The Fantasy Trip

tbeard1999 · 01-09-2018, 09:49 AM

Rolling additional dice for more difficult tasks is obviously too coarse to rely of for all task rolls. Hence TFT had modifiers to the roll as well. I replaced the additional dice mechanic with modifiers for the following reasons:

1. The original system required me to have (and try to remember) different, non-intuitive numbers for automatic hits, double damage, triple damage, automatic miss, weapon dropped and weapon broken results. These numbers weren't provided in the original 3 TFT books as I recall. They had to be derived or gotten from the Codex or GM Screen (neither of which I could find until the mid-late 1980s). In an era where personal computers cost $2-4000 in 2018 dollars, this had to be done by hand. Ugh.

2. Fencing talent made automatic hits, double and triple damage more likely on a 3d6 roll. What were the comparable numbers for rolling more than 3 dice to hit?

As an aside, the only other game I saw that used the "roll more dice" mechanic was Traveller 4. It tried to avoid the granularity by introducing the half die (i.e. a d3). In TFT terms, you might replace a -1 or -2 modifier with adding a d3. I'm not sure that's a great solution but it does allow you to get rid of die roll modifiers.

01-09-2018, 09:49 AM	#11
tbeard1999 Join Date: May 2013 Location: Tyler, Texas	Re: The Fantasy Trip Rolling additional dice for more difficult tasks is obviously too coarse to rely of for all task rolls. Hence TFT had modifiers to the roll as well. I replaced the additional dice mechanic with modifiers for the following reasons: 1. The original system required me to have (and try to remember) different, non-intuitive numbers for automatic hits, double damage, triple damage, automatic miss, weapon dropped and weapon broken results. These numbers weren't provided in the original 3 TFT books as I recall. They had to be derived or gotten from the Codex or GM Screen (neither of which I could find until the mid-late 1980s). In an era where personal computers cost $2-4000 in 2018 dollars, this had to be done by hand. Ugh. 2. Fencing talent made automatic hits, double and triple damage more likely on a 3d6 roll. What were the comparable numbers for rolling more than 3 dice to hit? As an aside, the only other game I saw that used the "roll more dice" mechanic was Traveller 4. It tried to avoid the granularity by introducing the half die (i.e. a d3). In TFT terms, you might replace a -1 or -2 modifier with adding a d3. I'm not sure that's a great solution but it does allow you to get rid of die roll modifiers.