The Fantasy Trip

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

After TFT died, I bought a lot of GURPS stuff. I tried to move my players over to GURPS a couple times, but it did not take. It just seemed slower. I reasoned that we knew TFT really well, but GURPS was slow because we didn't know the more complex rules. So I started a GURPS campaign and we played it until all of use knew GURPS backwards and forwards. We were not slow because we didn't know the rules.

The PC's knew the importance of good active defences, and put a lot of points into them. My NPC's felt the same way.

---

Normally, a fight against a bunch of mooks results in the PC's getting a wound or two and the mooks dying. (Or some die and the rest run away.)

In TFT, a PC swings and hits, the enemy swings and hits, the PC swings and hits and the combat is over. Nice and quick.

In GURPS, the PC swings and hits, but enemy parries. Enemy swings and hits, and PC parries. PC swings and hits and Enemy parries. Enemy misses. PC swings and hits and enemy misses his parry! Enemy swings and hits and PC parries. PC swings and hits and enemy parries. Enemy swings and hits, but PC parries. PC hits, enemy misses parry and combat is over.

Exactly the same result, but the GURPS fight takes 3 times longer than TFT to play out.

After that, we went back to TFT and stayed there.

I've had different experiences. GURPS remains a little slower but not by much. I can run either quite quickly. GURPS combats often play out very differently and much less predictably from by-the-book TFT combats. After 5-6 years of playing TFT, we could more or less predict how the action was liable to go if we knew the character stats. GURPS combat on the other hand has all sorts of options and tactics and usually much more dynamic movements. There's also much more variety of combatant types and viable tactics. The ability to attack and defend and block attacks makes it a valid tactic to fight such that you hurt enemies and don't get hurt yourself, without having piles of armor or knocking out all your enemies first.

I game mastered a pbem game in Dave Seagraves Thail campaign, and - foolishly - I used his rules, rather than my own. He had an auto parry rule, and for the characters with a high DX, well, they were not hit much. Fighting NPC's with high DX was slow and frustrating.

I STRONGLY recommend against any sort of parrying as a free action in TFT. If you want complex and realistic cut and thrust, then play GURPS.

Playing in that game you ran, I also had a very different experience. I really enjoyed it, and it showed me that some simple house rules could allow playing TFT with the experience I like in GURPS. It was not much different from playing GURPS for me, with you running the defenses automatically and telling us what happened. I was playing a character with good skills but low armor, and was able to be effective and not get cut up while taking a fairly bold position in fights, because of that. Without the parry rule, my character would have been ground down and/or killed if I had moved him the same way.

I wasn't seeing the rolls of course, and I'm not sure that rule is the best one, but I did see that it could do something I really enjoyed - being able to play a good light fighter who can fight effectively offensively and defensively and not get ground down as he would in TFT, with what seemed like pretty light rules (at least as a player with the GM resolving the attacks).

If you want to be harder to hit, get a Blur ring, or add some talents where anyone attacking you thru your front hexes gets a -3 adj DX to hit you. I have made such talents and they work. I really like the roll to hit, then roll for damage mechanic in TFT.

If you just like the idea of cut and thrust, clashes of swords, then fine. But don't make parrying a free action, which comes into play on EVERY attack.

In that same game, you also added Expert and Master weapon talent levels (and beyond, IIRC) which added an effect along those lines. However I didn't think I liked the effect, because they seemed like to clearly the thing practically every warrior would really want to get as much of as possible, and to create a "level of mastery" situation where all the Experts were notably better than non-Experts, etc. I liked having added layers of weapon talents, but I thought they were too good for the cost and too chunky in their effects.

As much as I would love to be able to play skilled fighters with defense abilities in TFT, I am also leery of the balance issue that they may overbalance the alternative option of the strong attacker with a big weapon unless something is done to validate that sort of fighter, too.

[larsdangly]

I think TFT and GURPS played in its most basic mode (core book; no automatic weapons, etc.) are so similar for small tactical combats that you can freely port rules back and forth between them with little risk of messing up the resulting hybrid. It is also worth noting that TFT is superior to GURPS when it comes to the narrow question of how spell casting acts in small, close fights (because the spell casting rules are so explicitly tactical and balanced against non-spell casting powers). So, if Steve draws on ideas from GURPS when revising TFT the result will probably be at least as good as either as a fast, fun table-top combat engine, and probably better than both.

Where the games differ a lot is in the complexity and 'trade space' of character creation and experience. TFT has both a much smaller family of options. The simplest difference is that a typical stat block for a GURPS character, NPC or monster, assuming moderate experience, is usually pretty complicated, sometimes having 20 or more skills, advantages and disadvantages to deal with. The same character in TFT will usually have 4-8 talents, only 2-3 of which involve any subtlety or thought to use.

More importantly, TFT trades off strengths in various attributes and talents under a lot of constraints with balanced exchanges. GURPS opens this up by making everything fungible with everything else, in a trade space so diverse and complex that it is pretty easy to figure out how to create a monstrous murder machine, tougher than Conan or any other NPC you will find in a source book, through a bunch of goofy exchanges ('if I have acne and hate my mother I'll be able to afford Sword skill at DX +4!!!'). GURPS is a great game, but this aspect of it gives rise to a lot of character design head games and complexity. Sometimes I'm in the mood for that, but usually I'd rather skip it.

