Episode 69: You Already Met the First Tiger
December 13th, 2013 | Robin
Ken and Robin open the Gaming Hut to air evolving differences in gamer expectations, with Feng Shui player feedback offering a time portal between the mid-90s and now.
Among My Many Hats looks into Ken’s gig as a dramaturg for WildClaw Theatre’s stage production of Shadow Over Innsmouth.
With the holidays nearing, the Food Hut learns what Christmas food means to us.
Finally Ken’s Time Machine gears up to undo the 1979 Iranian revolution.
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so you both have a lot of experience with role-players or roll-players, what traits, habits, attitudes, actions, ability’s, gifts, feats, mannerisms, worldviews or skills make a granite and/or fun player, are there ways you or I might improve or is a good player born not made.
Regarding the Time Machine scenario, I’m afraid there’s a tendency to assume that because the Shah was a ruthless guy and the CIA backed the coup that deposed Mossadegh, Mossadegh must have been a font of sweetness and light and wise governance. I suspect that leaving him in power would not have created a stable democratic Iran — the Thailand example is a good one: Iran would wind up with frequent coups and counter-coups as one gang of wannabe kleptocrats decide that the other bunch has been skimming the oil revenues long enough and now they want some. This lasts until a gang of Marxist kleptocrats get in charge, at which point either the Soviets arrive to lock in their new client regime, or the US and Britain arrive to kick them out at gunpoint, at which point you’re pretty much right back where we started with the coup that deposed Mossadegh.
I do like the idea of blowing up the Shah and making him Iran’s progressive martyr. Just for the inevitable Progressive community-center wall art showing the tryptich of Kennedy, King, and Pahlavi looking all visionary together.
Doctor Johnson famously said KING LEAR was too terrible to actually be put on stage: who would want to watch a poor old man going mad and someone having their eyes put out?
The white chocolate-cranberry cookies are clearly an alchemical blending: the sacred fusion of the red and the white that produces the Philosophers Stone.
My sister makes white chocolate-cranberry cookies for holiday consumption. They do not last long.
I enjoyed the podcast, but had some questions about the alt history of the Iranian revolution. Actually, just one:
Why not derail the Foster brothers in some way? If John Foster and Allen W. weren’t State and CIA–or if they hadn’t formerly been connected to various multinationals (Anglo-Iranian Oil and United Fruit–why not help Guatemala out while we’re playing with history?)–maybe we could avoid the ’53 coup against Mossadegh.
Of course, even if we help create a democratic, progressive, Western-leaning Iran, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve created a nuclear-free Iran. It seems to me that there’s a democratic, progressive, Western-leaning country in the mid-east that has nukes… but I can never remember its name.
It’s not Foster. It’s Dulles
The most stupid technological, political, and diplomatic decision of the post-war period was the UK, under PM Attlee , giving the Soviets the Rolls Royce Nene jet engine.
Had this been prevented I believe the Russian AF intervention in Korea would have been limited. The threat of Soviet bombers may be minimized.
Can Ken fix this with his time machine?
First: Special thanks to Robin for mentioning poutine as a possible Canadian food. The general consensus was that eating it is much like climbing Mt. Fuji: everyone should do it once in their lives, but no one needs to do it twice…
Second: I come from a miniatures gaming (as opposed to role playing) background, and no RPG feels complete without painted minis for all the PCs and any enemies they encounter. However, according to the RPG manuals I have acquired after hearing them mentioned on this podcast, combat seems to be less grid- or hex-based and more narrative in focus. So, I’d like to ask: do minis add to or detract from the modern RPG experience?
Poutine is marvelous food and I will hear no bad word said against it. If we had poutine on the regular in America (instead of only at fancy hipstery places like Bluebird in Chicago where they have an amazing, if ridiculous, duck poutine) I would fricking live on Mt. Fuji.
Personally I’d say that it’s not realy a matter of modernity, just preference. Overall very few RPGs nowadays have rules that require miniatures, or specifically integrate miniatures into the game mechanics, but even so some groups still like to use miniatures as a visual aid.
I’ve been running a lot of modern/SF games over the last few years, so I tend not to use them because combats in my games are often very dynamic and range over varied terrain and different ranges so I don’t think miniatures would help much. They’d tend to get in the way. However I’ll be playing in a Castles and Crusades game soon and we’ll probably be using miniatures sometimes.