Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

I love maps.  Star maps are especially neat, but the restrained retro-cool look of a Traveller map is even better.  Combined with the austere UWP code that defines each world’s primary characteristics you have unlimited adventure potential.  But you also have a huge referee headache: how do you plan an adventure when your players can go just about anywhere?  You could spend days detailing a single world only to see the PC’s traipse off into a completely different subsector. 

This problem has led GURPS Traveller author Hans Rancke-Madsen to argue that Traveller campaigns– especially beginner campaigns– should start on a single world.  He’s criticized old-school Traveller adventures as being run from one cardboard cut-out starport to another.  I’m sure his recent JTAS articles detailing Regina’s starport at an unprecedented level of detail are up to his usual standards, but I feel he’s missing the whole point of the game.  I mean… it’s called Traveller, after all.  Travelling the stars is, uh, sort of the core premise of the game.

The classic approach to dealing with this problem was to introduce a patron.  Even as far back as the original Book 3 Worlds and Adventures, the patron was the “most important NPC” and “the key to adventure in Traveller.”  Avenger’s Special Supplement 3: Patron Encounters provides 34 such opportunities.  Each includes up to 6 variations to allow you to determine the complications of the situation randomly or to give you ideas on how to play it out.  They tend to be much meatier than the typical GURPS style half-paragraph adventure seed.  You get a detailed encounter or situation, usually a job or objective, and often a few supporting props and proper names.  Many of them are sufficiently well crafted to give you a premise sufficient to launch the rpg equivalent of a one-hour tv episode.  Sometimes its pretty easy to imagine the “big reveals,” the setbacks, and the turn-arounds.

Being Traveller, some of these might be a bit dry.  There’s no bizarre alien encounters or mind-numbing artifacts.  Just a lot of Firefly style material appropiate for a small band of spacers that are just trying to make ends meet.  If you want to get crazy, you’ve got to go check out the latest from long time GURPS Space author, Stefan Jones.  His MacGuffin Alphabet takes a completely different tact.

MacGuffins are artifacts whose qualities have a way of drawing their possessors into deep mysteries, unceasing action, and unstoppable chases.  If you’re not sure how to use such a thing in a game, then check out S. John Ross’s notes on using a “Dingus” in an rpg plot.  The implied setting of the MacGuffin collection is sort of a Alan Dean Foster meets Douglas Adams affair with nanotech and veiled Monty Python references thrown in.  His writing is clean and entertaining.  This is a very classy collection of ideas that would have to be reworked a bit in places in order fit into a Traveller campaign, but make no mistake: this PDF will inspire your awe with its unabashed weirdness.  While these are much more fleshed out, again, than the typical Adventure Seed, they still require some work on the part of the referee to work them into his game.  Quite a bit is left to the imagination… but there’s still quite a bit to fire the imagination as well.

Hopefully these two supplements will go a long way towards helping you stock your universe with adventure goodness… regardless of where the players decide to go.

The T4 ship design system is not bad, at a first glance.  Unlike previous versions of Traveller that limited you  to a set number of “hardpoints” based on ship size, T4 assigns a Surface Area requirement for each component.  You can load up as many weapons as you want as long as you can fit them in both the internal space and external surface area.  (Obviously, the shape of your starship will have an impact on the volume and surface area.)  Note that, instead of the usual “generic” critical hit table, you can probably use these figures to come up with a more suitable custom table for each ship.

Each component is rated with power and crew requirement.  Once you’ve got the bulk of your ship designed, you then choose a power plant.  The excess power of 14.3 in the design below is calling out to be relevant in a combat scenario, but alas, it doesn’t appear to matter much in the T4 combat rules.  Determining your crew requirments is a bit more tricky: it’s not just a simple matter of checking your running tally.  Engineering crew is determined with one part of the numbers, command crew based on your total crew size….  Then you have to figure out who gets the nice diggs.  Due to the weird rounding rules in this step, you can’t breeze through this part.  With both these steps, it’s a little strange having to design most of your ship before picking these: you might not have enough space to do what you need, so you may be forced to go back and revise things.

