TheRPGSite

I am cranking on a new element to my long-standing campaign for The Fantasy Trip (TFT), and it has put me in the mood to spread the good word about this most excellent of old game systems. There are a few reviews here and there on the internet, and most gamers have heard of its existence, but it is rare to bump into someone who really is familiar with the game. I thought a 'Let's Read' thread might be a good contribution.

Preamble: the broadest definition of TFT as a game system includes a dozen pocket-sized board games published by Metagaming Concepts between 1977 and 1983, as well as a three-volume roleplaying game system published in 1980 and a half dozen supplements for that rpg. I'll be focusing on the core books of this latter half of the system. Nevertheless, it is important to realize where the game came in order to understand what its publishers thought it was all about.

TFT began in 1977 with Melee, an inexpensive, portable board game of fantasy gladiatorial combat. These rules set the tone for the design of the whole system: they 'read' short and simple but are rich in play. Play happens on a map overlain with a hexagonal grid, which combatants traverse following very clear, concrete rules. The sequence of play, and the relationship between movement and actions are also tightly prescribed. The highly tactical movement, actions and initiative lead to important decision points every turn of combat, where one player must react to the one before and makes a decision that influences the one that follows. And, importantly, every turn involves an exchange of movements followed by an exchange of actions, such that even the simplest of tactical situations (two combatants on a flat, open field) always involves a kind of jockeying of decisions. Your position influences my movement; my movement puts me in a position that influences your movement; our respective positions influence your action; your action influences my action; our respective actions influence our positions at the start of the next turn; and so it goes, around and around. In this respect, it is the most chess-like fantasy combat system I know. Some more recent games aim at a similar dynamic through the introduction of a relatively extensive and complex set of powers that are idiosyncratic to individual combatants. Melee accomplishes this the same way Chess achieves complexity: everyone operates under the same few rules, and a dynamic, interesting game emerges from the way each player uses those rules to try to obtain advantage.  

Perhaps the best insight into the significance of Melee was suggested in some thread I recently read: Melee is to TFT as Chainmail was to D&D. This is a very helpful way to understand the differences between these games: Chainmail was a miniatures war game that used very abstract rules to represent the capabilities and distinctions among 'units'; one could argue that tendency to abstraction led to the successful but peculiar things that characterize D&D - classes, levels, armor class, etc. Melee was created to be a concrete simulation of fantasy combat, with a narrow focus on the nuts and bolts of human beings moving through space and fighting each other. And this sort of concreteness and focus characterizes the whole rest of the game.  If you like this sort of system comparison, you might say Melee is to TFT is to GURPs as Chainmail is to OD&D is to post-TSR D&D. I don't want to bog down in that sort of jerk-off theorizing, but I think this is a pretty fair synopsis.

Melee was very successful, appealing to the war game, board game and roleplaying game crowds, and was quickly followed by Wizard — a board game of magical gladiatorial combat, fully compatible with Melee. While play several different roles in TFT when played as a full-on roleplaying game, it is most distinguished from other systems by the core of highly tactical rules and spell choices and a resource management mechanic that forces difficult tactical choices (casting spells reduces a character's ST, much like damage). Thus, spell casting in combat has much of the tactical richness as its sister-game, Melee. It is by far the most tactical magic system I've seen. And, as with the rest of the system, manages to present this tactical depth with just a few rules and a few dozen spells.

Melee and Wizard were followed by a series of 'choose your own adventure' style dungeons (Death Test, Grail Quest, etc.), which continued publication even after the full roleplaying game system was published as a series of three books, each the length and physical format of a normal weekly magazine: In The Labyrinth (ITL) presented the core of the roleplaying game as well as monsters, character creation and experience, game master advice and other things; Advanced Melee (AM) expanded on Melee with a much wider range of equipment and options; Advanced Wizard (AW) similarly expanded the magic system of Wizard, adding rules for enchantments, many more spells, magic items, etc. It's these three volumes that we'll read in this thread.

Publication came to a halt a bit before mid 1983, when Metagaming closed shop, the game was never revived in any official form, and it quickly faded from a major player ca. 1980 to pretty much dead and buried by the time its descendent, GURPS, was first published in 1986. A small internet community kept the fires stoked for some time, though most of those pages are now dead links or haven't been updated in close to a decade. Some fan produced material circulated, but never rose to the level of professional production of a new edition. There are a couple of retroclones out there (Heroes and Other Worlds; Legends of the Ancient World); I won't focus on these here, but you should check them out.

A few more introductory generalities: TFT is sometimes characterized as being 'rules lite' because it has a low page count and few moving parts (for example, characters possess only 3 core attributes — Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence — and most dice rolls use a similar mechanic based on d6's). Your character sheet can literally be a 3x5 card, even for the most complex, 'high level' character you ever play.  This is fair but provides little insight into what makes the game special. It is also sometimes described using mechanical details that might remind one of other games (e.g., its 'roll under' mechanics, point-buy character generation, the fact that armor reduces damage). Most of these observations also fail to give one much of a sense of what it is like to play TFT.  For starters, TFT is both among the fastest playing and most lethal fantasy roleplaying games you will see. It is odd to describe such a tactical, map-focused game as fast playing but it is. The lethality is extraordinary — this is a game that chews up PC's and spits out the mangled chunks. Also, TFT can be played several very different ways — as a competitive board game; as a conventional table-top roleplaying game; and as a 'pick your own adventure' roleplaying game a'la Fighting Fantasy. And there is nothing to stop you flipping back and forth among these different modes of play, even using the same collections of characters.  In some respects, TFT feels like Tunnels and Trolls for people who enjoy tactical board games. This might be the best insight into TFT for those who know old roleplaying games but haven't played this one.

Enough introductory wankery; off we go!

Can't wait. I was just checking sources for inexpensive copies of Melee and Wizard yestreen. All were too expensive to be worth buying to satisfy curiosity. Will be following regularly so post away.

Quote from: Matt;903909Can't wait. I was just checking sources for inexpensive copies of Melee and Wizard yestreen. All were too expensive to be worth buying to satisfy curiosity. Will be following regularly so post away.

While of course it would be wrong to advocate any such thing -- however much Thompson's given the finger to the hobby, he still owns the rights -- there are sites where you can get bootleg PDFs.

For really hardcore fans, I might be talked out of the few issues I have of Interplay, a digest-sized house organ for TFT that Metagaming put out between the time they sold off Space Gamer and Thompson folded the tent.

Beyond that, I still have great affection for the system -- heck, the final published TFT product was one of my first writing credits -- and very nearly went back to it when I restarted my campaign in '03 after a hiatus.

[ITL] From the Publisher

Most rpg books open with a forward that breaks the fourth wall by providing some insight into what the creators think they have just given you. Most of this is probably of interest only to the people involved in writing the game, but the forwards to first and second generation games remain interesting to the modern hobbyist because they were unusually straightforward with their comments about themselves and their competitors. If you go back and read the forwards to various editions of D&D ca. 1975-1980, Runequest, Tunnels and Trolls, Chivalry and Sorcery, Traveller, and TFT, you quickly realize that the authors of these various systems were reacting to each other very consciously and directly. The 'copy cat' games (don't get offended; this is honestly how they saw themselves at the time) were explicitly responding to and in some way 'improving on' D&D. D&D was defending its position by swatting back the value of these supposed improvements and explaining its own value as a carefully engineered game made by grown ups.

The forward to TFT is in this vein, but is also interesting because of the dynamic between its two principles: Designer Steve Jackson and publisher Howard Thompson. Things end badly between these two (at least from the standpoint of the legacy of their games). Thompson's view is the one that gets presented in the forward. And his message is clear: A good game should satisfy designer, publisher and customer, and what this publisher cares about most of all is securing a place in the market through price point. The thing Thompson thought was most important about TFT was that it was cheap.

And it was. The core book of the full role playing game (ITL) cost $5 when it was first published, and I think never rose above $6. That's about $15 in today's dollars - or roughly what you would pay for a similar page count through Lulu. This contrasts with ~$15 for a D&D hard back - a similar contrast with the cost of a big-company core book today. This is a game from a scrappy little company, serving up retail for the common customer who wants value for a buck. That's what Thompson thought this Fantasy Trip thing was all about.

Awesome.  I am a diehard TFT fan.  Played it when I was young, collected it (all of it) when I got older despite the prices.  I haven't been able to convince my groups to play it though - the thought of "rules-lite proto-GURPS" is just too much for my players, and it is very hard to convince them that this is a miss-characterization.  Of the early fantasy RPGs (D&D, Runequest, TFT) TFT gets the least love, and its a true shame.  

