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Originally Posted by larsdangly
A major design difference that transcends just the overall complexity is the fact that GURPS lets you trade everything against everything, including both positive and negative departures from the 'default case' human. So, if I am contemplating how high my ST score or battleaxe skill can get, I can consider raising them in exchange for taking on a fear or spiders or innumeracy or something. In TFT your 'trade space' is tightly constrained - ST can only be traded for DX or IQ (and visa versa), within narrow limits when characters are first defined. And the 'trade spaces' associated with talents and gear and so forth have a similar balance in effective outcomes, and narrow ranges of things that can be trade for each other. With the exception of leaving a stat low at character creation, there also aren't any really negative things you can trade for different positive things. This makes it much easier to play 'build a bear' in GURPS to create characters who are exceptionally effective at one thing (usually fighting), whereas if you try that **** in TFT it is pretty hard to change your overall dangerousness in combat or survivability on adventures just by design.
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Good points.
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Originally Posted by tbeard1999
In my opinion, here are some key distinctions -
TFT offers a FAR simpler and quicker character generation system. GURPS offers a much slower and infinitely more detailed character generation system.
TFT offers a better compromise (again in my opinion) between slow, detailed combat and fast, abstracted combat. In any case, TFT offers a faster combat system with a bit less detail.
TFT necessarily is more "generic" than GURPS in terms of character definition.
TFT is NOT "GURPS Lite" any more than GURPS is "Advanced TFT". They are very different games that share certain similar mechanics. Indeed, I always felt that GURPS looked a lot more like Champions than TFT.
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Good points as well. Except I'd call GURPS and Champions half-sibling children of TFT.
Quote:
Originally Posted by larsdangly
TFT and Dungeon Fantasy are really, really different. Beyond the complexity and speed of play, Dungeon Fantasy characters are more like those in the jacked-up modern versions of D&D (4E, or high level 5E characters), whereas TFT is a much deadlier, easy come easy go sort of game, where your characters are more like those in Tunnels and Trolls or low-level basic D&D.
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TFT would be something like the original D&D to GURPS' later (A)D&D editions.
To me, GURPS is what you get if you take TFT with a number of various house rules I've seen over the years (separate HT attribute, magic cast using a separate fatigue value instead of damage, move stat derived from attributes), and use some of the base assumptions that went into Car Wars combat. Essentially, if you change the focus to characters instead of cars, compress the phases out of Car Wars combat turns, and flip it from 2d6 roll high to 3d6 roll low, you've got something that starts looking very much like GURPS combat. Combine that with the house ruled TFT from above, especially with its hex-based combat system, add some Bondo and sand off the rough spots, and you've almost got GURPS.
Assuming the attributes are on the same scale (which I do), one attribute point in TFT is roughly equal to 20 character points in GURPS. TFT's ST is almost exactly the same as GURPS' ST plus HT.
So, I'd say that the "essential TFT" side of the line is: three attributes, slightly abstracted combat time, low-resolution points, low-resolution talents, attribute checks on more or fewer dice depending on difficulty. The "essential GURPS" has more finely detailed and general-purpose points, more finely detailed skills, more finely detailed combat, and is in general more finely detailed.