One unusual decision on the part of the designers was to specify armor values within the standard hull tables.  You don’t have the option to vary them.  If you want to increase the defensive capability of a ship you need to add in sandcasters.  A high sandcaster rating can be useful in deflecting laser and missile hits.  (Note that the ranges for the sandcaster table in the combat section are incorrect– they should be VS, S, M, and L.)  But when you buy a sandcaster the rules do not specify what you are getting.  Is it a turret that requires a gunner with a sandcaster rating of 1?  That’s pretty useless.  Is it a turret that requires a gunner with a sandcaster rating of 3?  That’s not so bad.  Can a gunner fire more than one sandcaster per turn?  I see nothing in the rules to help with this question, and once again I’m forced to pick over previous rules editions to try to ascertain what the designer was thinking.  In the ship below I purchased three of the sandcaster items, but I have no idea what I bought or if I can use them!  They take up nearly as much space as the laser, so I will guess that they are good enough to block one and merit a total rating of three and also require a single gunner to operate.  I have no idea if this is right, though.

The computer software section has been cut down quite a bit since the old days, but there still appears to be a remant there that ought to have been excised.  The “Return Fire” has no obvious use in the T4 rules.  Also, the table used to determine the required size of the Jump was ommited from the rulebook.  Looking through the errata, I see that the small ship designs are completely bogus… and that the patrol cruiser was completely mangled.  And missiles seem to be given short shrift: I see no information concerning the cost and space requirments of the standard and nuclear types, nor any information on guided or unguided.  What a mess!

I’ve spent several hours messing with T4 ship combat at this point, and to get any use out of it I still need to continue a comparative analysis between it and the other editions, design a slew of ships, and come up with a good half dozen house rules.  I have doubts that many people ever used these rules….

If you’re interested in the gory details, here’s a complete breakdown of the Patrol Cruiser design I slogged through.

One of the things that surprised me about post-ADQ Car Wars fandom was the attachment to the whole armed vehicle genre.  CWIN, for instance, covered news of post-apocalyptic armed autos in all of their manifestations: board games, computer games, card games, and probably even books and movies.  I guess the genre of the game was never that important to me– oh, Boy Scout Commandoes and dangerous pizza delivery runs fired my imagination as much as anyone.  It was highly accessible fantasy to be sure, but the endeavor of playing Car Wars was something much more than all of that. 

Other critics have labeled Car Wars as merely being a “design-a-thing” game, but I don’t think that’s the best category to describe what its all about either.  Car Wars has its feet firmly planted in two contradictory worlds: it’s is part of a family mini-games– inexpensive and relatively easy to learn games that utilize the trappings of older wargames– and at the same time Car Wars is part of a family of monster games… mini-games that raged out of control in a series of contradictory expansions and errata culminating into comprehensive “Compendiums” and “Doomsday” editions.  In other words, the true family of games that Car Wars belongs to includes Battletech and Star Fleet Battles– and genre and even the fact that it uses a design system is secondary to its categorization.

Comfirmation of my approach to “gaming cladistics” can be found in the excellent article, An Introduction to Elegance.  He classifies them as “quasi-RPG wargames” and uses them to epitomize the lack of elegant design in American games.  He then sets up the German games invasion as being infinitely superior in the gaming elegance department… and he uses an example from computer programming to support his argument.

But I don’t think it’s entirely fair to compare an abstract game to a simulation.  While “Quasi-RPG wargames” can of course benefit from techniques developed by the German designers, they are not inherently inelegant.  It’s more fitting to view Settlers of Catan as a more elegant version of the Monopoly and M.U.L.E. tradition of game.  In this discussion, it is important to understand the design differences forced upon a game by its choice of scope and granularity. 

The Car Wars design system is extremely elegant when judged from the correct vantage point.  The equipment list if finite and colorful… and the exact combination of speed, maneuverability, defense, and offense capability can be chosen at the whim and style the designer.  Complex equations are necessary only when calculating speed and range… simple addition tallies and percentage increases are sufficient everywhere else.  Most importantly, cost is an accurate balancing factor: Battletech and Star Fleet Battles both had to develop kludgy “Battle Value” and “Base Point Value” systems to accomplish the same thing.  Finally, the statistical values developed in the design process impact all of the various rules subsystems in clearly defined and significantly game-impacting ways.

