Rolls versus MA (Movement Allowance)

[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

[tomc]

I'm not sure about rolling against straight MA. Speed is speed, and most people consider it constant; you're fast enough or you're not.

However, I think when you need to see if someone can move quickly enough, a combination of reaction time and distance traveled, rolling vs MA plus DX makes a lot of sense to me.

To avoid a normal rock-fall trap usually just takes a roll vs DX, but if the rock-fall covers a large enough area, rolling vs DX and MA combined takes reaction time and footspeed into account. You need to start moving soon enough, and actually get out of the way. A DX 12 figure in chainmail (12+6) and a DX 8 figure with no armor both roll, say 5 dice, vs 18.

[hcobb]

If the PC saw a point of safety that they had to jump to then I would use the jumping rules at ITL 104

[Shostak]

If you are playing it out by turns on a tactical map, just letting MA contribute its normal effects for getting a character from point A to point B is best, with DX rolls thrown in to avoid hazards.

If you are abstracting this to theater-of-the-mind and are trying to determine if character can push their self to greater endurance or bursts of speed, I’d choose rolling against ST.

[larsdangly]

I like the thought, but the game doesn't use MA as something that is finely varied in a way that makes characters or even most species different from each other. It is basically a kind of effective tactical range, given your basic size, mode of locomotion and carried burden. A wolf has an MA not so different from a human runner, whereas the reality is the average wolf would smoke Usain Bolt over any distance and terrain, and moves at a speed about double that of most humans. So, if Bolt sets the bar for humanoids (in game terms, like an elf with Running talent), an average wolf should have MA of about 20. But MA doesn't measure speed in this way.

[Skarg]

If the GM is putting enough thought and math into it that it makes sense and provides reasonable results, then sure.

Usually figures don't move a random distance, though.

But that might not be what you're representing with a roll to get away from a chaotic danger zone. If there are boulders or whatever, then how they move is likely pretty unpredictable and random, so that the farther people run away (with their MA), the less likely they would be to be hit, so that would make sense.

But you'd still want to consider the odds, and how many dice to roll, and so on. e.g. a 3/MA roll means the MA 6 people are almost all going to get hit, most of the MA 8 people will, the MA 10 people have a 50% chance, and the MA 12-14 people are likely to get away. So that would seem to make sense for a danger moving about as fast as an unarmored human, suddenly coming at them from nearby.

And tomc's suggestion of rolling against the total of DX + MA is nice, too, if DX can help a person dodge or get past obstacles or something. ST might be helpful if you needed to push through some obstacles to get away faster, and IQ or spotting (so Alertness helps) might be helpful if it would help to be able to notice better directions to run in, etc.

[Rolando]

the way I would play this is to define a "safe" MA, everyone with MA:X+ is safe...for example everyone with MA8+ are safe, they outrun the danger (avalanche or whatever); everyone with MA6-7 have to roll 3/DX rolls to avoid falling and getting caught in the danger, if they pass the roll they are safe; everyone with MA4-5 must roll 3/ST to push themselfs and a 3/DX to not fall, if they pass both rolls they are safe; anyone with MA3 or less is hopelessly lost and will be caught in the danger.

If it is a dramatic scene I'll require more rolls and a failure will not doom the character, maybe you need 2 or 3 successes in 3 or 5 rolls, so you may fall and get up with rocks falling near you but may push and get sfae, or if the MA6-7 fail the DX roll they have a chance to push (3/ST) and evade dangers (3/DX) like MA4-5 and be safe...

Make it fun.

[Steve Plambeck]

Circa 1979, having only Melee and Wizard at that point, we wrote our own house rules covering many things that weren't addressed yet by the official rules. One was a rule for jumping horizontally (as in over a pit), with a roll vs MA, but I'd have to dig through old papers for the specifics. Probably 1d6 for every hex being jumped over.

(We were naughtier than that though. We also house ruled MA was an attribute, with a minimum of 8, and gave starting characters 10 free points to distribute as wanted instead of only 8, making a starting figure 42 points :) You could increase MA through XP, but no more than 2 points from wherever it started. Starting with an MA only 8 was a bad idea if you planned on wearing much armor.)

[Bill_in_IN]

Originally Posted by Steve Plambeck

Circa 1979, having only Melee and Wizard at that point, we wrote our own house rules covering many things that weren't addressed yet by the official rules. One was a rule for jumping horizontally (as in over a pit), with a roll vs MA, but I'd have to dig through old papers for the specifics. Probably 1d6 for every hex being jumped over.

(We were naughtier than that though. We also house ruled MA was an attribute, with a minimum of 8, and gave starting characters 10 free points to distribute as wanted instead of only 8, making a starting figure 42 points :) You could increase MA through XP, but no more than 2 points from wherever it started. Starting with an MA only 8 was a bad idea if you planned on wearing much armor.)

Treating MA as an attribute in that manner seems workable and I concur with starting at 8 being a drag for just about any level of decent armor. I'm fine with adhering to MA as described in RAW but adding a reasonable dimension for various saving rolls that involve movement can definitely fall into the GM preference category.

I remember running into other groups that played TFT. Every group had their own house rules which is common among many gaming systems. But TFT groups had some reasonable differences caused by the situation that you just mentioned. Some corrected themselves to ITL when it became available, some didn't, and most were hit and miss based upon their preferences.

[Steve Plambeck]

Originally Posted by Bill_in_IN

Treating MA as an attribute in that manner seems workable and I concur with starting at 8 being a drag for just about any level of decent armor. I'm fine with adhering to MA as described in RAW but adding a reasonable dimension for various saving rolls that involve movement can definitely fall into the GM preference category.

I remember running into other groups that played TFT. Every group had their own house rules which is common among many gaming systems. But TFT groups had some reasonable differences caused by the situation that you just mentioned. Some corrected themselves to ITL when it became available, some didn't, and most were hit and miss based upon their preferences.

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!