one I had heard of or seen before but I looked them up and will go down that rabbit hole of looking through all their minis at my next real opportunity. Looks like some cool stuff there.

Second, thank you for making yourself available! What a resource! I sort of have a million questions and none, if that makes sense. I hardly know where to start.

Let's go here first. I'm pretty intensely interested in Dave Megarry and the Dungeons of Pasha Cada (did I get that right?). My understanding is that dave made up the game to play on Blackmoor breaks. So ... did you ever see that or participate in it? Was it just Megarry and a few friends (always the same) who played it or did it make the rounds of different groups? What was the early "kit" of minis/map/etc. like?

I love what Annie is doing; I have a whole campaign that I'm building, based on her figures. It's set in Karelia, in the spring of 1944, and has her Red Army Women and their Allied sisters in the deep woods. It's going to be a very 'Arnesonian' / 'Barker' campaign, based on Tony Bath's rules for campaigns, run in Ye Olden Style. The idea is to set things up so that interested players can participate both in play-by-mail and online / live games; we have the equipment, so I thought we might as well have remote gaming so that mode people can play.

I'll do my best to answer your questions; we went to over 990 pages the last time I did something like this.

Yes, that's what I've been told by him and others. He's a very creative game designer, and the game is lots of fun - and still in print! I've never played it; I am not a board gamer, but everyone who has loves it. He's also helped Bill Hoyt do a Tekumel version, "Quest", which runs the exact same way and is just as fun. As I recall, the game pretty much stayed inside the original Blackmoor group, and then was published by TSR. Dave is kind of a private person, and I didn't;t see him much at CSA meetings - he was around Adventure Games a lot, and that's where my exposure to the game was. The game was always a board-game type of thing, with wonderful hand-made cards - one of his sisters did the artwork, I think - and game board. It was your very typical 'home-brew' game that came out of that group of really brilliant people; "Source of the Nile" was another fun game from that bunch.

The Twin Cities gamers at that time were made up of several distinct groups. There was the Fifth Precinct group and the Little Tin Soldier Shoppe groups, which are covered in Gary Fine's "Shared Fantasy", the CSA at the University of Minnesota, and the group at St. Thomas. Larry Bond, for example, was in that group. (Yes, that Larry Bond!) Michael Mornard was in the University of Minnesota and St. Thomas groups; I was in CSA, mostly. The Blackmoor Bunch, as I call them, was a sort of separate group that was also a sub-set of CSA, because of Dave Arneson's connection with it. So, I think "Dungeon" did show up at CSA several times when I was running / playing miniatures games.

[chirinebakal]

Sept 2, 2023 9:26:29 GMT -6 rayotus said:

(My oldest son just moved out for good - age 24 - and I took over his room. The first thing I hung on the wall was my vintage copy of the Dungeon! board, framed, as decoration. The next was my near-mint Holmes box in a shadow frame. Dungeon! is hanging over my computer as I type and I would throw a picture in here if I knew how. )

Great! My lovely Missus lets me have half our house for gaming stuff; w have the game room in the basement, my workshop, and my home office - which is my full-time office, now that I'm retired. I'll see about posting photos... 

[tdenmark]

Hello Chrine, welcome to ODD74!

Can you describe your first encounter with Dungeons & Dragons?

[chirinebakal]

Sept 2, 2023 17:30:03 GMT -6 tdenmark said:

Hello Chrine, welcome to ODD74!

Can you describe your first encounter with Dungeons & Dragons?

I'll try. I've never really played the actual game; I played a session in Blackmoor with Dave at a CSA meeting in late '75, and then a couple of sessions in Michael Mornard's "Ram's Horn" campaign. I don't think they were using the D&D rules as written. Dave had a woodgrain box version, and I think Michael had either a woodgrain box or a white box version. Neither played 'rules as written', and both ran their games very much in what became known as 'open sandbox'; the principle was for the GM to ask "What do you want to do?", and then the GM would act as a facilitator / enabler to make the adventures happen. Both had a lot of 'adventures' handy, but it was up to us players to make a decision on what rumor / hint / gossip we were going to follow up on. Both used the 2 or 3 D6 mechanics. Dave's Blackmoor was sort of low to medium magic 'low fantasy', with a lot of 1950s 'Technicolor medieval' top it as Dave was watching a lot of those on local TV - these were the days when the national networks went off the air at noon and didn't come back on until six pm, and the local stations would buy packages of cheap movies to fill in the afternoons especially on the weekends. Dave was very upfront that these were a lot of the inspirations for his games. Michael ran much more of a literate campaign, as he was a history buff specializing in the medieval period. Very much "Le Mort de Arthur" and especially "A Distant Mirror", a book which I still highly commend to anyone wanting to get the feel of how D&D was being played in the circles that I was in.

