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Old 05-09-2022, 12:24 PM   #21
Bill_in_IN
 
Join Date: Dec 2021
Location: Indiana
Default Re: Noob Question - Books needed to play

I concur with the last 5 posts.

I was never intimidated by TFT ever since I started playing it in 1980. It was my first RPG ever. A GM friend started me with character generation and arena battles gaining enough experience to improve attributes and upgrade to more powerful weapons. He then ran my character and PCs of other friends through Death Tests 1 and 2 and Security station. After that, he was on the spot to come up with more adventures. In the meantime, he handed the death tests and security station to me and said, "generate three new characters to accompany your character, Run them through these on your own, assign XP as stated, let me help you with your character upgrades to make sure that you are within the rules."

The process sank the hook even deeper into me than the coolness of the arena battles. I even started running other people through these modules as the GM.

Meanwhile, he was coming up with bigger adventures for our group of players. Initially, most were modified micro-quests tailored to our characters. We played many of them and our characters grew with it. It also forced him to come up with his own adventures for us. One of them was Barrier Peaks which was a D&D adventure to which he converted to TFT. He would ask me questions about converting things from D&D because I had played it some. He exploited me as I was an engineering student and was good with specifications.

This process also grew me into becoming a GM on my own. He began drawing me in and asking input for adventures. He eventually grew tired of GMing and started handing it over to me. He got to play some of his own characters for awhile instead of being GM. He eventually stopped playing and handed all of the game material over to me and I became the GM. He passed away in 1991. I continued to GM until about 1996/7.

The moral of this story is that you can play and have an array of characters to meet the requirements of many adventures without worrying about learning all of the rules if you trust your GMs. You can focus on character generation and playing the game. There is little to no intimidation to the TFT game system in comparison to the other RPG systems to which I have been exposed. Your buy in at the beginning is much cheaper, The rule set is more focused on combat resolution but allows to set up a whole area of Cidri of your own. You can simply play and have fun, become a GM, or both.

My TFT experience in conjunction with my professional career makes me really want to mentor new people into the game and look for GM candidates to mentor so that I can occasionally hand the GM role over and be a player. also, I'm old and if I don't mentor new GMs, the game group will die. If I hadn't learned to become a GM our game group would have died with my friend when he passed. Professionally, I mentored many new engineers.

Last edited by Bill_in_IN; 05-09-2022 at 01:43 PM.
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Old 05-10-2022, 12:09 AM   #22
Steve Plambeck
 
Join Date: Jun 2019
Default Re: Noob Question - Books needed to play

Quote:
Originally Posted by Axly Suregrip View Post
A players guide is very useful in introducing a new player to the game without handing them an intimidatingly large manual (ITL).

It should contain:
- character sheet
- list of combat options
- talents
- spells
- weapons/armor lists
- extra purchase items list
Those things for sure, but also:

- movement
- facing
- engagement
- turn sequence

Which all boils down to a merger of Melee and Wizard, with only the additions of talents and the equipment list. Each of those "MicroGames" was 21 pages, but there was a high percentage of overlap, so the result of the merger would be on the order of 35 pages (in the 4x7 inch booklet format).

Then import just those 3 things needed from ITL, talents, equipment, and a full page character sheet and we're looking at approximately 55 pages total (again if it's in the 4x7 format). Better say 60 pages because of the additional spells in ITL, assuming you wanted to include them. That's roughly only 40 pages in letter size format -- a mere 20 sheets of paper. That's less than 1/4th the size the current ITL book. Every group, or every GM within a group, would of course still need the full ITL book as their reference manual. But imagine how much easier it might be to bring new players into the group if they saw that all the rules they needed to get (and deal with) fit on 20 sheets of letter size paper. Take that D&D! :)

A sidebar here, but my oldest pet peeve with the Metagaming editions was the the weapons table was found in Advanced Melee, but the equipment table was found in ITL -- oh how that used to drive me crazy -- LOL
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