Experience with Chivalry & Sorcery?

Of the roleplaying games I have had a long-time love/hate relationship with, Chivalry & Sorcery is perhaps one of the strongest such beasts. I can't recall how many times I have pawed through the second edition sourcebooks—and later the first and second edition rulebooks (thanks again, Brad)--alternating between wonder and puzzlement.

The striving for a high degree of historical feudal verisimilitude with a deep level of detailed subsystems covering everything from handling the annual grain harvest to peasant jacqueries to the caloric intake of various foods (heck even an entire section devoted to how food is cooked and its in-game effects) has had a powerful pull on me.

Just as equally the pure fiddliness of its rules systems and identity confusion have just as powerfully repelled me. (How do the fantasy tropes work in a clearly European medieval society with a Christian Pope no less?)

Sadly I haven't had any personal play experience to sift it all out. I know for a short time in the late 70s and early 80s riding D&D's fad tidal wave that it was reportedly selling thousands of copies a year. Clearly it must have clicked with a number of play groups across the country, yet I have run into so little, lasting discussion of it.

So brethren, any experiences with playing this game in any of its iterations? Was it a positive, negative, or mixed experience? Why? How much by the book play did you use?

And of course, ever popular with me, how much of the domain play rules sections did you use? Ever run a manor? Use some of the magnificently flawed sourcebook material such as the mass combat rules or mercantile systems?

Inquiring minds want to know.

[Editor's Note: a follow-up post on Crushing Skulls can be found here.]

Epic Time in Runequest and C&S

“Time was born in Hell, where the shadows of chaos reigned and held the heart of the universe in greasy paws.” - The Gloranthan Calendar 

Blogging breeds obsessive behavior. I have been so stuck on thinking about epic time in D&D as per yesterday's post that I not only find myself tinkering with some matching sub-systems and mini-games (hey, at least it has some utility for the Domain Game), but also pulling down all my various old school gamebooks to see what they have to say about the march of time.

Most of the rules--unsurprisingly perhaps--fall into line with the D&D paradigm. Curiously however, two games that began life as OD&D spin-offs, Runequest and Chivalry & Sorcery, reject the one-for-one slower pace of D&D campaign time.

Here's what the second edition RQ rulebook says:

A time scale of one real week per game week makes the game drag unless one is running a campaign by mail. The authors recommend a scale of one real day per one game week.

Sadly nothing is given about why one would use such a compressed amount of time (and I admit to being mystified about why slower time would be ok for a postal campaign). You can infer the why from the longer and more frequent training periods and deeper character obligations to such things as cults, but you'd think that multiplying time at seven times the rate would warrant an explanation. (Applied to my own tabletop campaign, for instance, you'd have almost Pendragon-like passages of anywhere from 14-28 weeks between sessions.)

More interestingly first-edition C&S, explicitly contracts campaign downtime in order to capture the larger-stage roleplaying in the ways we were discussing yesterday. Here's the passage from “The Time Frame” section:

...the one day = one game day concept has been dropped in favor of a more telescoped time period...If large-scale actions are going to be fought, anxious War Lords are going to be very frustrated by a real-time winter period in which no campaigning is possible. To permit a few good wars, time has to be compressed. Also, time was compressed to permit characters to live out a reasonable proportion of their lives, and perhaps even descendants to take up the struggle.

One wonders if this was the kernel of an idea that influenced Pendragon's own system.

I rather like how it continues on to lay out a “campaign season” as some of you were suggesting yesterday in comments. Keep in mind it is mostly suggesting a one real week to four game week baseline:

The year is seasonal in nature, and winter is always a quiet period because conditions are simply too bad for anyone to seriously attempt an adventure outside settled areas. Even the monsters get out of the snow storms. The four seasons therefore down as follows.
Spring: April and May: 2-3 real weeks
Summer: June to October: 8-10 real weeks
Fall: November and December: 2-3 real weeks
Winter: January to March: 1 real week

I dig the quirkiness of this system, especially how it lays out game session windows in real weeks. Better get your game on if you want to visit that dungeon in game-time January. (Though I have a strong feeling that I would simplify such matters down more to the Pendragon way of having the adventure be in one stretch and the downtime as punctuation.)