I did manage to run a couple of one offs of HOW (Heroes and Other Worlds) which is a TFT retroclone with strong a Moldvay B/X vibe.  It removed some of the board-gamy tactical elements to make it more of a pure RPG.  Its an awesome friken OSR style game with great art, a bestiary book (like 300 pages), spell book, a few published adventures and a mag with a couple of issues.  I can't say enough about it.

Anyway, I am very glad to see TFT getting some exposure and love.

This and DragonQuest was what I liked at the time.

Melee and Wizard were the first fantasy games I ever played.
We played loads of the other Metagaming stuff but most of them were scifi.
I know we got Advanced when those books came out but I'm not sure what we used them for... probably just more of the same. We weren't too aware of RPGs yet... that came a bit later when our friends got us into AD&D.

TFT is one of my favorite systems, and showcases Steve Jackson's great talents in creating rules. However, when I pick up In The Labyrinth these days, what strikes me is the poor organisation and plain old bad writing. It's full of UPPERCASE and italicised words in body text for emphasis, exception rules hidden away in dense paragraphs, etc. Kind of surprising compared to my memory of a snappy and elegant game.

I think Howard Thompson was right - he was pissed that Steve kept on adding to the game and took an extra two years to finish it which only detracted from the game's strengths. The game is at its best kept simple, just Melee/Wizard with a few of the advanced rules grafted on.

Imagine that TFT had come out in 1978 when it was supposed to, with a second edition in 1980 with production values comparable with AD&D's. Gaming history could have been a bit different.

One of my players really likes TFT and one of my former players did too.

I have Melee and Wizard off e-bay a decade ago. But currently no one interested in playing TFT or ITL. Some brutally elabourate solos.

And lets not forget the two "Treasure Hunt" solos that doubled as a real world treasure hunt from clues in the adventure. The first was completed. The second was never found and its suspected was either never placed or Thompson retrieved it when the company folded. One of the big mysteries of gaming as Thompson has never confirmed what happened that I have ever heard of.

Theres been tries to acquire the rights both by Jackson and others. But the asking price has been too high.

The Legends of stuff seems interesting and its nice they have the rules for each setting up free.

I love TFT as well.   There are free copies of the game out there, and an updated version offered by Dark City Games as Legends of the Ancient World.  Basic Rules look free.  A quick glance shows few major differences.  The one I noticed is the skill list is a little thin, there are some cool "skills" (some operate more like D&D perks) in TFT, and all skills in TFT had a minimum IQ.  So you could be a big dumb fighter but if too stupid you might be limited to getting only skill in clubs.  You could use a sword but if you are too stupid you can't acquire skill in it.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;903936This and DragonQuest was what I liked at the time.

I seem to recall you were an early Traveller ref Shawn?  I don't come by here often enough to keep track it seems.

The name alone helped sell the game for players!

Sigged.

I'll be watching the thread, too. I doubt I'll be able to figure out which box I've packed my copies in, but if I figure out where I put the PDFs, I'll follow along...

Every once in a while, I'm tempted to use TFT's combat system and talents with OD&D, even thought about doing it back in the day. Probably wouldn't use the magic system, though. I actually like D&D's spell system much better, although I might borrow a couple ideas, like the way Gate works in Wizard vs. D&D.

[ITL] Introduction

This is Steve Jackson's opportunity to tell his side of the 'why we made this thing' story (along with the usual 'what is roleplaying' drivel all game authors seem to feel is necessary). He makes two substantive points: (1) TFT is built around a tactical set of rules governing movement and action; and (2) the rules are basically complete, functional and clear enough that it will be obvious how they should be interpreted - unlike the shitty systems all those other rat bags have published, where players have to make up their own rules and interpretations of the system.

As I noted above, this is where we see how an author of an early-generation rpg sees his niche in the hobby. They were all dickish to each other on this point, but the question is whether Jackson was more or less right. With nearly 40 years of perspective and experience playing all these old games, I'd say he has a point. For starters, TFT is close to the only rpg with a detailed, explicit system of tactical movement and maneuver (the only other major one being Dragonquest), and it is clearly the first and, I would say, best. This is obviously the most unique thing about TFT.

The second point about the completeness and coherence of the rules is more of a matter of taste, but I would back him up with some exceptions. After playing TFT for 39 years, writing an enormous volume of campaign materials additions and house rules, I would say this is one of those rare game systems where there is no ambiguity about what is intended, playing the first edition RAW is satisfying and complete, and, while anyone with an ounce of creativity will add monsters, talents, spells, items, etc., nearly any core rule you are likely to add will probably make the game worse. As we will see, there are a number of wonky things about the way TFT is presented (formatting errors, bizarre organizational choices and repetitions), but the actual structure and content of the rules is tight as a drum.

When I contrast it with its perceived competitors, there is little doubt Jackson has a point. I love it like a brother, but OD&D is a fucking mess and everyone knows it, so we don't have to have that argument. Tunnels and Trolls has a better claim to being well engineered, but is quite loose and schematic in some respects and has some core rules that are clear but 'break' so easily most people feel a need to change them. Jackson is not being fair to Traveller and Runequest, which are less tactical than TFT, but beautifully crafted and complete games (though RQ was taking shape more or less simultaneously with TFT, so perhaps you could say he wasn't talking about it). Dragonquest was first published in 1980, so it is fair to say Jackson didn't really know about it yet.

Quote from: Larsdangly;904027I would say this is one of those rare game systems where there is no ambiguity about what is intended, playing the first edition RAW is satisfying and complete, and, while anyone with an ounce of creativity will add monsters, talents, spells, items, etc., nearly any core rule you are likely to add will probably make the game worse.

I don't know about that. Even back in the day, there was a supplement called The Game Master's Codex, basically a reproduction of dot-matrix print outs of stat blocks and tables in the books, collected in one place and sorted in different ways. There was a whole Q&A section about ambiguous rules, some of which couldn't be resolved easily. Notably, most of these were in Advanced Melee and Advanced Wizard.

TFT, as I frequently post to explain where I'm coming from on threads here, was my first system, a sentimental favorite, and generally forms my "minimum bar" for what I want and need to be satisfied with a gaming system.

As the first post in this thread mentions, TFT does several things differently from most/all other RPG's, mainly in the tactical design where movements and actions are all crucial to what happens, and risks are very real. I'd also add that in general, the combat mechanics make some sense, and a large part of the design of everything seems to be about things being the way they are for reasons that make sense. That too seems to be a big contrast to many game designs, where many/most rules and abilities and creatures etc seem to have been designed for the sake of imagination, coolness, excitement, etc often at the expense of making sense. At least, that's how it feels coming from TFT and looking at most other RPG books - it's like "what? a rabbit holding a rifle? wait you don't use a map for combat? there's no way to die in one turn? what?"

As for Howard Thompson versus Steve Jackson, I tend to see them as Steve was the one who designed TFT and did all the solid development and brilliant parts that make it what it is. Howard was the businessman who ended up buying the rights from Steve and losing him, and then making clumsy low-quality products and running his company out of business. Howard and/or his editors indeed seemed to think that less was more, and the TFT products released after Steve left were full of mistakes and were inferior, showing much less work and understanding, and far less attention to detail.

There are still people making/sharing/discussing new house rules. See the TFT email list.

Quote from: Matt;903909Can't wait. I was just checking sources for inexpensive copies of Melee and Wizard yestreen. All were too expensive to be worth buying to satisfy curiosity. Will be following regularly so post away.

There is Legends of the Anicent World
http://www.darkcitygames.com/docs/Legends.pdf

And Heroes and Other Worlds
http://heroworlds.blogspot.com/

Quote from: estar;904035There is Legends of the Anicent World
http://www.darkcitygames.com/docs/Legends.pdf

And Heroes and Other Worlds
http://heroworlds.blogspot.com/

These are fine games and I encourage everyone to buy them both, but note the following differences with respect to ITL/AM/AW:

Legends of the Ancient World: a highly condensed and somewhat simplified version, closer to the original Melee and Wizard in scope, with a few talents thrown in to create characters who can do things outside of combat. The programmed adventures they sell are outstanding and perfectly add to the original opus of Metagaming boxed adventures (Deathtest, etc.).

