The Fantasy Trip

[Rick_Smith]

Hi all, David.
This idea was given to me by David Bofinger, so all honour should go for him.

Spells or talents that are sub-set / super-sets of each other (e.g. Fire: 3 hex and Fire: 1 hex) use the word 'includes' to describe the relationship.

So 'Fire: 3 hex' INCLUDES 'Fire: 1 hex'.
Or 'Sword' INCLUDES 'Knife' talent.

Talents which require you to know (and pay full price for) another talent uses the word 'requires' to describe the relationship.

So 'Master Thief' REQUIRES 'Thief' talent.

(I think that talents require far too much memory, so it would not hurt my feelings if Master Thief included Thief. The higher IQ might be enough to explain the upgrade, or perhaps Thief costs 1 mIQ and Master Thief costs 2 mIQ. Remember I've also suggested some additional talents to help each character class. If a talent 'Casing' is invented, then thieves could take it, and it would not be included or required necessarily. But thieves who are expert at casing secure facilities would be better and different from standard thieves.)

Compliments are due to David.
Voracious arguments about my strange ideas on talents and memory should, of course, be aimed at me.

Warm regards, Rick.

[tbeard1999]

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

Hi all,
I have advised that the new TFT has contest rules built into it. One advantage of this is it will make it trivial to write better rules for sneaking and hiding.

I also suggest that two or three talents are added which help people sneak, hide and camouflage (themselves or equipment) better.

Quite apart from making thief characters more interesting, it will allow rangers (specialists in stealth, scouting and ambush) to be more viable character types.

TFT has lots of rules and 'crunchy bits' for fighting. I think it is important that some other areas which TFT is weak in, are reinforced.

I welcome comments.
Warm regards, Rick.

What would such a system look like? I think the most straightforward - that would be consistent with current TFT mechanics - is "roll 3/attribute; the one who makes his roll by the most wins." Isn't that used in GURPS? Unfortunately, it requires subtraction.

[Rick_Smith]

Hi all,
My last post reminded me of another minor tweak I think TFT should have.

When I was building indexes for my spells and talents, I found that I got a whole lot of 3 hex this and 3 hex that sorted together. When I really would prefer the 1 hex, 3 hex and 7 hex spider spells to be sorted together.

So I recommend that the names of spells (and talents) look like this:

Shadow: 1 hex,
Shadow: 3 hex,
Shadow: 7 hex, etc.

or

Dragon: Summon 7 hex
Dragon: Summon 9 hex,
Dragon: Summon 12 hex, etc.

or

Mechanician
Mechanician: Experienced
Mechanician: Master

Warm regards, Rick

[Rick_Smith]

Originally Posted by tbeard1999

What would such a system look like? I think the most straightforward - that would be consistent with current TFT mechanics - is "roll 3/attribute; the one who makes his roll by the most wins." Isn't that used in GURPS? Unfortunately, it requires subtraction.

Hi Ty, everyone
That is called a quick contest in GURPS, and I would be fine with that. It is sufficient. The weakness, is the stronger character wins a LOT, even if they just have a 3 or 4 point lead. I've seen a half dozen other systems in other games, which give the underdog more of a chance, or can occasionally generate interesting kickers.

(I wrote about some examples in a previous post.)

But to me the style of the contest is less important than that some sort of contest is built into the base rules of TFT. The special weapons in Advanced Melee do not work well. But if there was some sort of contest, (especially one that is easily handicapped), it would be much easier to write playable rules for those funny weapons like nets or bolas.

Yes, contest require a bit more effort (and even, perhaps, subtraction), but there are situations where a contest just works better.

Warm regards, Rick.

[JLV]

Originally Posted by Rick_Smith

I'm curious about this "Grain into Gold." Can someone give a brief summary of what is in it? How suitable is it for TFT?

Warm regards, Rick.

It's a 72 page document that explores medieval economics, often in a confusing manner, and tries to simplify them for the common user. While, as I said, it's often confusing, it does do a pretty good job of creating a baseline understanding of a somewhat simplistic economic model. (The confusion comes in when they try to gloss over things without really explaining them, and then sort of assume you know what they're on about.) They attempt to regulate prices via a "standard daily wage" system -- which isn't a bad idea, as far as it goes, but does tend to both remove flexibility from the GM, and produce a fairly "colorless" economy, IMHO. Certainly their prices are more in line with what I would expect from, say, a late-medieval economy than the old D&D price lists were. However, if you want a book that talks to prices for fast reference, I would instead suggest something like ...and a 10-Foot Pole which provides suggested price lists for various eras and tech levels (stone-age, iron-age, etc., all the way up to the modern era). Such a book probably has more immediate utility for gaming purposes than does Grain into Gold.