[JLV]

Originally Posted by larsdangly

-snip-

More importantly, TFT trades off strengths in various attributes and talents under a lot of constraints with balanced exchanges. GURPS opens this up by making everything fungible with everything else, in a trade space so diverse and complex that it is pretty easy to figure out how to create a monstrous murder machine, tougher than Conan or any other NPC you will find in a source book, through a bunch of goofy exchanges ('if I have acne and hate my mother I'll be able to afford Sword skill at DX +4!!!'). GURPS is a great game, but this aspect of it gives rise to a lot of character design head games and complexity. Sometimes I'm in the mood for that, but usually I'd rather skip it.

This is very much how I feel about it -- I like TFT more than GURPS precisely because I don't HAVE to get into that kind of headspace in order to design a competitive character. In GURPS, you pretty much have to, unless you're just going to be some kind of "sidekick" character along for the ride. And don't even get me started on GURPS magic! I much prefer TFT for my Wizards, precisely because it's pretty easy to set up a useful and competitive character without spending a week immersed in the books trying to figure out the "perfect spell combo." (Which isn't really possible there either -- but that never stopped me or anyone else from trying!) Even with Advanced Wizard, I never had to spend more than about an extra ten minutes on character design for a Wizard character that was both useful and competitive in combat.

[larsdangly]

Because of the constraints on character generation and the pretty consistent implicit rules of trade offs, you actually have to work to create a TFT character who is uncompetitive in close combat with another of the same point value.

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by tbeard1999

Polyhedrals, Rick. They’re the answer. Polyhedrals. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

Hi Ty,
Here I can agree with you. I could 'bake in' a bunch of rules and
ideas in the game tables if I was willing to use polyhedrals. I've
stuck with d6 in TFT out of respect for tradition.

Warm regards, Rick.

[Rick_Smith]

Hi all,
I found that wizards and heroes were very nicely balanced at low levels, but as the two gained attributes, wizards became much more powerful. Both made to-hit and saving throws better at the same rate, but the effectiveness of the spells went up fast.

This makes sense, you want to have some really cool spells to aspire to, but other than the talent Unarmed Combat V, what really super cool ability could heroes work towards?

I balanced heroes and wizards in my campaign in two ways. First I made talents cheaper. (Including 1/2 memory point talents.) It always felt unfair that an IQ 10 wizard could have 10, reality warping spells, where as a hero at IQ 10 might only be able to fit in 6 talents. (I also said that some spells that I didn't like the dynamic of {looking at you Insubstantiality}, cost 2 memory to learn.)

Second I made several more higher IQ, cool talents for all character classes. So Thieves got Thief Lord. Climbers got Mountain Climbing talent. Woodsmen got Greenwalking talent. Fighters got Dance of Death. Diplomatic types got Magnetic Personality.

I ended up with so many talents it got a bit tricky to find them all. So I said that all talents in a series are in increments of 2 IQ. So my UC talents are at IQ 7, 9, 11, 13, and 15 respectively. I'm not claiming that is is realistic, but it worked. Talents were much easier to find.

I also included an index that listed: Talent name, memory cost, prerequisites, IQ requirement and page number. About 80% of the time, people could look at the index and find the information they needed right there.

I STRONGLY recommend that the new TFT makes talents both cheaper, and adds some very cool higher level talents.

Warm regards, Rick.

[bookworm562]

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

Hi all,
I found that wizards and heroes were very nicely balanced at low levels, but as the two gained attributes, wizards became much more powerful. Both made to-hit and saving throws better at the same rate, but the effectiveness of the spells went up fast.

This makes sense, you want to have some really cool spells to aspire to, but other than the talent Unarmed Combat V, what really super cool ability could heroes work towards?

I balanced heroes and wizards in my campaign in two ways. First I made talents cheaper. (Including 1/2 memory point talents.) It always felt unfair that an IQ 10 wizard could have 10, reality warping spells, where as a hero at IQ 10 might only be able to fit in 6 talents. (I also said that some spells that I didn't like the dynamic of {looking at you Insubstantiality}, cost 2 memory to learn.)

Second I made several more higher IQ, cool talents for all character classes. So Thieves got Thief Lord. Climbers got Mountain Climbing talent. Woodsmen got Greenwalking talent. Fighters got Dance of Death. Diplomatic types got Magnetic Personality.

I ended up with so many talents it got a bit tricky to find them all. So I said that all talents in a series are in increments of 2 IQ. So my UC talents are at IQ 7, 9, 11, 13, and 15 respectively. I'm not claiming that is is realistic, but it worked. Talents were much easier to find.

I also included an index that listed: Talent name, memory cost, prerequisites, IQ requirement and page number. About 80% of the time, people could look at the index and find the information they needed right there.

I STRONGLY recommend that the new TFT makes talents both cheaper, and adds some very cool higher level talents.

Warm regards, Rick.

We added an experience point purchase of Talents. What sort of effect did the lower IQ cost produce for the characters and the game?

[Chris Rice]

Originally Posted by bookworm562

We added an experience point purchase of Talents. What sort of effect did the lower IQ cost produce for the characters and the game?

Wizards weren't fuelling spells with ST in my game so didn't get strong in the way that warriors did. That helped restrict their power a bit.

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by bookworm562

We added an experience point purchase of Talents. What sort of effect did the lower IQ cost produce for the characters and the game?

About what you would expect... people took more talents. Since I had more high level talents, people eventually could become better thieves, fighters, etc. or they could be better generalists.

It was power inflation for all characters, except those who took very few talents (i.e. wizards), so the net effect that was non-wizards became more powerful.

Warm regards, Rick.

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

Wizards weren't fuelling spells with ST in my game so didn't get strong in the way that warriors did. That helped restrict their power a bit.

Hi Chris,
So you didn't use the "Recovery From Exhaustion" rules on page 39 of Adv. Wizard? Did your wizards power their spells with damage (like in the microgames) or from some other system?

Warm regards, Rick.