HOW: Very well written, produced and supported retroclone, including an enormous spell book and equally enormous collection of monsters. The core rules are structurally simpler than TFT, and I would say movement and maneuver in combat is too vague in HOW - it really should be played with reference to Melee or AM. Nevertheless, it has some nice additional house rules (e.g., reaction defenses). In play, you will notice three differences from TFT that sound subtle but actually make the two games hard to merge: (1) the vital statistics of weapons (damage, minimum ST, etc.) in HOW are very peculiar - an uncharitable person might even say botched. (2) player characters are enormously more powerful than NPCs and monsters due to higher starting stats and by virtue of having a sort of extra reserve of ST points to absorb damage and cast spells, not possessed by any but a few (apparently randomly chosen) monsters. This strongly changes the balance of play, making it much less lethal and balanced than TFT. (3) This last one isn't a necessary result of the core rules, but for some reason all the NPCs and most monsters presented to you in the game have really low, and almost uniform DX scores. People who think they understand TFT often say DX is the 'god stat' in the game. They are wrong, but regardless this leads to an odd dynamic where basically everyone and everything the PC's encounter has a to-hit roll and saves roughly equivalent to a 2HD monster in D&D. I don't like it, and it makes the published adventures really easy in comparison to those from TFT or LotAW.

Quote from: Kuroth;904012I seem to recall you were an early Traveller ref Shawn?

I was an early Traveller player. Then stopped for about 25 years. Then came back as a Traveller referee.

[ITL] The World of Cidri

Immediately following the introduction we get an overview of the nominal setting of TFT: Cidri — one of the oddest, coolest, most interesting, but ultimately most disappointing things about the game.

TFT can be played in any kind of setting, but is intended to be played in an artificial world of titanic scope — big enough to contain every campaign world of every DM you ever met. The central conceit is that Cidri was created by a race of mortal but exceptionally powerful beings who possessed the power to move across dimensions, sampling the technologies and magics of the earth, alternate earths, and countless other worlds besides. They used this knowledge to create a gigantic world (presumably hallow so its surface can maintain 1g...), and populate it with people, creatures, places, technologies sampled from across the multiverse. They ruled this world for many years, and then vanished, leaving it to its own devices. Whether your group chooses to game in a world resembling Arthurian Britain, feudal Japan, ancient rome, dinosaur-filled swamps and cave men, magician-kings, spirit haunted deserts, or anything else you might fancy, it is all actually transpiring on the same globe. We are to imagine that most people will live and die knowing nothing beyond their home culture, but the possibility exists to get on a ship or head off into the forest and eventually wander to a land so foreign and bizarre as to be like another age or planet. And, while most of the world is technologically more or less like the late middle ages, the creators left behind fantastic technologies and space-age complexes, so you might start life as a cave man and end up waving around a laser gun (assuming your GM thinks of a way to fold one into the campaign).

Jackson is clear about why he went this direction: it results in a game world where anything can exist, but with rational explanations. And, it results in a game where the creations of multiple game masters can exist side by side, with characters moving back and forth between them - the two 'worlds' interacting and evolving together. This latter point is one that I found to be common to the better-run D&D campaigns in the 70's: groups would cook up settings together, sometimes taking turns DMing and letting players mold parts of the world. The notion behind Cidri is that this is true not only for your personal group, but for every other group you might ever meet.

Whatever value you might find in the reasons Jackson had in mind, I have always enjoyed Cidri - it has a creative flair that makes it different from other game worlds, and it has always inspired me as a DM to cross-pollinate things from fantasy, history and science fiction in ways I might not have otherwise done.

The flaw of Cidri is that neither Jackson nor Metagaming really developed it in a significant way. It is a concept that a GM or gaming group might find inspiring, and in that sense it is stronger than the sense of setting one gets from the core books in OD&D or Tunnels and Trolls. But it pales in comparison to the richness of the worlds presented by some other contemporary games - Traveller and Runequest come to mind - and, despite the dozen or so publications that followed (pocket adventures and setting books), Cidri as a whole always remained out of focus, somewhere beyond the horizon. Personally, I have two reactions to the fact that Cidri basically died on the vine as a published setting: on one hand it is a lost opportunity that diminishes TFT in comparison to games of the same era and ambition. On the other, it may be a strength that TFT never transformed into a commercial product that tells you what to do with your game. Most of the gaming world has moved to a model where, before your character is even rolled up there is a massive infrastructure of past history, NPC's and plots that constrain what will happen in your game, effectively telling you what constitutes a valid new part of the setting. TFT never did this - it remains a game that offers a few inspirations and lots of mechanical 'widgets' (combat, gear, magic, an economics system, beasts, etc.), but never tells you what you are supposed to do with them. This is the message also given by OD&D, Tunnels and Trolls, Chivalry and Sorcery and some other old-school games. And there is something beautiful about it. I've always thought the whole idea of rpg's is that you aren't really playing unless you are creating something that might be big or small but is always new and comes from yourself. If you like this idea, you will like Cidri.

Quote from: Larsdangly;904027(along with the usual 'what is roleplaying' drivel all game authors seem to feel is necessary).

Its put in there because A: this stuff came out at the proverbial dawn-o-RPG-Time and were still new. And B: its still put in because you have to assume that someone will buy the game and not know what an RPG is.

That Cidri setting sounds pretty lame.  Does it have any bearing on the actual game and rules or can one toss it right out without having to alter anything?

For what it's worth, it's no worse than the 3rd Imperium and may be better as the 3rd Imperium occasionally intruded on the rules after 1981 Traveller, what with Amber Zones and Communication Lines and what not.

Folks tend to forget that (1) at the time this was published, RPGs were a new thing and frequently not even called RPGs, and (2) not everyone is intimately aware of the ins and outs of RPGs so it's a smart move to explain in brief and treat every game as it may be someone's first.

Quote from: Matt;904153That Cidri setting sounds pretty lame.  Does it have any bearing on the actual game and rules or can one toss it right out without having to alter anything?

....

You can toss it right out.  In fact you would be hard pressed to find any impact on the rules by the setting.  Cidri is a pretty standard take on "fantasy" back then, there was a strong strain where fantasy was set in the far future where remnants of science remained, I think of Kothar, The Dying Earth, and even Blackmoor.    

Even easier to toss out than the Traveler default setting, which I found a fairly lack luster take on Foundation.  Sadly, The Imperium, once just an idea to get people started, became the setting to many and even canonized.

Quote from: Matt;904153That Cidri setting sounds pretty lame.  Does it have any bearing on the actual game and rules or can one toss it right out without having to alter anything?

For what it's worth, it's no worse than the 3rd Imperium and may be better as the 3rd Imperium occasionally intruded on the rules after 1981 Traveller, what with Amber Zones and Communication Lines and what not.

Ahh, the casual anonymous sneer of the internet forum poster...I was wondering when we would spot it in is natural environment.

Anyway, Cidri is definitely a 'take or leave it' component of TFT. I'm not even sure the game designer and publisher took it very seriously. It is similar to the 3rd Imperium in scope and structure (semi-infinite; containing everything from monkey people to time traveling wonder aliens; capable of containing many different campaigns), but the two are basically polar opposites in design philosophy and execution. 3rdE is fully mapped out, has elaborate back stories, and is continuously reenforced by the supplements and published adventures. Cidri is just sort of a concept tossed out there for you to do with what you want.

Quote from: Larsdangly;904169Ahh, the casual anonymous sneer of the internet forum poster...I was wondering when we would spot it in is natural environment.

Ah, the profound inability to parse basic English when confronted with the challenge of reading comprehension! Sorry if your panties are in a bunch because I think Cidri sounds pretty lame and asked a simple question. Send me your address and I'll mail a box of Kleenex you can use to wipe your tears away.

I mostly agree with Lars on Cidri. Always figured that it was kind of an interesting concept, but because it has no effect on the rules, it just seems kind of tacked on, as if the writer(s) felt GMs couldn't or wouldn't add dinosaurs and robots unless there were some logical explanation, or explicit permission to play in the setting they want to play in. And it can't be because they were trying to keep the medieval fantasy pure, because the rules include blackpowder weapons by default.

Quote from: Larsdangly;904117And, it results in a game where the creations of multiple game masters can exist side by side, with characters moving back and forth between them - the two 'worlds' interacting and evolving together.

Remember when this game was published.  The late 70s was the heyday of the "multiverse" approach, where players took their characters to the tables of whichever person was GMing on any given day, and no one worried about how the PCs got there, or worried over which flavor of homebrew (or, indeed, published system) the characters were genned under.  Somehow it was all good.  While I don't know for a certain fact, I expect that Jackson's intent was to provide a canonical framework to do it in.

Quote from: Ravenswing;904189The late 70s was the heyday of the "multiverse" approach, where players took their characters to the tables of whichever person was GMing on any given day, and no one worried about how the PCs got there, or worried over which flavor of homebrew (or, indeed, published system) the characters were genned under.  Somehow it was all good.  While I don't know for a certain fact, I expect that Jackson's intent was to provide a canonical framework to do it in.

Exactly my experience, although characters had to come from some system close enough to D&D. There were teleport gates between the worlds of GMs in the same group and such GMs tended to stick to similar house rules and power levels, but characters from further afield were generally welcome, with only modest scrutiny for level or items that were too powerful for the GM's world (to keep the game fun in that world, not to police what anyone was doing elsewhere).

