Do you prefer Melee to MTM?

[RobW]

Goodness :o

200 figures, that's amazing. Our group usually knocks the map around at least once per battle, we would be a disaster in this context.

Do the players control one army and their characters, and you as GM the other? Or as GM do you orchestrate everything but the PCs?

I now understand why you prefer not to use adjDX for order of action!

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by RobW

Do the players control one army and their characters, and you as GM the other? Or as GM do you orchestrate everything but the PCs?

Players generally control their side of the battle, or at least the squads they are in. It depends on the situation, and whether any of the NPCs on their side are misbehaving or out of communication at the moment. (This prevents the "the GM is playing a huge game and only asking us what we want to do after huge delays" issue.)

Originally Posted by RobW

I now understand why you prefer not to use adjDX for order of action!

Yeah, average combats tend to be more like 10 - 20 figures for me, and somewhere in there, it can be a pain if there are several figures who could all act at a variety of adjDX points. Though you can also count down through the adjDX and make the responsibility to notice/decide when they act up to the players.

[JLV]

Originally Posted by KevinJ

As a stand alone tactical combat game I would take Man-to-Man over Melee. The first good game I ever played was ITL with Steve as the GM and that was already drifting towards GURPS. Man-to-Man was just the next obvious step up from Melee/Advanced Melee. The biggest advantage GURPS has over other games is that you can 'dumb it down' to just a bit more complex than Melee or ramp it up as high as yo0ur players like.

Once you include Magic, TFT is a good, working RPG that is easier to run than 1E GURPS and better as an introduction for players who may have only ever played one game their entire lives.

To be perfectly honest, I couldn't agree with this evaluation more. Man-To-Man is just about at my complexity limit. Adding in GURPS magic rapidly exceeded that. TFT remained my go-to game for precisely that reason.

[Mallen the dark]

I bought the orginial melee back in 1978. Loved it then, still love it now. But I still prefer melee. But I will not turn down a chance to play either.

[ak_aramis]

I played MTM exactly twice; both before GURPS was released. I've played hundreds of battles with TFT since then. I didn't even use the gridded option for GURPS when I liked GURPS...