Rolls versus MA (Movement Allowance)

[Bill_in_IN]

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

Oh yeah, by the time Advanced Melee and ITL came out, we had over 50 typed, single-spaced pages of house rules -- probably longer than Advanced Melee itself. That later grew to 100 pages. As ITL and the Advanced books came out, we cherry-picked what we'd use, and ignore the rest where we preferred our existing rules.

The extremely bad thing about this is that if someone from a different TFT group had ever joined ours, they'd have been dizzy trying to assimilate so many departures from the RAW they were used to.

When we eventually did try recruiting fresh new members that didn't have anything to "un-learn", even they were completely intimidated by the extent of house rules they'd have to learn in addition to the 3 volumes of official rules, the latter of which had gone out of print and were unavailable anyway.

If I could go back in time though, I wouldn't change a darned thing -- we had too much fun!

Our house rules weren't that much. However, we played long after it was out of print. So, we came up with higher level abilities/spells like Unarmed Combat 6, Megahex, Long-Distance Teleport, Expert Engineering (for better design and use of siege weapons). But, as I have stated before, I suspect all of that info went into a dumpster along with hundreds of really cool miniatures. I had it all stored at a friend's house who went through a nasty divorce and passed away 4 years ago. So, I'm starting from scratch. I can work my way back up to higher level characters.

As I'm creating my new area of Cidri, I'm creating similar but less powerful characters from my past (as best my memory can recall) to fill in the local ruling class, command structure, and general economy. As players join, they will be a part of that structure until they decide otherwise.

In honor of another friend that has since passed, I am recreating Wally, a Reptile Man with maxed out Unarmed Combat abilities. He has a squad of Reptile Men that are elite assassins and enforcers for a trio of human rulers that are high level Fighters and a Wizard. They are fair but strict which is why they don't mind using Reptile Men as their enforcers. Don't make them send Wally's group after you or themselves, LOL. Otherwise, they stay out of your business. They are mostly interested in building a large fighting force with specialists and use arena battles for recruitment. The are building a strong defense from neighboring hordes/lands and will strike out if they must. The local economy feeds that.

I should probably have started another thread about this.

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by Shaira

Hi everyone,

So imagine a character is simply trying to outrun some natural event - a landslide, tidal wave, lava flow, huge stone ball, etc. What do you all think about rolling vs MA as if it were an attribute?

Part of me rankles; I can see rationales for requesting rolls vs ST, DX, or even IQ in such instance, depending on how I describe the challenge. And I know that strictly speaking MA isn't an attribute but a precise number of how much a character can move in melee. But, dang, it seems such a no-brainer, even if it does stretch (break?) the TFT paradigm...

What do you think?

Cheers,

Sarah

I haven't used it much as a mechanic to represent reaction speed, but have occasionally used a 3d (or 2d, if I want to mainly catch out those in heavy armor) saving throw vs. MA in published solo adventures when I need to abstract a "get there in time" or "escape in time" mechanic without bothering with a hex grid.