Returning to the programming example… a nifty “elegant” abstraction is only relevant to a project if it can accomplish the same requirements as the “ugly” solution.  Sometimes it is the right decision to simplify things… but at some point the maxim “as simple as possible but no simpler” comes into play.  German games are fun… they are interesting toys… but they don’t even attempt to solve the same problems that we were trying to solve back in the eighties.  And I’m not sure that a “germanified” Car Wars game could come close to capturing the flavor of an effective dueling machine tossed into mortal combat at a funky arena.

Anyways, just a minor quibble with an otherwise solid post.  Check out the My Play blog for more interesting discussion and gaming analyis!

I tried a practice run through of the T4 space combat rules: just a standard duel between two TL 12 10 ton “Light Fighters.”  This really isn’t a fair test of the system– it’d be like judging Car Wars based on a duel between two body armor wearing pedestrians having a long range shoot out using only heavy pistols.  My first impressions were positive.  While not particularly exciting, the rules were fairly easy to follow and relatively uncluttered.  Of course, the fighters are restricted to shooting it out in the point-blank range band, so there are not a lot of options for maneuver.

In my test run, both fighters had to roll a 5 or less on two dice to score a hit.  The fighters lack a lot of fancy equipment, so critical hits tend to not do much.  To completely finish off a fighter it takes 5 hits with the point defense laser.  And with that you have a nice little probability problem for the aspiring actuary: what is the expected number of rounds it takes to finish a fighter duel?  In my case, one fighter scored a lucky hit on the other and took out its laser battery.  While the other attempted to flee, the fighter continually tried to close and keep firing.  It took a total of 37 turns to finish it.  That’s 370 minutes of game time, or six hours and ten minutes!

When opponents have equal maneuver ratings, the initiative is determined by flipping a coin.  To escape a battle, the fighter would have to win initiative three times in a row to get to long range.  Of course, even if he succeeds in breaking off, I think the attacking fighter can elect to pursue.

Anyways, I saw several places where the rules could be improved:

1) Critical Success and Critical Failure effects are not defined for skill rolls in space combat.  Addressing that could go a long way toward adding at least a possibility of a satisfying coup-de-gras moment in the above scenario.

2) The initiative step is more or less geared towards a face off between opposing fleets: the side with the most ships and highest leadership skill can close or pull away as it pleases.  The fifty-fifty approach used above is very unsatisfactory– surely there are other factors that can impact this all-important step.

3) T4 has been criticized for giving too much weight to attributes in its task system.  In space combat, however, attributes have no impact at all!  (This mismatch leads me to believe that these rules were mostly lifted from previous versions of Traveller without much thought to integrating them into a new vision of how things should work.  It looks like an opportunity to provide a “last word” on space combat was carelessly passed by.)

4) The no-effect critical hit results are very depressing.  They ought to at least force the characters of the target vessel to have to make some sort of saving throw to avoid problems.  Think R2-D2 locking down the stabilizer on the x-wing or putting out the fire on the Falcon.

5) The jamming and sensor rules are pretty confusing.  The terms are defined, the step is there, and there’s a table of modifiers… but what really happens here is not spelled out.  Evidently a successful jamming attempt can break an opponent’s sensor lock, or make it harder for them to get a lock to begin with.  But the difference between active and passive sensors are not addressed even though the choice is explicitly referenced.

6) There are not a lot of choices in this vision of space combat.  Perhaps a paper-rock-scissors choice could be made at the beginning of each turn… with a matrix of the results creating bonuses for later steps or creating new contests of skill.  On the other hand, perhaps Traveller space combat is intended to be dry and without a lot of surprises.  I’m not sure about this.

7) There are no effects for morale or endurance.

 Looks like a lot of room for improvement. 

Now the Hot Shot was the example car used to demonstrate damage allocation in just about every edition of the game.  Of course, once you were armed with equipment from any of the Uncle Albert’s catalogues, you probably wouldn’t step near one of the things.  How on earth could anyone think that was a good design?  You might explain it away by conjecturing that the original run was intended for fighting against early chassis and crossbow style ruffians… but I think its actually listed in the AADA guide that these won AADA championships two years in a row.  And that was before the variant fire rules that made it possible for cars like the Hotshot to actually set things on fire!

