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Old 01-16-2018, 05:25 PM   #331
Tequesian
 
Join Date: Jan 2018
Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

Starting to dig this stroll down amnesia lane. May have to dig into my storage locker to see if I can find my original rules, ya know, just for gigs.

Thanks, Mr. Jackson for reading my other post. Been a while since I last got to tell that story. Thanks for making a game that lent itself to that sort of guerilla gaming.

So here about rules. I notice a lot of folks making the same observations that I recall from back in the day. We experimented with a few different games back then, and basically worked out to what all modern gamers know.

The more of a simulation the game attempts, the less of a game it is.

We went through Traveller, V&V, the Morrow Project, Marvel Superheroes, Gamma World, Top Secret, and sometimes when I was not present, D&D. Was very anti D&D at the time. Basically, our house rules for TFT were sort of morphing into a combination of TFT and Traveller. For the Traveller game, we had already ditched Jack of all Trades and treated the Education stat with a lot of the JOT rules. It didn't seem like a far stretch to allow Traveller characters to learn skills like TFT. Had to come up with a way for the characters to purchase the skills though, so experience cost. Like TFT had.

Now, had circumstances been different, I might have had access to the gamer magazines of the day and gone with some of those systems posted, but instead, I had to notice my high level players having problems. My solution was that skill needed to be cheaper and independent of Int.

Conan the mage was not really a problem in my group. My players took an initial resistance to player mages as a ban, so they did not ask for mage characters until later. I just didn't want them to die as often as it looked like mages could. Cheaper strength batteries (low level ones) is one way around it, as is Drain Strength. I think we actually made a lot of use of healing potions though. In addition to being a good 'price of doing business' for adventurers, it tends to keep the characters alive.

Drain Strength spells can also lead to role playing opportunities as a given mage who has to lean on sapping the vitality of others gains a reputation for being a vampire or some other sort of undead. Remember, the what ever world the game takes place in is not populated by gamers. The people are people, and in most fantasy settings, uneducated. Thus given to whatever superstitions the GM needs to use to slow down player abuses.

That being said, sometimes player abuses are what make the game. Halfling boomer-rangers are kinda cool, with a touch of realism. Just remember that boomerangs are hard to make, and that to a halfling, it is a two-handed sword (so no, you may NOT carry ten of them), and they are already finely crafted.

Which kind of brings me to the thing about the game that I found by accident. First game I ever ran, no modules, made up my own adventures, often used ideas from the players themselves. Later I became acquainted with the 'module' story, and sometimes found myself as a player being a bit railroaded through the story, or as a GM trying to get my players to get the most experience out of said module for my money.

What I came to realise, though it took a bit, was that the best games are a sort of storytelling aikido. GMs all develop their own styles, but it should not be the job of the GM to pull on his bug stompin' boots and squash every possible rules abuse, or make every important npc glow with unearthly blue lightning when the players need to talk to them. Sometimes ya just gotta trust your players to tell an interesting story, and govern how the gameworld is going to react to them. Always with finesse.

I do recall we started to have some issues with the parry rules. It seems like we were experimenting with contested rolls. Swing sword, roll on adjDex, opponent can either make his own swing, or roll on adjDex to parry. Dodge we were going to just use extra dice, and leave it as the option for those who can not parry. Still a problem for high Dex combats, but then GURPS came along for us, and solved most of the issues we had run into in the game.

As far as lasers go, actually I am pretty sure TFT flat out had a laser rifle stat of 6 dice damage. Also seem to recall a .45 cal pistol damage suggest of 3 dice damage. Not in the weapon tables for fantasy, obviously. The point I would like to make here though, is that the form of catastrophic damage is a bit moot. The character that runs afoul of a laser rifle shot is just as dead as the character who got lippy with the high strength and dex Dwarven captain with the finely crafted battleaxe.

Yes, the types of damage will be a bit different, but it only matters to those who encounter the corpse. One die damage is a fight, two dice damage is potentially deadly (adventure ender) 3 dice or more is catastrophic. Pretty well validated in real life. Gunshot to the head is not really that much different than an axe to the head. I guess if that is really what the game needs, meh it probably also needs healing potion fountains along the way like drinking fountains.

Never had to go to that in my own games, but the thought did cross my mind once or twice. Usually someone was a master physicker though, as soon as experience permitted, and the players payed them for healing potion. No worries about what they are doing between adventures, eh?

Having played TFT and GURPS, and loved them both, my vote is for leaving TFT as more of a game. Quick & dirty introduction to role playing, as it were. If it's limitations really become a problem, time to advance to GURPS. Pretty elegant, in my humble opinion.