I had little interest in Cidri in TFT, since it didn't really rule anything out but also didn't really force anything in, and it matched what I thought of as the default setting for any RPG; direct advice on coordinating campaigns with several GMs without tying it up in a setting might have been better for me.

[ITL] Characters - overview and examples.

Whatever you make of TFT as a whole, there is no doubt that it was the first game to present a character creation process based on allocating points and buying abilities, without any random elements. So, it was the start of a major trend in rpg design. And, it was and remains one of the best examples of highly efficient character description - you can keep track of a PC on a scrap of notebook paper or a 3x5 card, even though characters are quite nuanced and have a number of things that distinguish them from each other.

Character creation starts with an overview of the mechanical steps, followed by a surprisingly long (~1-2 pages) detailing of examples of character archetypes; i.e., the collection of talents and sometimes suggested ranges of attributes that would be appropriate for a barbarian warrior, or wizard's apprentice, or merchant, and so forth.

The elements that go into defining a TFT character include: choosing a race (human or any of a number of others; I've DM'd giants, walking octopus, small dragon, etc.); decide to be either a 'hero' or 'wizard' (a wizard is someone competent at spell casting; a hero is anyone else); distribute a fixed number of points among your three attributes (Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence); you then use your Intelligence points as a resource of points to purchase talents and spells (talents are a mix of skills and special abilities; spells are spells). And that's it. If your game is just about dueling or dungeon crawls you will likely be allowed to pick any equipment you like. If part of a more elaborate campaign, you may need to get a Job (something we'll discuss at length) and use that job to earn money for equipment.

Quote from: Ravenswing;904189Remember when this game was published.  The late 70s was the heyday of the "multiverse" approach, where players took their characters to the tables of whichever person was GMing on any given day, and no one worried about how the PCs got there, or worried over which flavor of homebrew (or, indeed, published system) the characters were genned under.  Somehow it was all good.  While I don't know for a certain fact, I expect that Jackson's intent was to provide a canonical framework to do it in.

Aye. I recall we had three DMs and divided the same world into different areas that each DM created.  
Every time a different DM ran, the characters playing sans the DMs own characters would adventure in that DMs realm.
It worked out pretty well as all the DMs were on the same page in regards to rewards and treasure.

Quote from: Matt;904155Folks tend to forget that (1) at the time this was published, RPGs were a new thing and frequently not even called RPGs, and (2) not everyone is intimately aware of the ins and outs of RPGs so it's a smart move to explain in brief and treat every game as it may be someone's first.

And GMs and DMs were making stuff up on how to role-play a game at the table back then, rather than having their sessions being just adventure board/war game sessions. You can see the results of it now by how GMs and DMs play to this day, from the habits they learned back then.

In newer RPG books these days, role-play has been simplified in how it is done in one short paragraph usually. With short, sweet role-play examples used by GMs/Players in parts of the book, so new players to RPGing can either use them or ingore them for their gaming style. But if a GM says there will be role-play in our game sessions, and the players say, "How do we do that?", the GM can then point to the one paragraph in the book. And after a couple hours of in-game practice, everyone at the table is a role-player.

Quote from: Matt;904153That Cidri setting sounds pretty lame.  Does it have any bearing on the actual game and rules or can one toss it right out without having to alter anything?

From what I recall it played into some of the solos. There were at times bits of tech or whole locales that were not fantasy and were more at home in a post apoc or SF range even. But never much mention directly. Least that I saw.

[ITL] Optional (semi) random character generation

The next section of the character creation rules is an oddity that I suspect sees little use in most TFT games: a system for (sort of) randomly creating a character. The player is presented with a set of tables that can be used to randomly determine your character 'type' (fighter, thief, etc.) and race (including just the subset of races most likely to see use in a sane fantasy campaign - no walking octopuses), with the idea that you will use take the results, look back at the immediately preceding guide to talents and attributes that best suit each character type and build your PC accordingly. This is not so much a random character generation as it is a guided character-build for people who either don't want to decide themselves or enjoy the idea of playing any old rat bag of a character type. It is an odd addition to the game and, as I say, I doubt many people used it.

However, one of the most interesting tidbits in the game is a short paragraph and associated list that suggests you use use a random roll of 2d6 to determine your character's personality traits, including qualities like Bravery, Honesty, Greed, etc. Not much thought is given to how these numbers might be used other than as a guide to the way you play that character, but I found it interesting because it is the first appearance in a rpg (at least to my knowledge) of some sort of quantitative attributes that measure your character's personality and beliefs, as opposed to just physical and intellectual abilities. It was not until 1985 that Pendragon developed a similar idea into a whole sub-system of the game that arguably is its most important contribution to table top roleplaying. TFT didn't really do anything significant with the idea, but the seed is there. I've often wondered whether other groups fleshed it out into a full-blown system of character behavior like Pendragon.

Quote from: Larsdangly;904041These are fine games and I encourage everyone to buy them both, but note the following differences with respect to ITL/AM/AW:

Legends of the Ancient World: a highly condensed and somewhat simplified version [...]

HOW: Very well written, produced and supported retroclone, including an enormous spell book and equally enormous collection of monsters. The core rules are structurally simpler than TFT, and I would say movement and maneuver in combat is too vague in HOW - it really should be played with reference to Melee or AM. Nevertheless, it has some nice additional house rules. [...]

I just want to underline and agree. These retroclones and new adventures and content are great... but... they watered down the TFT combat system too much, especially in terms of movement & other effects that make tactical combat interesting. I would use strongly recommend using the actual TFT core rules for combat (Advanced Melee or at least Melee) and add these newer books for content or house rules, but not throw out the TFT rules they don't include.

About Cidri, I like it, because it says so little. I think that's the point. Saying so little leaves plenty of room for GMs to make worlds as they like, using their own imagination. It also doesn't give the players too much information that their PCs and even scholars in the game would/should NOT have, so it makes sense to not publish such details.

The Cidri storyline doesn't even say all campaigns are all one world, and IIRC it's even vague about what Cidri is. Since the creators of Cidri got their power via world-hopping gates, and they ruled many planets, many places "in Cidri" might actually just be on smaller planets, perhaps linked in some places (or not) by gates.

Quote from: Larsdangly;904291However, one of the most interesting tidbits in the game is a short paragraph and associated list that suggests you use use a random roll of 2d6 to determine your character's personality traits, including qualities like Bravery, Honesty, Greed, etc. Not much thought is given to how these numbers might be used other than as a guide to the way you play that character, but I found it interesting because it is the first appearance in a rpg (at least to my knowledge) of some sort of quantitative attributes that measure your character's personality and beliefs, as opposed to just physical and intellectual abilities. It was not until 1985 that Pendragon developed a similar idea into a whole sub-system of the game that arguably is its most important contribution to table top roleplaying. TFT didn't really do anything significant with the idea, but the seed is there. I've often wondered whether other groups fleshed it out into a full-blown system of character behavior like Pendragon.

Um... Boot Hill has Bravery which was a factor. Circa 1975, Fantasy Wargaming has personality stats circa 1982 and Im pretty sure they neither knew nor cared TFT existed. The idea of stats for more than game stuff was occurring to everyone about all at once as they looked to expand past D&Ds basic style. Even AD&D did. But TSR was experimenting just about right out the gate.

Quote from: Skarg;904301I just want to underline and agree. These retroclones and new adventures and content are great... but... they watered down the TFT combat system too much, especially in terms of movement & other effects that make tactical combat interesting. I would use strongly recommend using the actual TFT core rules for combat (Advanced Melee or at least Melee) and add these newer books for content or house rules, but not throw out the TFT rules they don't include.

I totally agree. There is a need for a retroclone that really preserves all the essential features of TFT combat. (Or people can just figure out how to get the originals). LotAW adventures are easy to play with original TFT. HOW is not.

[ITL] Choosing attributes

Here is where the rubber first hits the road: we have finished with preambles, over views, character design suggestions, random tables you aren't going to use, and now we are ready to actually do something: distribute our allotment of points among the three characteristics — Strength (ST), Dexterity (DX) and Intelligence (IQ). You get to play this game using a total of 32 points, and a minimum score of 8 in each (focusing for the moment just on human PC's). How hard can that be? – we are distributing only 8 flipping points with only two degrees of freedom!