This problem wasn’t fixed even with 5th edition Car Wars.  The Piranha got numerous improvements… with all three machine-guns moved to the front and loaded with incendiary ammo.  It was more than a match for the old same-old same-old Hotshot….

Anyways, here’s my version that I worked up during the early nineties– er, forties.  With a double dose of the minedropper option, incendiary mines and bullets, and extra armor, this version is a little more survivable.  Not by much, maybe, but it will set things on fire!

Hot Shot II— Luxury; Extra Heavy chassis; Heavy suspension; Large PP w/SCs; 4 Solid tires.  Driver w/Body Armor.  2xMachine Gun w/40xIncendiary; 2xMinedropper w/20xNapalm; 2xFlamethrower w/20xStandard.  4xLink; Fire Extinguisher; Targeting Computer; HD Brakes.  137 pts. Plastic (F: 40 R: 29 L: 29 B: 29 T: 5 U: 5); 1×10 pt., 2 spc. Plastic CA (Driver).  Cost: $19,990, Wgt: 6,520, HC: 3, Top Speed: 90, Accel: 5.

[This vehicle was designed with Compendium 2e rules using SPARK’s nifty design tool.]

Traveller players are a notoriously difficult bunch to please.  There are so many campaign types: merchant, mercenary, explorer, etc.  There are so many rule sets: classic, MegaTraveller, The New Era, T4, T20, GURPS Traveller, etc.  Most players don’t even play a single ruleset, but pick and choose pieces of each one and/or modify them heavily with houserules.  Then there are even the different types of games: miniatures games, grand strategic, ship combat.  For ship combat there are even 6 or 8 totally different systems of varying degrees of detail.  There are several different regions of space to play in: the Spinward Marches, the Solomani Rim, and Gateway.  There’s countless others that have less detailed support than those major regions.  And all of those regions can be played in during a half dozen hisorical eras.  But even playing in “official” areas/eras, players are still divided on major issues of technology and culture… and they tweak things to present Traveller as they think it really works.

So… if you were going to make a product for this crowd… what would it be?  How would come up with something for such a balkanized group of gamers?  No matter what you do you are likely to enrage some faction.  And the quiet die-hards are more than likely going to use just parts of what you produce to fine tune their personal universes.  For this crowd of picky gaming critics… what can you possibly do at this point to get them excited… to startle them… to even just get their attention?  Haven’t they seen it all by now? 

One wonders if the fans even really want to see something new.  While the Rebellion plot threads running throughout the MegaTraveller materials upset a great many of them, the Virus that debuted in The New Era sent many more over the edge.  Instead of pushing forward with a “ruined” Imperium, T4 turned back the clock of the setting by over a thousand years.  Similarly, T20’s default setting went back a hundred years or so.  The GURPS line went forward from the classic Traveller period… but in an alternate universe where Virus and the Rebellion never happened.  But going forward in that manner didn’t quite sit well… so the 4th Edition GURPS Traveller setting went even further back than T4 to the Interstellar Wars period– the setting derived from GDW’s wargame “Imperium” which wasn’t even technically a Traveller product when it came out!

Going forward seems to be the last thing on anyone’s mind.

And then, onto the scene comes a certain Martin J Dougherty.  A long time player and fan, I first became aware of him via the Citizens of the Imperium site that was more or less a hang-out for T20 fans with a strong “grognard” subculture.  He had this crazy dream of pushing the timeline forward from the New Era… and he’d even written a novel to do it.  I thought this was vaguely lame at the time… I mean, that would be like me writing a Car Wars novel, right?  I was skeptical.

Time went on, and I kept seeing this guy’s name turn up.  He wrote the short story that appeared at the front of QLI’s reprint of the venerable “Classic Books 1-3.”  He’d written the “Behind the Claw ” Spinward Marches sector book for GURPS Traveller.  (In a mix-up, a draft got published by mistake instead of the final version.  Steve Jackson never fixed the problem and quietly let that essential sourcebook go out of print.)  “MJD” wrote a a sourcebook about the Imperial Navy… but Steve Jackson decided not to go with the book.  Not to be dissuaded from his dreams, MJD published it himself… and it can now be purchased at e23.  MJD even had a primary role in launching a new line of “Little Black Books” supporting the classic era with background, ships, and adventures in the years just preceding the Rebellion. 