I do however, apologise if I have restated anything others are saying. Read some of it, but this thread is rather long and I have sort of already been online a bit.

One parting thought though. The bell bottoms armour totally needs to have some serious lapels by way of neck and throat protection. The Leisure suit legions of King Phlagarxes may protest, but they were never the most fashion conscious trooper anyway.
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Old 01-16-2018, 05:55 PM   #332
Bayarea
 
Join Date: Jan 2018
Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

Quote:
Originally Posted by larsdangly View Post
I'm not sure I understand what point there would be in making it harder to kill someone in TFT. If such a rule were applied in a balanced way across all PC's, NPC's and monsters, then all you are doing is delaying the inevitable and slowing the action without making combat any less dangerous. If such a rule were applied only to PCs (I'm not saying anyone has suggested this, but it is how some games work), then all you've done is taken an intrinsically unfair fight and dressed it up as a fair fight.
I not sure who first introduced it (maybe Ty Beard) but the rules we ended up playing in campaigns was that at 1 you were unconscious, from 0 to - your ST you could be revived. Only if you survived the battle and a Physicker could stablize you however anything beyond -ST and you were dead and gone.

This didn't affect combat effectiveness as a 1 you were out of the battle, but it allowed a margin so someone could survive the ambush and get the party back to safety.

Obviously if the party lost they all died, but in a situation where half of the group is invalided stabilizing them can be a problem. Then you can have running fights, the possibility of abandoning you wound comrades (you cad!) and other dramatic events that don't happen in TFT because badly wounded PC can still go as long as their ST is above 1.

This isn't changing the actual fight just what can happen after, and I for one do not use the instant healing potions I use Rick's rules slow but steady healing.
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Old 01-16-2018, 06:08 PM   #333
stefanj
 
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Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

Quote:
Having played TFT and GURPS, and loved them both, my vote is for leaving TFT as more of a game. Quick & dirty introduction to role playing, as it were. If it's limitations really become a problem, time to advance to GURPS. Pretty elegant, in my humble opinion.
I agree. A fun combat/action oriented game. Simple map-oriented adventures. Magic items and "powers" that give characters the ability to deal with run-down strength.

Quote:
One parting thought though. The bell bottoms armour totally needs to have some serious lapels by way of neck and throat protection. The Leisure suit legions of King Phlagarxes may protest, but they were never the most fashion conscious trooper anyway.
Must debate whether to share this with Liz . . .
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Old 01-16-2018, 07:40 PM   #334
bookworm562
 
Join Date: Jan 2018
Default Re: Dying in TFT - Revivals and When do you die.

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Originally Posted by Rick_Smith View Post
Hi Bookworm, everyone.
I'm not quite sure what you are saying in the first paragraph. Expand?

As for revival rolls, my thoughts on death and dying in TFT ran along these lines. In real life it is pretty easy to be knocked unconscious and live. But in TFT it is a knife edge. A person knocked out is on the ragged edge of death.

Also in TFT, there are no mortal wounds and you never see people who are dying, and give out some final bit of wisdom before they pass.

So in my rules, people at 1 or 0 ST may pass out. People who are at negative ST are mortally wounded. They slowly take damage until they die.

So my rules allow people to be hurt so bad that they are:
-- down helpless and unconscious.
-- down helpless and conscious.
-- down helpless, mortally wounded, and unconscious.
-- down helpless, mortally wounded, and conscious.

People who are morally wounded can be stabilized. If you make the roll, the person stays at negative health, but are stable and don't lose more hit points over time.

These rules are more realistic, are more dramatically interesting and reduce the mortality rate of my PC's. I thought all those things were good. That said, I'm not 100% happy with my rules, they are a bit more complex than I would like. But they don't come up that often, so I'm worried less about them than something that slows the core combat game flow.

I don't penalize attributes as the person was really not dead. If they WERE dead, they lose 5 attributes like a Revival Potion.

I think that a 4vsDX roll to revive someone is too easy. My rules are more complex: you take how far you are into the negatives, and double it. That is the number of dice you roll. So if you are at -4 ST, the physicker needs to make an 8 die roll (verses victim's basic ST + physicker's DX). But expert care can reduce this a bit. The upshot is that saving someone is easy if they are at -1 to -3 ST, but gets very hard, very quickly.

Did this answer your question?

Warm regards, Rick.
Hmmm. Yes you did answer the question. I guess that a 4 dice versus IQ for the roll, -1 on total for Physicker, -3 for Master Physicker was what I should have written. We rarely had people survive long enough to be Master Physickers, so it is tough roll for our group of gamers.

