Your House Focus: Inside vs. Outside the Labyrinth
 

When you play The Fantasy Trip, while At The Table, what proportion of your time do you spend on non-combat activities? Outside the Labyrinth, I mean. This would include stuff like world exploration or looking for a Quest (as opposed to already being on one), but also training, creating or acquiring equipment, or other character development (things which could be done away from 'The Table' entirely).

Re: Your House Focus: Inside vs. Outside the Labyrinth
 

Well "labyrinth" and "combat" are also not the same thing. In some campaigns, there was lots of combat, none of it in labyrinths. Even in the campaigns with many labyrinths, there was even more fighting done outdoors or indoors or on ships.

Our TFT (and TFT-like GURPS games) have always had both lots of combat and lots of world exploration and travel, non-combat adventure activities, skill/stuff acquisition, making friends/enemies, finding things to do, struggling versus various groups, and roleplaying.

Re: Your House Focus: Inside vs. Outside the Labyrinth
 

Hmm. Usually the training, equipping, downtime activity stuff was done in a "maintenance" session that lasted about half an hour before the official start of the game. Everyone got a chance to settle down, greet each other, joke around a bit, spend some of their accumulated loot, check for healing, check for training status, roll for jobs or other downtime activity (I had a whole series of charts for this based on the old Avalon Hill game Down with the King -- which had some really kicka** activity tables, especially if you added in the optional ones from the General) and all that sort of thing. Along the way, I'd dispense any rumors they had picked up in the interim, and we might briefly role-play a haggling session or something of that sort, depending on the circumstances. This gave everyone a chance to settle in a bit, talk about ideas for the next adventure (or next stage of the current one), and get their heads back into the gaming space. It also gave me the opportunity to jot down notes for future events picked up from their casual conversations (hey, what can I say? I went on to a career as a spy!) that would come back to haunt them later. (insert evil laugh here).

From there we'd move on to the next stage. NORMALLY that entailed a wilderness trek to some kind of labyrinth to accomplish some kind of mission (sometimes that really was true -- frequently the mission was the classic "kill the monster, steal his stuff" murderhoboing). That's where the vast majority of our table time was spent (our average session in those days was anywhere from four to eight hours depending on classes, time of the year, etc. and we usually met every week or so, sometimes a lot more frequently -- especially in the summer).

Re: Your House Focus: Inside vs. Outside the Labyrinth
 

My gaming group spent relatively little time exploring labyrinths. From early on, we had a whole world to explore--and we did. We could (and did) travel to distant lands based on ancient Greece, Rome, the Vikings, Egypt, Arabia, China or Japan, plus the more-than-occasional lost city in the desert or jungle. (Can you tell the GM was a huge fan of the pulps?)

We traveled constantly, getting a lot of our combat experience in random encounters between planned adventures. We accumulated allies and enemies along the way, at least until they died--though the major villains had an annoying tendency to make dramatic comebacks (I did mention the GM loved his pulps, right?).

Re: Your House Focus: Inside vs. Outside the Labyrinth
 

If you want to recreate some of that with the new version (and assuming you don't have the original notes from way back when still available) allow me to strongly recommend the GURPS Classic splat books on each and every one of those! PDFs are available (and one or two might be available through Print-On-Demand by now) over at Warehouse 23, and they are some well written source books! (You can ignore any stats, or even convert them to TFT without too much of a hassle...)

Re: Your House Focus: Inside vs. Outside the Labyrinth
 

Too late! (The GM of that long-ago game is still GMing, but alas is 3000 miles away.) I have a long, long bookshelf full of GURPS books, including all those region/culture books, so I have all the background gaming material I'd ever need.

My intended TFT campaign world will be less epic in scope anyhow. More like a Mediterranean area campaign.

Re: Your House Focus: Inside vs. Outside the Labyrinth
 

The PCs in my game have explored exactly 2 Dungeons so far in the game. 95% of the game has been spent exploring the Taboo Lands to find clues about the stirring of magic in the world. They started with a 400+ year old map and have been filling in details since.

Of the 2 'dungeons'. one had a Silver Slime in it and the other had a bunch of goblins inside. They are searching for Irudez-Bal, which is the hidden city of the Sorcerer-Kings who brought about the Magic Apocalypse some 400 years ago. Now that will be a LABYRINTH...