The guy is prolific, persistent, and not easily discouraged… and somehow he decided to not just talk about it, but he really did go and launch a new line of Traveller products that seriously supported a background set about 50 years after the New Era game.  “1248″ sat in the play-test area of the COTI boards for months.  It quietly got published sometime last year.  I hadn’t heard too much about it, but I had enjoyed the “Little Black Book Series,” so I took a chance and picked it up from e23 recently.  After several pages into the book, I slowly transformed into Sylvester after he’d seen the kangaroo-that-he-thought-was-a-mouse:

“B-b-b-big!  HUGE!  Big!  Big!  L-l-l-large!  Gigantic!”

I’d read the Classic Traveller Adventures and the GURPS Alien Races series, so I knew a lot of the basics of Traveller history and setting.  1248 takes that setting… and then spins the tale of the Rebellion and The New Era.  Even with my cursory knowledge of Traveller, I could easily follow the players and races involved in the tale.  I knew nothing about MegaTraveller, really, or TNE… so this was the first time I’d learned the details of what had occurred in those incarnations of the game.  What a story!  But it keeps going.  GDW’s last iteration of Traveller, “TNE,” was left partly undone and partly as a cliff hanger… but this book finally gives us the answers to wild things like The Black Curtain, The Empress Wave, Longbow, and the Zhodani Core Expeditions. 

As a teenager I’d always been disappointed by how Isaac Asimov had handled his Foundation Series.  When he picked up from the original trilogy, things just got stupid.  I wanted to see the Foundation grow into a real empire… and see the two Foundations work out their differences.  Instead, Asimov delved into the past and worked his robot novels into the background.  Now… more than 15 years later, I can finally have what I was longing for in a clash of space empires.  Oh yes… space ships explode in this one.  After reading lots of Classic Traveller and GURPS Traveller where a decadent status quo was carefully maintainted… now… all hell breaks loose… again and again and again!

70 pages of action packed history.  30 pages detailing the major states.  30 pages of secrets.  A really nifty system for specific generation rules for destroying Traveller settings and then helping them recover… and it’s fine tuned for each of the major interstellar terrains.  Finally, you get the details of part of a subsector, world descriptions for several planets, adventure seeds, and maps for three worlds.  160 pages altogether… and it can be had for a measly fifteen bucks.

All in all, I have to say this is the best Traveller product I’ve ever read.

Outstanding.

I won’t get into the details of the history and background as I don’t want to spoil it.  But for the old fashioned Car Wars fanatic like myself, I couldn’t help but notice that a special attention is given to the starship designs used by each faction each step forward into the future.  Unlike the original Traveller game where the design system came first… and then the background material came later and turned out to be somewhat inconsistent with the “crunchy bits”… this time, the “flavor text” is impacted very much by the implications of the existing design systems.  This is a real bonus to wanna-be gearheads like myself that want to know how developing battle fleets utilize their resources to come up with a coherent ship design strategy.  The text doesn’t go overboard with this stuff and there’s certainly no stats there, but you can tell that the authors really liked space ship designs.

You don’t need to be a Traveller expert to get into this, but you will get more out of it if you’ve read the Classic Adventures and some of the Alien Races series.  If you’ve held off on MegaTraveller and TNE, then you get a pretty good summary of what transpired in those supplements.  If you’ve been thinking of picking up MJD’s Traveller novels like The Diaspora Phoenix, then you might get some spoilers for those in this book.

Cranky Traveller fans are notorious for despising Virus, but there’s nothing in 1248 that forces you to feature it in your game.  Players can safely downplay it the same way I omit the more irritating major races from my scenarios. 

Probably the best part about the background is that there are so many flavors of Space Empire to choose from now, all of which are separated by huge expances of Wilds.  On the battered worlds of those decimated regions, a few PC’s with a ship can have a huge impact.  Games will not necessarily blow up into epic cinematic silliness just because they’re set in 1248… this is still Traveller style “mostly sorta hard-ish” space opera with less opera than most.  But PC’s will easily get in situations where they can transform the quality of life of a struggling culture, topple Technologically Elevated Dictators, or bring peace to two warring pocket empires.