Let's start by considering what stats do for you: ST is a pre-requisite for using the various weapons, and actually a very strict one. To first order, every point you increase ST will increase your maximum damage by 1 and expected value of damage by ~0.5-1. ST is also your reserve of HP, and so dictates how durable you are in combat. DX controls your chance of success at most physical actions (including spell casting, something we'll come back to repeatedly), as well as your place in the initiative order during the 'action' part of a combat turn. DX is reduced by worn armor, which has the effect of reducing damage done to you. Thus, DX is also indirectly connected to how robust you are in combat. IQ dictates the number and sophistication of the skills you can know, as well as your chance of noticing things or resisting certain magical effects.

Most people I know who have a passing experience with TFT take one look at character generation and decide this is obviously a game that has one ideal 'build'. I have trouble reacting to this, mostly because whenever I hear someone say the word 'build' in a table top rpg context I want to reach for my flame thrower and re-enact that scene in the pill box from the start of Saving Private Ryan. But, fortunately there is also a more rational answer: by some miracle of game design it is actually very hard to figure out what distribution of points among stats is best, even when looked at with the incredibly narrow perspective of combat alone. I.e., even if we ignore for the moment that our characters will do things other than fight at close quarters (duels and skirmishes at 10's of meters or less range), I defy you to demonstrate that there is one truly ideal recipe.

The most common 'read' of TFT, after a skim or a session or two of play, is that DX is the 'god stat' and should be maximized. It is trivial to show how wrong this is. Consider a toe-to-toe melee fight between fighter with ST 9, DX 15, IQ 8, armed with a rapier (1d damage) and unarmored (to keep that DX at its tip-top value), fighting a foe with ST 11, DX 13 (adjusted down to 10), IQ 8, with a large shield, leather armor and a short sword (2d-1). The first will have an expected value of damage per turn done to his foe of 0.48 points (0.954 chance of hit, 1/6th chance of doing 1 point and 1/6th chance of doing 2). Thus, the expected time to render his foe unconscious is just over 20 turns, and he has very little chance of removing his foe in one blow. His foe, on the other hand, has an expected value of damage per turn of 3 points (50 % chance to hit with 6 points of damage average), and will kill his foe in 3 turns, on average (with a good chance of removing him in one blow). I ignore chances of 2x or 3x damage hits in this analysis (wrong, but not very important statistically). Nevertheless, the point is obvious: your near-max-DX character is going to get badly fucked up nearly every time.

On the other hand, if I change the situation just slightly - start at greater range and give the high DX character a short bow; add a little armor and a buckler to that rapier, heavily armor the stronger combatant, etc. - and the odds quickly shift around.

And, while IQ was not really relevant in this example, once characters gain enough experience to raise their total stats to 35+, an ideal strategy in many situations will depend on some advanced talent (missile weapons, guns, fencing, etc.) ... which likely will only work if you made the right choices regarding ST and DX when the character was first created.

The point is, there are a few bad choices that you quickly figure out - generally, anything with an extreme value for any one stat - and then a range of basically acceptable choices, each of which is better in some situations and worse in others. And out of this comes a game with a lot of tactical subtlety: knowing the best set up for both yourself and your opponent in each situation, and 'gaming' the rules of movement, initiative, engagement and facing so that you get to do what you want and your foe doesn't get to do what he wants.

I agree.  The interplay of the three stats in TFT is a very *tight* mechanic.  

It is not just combat monkeys either.  The same goes for Wizards.  For Spellcasters, IQ is essential for options and powerful magic but you need DEX to cast successfully, and STR to power the spells. A sorcerer cannot max out on IQ any better than a warrior can max out on DEX or STR.  There is a range of options, but the only really poor choices are min/maxed unbalanced ones.

HOW, which is great game (don't get me wrong), messed with this delicate balance a little bit by adding Endurance as a stat.  It makes PCs a little more "heroic," but it is a true dump stat compared to STR.  I've been working on a Luck stat to replace END that preserves the tightness of the game's stat balance, but it is tricky.

Related to the tightness of character stats is an issue (flaw?) that I have had a hard time getting past, and that's character advancement, but we haven't gotten there yet...

This site by a long term TFT player may be of interest:

http://www.meleewizards.com/rules.html

Quote from: Madprofessor;904706I agree.  The interplay of the three stats in TFT is a very *tight* mechanic.  

It is not just combat monkeys either.  The same goes for Wizards.  For Spellcasters, IQ is essential for options and powerful magic but you need DEX to cast successfully, and STR to power the spells. A sorcerer cannot max out on IQ any better than a warrior can max out on DEX or STR.  There is a range of options, but the only really poor choices are min/maxed unbalanced ones.

HOW, which is great game (don't get me wrong), messed with this delicate balance a little bit by adding Endurance as a stat.  It makes PCs a little more "heroic," but it is a true dump stat compared to STR.  I've been working on a Luck stat to replace END that preserves the tightness of the game's stat balance, but it is tricky.

Related to the tightness of character stats is an issue (flaw?) that I have had a hard time getting past, and that's character advancement, but we haven't gotten there yet...

HOW is such an awesome series of books - writing, content, artwork; all great. But...he kind of screwed the pooch on some of the quantitative things. It looks like TFT on paper, but when you start playing you realize just how much mechanical balance is built into the original, and how easy it is to break with a few rules changes.

Quote from: Larsdangly;904741HOW is such an awesome series of books - writing, content, artwork; all great. But...he kind of screwed the pooch on some of the quantitative things. It looks like TFT on paper, but when you start playing you realize just how much mechanical balance is built into the original, and how easy it is to break with a few rules changes.

Like most rules lite games, TFT is very easy and tempting to tinker with which can be good and/or bad.

[ITL] Choosing abilities


Once your character's three attributes are set, he or she is completed by selecting a set of abilities — talents, spells and languages. During character creation the process is simple: First, you must decide whether your character is a 'hero' or 'wizard', which determines the relative costs of talents and spells. Once that is established, your IQ determines both the set of talents and spells available to you (i.e., some talents and spells require IQ 8 or higher; others 9 or higher; etc.), and the total number of them you can know.

If you are a hero, you may choose from among the talents available to you, 'spending' 1,2 or 3 IQ points for each (depending on the talent), up to a maximum equal to your IQ. You may also buy spells (Really; my fighter can just pick spells during character creation?!? Yes!), at a cost of 3 IQ points each.

If you are a wizard, spells cost you 1 IQ point each, but most talents cost you 2x the usual number of IQ points.

Thus, heroes and wizards all have access to the same talents and spells, but the point costs will promote two 'typical' sets of choices: talent-heavy and spell-heavy. So, one shouldn't think of 'hero' and 'wizard' as comparable to D&D classes; they are labels to categorize parts of a continuous spectrum. It is also worth noting that this system makes it trivial to create characters in the mold of iconic D&D classes (though you might want to write up a couple of new spells if you are trying to model a cleric or druid).

Languages are simple and boring: 1 IQ point for each foreign language, for either heroes or wizards.

Quote from: Teazia;904713This site by a long term TFT player may be of interest:

http://www.meleewizards.com/rules.html

Thanks for the link. I have seen this guys work before (nice minis and terrain). He uses TFT mostly as a skirmish miniatures wargame - which it excels at.  I think it is a little tough to get the full value of TFT without a hex map by playing it as a theater of the mind RPG because the movement and tactics are such a large part of the tight mechanics Lars was talking about.

Quote from: Madprofessor;904814Thanks for the link. I have seen this guys work before (nice minis and terrain).

The terrain is HeroScape tiles that have been flocked and otherwise embellished on and what looks like a matching flat terrain. The minis are from all over. But HS minis work great with M/W and TFT. If you look at his 3d TFT rules you'll see how he merges the two.

[ITL] Experience and Advancement

And...I'm back! After a couple of weeks of travel, let's see if we can revive this thread.

So, we left our TFT cliffhanger having laid out the basic procedure for creating a character. Next we are presented with the rules for earning experience points and advancing character attributes. For some weird reason this is sandwiched between the outline of character creation and the explanations of talents, but, whatever.

Experience points are earned in TFT for a few generally obvious things: time spent in play; doing damage in combat; defeating foes (by any means); casting spells; succeeding at challenging rolls of any sort; and arbitrary bonuses for roleplaying.

Perhaps my favorite rule is that you get experience points for showing up: if you are sitting at the table, you are getting EXP. I like this because it is simple - clock in, clock out and you know what you earned - and because it feels both fair and realistic. If you are logging hours on adventure, you are learning something.

The combat-based experience is significant, but has some odd properties. You get one EXP per point of damage done to a foe (an important but unanswered question is whether you count damage you do that is blocked by armor; I would say it should count), plus you get their DX score in EXP if you defeat them. This is loosely reasonable, but the experience you earn does not scale with the difficulty of your opponent. A foe with ST 20, DX 20 is enormously more difficult to defeat than two foes with ST 10, DX 10. And what are we to make of a foe's talents or magical abilities? Perhaps the best that can be said about this is that it lets you advance by fighting but does not encourage you to treat the game as an EXP mining exercise.