So, I don't know if what I was playing would be considered 'D&D' these days. Very rules-light, very world-setting driven, very 'hand-wavy, loose-goosy' from what I've been told my more modern gamers. Very much 'friends sitting around the table laughing their heads off', and long before 'this is serious stuff' took over. See also "The Elusive Shift" for more on this.

And, I should note, back then we didn't know that the miniatures games, the board games, and the role-playing games we were doing were all separate genres. We did all three, often in the same game session, where we'd use miniatures on a board game board to resolve something in an role-playing campaign. We played the game, got on with difficult spots with a dice roll, and kept on with the adventure. We had all read mostly the same books, seen the same movies, and pretty much knew how to run adventures of any kind. Tony Bath's "How To Run A War-games Campaign" was our basic text - Phil used it to design and run his Tekumel campaign, where it provided the living world that we adventured in. I still use it; I'm setting up my Karelia campaign using it.

Does any of this help answer your question?

[Finarvyn]

This is great stuff, and matches my own experience in the 1970's even though I had no contact with the Twin Cities groups.

Today's players and today's rule sets seem to focus on "master the rules" as a sign of game mastery, but back in the day in my group we had maybe a dozen participants but only 3 of us owned the rules and had actually read them. Most of the players did NOT know the rules and were never encouraged to min/max anything, but instead would be presented with situations and they would react and the DM would tell them what type of dice to roll. The DM would adjudicate things behind the screen and most of the time the players didn't know how it was done.

Now, having said that, players are clever and look for patterns. Some even took notes like, "orcs can be hit on XX but not YY" or "skeletons can be killed on a single hit" and slowly built a file of basic properties of monsters. Plus, I allowed them to identify their magic items quickly and they knew if their sword was +1 or +2 or whatever, and clearly the value of an attack bonus was on their mind. That kind of thing.

I believe that some of the current Blackmoor games being run are even looser than that. I would love to play in that style again!

[chirinebakal]

Agreed. I got kicked out of a 5e campaign because of this; it was set in Blackmoor, run by a friend, and I was invited to join because of my experience in Blackmoor. After a couple of game sessions, one of the players told me that because I didn't have 'system mastery' I was holding the group back and he told me that if I couldn't play at his level I should get out of the campaign. So, I agreed with him and handed my PC sheet to my friend the GM. There was a shocked silence, and then one of the other players asked him if had any idea who he'd just kicked out of the game. He didn't, and several of the players filled him on my history. I just smiled, thanked everyone for their time and the fun I'd had in their game, and left. Haven't played in any RPG games since then, back in 2018.

I was told later that this player was a Big Wheel in WotC's Adventurers' League, and his standings in the League were his big focus; he was, I was told, very concerned that I was affecting his League standings. I was also told that eventually he was banned from League events at the FLGS, because he was doing this in all the games that he was in.

If you want to try this style of play, meet Bob Meyer at this coming Gary Con.

[havard]

Always good to see you Chirine!

[rayotus]

Chirine, regarding miniatures available and scales.

Thinking back to those early tables 1970s, what sizes and lines of miniatures do you remember? Were you doing a lot of substituting (e.g. Napoleonic figs as fantasy fighters)? Were people a stickler about keeping figs all in the same scale (roughly), or were 25mm figs mixed in with 1/72 and 54mm? Were they hard to get? How many were plastic? How often were "toys" (e.g. plastic monsters) used as figures. I just sort of want your general impression of how "into" the figures people were or if they kind of got forgotten during the role-playing.

[chirinebakal]

Sept 5, 2023 10:21:22 GMT -6 rayotus said:

Chirine, regarding miniatures available and scales.

