Dungeon Fantasy vs TFT

[JimmyPlenty]

Hi all.

I was a big fan of Melee, so I am excited about this, but I am also confused.

Since TFT kid of turned into GURPS and Dungeon Fantasy is based off of GURPS. What is the difference between TFT and DF?

[Chris Rice]

TFT is simple, elegant, fast playing, a lot less crunchy. I looked at DF but it was waaaay to much crunch for my tastes.

[Dave Crowell]

TFT is definitely lighter rules with far less crunch than GURPS. I tried GURPS and while I can see the evolution from TFT, especially in the earliest versions of GURPS, it is too crunchy and detailed for my taste.

[tbeard1999]

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

TFT is simple, elegant, fast playing, a lot less crunchy. I looked at DF but it was waaaay to much crunch for my tastes.

Yeah, that was my opinion too. It seemed to me like an uncomfortable compromise - WAY too much detail for casual dungeoneers, but not enough for hardcore GURPS fans. Of course, I could always play TFT if I wanted a rules-light system.

Originally Posted by Dave Crowell

TFT is definitely lighter rules with far less crunch than GURPS. I tried GURPS and while I can see the evolution from TFT, especially in the earliest versions of GURPS, it is too crunchy and detailed for my taste.

Agreed. I never could get excited about GURPS as a system. It was too much like the parts of Champions I didn't care for. And the 1st edition made it way too easy to get a character who could parry most of the time.

On the other hands, the GURPS sourcebooks were an amazing resource (still are) for any RPG gamemaster.

[InexplicableVic]

DF is pretty great and not difficult to use at all if you've got an experienced GM. As usual, you want to roll low unless it's damage or a reaction roll; then roll high. Pretty easy stuff, I've seen 10 year olds play it very easily. And I like DR and being able to block/parry/dodge, instead of the AC abstraction of D&D (which I also like and play). But just reading GURPS/DF without playing it can seem intimidating or difficult. And to be sure, DFRPG takes out all the background math that are present in all the GURPS books and simplifies it. It's damn fun (I've been playing for several years in Peter Dell'Orto's Felltower game).

My question is: Will TFT basically take away support for DF and DFRPG? It seems like that answer might be yes. I still backed it, but there's concerns for sure.

[JLV]

What Ty said -- TFT is a much better system in my mind, simply because I can keep everything in my mind and not have to spend four and a half hours looking things up in the game books.

I know that GURPS is really almost more a designer's tool in some ways than it is an "RPG" in that you can pick and choose between literally hundreds (perhaps thousands, by now) of options to get the level of complexity/realism/crunch that you prefer for your game, but the starting level of crunch is higher than I prefer and higher than TFT is.

To me, the adventure is more important than the mechanics, and TFT allows for that better in my personal opinion. Having said all of that, however, I think TFT will become a gateway to GURPS for a lot of people, since the similarities are definitely there, and most of us go through a "we need greater granularity/realism" phase at some point in our lives.

As far as Dungeon Fantasy goes, I backed that one because at the time it occurred, I didn't believe it would ever be possible that TFT would come back, and I wanted something that my players could get hold of too, but now that TFT is back, I'm betting that DF stays on my bookshelf for a long time to come... DF is way crunchier than TFT is, though substantially less so than a GURPS campaign with all the bells and whistles.

Hopefully all these answers help you to determine which system is in your ball park! ;-)

Originally Posted by Spartan506

My question is: Will TFT basically take away support for DF and DFRPG? It seems like that answer might be yes. I still backed it, but there's concerns for sure.

From what Steve and the gang have been saying, I just don't see that happening -- they seem fully committed to keeping DF going (and, in fact, I think it's one of their better selling GURPS lines). What might happen is that you'll see some dual-statted stuff for both DF and TFT come out (since they are two different ways of addressing the same subject), and such a procedure would save SJG a bit of money on the production end, but that's pure speculation on my part.

[JimmyPlenty]

Thanks all.

Yeah, I just looked at a character sheet for DF and it is really just GURPS with all the stuff you would not need taken out. Which is fine, but certainly heavy as heck as compared to TFT. So DF is not for me.

Of course, now I wonder how the combat system compares to Man-to-Man another GURPS-y thing. I always liked MTM because I would just like simple gladiator stuff. (Which is what I ran Melee as when I played)

[Wayne]

What would be really cool would be adventures with combined stat blocks

[JLV]

Originally Posted by JimmyPlenty

Thanks all.

Yeah, I just looked at a character sheet for DF and it is really just GURPS with all the stuff you would not need taken out. Which is fine, but certainly heavy as heck as compared to TFT. So DF is not for me.

Of course, now I wonder how the combat system compares to Man-to-Man another GURPS-y thing. I always liked MTM because I would just like simple gladiator stuff. (Which is what I ran Melee as when I played)

Okay. I'll take a shot at that. Man-to-Man was the equivalent of Melee for GURPS -- it launched the system back in the day, and covered one-on-one and small group combat for the new GURPS system, the same way that Melee did that originally for The Fantasy Trip.

Since it was GURPS, it changed things by adding the HT statistic (to the already existing ST, DX, and IQ), and changed the time-scale of combat from five-second turns to one-second turns.

The effect of these two changes was to make combat much crunchier than it had been in TFT -- one second turns allow the players to get into the nitty-gritty of parries, specific attacks and other, what you might call "micro-tactical" decision making, at that level of combat. In TFT, you basically "take a single swing" at an opponent during your five-second turn. Elsewhere on these threads we've discussed the differing time scales, and it's worth pointing out that in a sword fight, five seconds can be forever -- and, comparing it to Man-to-Man, in effect you are compressing five different attack/defense choices made in Man-to-Man into a single DX roll in TFT.

To sum up, on a complexity scale of 1 to 10, with TFT falling at roughly the 3 or 4 point, Man-to-Man drove that up to the 6 or 7 point. (As time went on, GURPS combat got even more crunchy, and I'd say is now in the 7 to 8 range on that scale, but that's a personal opinion that others may not agree with.)

I'm not sure if that really got you where you wanted to go, but if I failed, let me know (plus others will probably weigh in on this), and I'll try to do better.

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by JLV

To sum up, on a complexity scale of 1 to 10, with TFT falling at roughly the 3 or 4 point, Man-to-Man drove that up to the 6 or 7 point. (As time went on, GURPS combat got even more crunchy, and I'd say is now in the 7 to 8 range on that scale, but that's a personal opinion that others may not agree with.)

When you add all the options in G:C1 G:C2, G:SO, and G:MA, it raises higher still...

The only thing from GURPS I really would like in TFT is a HT stat added... and not in Legacy.