The book is largely system free.  You just need to have a grasp of Traveller’s simple Universal World Profile to use the world data.  Don’t be put off by the T20 markings on the cover: the only reference to those rules is a reminder to T20 players not to confuse Traveller’s Charisma stat for Vargr with D&D’s Charisma attribute.

Highly recommended.  1248 is available from e23… but the entire product line can be viewed on the COMStar site.

Some vehicle designs are just meant to happen.  You pick what you want and it all falls into place: no fussing or tinkering.  The Boromir is one of those.  Its as close to a perfect design as any I’ve worked up.  I loved driving a Boromir… you might not win the event, but you could count on taking at least one person down!

The Boromir has the heavy hitting power of the APFSDS anti-tank gun.  Accuracy is improved with a single weapon computer.  The flame cloud streamer is great for nailing vehicles that have stalled… it’s one of the few dropped weapons that can really contribute to an arena fight.  Maneuverability is improved with spoiler, airdam, and heavy-duty brakes.  Tires are not skimped on: they’re solid with the usual guards and hubs, too.  There’s not one extraneous item on the thing.

(Division 20 seems like the optimal budget for an effective vehicle, to me.  If you throw too much more money at it, then you may as well get two vehicles if you have the drivers available.  Division 30 is just outright silly.)

Boromir — Pickup; Heavy chassis; Heavy suspension; Super PP; 4 Solid tires.  Driver w/Body Armor, Personal Fire Extinguisher.  Anti-Tank Gun w/10xAPFSDS; Flame Cloud Streamer w/2xFlame Cloud.  Single-Weapon Computer; HD Brakes; Spoiler; Airdam; Ramplate F.  169 pts. Plastic (F: 60 R: 34 L: 34 B: 29 T: 6 U: 6); 2×10 pt. Plastic Hubs F; 2×10 pt. Plastic Guards F.  Cost: $19,998, Wgt: 7,149, HC: 2 (3), Top Speed: 95, Accel: 5.

[This vehicle was designed with Compendium 2e rules using SPARK’s nifty design tool.  The output above is straight out of the spreadsheet and isn't quite the same format as the original material, but for a nice free tool... I can't complain.  Note that the designer seems to count the weight of personal equipment!]

I’ve always thought it strange that Interstellar Wars was released without any weapons stats.  The suggestion of just using the standard stuff in the 4^th edition core books always seemed pretty lame to me.  While the lack of any equipment in the new GURPS Space has now been fixed with the release of GURPS Ultra-Tech, GURPS Traveller still remains without any sort of conversion document to 4^th Edition.  This leaves some GT fans feeling somewhat abandoned by SJG.

While GT Demigod Loren Wiseman has recently scoffed at a COTI Poll indicating that a significant portion of fans desired a return to a Classic Traveller or MegaTraveller style rulesets, it ought to be noted that his own line of PDFs are indeed dual statted for those legacy systems.  Nevertheless Loren states he is indeed negotiating several new GT products slated to come out on e23 even as we speak, so hopefully the line is firmly in the “not dead yet” department.

A gaming guru known only as “GamerGirl” on the Steve Jackson boards has done the necessary crunching to translate the weapons on armor of GURPS Traveller into the 4th edition rules.  Her tips can help frustrated GM’s make the best of this irritating situation.  She has kindly given me permission to repost her findings here: 

__________________________________________________________

Well, actually, if you already have 4e, you can still implement the Traveller equipment list as presented on GT2e114-115 and the armor on the preceding page with just a few minor changes. If someone had told me what I’m about to tell you, I never would have had to switch over to G3e, but now that I understand both systems, I know what the main differences are:

1. Calculate Dodge as simply HT+DX/4, like Basic Speed, and drop the frak; that is to say, Dodge is pretty much equal to Move. The Passive Defense of any worn armor (abbreviated PD) is added to dodge or sometimes other defense rolls.

2. You can use the Accuracy as given. Holdout (Hld) is mostly applied to ‘to hit’ rolls with that gun in close combat. You might also occasionally use it to modify a concealment roll when trying to sneak past Starport customs agents, etc.