Thinking back to those early tables 1970s, what sizes and lines of miniatures do you remember? Were you doing a lot of substituting (e.g. Napoleonic figs as fantasy fighters)? Were people a stickler about keeping figs all in the same scale (roughly), or were 25mm figs mixed in with 1/72 and 54mm? Were they hard to get? How many were plastic? How often were "toys" (e.g. plastic monsters) used as figures. I just sort of want your general impression of how "into" the figures people were or if they kind of got forgotten during the role-playing.

I got started in Airfix OO / HO / 1:87 / 1:72 soft plastic, because they were cheap and available. I 'moved up' to 54mm / 1:35 / 1:32 when I got my first job and could afford them. You needed a huge room and a 100' tape measure for tank battles, and we rejoiced when we got the 1:87 Roco 'Minitanks' line and we could run games on a table. When I got to the Twin Cities, the Heritage and Minifigs lines were just coming out, and we adopted them whole-heartedly as they were 'proper' fantasy figures. Dave used a lot of 'dime store' plastic 54mm figures like the proverbial cowboys and Indians, and got a batch of cheap plastic monsters - I had his original Rust Monster, and gave it to his daughter - because they were cheap and easy to get. Gary had, along with Don Kaye, a lot of 40mm Elastolins. Eventually, a lot of 54mm plastic Britain's also got used. Anything for used for anything, as the selections were limited back in those days.

Generally, we didn't mix the two-inch-tall figures with the one-inch-tall ones - it just looked too 'off'. And since the GM / referee was usually the one supplying the figures for a game, it rarely was an issue. If it looked good on the table, it got used. I have a big pile of 'fake ice cubes' from a party decorating supply house that I use as gelatinous cubes, for example. If we saw something that would work, it got used, and then written up into whatever set of rules we were playing / working on.

We used miniatures as a tactical display, as seeing the table saved a lot of time doing descriptive prose. Dave loved to draw plans on big sheet of paper and them move the figures around on them. I still do that, and then usually build up the plans into models; I like modeling, and for us there was always 'That Guy" who loved a particular era / genre and who could always be counted on to build things for people to game with. I still game that way, and I'm told that my game tables are legendary. I just like to have fun, and amuse my friends with my games.

A lot of us still use miniatures a lot, and things can get pretty wild. The photo I use as an avatar is from one of my Night Witches RPG games.

[chirinebakal]

Duplicate post deleted, as it did it when I did an edit. Sorry about that!

[mrmanowar]

Woohoo! Glad this got set up! At any rate, I do have some questions. As such here they are!

1.) Gaming in the era you do up until present day, was there anything when you first entered into gaming and being a referee/DM/GM (use your favored terminology) that you learned or observed from those groups whether a technique or a style you thought was rather clever that you adopted in your own games or later adapted based on what you saw/observed?

2.) Leaving modern terminology aside how did you and your peers look at games like wargames, like D&D, like Tekumel, etc. Did you classify them as games based on a common title when you perhaps decided what game was going to be played on a particular day? What kind of discussion occurred after the games regarding rulings?

3.) It seems based on most of the Minnesota Group there was people who for one reason or another wanted to run games whether it was a variant of existing rules or an extension of what was played previously. Either way, there was quite a rise in people who wanted to run games. Did you have to run games as a default position initially or was that something you wanted to do? As a corollary to that, based on your recent experience do you think people who run games nowadays get put under a certain criteria because of social media/YouTube etc. whereas they might be under a scrutiny that wasn't there when you started?

4.) I've read about how you painted and used miniatures in your games before. Do you think the miniatures are kind of a cool way to showcase an encounter (this doesn't necessarily mean combat to use modern terminology) but an interesting way to add a kind of "realism" to your world or get them more in the mood for what was happening?

5.) What's something you think gets "lost in translation" from people who perhaps came from a wargaming background but just jumps into D&D or some other role-playing game that was not even thought about when you first started gaming?

I have plenty of more questions but don't want to bog this down. Thanks again for your willingness to answer questions and interact with us!

[greentongue]

Another window opened!
Good to see details from the past not being lost.