I really like the notion of a player having a new possibility and hope of survival with a roll for revival. It has that epic feel for me of surviving against the odds and/or risking life for adventure. I found the "Roll the Body Mechanic," from Dungeon Crawl Classics a bit off putting at first, but it worked to slowly create a class of retirement by attrition. If you're getting a penalty of an attribute point each time you normally would have died, you'll start with a new adventurer. Especially if you don't get much experience for a few adventures. (You could also receive negative experience points for the roll.)

My question might have been better if I asked does it change the feel of the game, the fear of death and vile endings that make a player cautious. I'm guessing not at all.

The other idea came from the fact that when we started, we played with experience rules of giving out experience at the end of the night. We could slobber over the character sheet and then decide what we wanted to do with our character. It added to the fun. Getting a set amount of experience at the end of the night can make it difficult to even get attribute gains.

However, it really did limit the amount of attribute bloat, because at a certain point you just hit a wall as far as advancement of attributes, and it was easier to be tight on experience than not.

Lastly I want any mods or House Rules to be simple and easy to implement. They have to be simple enough for a beginner to follow, make it easy as possible. (It is why we dropped the double damage on a charge attack with pole weapons. Too much argument? The rule went out the door.)

Thank You.

By the way, for anyone else out there reading and taking the time to reply or bring up ideas, I appreciate it. It really is fun.

Last edited by bookworm562; 01-16-2018 at 07:46 PM.
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Old 01-16-2018, 08:55 PM   #335
larsdangly
 
Join Date: Dec 2017
Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

Just to make sure we are all talking about the same thing, the standard canonical rules in ITL are: you are rendered unconscious at ST 1 and dead at ST 0. So, the notion of a threshold of death where you are knocked out of a fight yet not murdered is already cooked into the game.
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Old 01-17-2018, 01:34 AM   #336
Rick_Smith
 
Join Date: Apr 2014
Location: Coquitlam B.C.
Default The distance between the quick and the dead.

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Originally Posted by larsdangly View Post
...the standard canonical rules in ITL are: you are rendered unconscious at ST 1 and dead at ST 0. So, the notion of a threshold of death where you are knocked out of a fight yet not murdered is already cooked into the game.
Hi Larsdangly.
Yes, but let us say you are at 3 ST and take randomly from 1 to 10 damage. How often do you end up unconscious? TFT has a gap where you are down but not dead, but in the real world it is far easier than in TFT to be out of the fight but not dead.

As a guess, in the real world, I would estimate that 10 people get knocked out, or incapacitated for everyone who takes enough damage to die.

So the people who are widening the amount of values where you are down but not dead, are trying to capture that idea. (At least I was doing so.) No one was arguing that people could NOT fall unconscious in TFT.

Harkening back to my argument about what is dramatic, having a much loved character collapsed, (but still conscious), and crying for help (the fire is spreading) is more dramatic than, "oh, he's dead." My rules are more complex than standard TFT, but I have a richer set of verbs. I can tell stories that are impossible with regular TFT.

I'm not saying you are wrong in your preferences. But I am arguing that there are a number of good reasons why others might want to liven up this section of rules.

Warm regards, Rick.
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Old 01-17-2018, 02:05 AM   #337
Rick_Smith
 
Join Date: Apr 2014
Location: Coquitlam B.C.
Default Re: Dying in TFT - Revivals and attribute loss.

Quote:
Originally Posted by bookworm562 View Post
...
I really like the notion of a player having a new possibility and hope of survival with a roll for revival. It has that epic feel for me of surviving against the odds and/or risking life for adventure. I found the "Roll the Body Mechanic," from Dungeon Crawl Classics a bit off putting at first, but it worked to slowly create a class of retirement by attrition.
...

My question might have been better if I asked does it change the feel of the game, the fear of death and vile endings that make a player cautious. I'm guessing not at all.
...

However, it really did limit the amount of attribute bloat, because at a certain point you just hit a wall as far as advancement of attributes, and it was easier to be tight on experience than not.

Lastly I want any mods or House Rules to be simple and easy to implement. They have to be simple enough for a beginner to follow, make it easy as possible. ...

Thank You.

By the way, for anyone else out there reading and taking the time to reply or bring up ideas, I appreciate it. It really is fun.

Hi Bookwork, everyone.

I'm not that worried about the complexity of my house rules. If _I_ can remember it, and the rules are doing what they want them to, then everything is good. However, the designer of the core books has a much tougher path to find. Steve has (say) 128 pages to fill. Every rule has to be simple, and expressive. If I want to write 3 pages on death and dying, more power to me. Steve might find he has a budget of 800 words on the subject.