Experience point gains lead to increases in total attribute points (the sum of ST+DX+IQ), with a rapidly rising number of EXP needed to gain 1 point as your total increases. An important question is, what sort of power level did the designers imagine PC's would rise to in typical campaigns? if you play straight up and don't account for other means of gaining attributes (more on this below), I would say a character with ~50 attribute points, total, will generally be the most powerful you will likely find. This view is strongly re-enforced by a fascinating table presented in Interplay Magazine ca. 1982, compiling all of the character deaths that had happened in the designer's campaigns, the cause and the PC's point total at the time of death. Out of hundreds of PC's killed, essentially all of them died with fewer than 40 attribute points, meaning they had advanced ~0-8 points since creation. I.e., the normal structure of the campaign is a rapid turn over of generally inexperienced characters.

But there is an exception, and it is a big one: you can also gain attribute points between play sessions through your 'Job'. Jobs get their own chapter and will be discussed more later in this thread, but an important point to make here is that they provide a roll made once per campaign week that can either result in great harm (4d6 damage - enough to kill most inexperienced characters) or give you a stat increase. When your character is freshly minted, this whole sub-system feels more dangerous than it is worth and smart players will want to avoid jobs with high chances of damage or stat gain. But once your ST rises to the point where you can avoid death on a bad job roll, this suddenly becomes an excellent way to rapidly raise your attributes. Imagine a job that provides a 10 % chance per week of a stat point - in one campaign year you will increase by 5 points, no matter how many attribute points you already have. This greatly exceeds what you are likely to achieve by EXP in typical play, rendering the experience system irrelevant for these sorts of characters.

Feedback from our experiences:

* Where the rules for various things are is a common gripe for TFT, as it can seem a little arbitrary. I ended up (memorizing and) adding colored tabs to the pages of the three main books, so I could find things quickly.

* We never ever used your perhaps favorite rule, the experience points from showing up and spending time sitting at the game table. We might agree with your rationale that you can get EXP from your character doing general adventure things, and sometimes would give some EXP for general things done in game, but not for time the player spent at table.

* We were clear that you don't get experience for damage stopped by armor. I think there's probably a Q&A somewhere about it, but it was pretty clear to us, coming from the previous games, which did not have the damage-based EXP, that the EXP should be fixed per foe. Otherwise you could get a huge pile of exp for fighting someone in heavy armor with a light weapon, for example. However we did eventually add a house rule which took armor (and balance considerations) into account in a different way.

* Yes a 50-point character was about as powerful as anyone ever was in our games. I think the highest we had was actually 46 points, after about six solid years of play.

* A 4d6 job risk result can kill practically anyone. Our players did the reverse - trying job rolls when they were younger, and later avoiding them since they did not want to risk/waste their long-surviving characters on generic employment. Also by the time we had played that much, we realized the job table was fairly crude and that the +1/4d6 chances were ok for a crude mechanic for starting characters and new players, but wasn't really satisfying. Yes, it offers a way to bypass the EXP curve, and a way to have a character randomly killed, neither of which really satisfied us for developed characters - the GM would instead use his discretion and/or play things out rather than use the job table inappropriately. One thing ITL is good about is teaching how to learn to apply GM discretion. Though not everyone learned that, as seen on some TFT threads where people did the math on the job table as if it were supposed to be statistically accurate and applied to the whole population, in which case it does break down - many people die at work, and survivors pile up silly attribute totals by the time they are old.

Huh.  I was curious, following Skarg's comment, and pulled out my records.  Playing TFT regularly (with multiple groups) from the fall of 1983 through to March of 1986 -- when I converted to GURPS -- and leaving out special one-off "build on 90 pts" runs, the highest point character was 47.  That character was a fair bit more experienced than anyone else (44 was the next highest), but there were two factors involved.  First, most of my players did at least one tradeout.  Secondly, that player (my then-fiancee, as it happened) didn't, and the character was the oldest in my campaign, starting in 1981 in my VD&D homebrew and having been converted.

The game is clearly designed for characters with 30-50 total character points and it is unlikely you will find a way out of that range without cheating. But just to give a sense of how it can happen, my longest running character (actually started in 1978 as a Melee gladiator, then adapted to TFT once that came out) had 62 points when I finally stopped playing him. He got them by joining Thorz's guard after succeeding at both Deathtest modules. This job has an insanely extreme job risk roll, but my ST was already high enough (I forget exactly, but something like 21 or 22, I would guess) that there was almost no chance of my getting killed that way. So, I just racked up the attribute points, gaining a new one every ~10 weeks for several years. He was basically an unstoppable monster who could kill a 7 hex dragon on his own without magic weapons. So, it can happen. But the odds of it happening a second time are small - the only thing that made it possible was his survival to a point where his ST made him basically immune to death by job damage. Most characters don't live that long.

Over on BGG there was a thread with the assertation of why use anything other than spears?

Quote11 Strength 13 dexterity character with a spear and no armor seems like it beats all other characters 1 on 1.

For reference here is the strategy set
Vs Opponents with less dexterity
Charge attack>disengage>repeat
Vs Bow users

Run 10 spaces forward Turn 1, Turn 2 Get the charge attack before they are able to switch to their regular weapon.

Vs Opponents with more dexterity

Charge attack once then fight normal hand to hand.

Vs Other pole weapon users

Stand at jabing range and keep jabing them over and over.

There are 2 counters I can see and those are 13 ST 11 DEX Halberd, Halberd that stands in place will get a +2 Dex bonus when charged upon and OHKO the spear in a very lethal exchange that the halberdier has a higher chance of winning. The question remains if Halberds win the jab wars.

The other character to consider is another spearman with leather armor, since leather armor gives the spearman a good defense in the jab fight.

But seriously every weapon in the game that isn't a pole weapon is flavor text

It got picked apart some over there. But seems there is no penalty for using a spear or pole arm such as getting in up close past the pointy part.
But whats the thoughts here?

I've seen a million arguments like this and they all boil down to the fact that this is one of a significant number of good strategies, many of which compete with each other on close to even terms, varying slightly with situation. For example, a combatant with decent armor can trade these exchanges with advantage: cutlass+chain+large shield will do 2d-2 damage but take only 2d-3 from the charging spear (and 1d-4 from the spear without a charge). This difference in damage done/taken nearly makes up for the difference in adjusted DX (13 vs. 10) - basically a toss up. And the armored character will do much better in other situations (receiving missile fire; fighting multiple opponents). A ST 9 DX 15 archer will get off 2 shots per turn with high probability of success, likely doing 2d-2 damage before he closes (more if the encounter begins at greater range; obviously less if they fight in a phone booth). Switch to a javelin in melee and you are playing the polearm game with only modest disadvantage (note that javelin's cannot 'poke' in one place in the rules but can in another, so when pushed I think it has to be allowed). Neither of these are iron clad paths to victory against this person's magic build, but they are good alternatives with something close to parity. We could go on and on; that is the point of the game's combat system: lots of choices, some a bit better in one circumstance, some a bit better in others.

The character advancement through stat increase was, what I considered, the worst part of the game.  It wasn't horrible, but the fine balance of stats at chargen and the tightness of the math, that were such a feature of the game, went right out the window.  I always felt that the game needed fairly static stats and advancement through a finer grained skill/talent system - but that's just me.

Quote from: Madprofessor;907480The character advancement through stat increase was, what I considered, the worst part of the game.  It wasn't horrible, but the fine balance of stats at chargen and the tightness of the math, that were such a feature of the game, went right out the window.  I always felt that the game needed fairly static stats and advancement through a finer grained skill/talent system - but that's just me.

This makes a certain amount of sense, but goes awry faster than you might think. Skill systems different from TFT's talents amount to another way of raising DX (or IQ). The issue is not what you call these sorts of increases; the issue is that once you blow the doors off one of these stats, you've sort of won the game. This is delayed longer than you might think if you haven't played a lot, because you are presented with certain trades: armor trades for DX; extra attacks or special attacks trade for DX; and, increasing DX above 15 or so doesn't gain you anything. So, the question is, what happens when you've already made all the possible 'trades' (full armor; fighting with two weapons; etc.) and your adjusted DX is still very high. At this point you are sort of pegged out and the game is more or less over. I would agree that TFT looses its way when you get to this point. But that occurs only when PC's have total attribute points over 50 or so. And as we were saying earlier, that is a rare happenstance.