At the end, the last three chapters are dedicated to suggestions on how you can employ their economic model in your FRPGs. Many of the suggestions are quite good, but directed more towards a D&D-ish high-level campaign style (where you're trying to run a fief, or build a church or something), and so might not be as useful for something that really needs a more useful economic system from the ground up. Mind you, you could take this and implement it, but it seems unnecessarily complex for TFT to me. I want about the same level of "reality" in the economic system as I do in the combat system, which is why I stole Trailblazer, simplified it a bit and used it for my TFT campaigns -- it worked about the way I wanted it to, it was about as complex as I wanted (actually a bit too complex, still), and it gave me the level of "guidance" I wanted for things like jobs, unexpected economic opportunities, price fluctuations, caravan/shipping/trade routes and frequencies, and the like.

There IS also a suggested price list for individual items at the end of the book. The price on OneBookShelf isn't bad for what you get, and I'd buy it if I were interested in this topic and didn't already own it. It's an interesting book if you want to take a hard look at some underlying economic considerations in your world design. But, as I said, it seemed a little too involved for what I was looking for for a game like TFT. (Likewise, I'd want a relatively simple gross political system; something more along the lines of Divine Right than, say, Kingmaker in terms of complexity.)

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by tbeard1999

I really don't consider endlessly rolling job rolls to constitute "roleplaying".

As I recall, I generally allowed 1 roll between adventures, regardless of how much time actually elapsed. Characters could collect salaries for however many weeks elapsed; but only 1 risk roll.

As an alternative, give a flat % chance of death, regardless of the character's highest attribute if he rolls the high risk number. Otherwise a character with any attribute of 15+ will only fail 5% of the time. And if the character has ST25+ he's invulnerable.

This one fix would make the "keep rolling jobs until you get as many points as you want" strategy unlikely to work long term.

Another type of fix:

• A notable success just grants 100 or so EP. (or maybe 1d x 1d x 10 EP, or the GM comes up with a positive job/living experience that may lead to EP or adventure opportunities, and resolves it or plays it out).
• A risk result is whatever the GM says happens - make it challenging and/or unpleasant, but appropriate for the type of job and/or the location the job is in, and assign (or play out!) the consequences.

This can also solve the "it's not roleplaying" part of the problem. That is, spending time doing things such as living someplace and/or working at something can lead to situations that can be played out and lead to interesting situations and adventures.

[larsdangly]

This whole subject improves dramatically when you introduce some sort of pallet of weekly activities players can choose from (or add to) in order to flesh out what is going on during those weeks when they get their job income and make their risk roll. En Garde! is the best model for this sort of campaign play, although if you were to write up a few pages of rules for it now I'm sure the end result would look closer to the Downtime activities for 5E ± the travel rules from The One Ring ± the campaign rules from En Garde.

[Rick_Smith]

Hi all,
The job tables were there in ITL and so I used them without much thought. I had people who could not make it to every session, so they most often got used by players who had fallen behind a few weeks. Sometimes the party would split, and we needed one group to kill a month until the other players got back. The basic philosophy was that it was a tool to help simulate the GM's little world.

The job table gives the job name, required skills & attribute levels, risk and wages. Not much room to add more columns of data if we wanted to. Apart from the experienced gained being too generous, (and the wages of low skilled labor being too high), it was workable. A very minimal way of simulating non-adventuring jobs. Each job (almost) fit into a single line.


So my question to the forum is:
-- Should the space in the new books shrink, keep the same size, or expand the page count for the job table / time spent not adventuring?

-- If Steve was to add, say, 20% more page count to the job table / time between adventures - what would we like to see?

I'm curious exactly what people would want from this.

My feeling is that maybe a few more jobs would be nice, but the current table does what it was designed for. If we wanted a cool expansion that gave characters more things to do and more variety in the down time between adventures - that would be cool. I might buy that expansion product if it was done well. But I'm not sure that we would want it in the base books.

Warm regards, Rick.

[JLV]

Personally, I'd like to see a lot of different down-time activities added, based on En Garde and Down With The King sorts of activities (allow me to clarify -- not ripping off those games, but rather in the same spirit as them); but then I've already exhaustively noted that previously.

[Rick_Smith]

Hi all,
I am a science geek and so I LIKE metric. (Science and Engineering is at least 4 times easier with metric.)

I vote for the sensible system.

:-D

Warm regards, Rick.