Vigilance
Explorer
I enjoyed this quite a bit.
Bout time there was a modern podcast.
Edit: Having listened to the second podcast, you can probably imagine I have some reactions.
First, thanks for the many kind things you said about my book.
Second, my fingers were itching to type during the discussion of Blood and Fists. The end conclusion that you came to, I felt, were spot on, so I'm glad I waited for the discussion to hash out the various points before I typed this.
For instance, I did feel very early in the discussion, one of the participants (I think it was the 3rd gentlemen with Fraser and David, whose name escapes me) kept referring to martial arts as narrative.
I am glad in the end all three of you said you need both mechanics and narrative, and that even moved the conversation into a discussion of martial arts LARPs, which is exactly what you have if you use martial arts (or any other in game character ability) solely as narrative (which I felt one of the gentlemen was advocating).
I mean, sure narrative is important, but crunch is like the legs of a chair. The most beautiful chair in the world still needs legs, and those legs need to conform to mechanical requirements.
Now certainly, Blood and Fists has a LOT of mechanics in it, but sometimes I think people get into counting all the feats the book contains and consider it strictly a mechanical product. In fact if you look closely at the book, more than half of it is flavor text. I'd actually guess that about 60-65% of the book is flavor text and not crunch.
So to my mind, the book was designed more or less with the same idea the discussion settled on. The book adds a lot of crunch to the game. But if you look at the descriptions of the real world styles, and the simple fact that book uses real styles in the first place is primarily there as a function of character- of roleplaying.
To me, this is the reason for doing 100 or so hours of research on style history and flavor text alone for the book. It would have been MUCH easier not to do that research, but then you don't get the great character hooks that come from choosing Savate over Tae Kwon Do.
Mechanically those two styles might be very similar. The book gives you that mechanical foundation but then also gives you information that adds to your ability to role play your character and role play his martial arts styles.
Ok... done rambling now. I was honored that my book came up in the discussion, especially in such a favorable light and I found the different points of view fascinating.
Thanks again for the great podcast.
Chuck
Bout time there was a modern podcast.
Edit: Having listened to the second podcast, you can probably imagine I have some reactions.
First, thanks for the many kind things you said about my book.
Second, my fingers were itching to type during the discussion of Blood and Fists. The end conclusion that you came to, I felt, were spot on, so I'm glad I waited for the discussion to hash out the various points before I typed this.
For instance, I did feel very early in the discussion, one of the participants (I think it was the 3rd gentlemen with Fraser and David, whose name escapes me) kept referring to martial arts as narrative.
I am glad in the end all three of you said you need both mechanics and narrative, and that even moved the conversation into a discussion of martial arts LARPs, which is exactly what you have if you use martial arts (or any other in game character ability) solely as narrative (which I felt one of the gentlemen was advocating).
I mean, sure narrative is important, but crunch is like the legs of a chair. The most beautiful chair in the world still needs legs, and those legs need to conform to mechanical requirements.
Now certainly, Blood and Fists has a LOT of mechanics in it, but sometimes I think people get into counting all the feats the book contains and consider it strictly a mechanical product. In fact if you look closely at the book, more than half of it is flavor text. I'd actually guess that about 60-65% of the book is flavor text and not crunch.
So to my mind, the book was designed more or less with the same idea the discussion settled on. The book adds a lot of crunch to the game. But if you look at the descriptions of the real world styles, and the simple fact that book uses real styles in the first place is primarily there as a function of character- of roleplaying.
To me, this is the reason for doing 100 or so hours of research on style history and flavor text alone for the book. It would have been MUCH easier not to do that research, but then you don't get the great character hooks that come from choosing Savate over Tae Kwon Do.
Mechanically those two styles might be very similar. The book gives you that mechanical foundation but then also gives you information that adds to your ability to role play your character and role play his martial arts styles.
Ok... done rambling now. I was honored that my book came up in the discussion, especially in such a favorable light and I found the different points of view fascinating.
Thanks again for the great podcast.
Chuck
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