What, Exactly, is The Fantasy Trip: Melee

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by Dave Crowell

As a miniatures game TFT stands head and shoulders above the original D&D rules and the Man-to-Man and Fantasy Suplement rules in Chainmail.

So does RQ.

Traveller's personal combat was later extracted into a boardgame: Snapshot.

[JLV]

On the other hand, I always found RQ to be a LOT more fiddly than TFT was. Likewise with Call of Cthulhu (which I still play a lot of, 35 years later). Let's face facts, for simplicity of concepts, speed of learning and quickness of play, TFT is in a class all it's own.

For a lot of people TFT probably doesn't do it; they probably prefer more complex and "realistic" rules for combat and things. For me, TFT just about hit the sweet spot -- it's simple enough to quickly set up, and quickly play, but the nuances and complexities arise from the finely woven intermeshing of the various game concepts. Much like Chess (another game that is easy to set up, easy to learn the moves to, and incredibly complex in nuance), there are a never-ending series of trade-offs and decisions the players have to make and quite often a seemingly simple decision or move you made several turns ago is what results in you getting killed several turns from now. Definitely NOT a "beer and pretzels" game in THAT sense! ;-)

Put another way, I guess I like my "complexity" in the play of the game, not the rules of the game...

[Shostak]

Originally Posted by JLV

Let's face facts, for simplicity of concepts, speed of learning and quickness of play, TFT is in a class all it's own.

Agreed. I found the TFT rules pretty much faded into the background, allowing a more immersive role-playing experience. We had very little metagaming back in the day.