Now I am going back to touching all the door knobs and counting all the pens in my office.  

Blurring the Line Between GM and Player

One of the standard conventions of modern role-playing is that a Chinese Wall must separate players from their gamemasters. Outside of some marginalia, no matter what generic or cornball title he is given, the GM is invariably described as the neutrally-adjudicating, virtually-omnipotent force behind the game world and the players as his primary cast of actors.

Was it always so?

Anyone who has been around the block a few times in this hobby knows there has always been some creep over that supposedly hard line. One of the most commonly encountered was the adversarial GM, the kind of killer ref who intentionally or unintentionally strayed over the line into being a virtual player by dint of his antagonism. This behavior just as invariably was a game-killer, and social conventions were thrown up earlier in the hobby's history prescribing it.

Other somewhat-less heinous examples persisted over time, such as the “DM's PC”: either a de facto one such as a much-too-beloved, virtually-indestructible NPC (think elderly, graying wizard here); or the more straightforward NPC that would double as the DM's PC when he passed the ref hat for a session. Controversy about such blur exists to this day. 

While there seems to be a lasting and understandable grudge against transgressing the gamemaster-as-player line, I keep finding myself wondering if there may have been alternative, interesting paths for the player-as-gamemaster passed by—a feeling only compounded each time I run across an odd little transgression in an older rule set or campaign history.

Here's an example.

First edition Chivalry & Sorcery (and a huge thank you to HC player Brad for his generous help here) has a notoriously complicated system covering the latter half of its name. What it lacks in easy-to-grasp brevity, it makes up for in color and scope; and one of the more colorful elements is the reliance on the guild-like networks of the Magick Orders.

Here-in lies an interesting player-as-gamemaster blur:

The rules governing “Magick Orders” provides that the first player to have a character who is connected with some Magical Order or Society should design the whole organization. He must determine the number and level of Masters, Journeymen, Apprentices, servants, and monsters.

So far a larger amount of control of the game world being granted to a player then is the norm, but still a reasonably contained one, no? The clincher though is that sentence above is in the section called “Designing the Place of Mystery” (coding for a C&S dungeon or adventure site).

Note how the sorcerer player is now conceded primary design and control in this process:

He must then design a Guild Hall or other headquarters for the order by drawing the complex on large-squared graph paper...showing the various quarters, libraries, storerooms, and catacombs. Patrols are established, traps, and warning devices are set, etc. In short, the player designs a place of mystery...

The player is thus not just designing a piece of his background or a stronghold, but a primary target for adventure by other players. The section is all the more remarkable in that it goes on to detail five long points on rules governing how the player would design this “dungeon” objectively from the limits on numbers of men and monsters guarding the complex to how treasure and traps would be apportioned. One of the most awesome being this one:

To confound the lovers of secrecy, rumors abound in the game, and once each year the player Guilds must publish a list of all the major magick items and materials that exist within the confines of the place. A bit of lying is possible...

I have to admit I am still a little too stuck in our conventions to wrap my brain about how this would actually work at the game table. Does the designing player don the GM hat when his complex is raided or does he hand over his design notes to the presiding GM? Would this require a larger play group with a different (and opposing?) group of players or a larger open-world campaign with other sets of GMs and players? Or what?

I don't have the answers, but I sure am intrigued by it. And truth be told I have, like many others these days mucking around with the open edges of classical play, have already been unwittingly experimenting with some limited forms of this by encouraging co-creation with players both in the HC sandbox and the Domain Game.

How do we keep up opening up more of these doors? How do we make it work? Or should we even bother blurring this line again?