Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

I was going through my old site and came across this article Ron Pehr wrote for the Space Gamer:

http://web.archive.org/web/200707241...t/superher.htm

I'm not into superheroes, but this article also has a considerable amount of basic information for a possible TFT modern supplement.

A different take on TFT modern can be extracted from my own TFT Traveller conversion http://web.archive.org/web/200707241...t/travellr.htm

And the High Tech TFT combat system expansion: http://web.archive.org/web/200707241.../tft/HiTek.htm

I suppose I should also mention Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes. It has a skill system that could be very easily adapted for TFT; they're already organized by IQ and by IQ point cost. http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/mercen.htm

Re: Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

IMHO, if you are already playing GURPS you want GURPS Supers, and if you are not already playing GURPS, but want a superhero campaign, you want Champions.

Super-attributes will just stretch TFT all out of shape.

Re: Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

With sufficient archaeological skills applied to my basement, I may be able to find the rules from the Fantasy Trip Supers game we played quite a bit in college. The Champions system worked much better for us melted down into TFT style! =^,^=

Re: Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

Sophmore year in college, I switched my 1E AD&D game over to TFT for about a semester as an experiment, letting players convert characters as best they could.

I remember using the Superheroes article from Space Gamer as an option for letting characters get "innate magical abilities". It was a lot of fun, but alas, the derth of ongoing support for TFT led us to eventually go back to D&D.

Re: Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

I would recommend M&M or Fate before Champions nowadays. Champions seems to be the game of being good at making Champions characters, rather than especially anything in comics.

Re: Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

I've had many great, fun games of Champions that were very comics-like. Also a lot of games of Fantasy Hero that were very fantasy novel-like, and so on...

But! If I've got a bunch of friends who play TFT, but not GURPS, M&M, Fate, Champions, etc., and we all want to play superheroes, why not use a ruleset we know? (I'm pretty sure I've said the same thing for Car Wars and Autoduel Champions over on the Car Wars forum.)

Also, I'm not going to pretend Champions is a light, easy game; it works best with people who've been playing it for a while, or who've had the time and energy to figure it out on their own. GURPS is on par with Champions; M&M and Fate are a bit more lightweight but have their own quirks. With TFT, even with superheroes, you can have characters made and be fighting in ten minutes.

Re: Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

The TFT supers article was quite playable... (TSG 65)

Re: Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

I second Mutants and Masterminds. It is an extremely well written and designed game, that emulates comic book action perfectly.

Re: Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

I agree with this completely -- Champions was our go-to Superhero system back in the day, not some conversion attempt (I haven't played or run a Superhero game in a quarter of a century, though).

Re: Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

Hmm. Far be it for me to dispute the Author, but we didn't find that in our play. Some different extrapolations needed for High ST, yes. Finding the playable level for maximum DX or IQ, yup. But we played happily for years from that base, plus assorted handwaves and repurposings. (Spidey's web attacks, for instance, leveraged the rules for Nets and Bolas.)

Bob P
Sparks, NV
First TFT Played 1 Apr 1981 (no foolin')

Re: Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

As I learned writing my clone, TFT's DNA is all through Champions. The original Hero guys have said that they played a lot of TFT prior to designing Champions. I'd go so far as to call GURPS and Champions/HERO half-sibling descendants of TFT. (Champions is the spawn of TFT and whatever playable game lies at the heart of Superhero 2044; GURPS descends from TFT and Car Wars, believe it or not, as I discovered many, many years ago when trying to create "Cart Wars"... These are why Autoduel Champions was possible, and why GURPS Autoduel (1e) was relatively straightforward.)

Re: Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

I can definitely see that. The core of TFT works well enough as a frame to hang just about any game - but of course if you go too far you DO end up turning or evolving nto either GURPS or Champions or something else entirely.

(For instance: The mods I ended up using for my anime-inspired demon-hunting TFT game back in 1992 or so ended up becoming part of the Demon City Shinjuku rpg, and then from there, with minor changes BESM. Both were "roll under" systems with three stats, so... They then migrated uncredited into BESM's daughter-game Silver Age Sentinels and then to Silver Age Sentinels d20, whose power rules were released under the Open Game License. I recall seeing small traces of them in use in Mutants and Masterminds (which acknowledged using the SAS d20 OGL), albeit in a significantly evolved form. But these specific rules were originally designed for TFT...)

Re: Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

If you were going to run a Supers game, that might be. But perhaps when you are creating a new monster from scratch and want one outlandish unique trait or your wizard is looking to raid the Azaroth Followers tomb to get some horrendous spell suggested by a dying minion, it would be a great sourcebook to raid.

It could also be used for a backlash mutation result.

- Hail Melee

Re: Fantasy Trip Modern and Superheroes
 

A theory of game design I like is to make sure your game covers the main tropes of the stories you're addressing. So for a modern game, you want to make sure it handles the recurring combat scenes like:

• Character A has the drop on Character B. If A wants to cause B great harm he can. If B tries to act against A, A will probably be able to hurt B before he can carry out his attack.
• Character A and B are each behind cover. Occasionally they stick their head out, take a shot and pull back. Mooks might get hit by this, nobody important will, but they seem to find it stressful like they're burning through notional hit points or something.

A decent modern game has to handle both these, at least. Many don't. I'm not sure how you'd make TFT do it.