fwiw I played High Fantasy and I thought it was very playable. The combat system was unusual but fast. Overall the game is probably too simplistic for most tastes--barely more elaborate in terms of character differentiation and action than white box D&D.

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About FW, via the blog I linked earlier, there's a bunch of pages that  tabulate the various systems and modifiers. Start here: http://www.nettally.com/gldearman/gaming/fantasy_wargaming/rules-handouts.html

This is one of the few "classic era" RPGs that I have never seen. It just wasn't distributed in Australia.

Quote from: Arminius;834094This is probably my source: https://mikemonaco.wordpress.com/bruce-galloways-fantasy-wargaming/

Real RPG history research there, and knowing about its genesis (and the sad premature passing of 3 of the 5 authors) makes you more inclined to forgive the blemishes of this notorious game.

Quote from: The_Shadow;835318Real RPG history research there, and knowing about its genesis (and the sad premature passing of 3 of the 5 authors) makes you more inclined to forgive the blemishes of this notorious game.

Being dead does not excuse being a dick when you were alive. Loraine williams did some pretty nice things while running TSR. She also left a larger legacy of problems and lined her own pockets massively in the process. Problems that are still plaguing D&D 15 years later. When she does finally pass away that is not going to excuse the bad things she did and the legacy she left that she built herself.

Fantasy Wargaming is tiny in comparison. But it still doesnt excuse their bad behavior. It is a legacy they wrote themselves. If you have to stop and piss on someone elses works in your own product then that says nothing good about you and drags down your own product. Hell we have to warn new designers not to pull that stunt at least once a year even now. Possibly moreso now.

Interesting game. Bad designer attitude. Not like that is anything new.

Unfortunately see so very very much worse.

If you can find the game give it a glance through. Make of it what you will. I thought it was playable. Others totally disagree with me.

Quote from: Omega;835390Being dead does not excuse being a dick when you were alive. Loraine williams did some pretty nice things while running TSR. She also left a larger legacy of problems and lined her own pockets massively in the process. Problems that are still plaguing D&D 15 years later. When she does finally pass away that is not going to excuse the bad things she did and the legacy she left that she built herself.

Fantasy Wargaming is tiny in comparison. But it still doesnt excuse their bad behavior. It is a legacy they wrote themselves. If you have to stop and piss on someone elses works in your own product then that says nothing good about you and drags down your own product. Hell we have to warn new designers not to pull that stunt at least once a year even now. Possibly moreso now.

Oh, come  on.

Their crime was that they wrote some things people disagreed with in an arrogant and annoying manner, probably deliberately for entertainment value. Either you are entertained, whether you agree with their opinions or not, or you are not entertained. They didn't say something insensitive, they didn't encourage horrible practices, they didn't embezzle anything, steal anything, maim or murder anyone, or even just suggest something that was widely adopted and produced aesthetically displeasing results. They are just some relatively obscure writers who wrote some stuff.

Calling that "bad behavior" is kind of silly.

Quote from: Brad;834933http://www.trimboli.name/fwcharacters.html

Not exactly unplayable...but reading it takes me back to grad school seminar and endless journal articles pontificating about subjective crap. I forced myself to read the whole thing and it ranks right along side Role-Playing Master and Master of the Game by Gygax for entertainment value.

Hee ha...I have both of those Gygax books and assume you are being sardonic. Interesting curios, though. A look into Gygax's view of roleplaying, which is very different even from what was common among players at the time they were published. At least among those I knew. Some might charitably call it laughable.

I like to think I have enough detachment to find the early 1980s pontifications of some snobbish Cambridge-educated gamers amusing without getting into a rage about their character deficiencies. Likewise with Gygax's atrocities such as "Master of the Game". Hilarious, but he's like a nutty and sporadically brilliant uncle who you love to death.

Quote from: The_Shadow;835477I like to think I have enough detachment to find the early 1980s pontifications of some snobbish Cambridge-educated gamers amusing without getting into a rage about their character deficiencies. Likewise with Gygax's atrocities such as "Master of the Game". Hilarious, but he's like a nutty and sporadically brilliant uncle who you love to death.