All that said, I've tossed thousands of words of rules because (a) they were so complex I was not remembering them a few months after they were written, or (b) they slowed down play. Over the years, I've gotten much more leery of making complex rules.

It sounds like the Dungeon Crawl Classics have a system were revival is fairly easy, but there is an attribute loss. That could work in TFT. Let us say you are using the rules from Advanced Melee and an orc cuts off your leg. If you let PC's sacrifice 2 attributes to avoid this, then that will combat attribute bloat. (Not that I am suggesting this seriously. Just a random thought.)

As for, how do my rule changes on death and dying affect the feel of the game? Well, I've made a lot of changes and over the years, this has resulted in death happening less often. I used to be known as a killer GM, and PC's died a lot. The PC's felt less like characters, and more like a set of combat stats. Yes you could make a new one in ten minutes, but it took a long time before Tuesday's set of numbers felt different from all the other sets of numbers.

Now characters last much longer. Death happens less frequently, but it carries more weight than it used to. And that is the big change.

I have a high powered campaign. There are enemies dishing out a lot of damage. Players can now survive from (say) 0 to -3 ST fairly easily. But PC's still go down to -7 health, and they still die.

I totally agree about how fun it is to talk about all of our favourite rules. I will be very curious to see what Steve does with TFT.

Warm regards, Rick.
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Old 01-17-2018, 10:39 AM   #338
Chris Goodwin
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Hillsboro, Oregon, USA
Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

In my clone I had an option for nonlethal damage. If your total nonlethal damage plus lethal damage exceeded your ST, you were unconscious, and if your total lethal damage exceeded your ST you were dead. ST spent casting spells was considered nonlethal damage.
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Old 01-17-2018, 12:46 PM   #339
larsdangly
 
Join Date: Dec 2017
Default Re: Dying in TFT - Revivals and attribute loss.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick_Smith View Post
Hi Bookwork, everyone.

I'm not that worried about the complexity of my house rules. If _I_ can remember it, and the rules are doing what they want them to, then everything is good. However, the designer of the core books has a much tougher path to find. Steve has (say) 128 pages to fill. Every rule has to be simple, and expressive. If I want to write 3 pages on death and dying, more power to me. Steve might find he has a budget of 800 words on the subject.

All that said, I've tossed thousands of words of rules because (a) they were so complex I was not remembering them a few months after they were written, or (b) they slowed down play. Over the years, I've gotten much more leery of making complex rules.

It sounds like the Dungeon Crawl Classics have a system were revival is fairly easy, but there is an attribute loss. That could work in TFT. Let us say you are using the rules from Advanced Melee and an orc cuts off your leg. If you let PC's sacrifice 2 attributes to avoid this, then that will combat attribute bloat. (Not that I am suggesting this seriously. Just a random thought.)

As for, how do my rule changes on death and dying affect the feel of the game? Well, I've made a lot of changes and over the years, this has resulted in death happening less often. I used to be known as a killer GM, and PC's died a lot. The PC's felt less like characters, and more like a set of combat stats. Yes you could make a new one in ten minutes, but it took a long time before Tuesday's set of numbers felt different from all the other sets of numbers.

Now characters last much longer. Death happens less frequently, but it carries more weight than it used to. And that is the big change.

I have a high powered campaign. There are enemies dishing out a lot of damage. Players can now survive from (say) 0 to -3 ST fairly easily. But PC's still go down to -7 health, and they still die.

I totally agree about how fun it is to talk about all of our favourite rules. I will be very curious to see what Steve does with TFT.

Warm regards, Rick.
That all makes sense, and I agree that house rules are often more complex than published rules yet fine in their own right because the half dozen people who need to work with them understand all the details and can adapt them through play testing.

One design goal I try to stick to whenever I introduce a new house rule that potentially influences balance or lethality is that I try to compensate for any new benefit with a similarly valued penalty and visa versa. For example, expanding the 'buffer' range of ST where you are incapacitated but alive might be desirable for all sorts of reasons, yet clearly reduces lethality. So, if I were writing such a house rule I might pair it with a new rule that increases lethality. For example, any time you take a 'major wound' (a single injury doing at least your knock-down limit), then you start taking 1 further point of damage per hour until you are successfully treated by a physicker. Some playtesting would be needed to sort out just how these should work in detail, but something like this would let you meet desires for more dramatic consequences of damage and injury without fundamentally changing the overall lethality of the game.
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Old 01-17-2018, 02:16 PM   #340
Steve Jackson
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Default Re: The Fantasy Trip

I'm in agreement with the observation that the needs of basic MELEE/WIZARD are different from the needs of a campaign game.
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