The (Unintentional?) MMO End Game of TFT

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Tywyll

I also like the idea of high level combat becoming a 'wish-battle'. Character's become more mythic when you imagine their clashing swords are surrounded by a constant struggle of wills to shape reality to their whim.

May I recommend Mage: The Ascension?

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

Yes, but how long did it take for you to develop that sort of expertise? Every group I've watched playing GURPS seemed to spend a lot of time looking at the rules, discussing the rules, arguing about the rules, trying to find the rules etc.

Even TFT isn't really quick, compared to systems like BOL and T&T, but I can put up with the slowdown for the added tactical nuances. And to develop a reasonable familiarity with the rules doesn't take very long.

The worst thing I ever watched was a group playing Rolemaster who weren't really familiar with the rules at all. They were right next to my group's table and I seriously considered killing them to put an end to the misery.

I spent six years playing TFT first until TFT was second nature and seemed too limited to us. Then GURPS only took a few sessions to pick up (because it shares so many concepts with TFT), starting with the nice original into materials Man To Man, Orcslayer, and the first edition of the Basic Set, which made it very focused on things that were natural extensions to TFT. Within about six months, I had GURPS down, was converting my TFT campaign, and running large complex battles with it.

And apparently I'm an outlier in terms of handling complexity.

Certainly GURPS has a learning curve, can be run slowly and clunkily and probably will by people trying to learn it. Also, even I find the 4e Basic Set to be overwhelming because it includes and intermixes stuff from all sorts of genres I don't use and cares about universal point costs which I also don't use. But the original 1986 combat system is more or less the same and once the GM learns that, it can be a nice "Advanced TFT".

[zot]

Originally Posted by Skarg

Certainly GURPS has a learning curve, can be run slowly and clunkily and probably will by people trying to learn it. Also, even I find the 4e Basic Set to be overwhelming because it includes and intermixes stuff from all sorts of genres I don't use and cares about universal point costs which I also don't use. But the original 1986 combat system is more or less the same and once the GM learns that, it can be a nice "Advanced TFT".

This could be what hit me -- we played the original GURPS in 1986 and had a lot of fun with it. I stopped role playing around 1991 or so and resumed around 2004. In 2005 (I think) I bought GURPS 4e and tried running a campaign with GURPS Powers and that's when I found it to be unnecessarily complex, too slow to run, and too lethal.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by zot

This could be what hit me -- we played the original GURPS in 1986 and had a lot of fun with it. I stopped role playing around 1991 or so and resumed around 2004. In 2005 (I think) I bought GURPS 4e and tried running a campaign with GURPS Powers and that's when I found it to be unnecessarily complex, too slow to run, and too lethal.

I'm not surprised people would tend to have such an experience.

4e made a whole extra game out of calculating points for anything from any genre... a whole extra game that's super-deluxe kitchen sink point-buy that I'm not interested in myself but is still in the way of finding the basic ordinary normal human low-tech things in the 4e Basic Set.

In earlier editions, superpowers were nicely hidden in supplements, rather than being alphabetized in with the normal stuff.

And, GURPS with super powers or even guns tends to be pretty deadly by default, since it's trying to give logical outcomes. I imagine there is a way for a strong experienced GURPS GM to figure out how to design and run a supers campaign that plays fast enough and isn't super-deadly, but I think the system by default leads you to complex weird super-deadliness. I avoid superheroes altogether, but when my friends have run GURPS superheroes, it's always quickly become a savage bloodbath because the default system has a core of logical cause & effect and mortality... it's like a constant lesson in why superhero action would cause massive collateral damage and would not play out like it does in the movies. (Which I personally think is great, because that also tends to be my reaction as an audience.)

[JLV]

Originally Posted by zot

This could be what hit me -- we played the original GURPS in 1986 and had a lot of fun with it. I stopped role playing around 1991 or so and resumed around 2004. In 2005 (I think) I bought GURPS 4e and tried running a campaign with GURPS Powers and that's when I found it to be unnecessarily complex, too slow to run, and too lethal.

I'm sort of in the same boat -- GURPS 1E was very fast to pick up and only marginally more complicated than TFT. But now, with the current edition, it's something I simply don't find fun or amusing anymore, and it definitely doesn't emphasize the gaming elements that I'm most interested in. I would probably buy GURPS 1E again, if I could find it for a reasonable price (and I do have things like Orcslayer and Man-to-Man still), but 4E leaves me absolutely cold. And frankly, so does Dungeon Fantasy for many of the same reasons. Now if they translated DF into 1E... ;-)

Somewhere along the way, they buried the bones of a good, simple, but even more interesting than TFT, system under so much fat and rules agglomeration that it's become a kind of joke to many players that I've spoken with over the past decade or so. Kind of like what happened with Squad Leader when it morphed into Advanced Squad Leader.

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by Tywyll

I've never had the experience of characters achieving attribute bloat either, but many posters on these forums insist that it was a real issue in the old game.

Further, the tools to do what I'm talking about are in the rule book. This isn't some weird splat or crazy combo...it's in the core book. I won't be the only one to see it. And its 'necessity' is a creation of the new xp system that artificially caps growth.

It was quite an issue ... because it was the sole means of improvement. To get new talents, raise IQ.

it's a huge and fundamental change to how the game works.

[Tywyll]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

May I recommend Mage: The Ascension?

Why would I want to play a game that doesn't work? :D