Damn you! Now I am going to have to read that thing one of these days. :jaw-dropping:

Quote from: Omega;835494Damn you! Now I am going to have to read that thing one of these days. :jaw-dropping:

Just don't pay too much for it :-) The sporadic brilliance I mentioned is found elsewhere in his ouevre...

I had High Fantasy first edition, which didn't have the skill rules in it.  Mind you the skill rules were a list of skills that you rolled percentile to find your rating in them but even so.  They weren't in the original book.  Nor was the solo adventure and setting material.

The system was interesting if oddly structured.  Very much in the "a different rule for every subsystem" mode, combat resulted in direct losses in attack bonus, defense bonus and armor defense bonus.  It made for a scary chart but it was an interesting notion.  I think it was the first fantasy game I saw that gave alchemists firearms.  Really it did a great job of giving the classes meaningful stuff to do with their downtime and treasure.  Top notch stuff in there.

The setting was more in the line of Empire of the Petal Throne than Tolkien.  Aztec / Indian inspirations and fairly wild adventure concepts for the time.  At the time that put me off, I wanted more Tolkien in my fantasy not less.  But next to Fantasy Wargaming, High Fantasy is clearly written and interesting and, as best as I can remember not particularly bad about proclaiming its superiority to other rpgs.

I think Master of the Game wasn't all that bad.  But then I like that kind of behind the scenes author's thoughts type of thing.  Asimov on Science Fiction and Ursula K LeGuin's The Language of the Night are two of my favorite books.

On the other hand first edition probably still has the worst cover in the history of gaming.

Quote from: David Johansen;835499I had High Fantasy first edition, which didn't have the skill rules in it.  Mind you the skill rules were a list of skills that you rolled percentile to find your rating in them but even so.  They weren't in the original book.  Nor was the solo adventure and setting material.

It had a heck of a cover that got my attention, and a glance through it was intriguing. The later edition looked even more so to me with more material, and reviewers praised the scenarios especially.

I never actually got around to buying it, but I suspect I'd like it better than many other folks.

QuoteThe system was interesting if oddly structured.  Very much in the "a different rule for every subsystem" mode, combat resulted in direct losses in attack bonus, defense bonus and armor defense bonus.  It made for a scary chart but it was an interesting notion.  I think it was the first fantasy game I saw that gave alchemists firearms.  Really it did a great job of giving the classes meaningful stuff to do with their downtime and treasure.  Top notch stuff in there.

The setting was more in the line of Empire of the Petal Throne than Tolkien.  Aztec / Indian inspirations and fairly wild adventure concepts for the time.  At the time that put me off, I wanted more Tolkien in my fantasy not less.  But next to Fantasy Wargaming, High Fantasy is clearly written and interesting and, as best as I can remember not particularly bad about proclaiming its superiority to other rpgs.

I think Master of the Game wasn't all that bad.  But then I like that kind of behind the scenes author's thoughts type of thing.  Asimov on Science Fiction and Ursula K LeGuin's The Language of the Night are two of my favorite books.

On the other hand first edition probably still has the worst cover in the history of gaming.

Quote from: Arkansan;834073Huh, didn't know that. I wonder has anyone around here ever played it? Was there any follow up to it?

I tried to play this when I bought it as a kid in middle school back in the day. I think it exceeded my "esoterica" expectation that had been previously set by the 1E DMG....by a wide margin. I recall staying up for several nights trying to decipher how to design characters, then running them through some test cases, tying to figure out how the combat rules worked (or didn't) and being utterly impressed at the "feel" of medieval antiquity the book exuded (put another way when you're 12 it feels pretty authentic).

In the end I couldn't figure it out enough to run it, but it was a hell of an experience. This is definitely one I'd pick up again just for the nostalgia factor.

Quote from: camazotz;835712I tried to play this when I bought it as a kid in middle school back in the day. I think it exceeded my "esoterica" expectation that had been previously set by the 1E DMG....

Kind of how I felt about SPI's Universe RPG. Except that the 1e DMG was absurdly easy to grasp by comparison. But once things clicked Universe was fairly easy. Some games just never do for some reason.