Quote from: Larsdangly;907391But there is an exception, and it is a big one: you can also gain attribute points between play sessions through your 'Job'. Jobs get their own chapter and will be discussed more later in this thread, but an important point to make here is that they provide a roll made once per campaign week that can either result in great harm (4d6 damage - enough to kill most inexperienced characters) or give you a stat increase. When your character is freshly minted, this whole sub-system feels more dangerous than it is worth and smart players will want to avoid jobs with high chances of damage or stat gain. But once your ST rises to the point where you can avoid death on a bad job roll, this suddenly becomes an excellent way to rapidly raise your attributes. Imagine a job that provides a 10 % chance per week of a stat point - in one campaign year you will increase by 5 points, no matter how many attribute points you already have. This greatly exceeds what you are likely to achieve by EXP in typical play, rendering the experience system irrelevant for these sorts of characters.

Quote from: Skarg;907403* A 4d6 job risk result can kill practically anyone. Our players did the reverse - trying job rolls when they were younger, and later avoiding them since they did not want to risk/waste their long-surviving characters on generic employment. Also by the time we had played that much, we realized the job table was fairly crude and that the +1/4d6 chances were ok for a crude mechanic for starting characters and new players, but wasn't really satisfying.

I'm guessing this will be corrected later on, but to clarify right now: the job risk roll is 3d6, not 4d6. If you roll above the high risk number, you make a save (3d6 vs. highest attribute.) Only if that roll fails do you take 4d6 damage.  So, there's  little cushion of safety there, but if you basically fail two rolls, then you are going to take massive damage and probably die.

Quote from: Madprofessor;907480The character advancement through stat increase was, what I considered, the worst part of the game.  It wasn't horrible, but the fine balance of stats at chargen and the tightness of the math, that were such a feature of the game, went right out the window.  I always felt that the game needed fairly static stats and advancement through a finer grained skill/talent system - but that's just me.

That's not a hard fix.  I came to think the same thing after seeing rolls get really easy when characters started inching into the 40s, and decided on a fix: rather than roll off your XP-fueled stat, you rolled against (Original Stat) + (1/2 the difference between original and current).  It helped.

What I wrote is not incorrect; it is just unclear. By '4d6 job risk result', I was referring to the 4d6 damage you take as a result of missing your job risk roll.

Quote from: Ravenswing;907509That's not a hard fix.  I came to think the same thing after seeing rolls get really easy when characters started inching into the 40s, and decided on a fix: rather than roll off your XP-fueled stat, you rolled against (Original Stat) + (1/2 the difference between original and current).  It helped.

My house rules just replace the outcomes with a table of possible consequences that are less extreme than 'automatic +1 stat vs. 4d6 damage'. A good result can include some number of experience points, or a windfall like an inheritance, or patronage from a powerful NPC, etc.; a bad result can mean getting arrested, earning the enmity of a powerful NPC, a workplace accident, being robbed, etc. I find this makes the job roll both more interesting and less likely to derail the campaign (by killing you) or get used as a 'hack' to gain excessive stat points.

Quote from: Omega;907444Over on BGG there was a thread with the assertation of why use anything other than spears?

...

It got picked apart some over there. But seems there is no penalty for using a spear or pole arm such as getting in up close past the pointy part.
But whats the thoughts here?

The comment about a ST 11 DX 13 spearman being ultimate is an irrelevant and inaccurate munchkin whine.

1. It's irrelevant because the context is limited to one-on-one duels between starting-point warriors in a specific abstract situation.

2. Within the limits of the context, which is assuming such a duel where the fighters act a certain way, which choice of attributes and equipment (not taking into account Talents or anything else) is the most statistically likely to win a duel like that - it has some amount of validity, but not by a great amount. In those circumstances and with those limit on situation and tactics, against all the other possible choices at that starting level with standard weapons, yes, that build has a slight statistical edge over other such choices. But that's not the only situation one plays, and the advantage isn't very big.

3. The suggestion that non-pole-weapons are "flavor text" is sheer troll bait. Pole weapons have serious advantages which are also limited. They do less damage than equivalent other weapons except in a charge, want two hands, tend to attract enemy attention (consideration for PCs who want to survive in a campaign), and of course have all the disadvantages of being large & conspicuous.

4. As for why use anything but spears? Well every weapon has some use, and spears are a good choice, as are most of the weapons in the game, and  in reality. In fact, spears were used before bronze weapons were developed, and after gunpowder weapons were, as main line military weapons. People still put bayonets on rifles to have a spear in combat. But there are many common situations where a spear isn't great. Even two-handed, it's 1d+1 or 1d+2. Foes with armor start to be relatively immune to that, or greatly reduce it even in a charge. Even in just the base Melee game, all the weapons have rolls in different situations, even just going to a 2 on 2 battle.

Quote from: Larsdangly;907493... the issue is that once you blow the doors off one of these stats, you've sort of won the game.

Well, if by won the game, you mean there are diminishing returns, ok. High attributes aren't the only thing that determines outcomes by a long shot, though, and there remains some advantage to increasing every attribute to higher levels than we ever reached as PCs, and even for the most powerful characters in the game. There are many DX adjustments, and adjusted DX still determines who strikes first, which can make all the difference. Excessive ST is useful for hit points, mana points, advantages of great strength, encumbrance, and things that require hard ST rolls, knocking people over, etc etc. Excessive IQ can always be put to use too.

QuoteThis is delayed longer than you might think if you haven't played a lot, because you are presented with certain trades: armor trades for DX; extra attacks or special attacks trade for DX; and, increasing DX above 15 or so doesn't gain you anything. So, the question is, what happens when you've already made all the possible 'trades' (full armor; fighting with two weapons; etc.) and your adjusted DX is still very high. At this point you are sort of pegged out and the game is more or less over. I would agree that TFT looses its way when you get to this point. But that occurs only when PC's have total attribute points over 50 or so. And as we were saying earlier, that is a rare happenstance.

At the point we reached 46 point PCs, we'd played for years and were ready to upgrade to GURPS, but not because of the point levels. DX 15 is definitely not the max useful DX, even if you discount striking first. You can benefit from armor that could reduce your DX 3 to 8 points, and want to go for called shots, or sweeping blows, and to be able to do long-range shots or spells, cast spells in metal armor, fight in the dark, on bad ground, while suffering wound penalties, or to hit skilled defenders or people with blur spells on them, or who are just dodging and/or behind partial cover, etc etc etc.

50 points or more due start to seem a bit super-hero-like, though. Unlike pile-o-hitpoint games, though, they still tend to be fairly mortal and beatable by larger numbers of much humbler attackers... it was more a matter of magic that tended to start to be more of a power issue. That spear user was liable to have a hard time against people with strong magic armor, for example.

Quote from: Ravenswing;907509That's not a hard fix.  I came to think the same thing after seeing rolls get really easy when characters started inching into the 40s, and decided on a fix: rather than roll off your XP-fueled stat, you rolled against (Original Stat) + (1/2 the difference between original and current).  It helped.

hmm... not a bad idea, so do you use the "xp-fueled stat" for health (str) and max talents (IQ) etc. and just use the hybridized number for success rolls, or am I misunderstanding what you are saying altogether?  Would you mind clarifying? I might steal it if I can work through the implications.

My house rule solution to the perceived problem of having too narrow of a useful range of DX scores is to leave the core mechanics alone (since they work well for a wide range of play, and are more likely to break that get better when you start monkeying with them), and incentivize further DX increases by letting all combatants exchange special combat actions for added dice to their rolls. E.g., if you perform two attacks or an attack and a parry (another house rule) then both are rolled on 4d6 rather than 3d6. In this case, your adjusted DX of 16 starts looking like just enough instead of a gaudy excess.

Ya, there are several types of house rules that I like that also add more applications of higher DX and things for higher experienced characters to want. Larsdangly, have you posted your house rules? They sound good but I don't think I've read them. Others I've used and/or seen include other types of schemes for increasing difficulty of hitting more skilled characters (like having DX thresholds where you can choose to attack and defend both at a higher die roll (4d6, 5d6, etc) akin to part of what Lardingsly wrote, or adding a defense roll system, and/or adding "superscript" attributes like mIQ (instead of increasing IQ, increase memory points by 2 without increasing IQ, for the cost of one point) along with expanded talents that give combat advantages which add uses for higher DX, or fST which adds 2 points of fatigue without increasing ST, or hST which adds 2 health (hit points) without increasing ST, or mST which increases muscle but not fatigue or health, or adding an experience system for talents, and new talents, so that EP goes to talents as well as attributes. Tweaking the experience rules can help slow power creep, too.

