Lurker Below wrote:Playing at the World arrived today. Wow. I did notice that there is no writer's blurb. No headshot either. What gives? Bashful?And where do I have to go to get it signed?LB
Guy Fullerton wrote:My copy just arrived from Amazon today. Oh! My! Gosh! It's! Huge!I love that you put the book's encumbrance value on the back cover!
Zenopus wrote:I noticed that, thought it was the price in gp, but encumbrance makes more sense!
Ligmancer wrote:I'm about a hundred pages in and I love this book. Even if the rest is awful (which I highly doubt), what I've read so far has already been worth the cost. Thanks Jon, well played!First few levels have been cleared, now on to the lower dungeons...
sauromatian wrote:One of the (many) big revelations I've gotten from the book thus far is the part about use of spring-loaded toy guns & pea-shooters in early/mid-20th-century wargaming. I have a set of these toys, something I got for my son years ago, but never dreamed that it had this role. The plastic soldiers are the same scale & design as the big kids' wargames, with a catapult & a cannon to know them down with plastic balls, & castle walls for cover. It would not be hard to integrate them into a game with conventional rules. The hardest part to imagine is players actually allowing their delicately constructed metal figures to be hit with the projectiles. Some minis would fall more easily than others, tilting game balance away from simulation. The book describes a formative game involving a whole rack from the toy store. I imagine an early session proceeding from table-to-table in Gygax's fabled basement dungeon. Table 1 is set up for Diplomacy, perhaps with upside-down maps of North America & the Netherlands. Table 2 is Outdoor Survival, while Table 3 holds stamps & stationary for play-by-mail movements. The rest are a profusion of metal & plastic dinosaurs, soldiers, & siege engines. Under this basement would naturally be located a tunnel to China, source of all the magical numbered polyhedrons.
increment wrote:Remember that Britains weren't too delicate, especially not the models made in the early 20th century.
increment wrote:They're much larger and studier than miniatures we're used to today. Still, by the 1950s, you hear stories of gamers like Charles Sweet who shot q-tips from his canons instead of dowls, and would then place a metal circle around the area that the q-tip fell to determine which figures were killed by the shell. This reflects the conceptual shift from treating miniatures as toys to caring for them as collectibles.
