01-04-2018, 02:58 PM | #71 |
President and EIC
Join Date: Jul 2004
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
I joined the SCA to research MELEE (and had a lot of fun, and stayed in for years). One of the first things that I learned is that most swordfighting does not involve parries; fencing is a spectacular exception. If you are using your weapon to parry, you are not using it to strike.
Now, rattan (which is what SCA weapons are made of) is NOT the same thing as metal. It is known :) I am told by those who have swung real swords at real shields that metal has less "bounce" even when it does not bite into its target. But I came away feeling that if you have a blocking device (cloak, shield, second sword, chair) you should use that to block with, and use your weapon to hit with. I enjoyed SCA fencing a great deal, and eventually became competent, and it really is a different art. |
01-04-2018, 03:03 PM | #72 |
Join Date: Dec 2017
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
TFT was my first role playing game and my high school group ran a campaign using it for two fun years. We created a science fiction version that had new talents, weapons, and a starship design process. We created a Melee-like microgame based on these new rules and a magazine article to introduce them and presented to Metagaming but they were not interested, I suspect, because Starleader was under development. They did publish the magazine article in Interplay #4 which I still get see mentioned in various forums. In the last two years I've revisited those original rules to update them. I would like to see some way to get these into wider use.
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01-04-2018, 03:25 PM | #73 | |
Join Date: Dec 2017
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
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One could quibble about the perfect rate of XP cost progression and ratio of costs for TP vs. other attributes, but I've run the rule I describe for decades, over several thousand hours of play in all, and it is a simple formula that never seemed to bother anyone. As for the finer details about languages and so forth, I think the most straightforward way to address this is to add new talents. In the published game, there are well over 100 talents already (so another few doesn't really change the scale or complexity of the game), and they are used to cover everything from life skills, natural gifts and all sorts of other things. So, it is doesn't really change what a talent means in the game to declare a 1 TP talent can be purchased to learn an exotic language, etc. The broader point I would make is that the game should not be changed to improve it as a simulation, or to improve it in response to some theoretical game-design goal; it should only be changed in ways that make it even more fun to play, which can mean 'fixing' places where you encountered a problem, in play at the table, or where you had some desire for your character to do something that seems like it would be fun and should be possible, yet the rules don't support it (examples from the original game could be the new weapons added going from Melee to AM or new spells and enchantment rules going from Wizard to AW). In both cases, the litmus test is not how clever it looks on the page, but rather how successfully it integrates with the rest of the game in play, at the table. The hobby is littered with 'fantasy heart breaker' rules sets that have all kinds of cool concepts baked into them, yet they just aren't fun to play, or they aren't functionally different than much simpler games. The strength of TFT is that it came out of a pair of super well engineered board games, and when it was translated into a roleplaying game it didn't fundamentally change. That should remain the core idea behind any revisions that happen over the next year or three. |
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01-04-2018, 03:38 PM | #74 | |
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Arizona
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
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01-04-2018, 03:41 PM | #75 | |
Join Date: Dec 2017
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
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The weapon systems considered by HEMA include some where a 'empty parry' (a displacement of an incoming attack that does not simultaneously attack or threaten the foe) is a mistake, and others where an empty parry is a core part of the system. Longsword, messer and sword+buckler are good examples of the first type, and military saber is a good example of the second type. The ideal response to an incoming attack for this first type of weapon system is an action that negates the attack by displacing or avoiding it, while simultaneously returning an attack of your own (or at least a threat that sets you up for an immediate counter) as part of the same motion. The core techniques for german and italian longsword provide lots of examples of this principle. In translating this into game design, I would say the important point is that there are three reasons to add some kind of active, skill-based defensive capability into melee combat: (1) two of the ways the game 'breaks' as characters progress in experience is that they can only become harder to kill by getting stronger or wearing more armor, and they can't get better at killing others by raising DX past a certain point. This makes characters evolve in strange and unsatisfying ways as the game advances. (2) everyone is pretty easy to kill, even when they are quite dexterous and have lots of talents. And (3) it violates the feeling of verisimilitude to have no ways to actively defend yourself, even when a less skilled foe attacks you. For all of these reasons, I think the game is better when you toss in a well designed rule for something more or less like a parry. The rules I described in a post a couple of pages up accomplish this, and in a way that doesn't change play much for low-DX characters but allows high DX combatants to both defend themselves actively and attack on the same turn, with some significant chance of success at both. |
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01-04-2018, 03:58 PM | #76 |
Join Date: Dec 2017
Location: London Uk, but originally from Scotland
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
Dodge and Defend options already exist in the rules so I'm not sure why the need for new defensive rules such as "parry" etc. Obviously as adj DX rises the value of 4DX rolls in defence become less valuable, but that to my mind is a basic flaw in the rules which is easily fixed via a "versus mechanic" and not by introducing new rules for individual cases.
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01-04-2018, 04:08 PM | #77 | |
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Arizona
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
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Still, all of this is pretty "tactical" for a five-second Melee turn! |
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01-04-2018, 04:17 PM | #78 |
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Arizona
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
Which reminds me, one talent my original group back in High School/College absolutely insisted on, even before Metagaming went bust, was a "Quick Draw" talent to simulate Iaijutsu. It was originally even called that, but later morphed into "Quick Draw" which could also be used with a trusty six-shooter in the old west...
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01-04-2018, 04:53 PM | #79 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Columbia, Maryland
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
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01-04-2018, 05:18 PM | #80 |
Join Date: Jun 2012
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Re: The Fantasy Trip
I think that a melee combat game should have some sort of dodge/parry/all-out defense mechanism. I'm not sure that it really needs more than one to be a playable game. From a game play point of view I don't see it being important that opponent A is parrying with his sword, opponent B is hiding behind his shield, and opponent C is dodging out of the way, what is important is that each of them is harder for me to hit and damage.
My primary experience of a game with seperate attack and parry was Stormbringer and combats between well matched, skilled opponents could drag on in an endless dance of Attack-hit, Parry-blocked (or Dodge-miss), lather, rinse, repeat until finally someone landed a critical hit and it was game over for one of the fighters. Realistic, maybe, but it made for boring game play after a while. I like combat games to be decisive. |
Tags |
in the labyrinth, melee, roleplaying, the fantasy trip, wizard |
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