3. If the attacker’s adjusted (usually, the main modifier is for range, but there are other conditional modifiers on the Ref’s screen and in the Basic Set, but these are pretty much the same as they are in G4e) “to hit” roll is less than the SS number of the weapon, apply an additional -4 to the roll for unaimed shots- if your players crank their Gun skills up the way mine do, you usually don’t have to worry about this rule.

I recently got to see Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile in concert.  I have to say this was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen: the improvisational freedom of jazz… combined with the technical range and precision of classical… in the context of Appalachian style and tradition?!  Not exactly three things you’d think would go together.

It’s really quite disarming to actually see what Edgar Myers is doing… and how effortless he makes it look.  I’d heard recordings of this sort of thing before, but they really don’t compare.  I was about 15 rows back and Meyer’s bass was pointed right at me.  There’s just something about the sound that CD’s don’t capture.  And between songs you get to hear all of the banter– it just draws you in and makes you feel like they are performing just for you. 

Thile was so jittery and awkward.  He’s probably one of the greatest musicians in the world and yet he comes off as self-conscious and insecure.  At one point he announced a song and said it was written by “two really famous musicians: Edgar Myer and and Mark O’Connor.”  He emphasized how famous these guys were a couple of times while Meyer just quietly stood back and waited.  “You’re famous, too Chris,” he interjected.

Meyer can say more with a look than these prima-donna types like Bela Fleck and Thile can say in 15 minutes. 

Anyways, I remember Teri Gross interviewing some guy from Radio Head talking about how he’d get so bored at their concerts.  He’d be bored with a set of songs by the time they recorded them… but after they recorded, they needed to promote the album with a tour.  He’d just stand up there and be… totally bored and not into it.

Teri and this Alternative Rock Star had to bask on the sheer coolness of this point for a bit: wow… it’s just so authentic.  What a rip off!  Come on… you’re an entertainer.  Putting on shows is what you do!  And this is the best you can do for your adoring fans?!  I bet it’d stink to be married to this guy.  “Yes dear… I neglected to buy you flowers this Valentines day because I’m simply not particularly inspired by your ravishing good looks at the moment.”  Riiiiight.

But that’s the thing about Meyer and Thile.  They seem to be completely into what they’re doing.  There’s just no doubt in my mind that they are playing exactly the kind of music that they want to play… and playing it the way to want to with the people they want.  It’s great.  They don’t have to make some sort of statement by “being authentic.” 

Something tells me that if you’re putting a lot of effort into “being authentic” then maybe you really aren’t.  But I am going to the show to have an experience.  Maybe Meyer and Thile have cooked up some of the banter before hand.  Maybe they really didn’t want to do the Bach “cover” songs.  If so, then they sure fooled me.  I don’t care either way.

If I take the trouble to go to a concert, then I want to feel like I’m witnessing history.  I want to feel like I’m part of a unique moment in time… and that somehow… it actually is for me.  Meyer and Thile are the only musicians that I can remember ever actually pulling this off so completely.  They are making history… but in an unprecedentedly intimate way.

 Update 3/29/2007: Here’s a blog entry by someone else that was at this concert– and they even have full text of the “you’re famous” banter I mentioned above.

I played a real miniatures game this weekend.  The rules were from the 1983 Challenger: Ultramodern, and they gave me a new respect for wars and warriors.  The biggest difference between this and other games I play is that we played much of it double blind.  I plotted my movements on a map and my opponent stuck closely to a plan.  My opponent feinted an attack in one quarter… and while my own tanks were moving into position to respond, they were overwhelmed by the brunt of his forces!

Turns went slowly.  Artillery attacks were declared.  Units moved.  Each unit then rolled to acquire targets.  Units that “saw” an enemy would roll to-hit.  Damage effects would then be rolled.  Finally, morale would be checked.  At the end of the turn, artillery attacks were resolved and counter batteries got to fire, too.  Each miniature repesented a single tank or apc, but things got pretty crowded– I can see why most systems opt for something like 1:3 or 1:4 in that department.

I’ve never played anything with this level of detail.  Little dinky accounting tricks seem to have little affect on the game: battles are won by those with good planning and cool heads.  My plan stunk, I froze, then I panicked.  I know it was my first game with the system, but I’m pretty embarrassed.  The game required so much honesty on the part of the players, though, that it really wasn’t so much of a competitive event: it was more about just experiencing how everything would play out.