[chirinebakal]

mrmanowar Avatar
Sept 6, 2023 22:11:34 GMT -6 mrmanowar said:
Woohoo! Glad this got set up! At any rate, I do have some questions. As such here they are!

1.) Gaming in the era you do up until present day, was there anything when you first entered into gaming and being a referee/DM/GM (use your favored terminology) that you learned or observed from those groups whether a technique or a style you thought was rather clever that you adopted in your own games or later adapted based on what you saw/observed?

Yes, all the time. I learned how ro run my games and keep people interested, and how *not* to run games and lose players. Phil could not compress time, and so it took literally months of real time to go anywhere. Phil could be a wonderful GM, and he could be the most boring GM you can imagine. From Dave, I learned how to not get mired in The Rules, and keep things moving quickly and to keep the players attention and focus.

2.) Leaving modern terminology aside how did you and your peers look at games like wargames, like D&D, like Tekumel, etc. Did you classify them as games based on a common title when you perhaps decided what game was going to be played on a particular day? What kind of discussion occurred after the games regarding rulings?

No. We based them by era and subject. We played what we felt like, unless one of the on-going campaigns tossed up a battle to be fought; then, we'd use whatever seemed to work the best. We'd discuss the game over pizza after the meeting / session, discuss what did and didn't work, made notes and didn't do the non-functional stuff again.

3.) It seems based on most of the Minnesota Group there was people who for one reason or another wanted to run games whether it was a variant of existing rules or an extension of what was played previously. Either way, there was quite a rise in people who wanted to run games. Did you have to run games as a default position initially or was that something you wanted to do? As a corollary to that, based on your recent experience do you think people who run games nowadays get put under a certain criteria because of social media/YouTube etc. whereas they might be under a scrutiny that wasn't there when you started?

People just liked running games. There were some really creative people involved. I got into running g games because I liked to build things, and people wanted to see them on the table; the games were a way for me to show off my skills and amuse my friends. Yes, people are under a lot of pressure because of things like 'Critical Role', as they're expected to deliver that same kind of 'professional quality'. It makes for far less people running games, and it's a bad trend to see from where I'm sitting.

4.) I've read about how you painted and used miniatures in your games before. Do you think the miniatures are kind of a cool way to showcase an encounter (this doesn't necessarily mean combat to use modern terminology) but an interesting way to add a kind of "realism" to your world or get them more in the mood for what was happening?

Yes. People get more 'immersed' when they can see themselves getting shot at. (Winston Churchill pointed this out.) People can absorb a lot more of the situation and the setting when they can see and touch it.

5.) What's something you think gets "lost in translation" from people who perhaps came from a wargaming background but just jumps into D&D or some other role-playing game that was not even thought about when you first started gaming?

There is no real cross-over anymore between the two that I've seen; locally, 'warmers' are not welcome in the 'RPG' groups as the latter view the former as nasty, war-mongering, fascists. It does not make for reasonable or civil discussions, which is why I stay out of the local gaming scene. The situation may be different elsewhere, but that's outside my experience. It also does not help that a lot of 'warmers' come to RPGs after they've been involved with Warhammer, which makes for very unhappy game sessions in my experience.

I have plenty of more questions but don't want to bog this down. Thanks again for your willingness to answer questions and interact with us!

You're welcome!

[chirinebakal]

Sept 7, 2023 12:17:24 GMT -6 greentongue said:

Another window opened!
Good to see details from the past not being lost.

Thanks for the kind words!

I've been following the thread on Dave's time at Full Sail; I don't know why - and will not speculate - on why the OP has such a hard-on for Dave, but he, like a lot of other people on RPG forums, tends to forget that he's talking about real people who some of us knew and interacted with. I, like a number of my contemporaries, have gotten tired of it; I don't see a lot of the point to it, as none of the people being talked about are alive (in most cases) to defend themselves. It's always easy to attack the dead. It's pointless, but satisfyingly easy.

So, I'd like to take the opportunity to personally thank the OP in that thread for reminding me why I left this and other RPG forums some years ago, and why I had great misgivings about coming back here. If I may, I'd like to quote Sir Jacob Astley, and wish everyone on this forum all the best. I'll be over on my forum, if anyone wants to talk with me.

Window's closed. Goodby.