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Old 06-19-2018, 05:38 AM   #31
pyratejohn
 
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Another best memory. The hand-to-hand duel wielding dagger dude someone in our group devised. The guy was next to impossible to kill in the arena.

Oh, these was also the longest matched set of initiative rolls I have ever seen in my 40 years of gaming. I swear a friend and I rolled the same initiative number like seven or eight times in a row. It was freaky.

AND! The huge miniature battle using all of my MM 15s! That was a blast!
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Old 06-21-2018, 09:52 PM   #32
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During the original campaign I ran 30some years ago the characters had become very powerful and I wanted to try something different. I had them explore a Mnoren ruin and go through a gate to place of boxy houses and well manicured lawns. Going to the first house the characters find the players gathered around a table. ( I was amused when The Gamers did almost the same thing ) Using instructions found in an issue of The Space Gamer, I had each player create a character sheet for themselves and I gave them 20 minutes to find items around the house to take back with them. We then became a group of mysterious strangers that would show up occasionally.
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Old 06-22-2018, 03:24 AM   #33
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I remember that Space Gamer issue. As I recall, the DX test was to hold a ruler perpendicular to the floor, release it between two fingers, and DX was based off of the number where it was caught.
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Old 06-22-2018, 01:25 PM   #34
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Yep. We used that to create some characters one time -- they'd stepped through a one-way gate while out on a hunting trip in Colorado and wound up in Cidri...
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Old 06-22-2018, 03:46 PM   #35
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Check out the latest post!

http://thefantasytrip.game/news/2018...n-interview-1/
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Old 06-22-2018, 04:07 PM   #36
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Hey! I made the cut! ;-)
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Old 06-22-2018, 06:23 PM   #37
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(Steve: this is an excerpt from a longer essay on TFT and game design.)

I first ran into TFT visiting my local hobby shop in 1979 in London: a tiny little place at One Dalling Road in Hammersmith called Games Workshop. You may have heard of them. They’ve grown a bit since then.

My brother Tim and I, occasionally with friends, would make regular pilgrimages there on the tube from our house near Sloan Square – once, twice a week if we were lucky.

The shop really was tiny. Maybe 20’x30’. The walls were thick with shelves and glass-front cases filled with games and magazines and lead figures and painted dioramas. There was a low counter with the till and small stuff: dice and cards and such. In later years there was even a small gaming table where the Games Workshop lads taught me how to play Warhammer.

At any rate, my brother and I would buy piles of lead figures then hurry back to the bedroom we shared overlooking Cadogan Garden to paint them. Then we’d set out our unit blocks into an impromptu subterranean floor plan, and get to dungeoneering, me running him through adventures.

I already played D&D, having learned the game from a friend a couple years before. It was fun: more fun than any game I’d ever played. Obsession level fun.

But the rules had problems. Three, actually.

The first was, the combat in D&D sucked, to put it mildly. Here we were, my brother and I, carefully laying out a 3D dungeon map and deciding on marching order and monster placement and exactly where each speck of dust was ... and the ensuing combat was, what, like one minute per round? Really? At that scale in real life I could have run down to the shop around the corner for a bag of crisps and a can of Skol and been back in time to see the first casualty.

Then I found TFT.

In the middle of the floor at Games Workshop was one of those tall skinny postcard racks. And on that rack were little postcard-sized games: Metagaming microgames.

I bought Ogre and Ice Wars and Invasion of the Air Eaters and One World and Annihilator and their only “big box” game, Stellar Conquest. And I bought Melee & Wizard and all The Fantasy Trip line of supplements and adventures.

Melee & Wizard were a revelation. Fast combat. Short timespans. Tactical decisions that mattered. Combat modifiers that made sense. Spells and weapons and armour that let you do what you wanted without abstracting it to death. The metaphors were simple and direct and made immediate sense: weapons hurt: armor protects: magic is fluid and limited only by creativity & the Wizard’s remaining strength. It felt close and real and personal. And fun to play with my brother.

Those hours with Tim were the best...

(Thanks for the happy childhood, Steve!)

Last edited by Jackal; 06-22-2018 at 06:26 PM. Reason: Readability
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Old 06-24-2018, 02:33 PM   #38
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In the spirit of "background [that] made this story possible"... In the spring semester of my sophomore year in high school in 1976, I had the unbelievably good fortune to start working at little company I'd never heard of called Metagaming Concepts (later just Metagaming) and worked there until early 1978. During my time there, I had the incredible privilege of watching an unbelievably creative - and yet somehow still disciplined - mind at work, as it invented and developed the entire TFT system out of thin air. Plus, I got to have a great deal of big dumb fun while participating in playtesting the Microgame elements and, later, the integrated system. So I guess the whole experience could be called a "best memory". I regret, though, that I was too young and stupid to properly grasp and appreciate the magnitude of everything that was going on. At the time, to a nerdy 16-year-old, it was just a whole lot of fun.

On a single-session basis, it would have to be a tie. The first time my brother and I ever playtested Melee, with Steve Jackson and Howard Thompson looking on, has to be one. As there was a Romeo and Juliet movie out around that time, with lots of cool-looking rapier-and-main-gauche swordplay, I created a character suited to use those (though both Howard and Steve gave me a hard time about how I pronounced "gauche"). My brother set up a stronger character with a broadsword and some kind of mail, so low DX. While he couldn't hit me, my wimpy weapons couldn't do a lot of damage. So we spent a while dancing around until I finally was able to give him the "death by 1000 cuts treatment".

The second would be one of TFT labyrinth scenario playtest sessions with Steve as GM. In general, our little group had a bad habit of going in, getting a bit cut up and then ducking out really quickly. On this particular occasion, Steve hit us with a fairly large party of Orcs in a cavern-like entrance chamber. We beat them off and were going to do our usual “hightail it out of there” operation. But when we tried to exit, Steve said something to the effect that, “It feels like someone has piled a million pounds of sand on the door.” So, on we went. The real problem came when we stumbled on a - very dark - dragon's lair. We could see another tunnel across the way and intended to just dash across and regroup a little way from the other entrance. Apparently, we didn't clearly express that plan, so Steve took the opportunity to explore certain aspects of “panicked flight”. He started firing off several series of “Left or Right” choices as he seemingly made us run a mini-marathon, with the end result that we were hopelessly lost, had to start an entirely fresh map with no good reference, and try to go from there. There followed a protracted episode of wandering blindly around Steve’s dungeon and blundering into things, during which we simply could *not* find an alternate exit. It finally - mercifully - ended about 4:00 or 4:30 the next morning when a weary (and frustrated) Steve announced that we came across a hole in the tunnel roof that “looked like it was just made” which put us in a upper-level tunnel with a way out. Otherwise, we might still be there.
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Old 07-12-2018, 02:31 PM   #39
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Groknard View Post
Best TFT memory, I'll try to keep it short. It was July 1980 and the family went to a state park for a week of "camping". Date is really clear because the Republican Nat'l Convention was on TV all week, and ELO had two songs on the charts. But I was 15 and I hated this trip. I took Melee, Wizard and a Microquest (Treasure of the Silver Dragon?) with me to pass the time.

(Snip)

Sorry, that was the opposite of short.
Wow! This is a great story.
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Old 07-12-2018, 08:17 PM   #40
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TFT has proven so versatile that the older group I play with uses it for a variety of pickup games as well as long-term campaigns. We've done several Wild West games, a send-up of Jurassic Park, an annual Christmas game based on the Rankin & Bass Christmas specials, and a game set during the Vietnam war. My favorite, though, was a Lovecraftian horror game set in Victorian London which started as a one-shot but turned into a seven year long campaign because we fell in love with our characters, the unlikely pair Sir Andrew Hope-Davies and Inspector Matthew Mulgrew. The unique aspects of TFT magic definitely lent a distinctive feel to the game and I was surprised at how little we needed to tweak to make it work for the setting.
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