But again, that wasn't really the wall we hit. We hit a wall of wanting more detailed/realistic/interesting/unpredictable/gritty stuff, which GURPS filled. Our characters were only up to one 46 at most, and the balance issues were not so much due to high attributes, but due to having got some magic items that made it really hard for non-magic opponents to be much threat to them (by TFT standards... there's always some risk, but it's definitely unbalanced when you can oneshot most ordinary people and they have little chance to do damage without a really lucky attack, but that was due to high armor & some magic, not to super high attributes).

DX 16 excessive? So you don't wear armor or shield? Don't ever want to stand on broken ground or on dead bodies, fight in the dark, go for limb or head shots, throw things at distance, or do anything else requiring a 4d+ roll, and you don't mind going after someone with DX16+?

Quote from: Madprofessor;907645hmm... not a bad idea, so do you use the "xp-fueled stat" for health (str) and max talents (IQ) etc. and just use the hybridized number for success rolls, or am I misunderstanding what you are saying altogether?  Would you mind clarifying? I might steal it if I can work through the implications.

Mind you, other than the occasional convention run, and a few months in 1998, I haven't run TFT regularly in 30 years; I wouldn't depend on my memory for it.

But yeah, it was pretty much for success rolls only, with a couple exceptions: weapon damage was one, I recall, and the IQ threshold for learning certain talents another.  Hit points still got to be the current ST score, and points for talents still got to be the current IQ score.  It went a long way towards not making success rolls almost automatic, especially as characters hit 40+ points.  I just pulled out the folder with my copies of PC sheets from the early 80s, and I'm struck by how many characters by 40 had 14-15 DX and IQ, never mind the wizards: that 47-pt character I talked about had an IQ of 21, and that's pretty much a roll-to-fumble on any conceivable IQ check playing RAW.

I've previously distributed a large set of my house rules, but I don't wish to refresh the links and files and so forth because it is basically an annotated version of the original text and so violates copyright (more importantly, to me at least, there are now a couple of commercial retroclones and I don't want to unfairly compete with them by sending anyone files containing original TFT material). However, I'm currently working on an 'IP clean' version and will make it widely available when it is ready. And, anyone who wants to talk about house rule ideas in this thread will find I have a lot to say on the matter!

[ITL] Talents

Next, we come to one of the meatier and often referenced sections of In The Labyrinth: The list and descriptions of talents. 'Talents' in TFT are a catch-all group of character abilities that include things other games might call skills, powers, status, etc. A talent might be the skill of fighting with a sword, or exceptional athletic ability that makes you run faster, or damage resistance resulting from a life of fighting, or investiture as a recognized priest in a religion.

You can see in TFT's Talent system reflections of several other kinds of games: the skill based system of Runequest; a sort of generic, 'build-a-bear' version of D&D's class powers. It is also obviously the seed of GURPs's skill and advantage/disadvantage system. The question is, should we look at it as a sort of historical artifact - a technology that was superseded and is interesting now only as a background to the games you want to play - or is it instead an equally good way of going about the problem of describing what characters so. This is a matter of personal taste, but I am strongly in the latter camp. The length of the Talent list is long enough to be satisfying but short enough to be easily learned and remembered, and the basic mechanism of choosing talents is very simple. And the number of them each character can know is quite limited (half a dozen would be at the high end of normal), so it is rare that you have trouble recalling what a PC or NPC can or cannot do well. I greatly prefer this to the complexly interlocking family of hundreds of options one encounters in GURPs.

A recurring question among TFT players is how one should modify and add to the talents. Anyone with a trace of imagination will want to do something in this direction, and the few volumes of Interplay magazine (the house zine of Metagaming) present plenty of additional and modified talents. So, I think it is perfectly natural to think of this list as a base on which you build. But you have to tread carefully: TFT is an extremely well balanced game - its core engine is basically designed explicitly for the tricky goal of diversity with balance, so it could be used for a competitive board game. Almost anything significant that you do has the potential to upset that balance, introducing one 'correct' character design where there used to be dozens of different but more-or-less equally good character types. I've written many, many new talents and changed some of the standard ones, and I can tell you my 30-year old talent list has had to undergo a lot of pruning and editing to correct mistakes I've made.

There are many opportunities for good new talents; two of my favorite directions to go have been additions that enrich the 'Job' system, opening up new possibilities in campaign play, and replacing some of the sort of arbitrary mechanical benefits of advanced martial arts talents with more historical, setting-specific material (sort of like a very streamlined TFT version of the GURPS martial arts books). There are also lots of opportunities to screw the pooch. I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to add another dimension to the talent system by having variable levels of talent that open up bonuses (e.g., 'Sword +3' gives you a +3 adjusted DX with your sword). This sounds like an obvious thing to do, and I've tried it on for size for periods of several years. But in the end I removed it because it basically breaks the core character attribute system. It presents players with a 'hack' that lets them circumvent months or years of hard earned experience - it breaks the campaign in the same way as handing your PC's a powerful magic item.

This is a good overview of Talents and modifying them, and some pitfalls therein.

I agree the ITL Talent sustem is not necessarily inferior to other skill systems, and that it is very well-designed and balanced and works quite well for most characters. However it doesn't completely satisfy me, either. It is fast & easy to use and serves for many characters. I think it works best when it describes Talents (areas of particular competence or ability) rather than just skills, because of the IQ limits, IQ's use for other functions, and the lack of grain for describing different levels of skill, the roll of which falls to DX which applies to everything. I think that it's imperfect to use IQ as the limit on talents, as I don't think that's at all how reality works, and I think it collapses functions of IQ and skill that would be better to have independent for some characters, and for balance and making sense. I think adding a "memory" mIQ attribute option (where you get multiple memory slots for the EXP cost of a +1 IQ, without increasing IQ for other purposes) goes a long way in an easy fashion, to address that.

Otherwise you get the phenomenon which I think is (hilarious and) unique to TFT, where people want to learn something like Swimming, but they happen to be "out of memory points" due to knowing, say, Sword, Shield, Horsemanship, Literacy, Leadership, Alertness, Beekeeping, so they can't possibly learn to swim until they either increase their IQ, or (chuckle) travel to someplace with a wizard whom you can pay to perform the needed service - using magic Telepathy to erase one of their talents from memory, so they'll have "room" in their skull for Swimming... I guess I'm skipping ahead in the book, but it's relevant to the Talent section. (Perhaps in the modern world, we actually use TV for that - rot out one of your skills through bad TV until you can learn something else.

GURPS 4e by now does have WAY too much stuff to consider as a whole, but that means a GM needs to prune it and offer a concise campaign handout to new players. Before 4e I don't think this was such a problem. Man to Man and 1e were closer to TFT in the number of skills available (though still more, and of course with levels of skill).

I agree that you don't want added levels of talent duplicating DX, but I think I do want the ability to represent increasing levels of skill mastery, without breaking game mechanics or running out of IQ points to do other things. Rick Smith has a nice set of Internet-posted house rules which include (among many other things) higher levels of weapon talent, which works but also has the side-effect of creating something a bit like a martial arts movie or D&D with "levels" of skill mastery, because his house rules also add an active defense system, and those talents made it 1 die harder to hit someone for each higher level of skill mastery than the attacker. So much like fighting-skill-oriented films where a theme is outclassing others with skill mastery levels, this has a similar effect, which actually works surprisingly well as long as you don't mind that mindset.

Another house rule I've used for years that was created to address your point above: characters have a property called 'talent points'. When your character is created, your TP equal your IQ (though I permit characters to trade 1 point of ST, DX or IQ for 2 TP during character generation - this trade does not work in reverse and can only be made when a character is first created). TP are used to purchase talents, spells and languages. As characters advance, they may purchase 1 TP for half the cost of one attribute point. And, your EXP required to advance is independent of your TP's. So, this incentivizes characters to focus on gaining new talents as a way of improving over time. But obviously with limits, as this strategy will make you more diverse but not really much more powerful so long as your attributes stay at their original levels. This is one of the more significant house rules I've introduced, but I haven't seen it lead to an imbalance in play after ~20 years of use. So, I think it is pretty good.

Yes, that's practically identical to what Rick Smith and others use. On the TFT email listserv it's generally called mIQ or memory points. It seems to work just fine, and as I said, it can make otherwise-problematic extended skill-level talents not such a balance issue. Though I agree that just having a hand weapon talent increase DX is problematic since it's basically semi-specialized power creep.

That said, your suggestion of advanced combat talents that 'click' you into a higher tier of ability is definitely already part of the game (fencing; missile weapons; two weapons; unarmed combat). These talents basically buy you a single substantial advantage that does not translate into a simple boost of your success changes above your normal DX. E.g., fencing increases your damage (extending the extra-damage range); high levels of UC increase damage and make you harder to hit; missile weapons basically compensates for the range penalty to DX at common missile fire distances. My house rules expand on this model by providing a variety of 'cool powerz' combat talents (with some effort to make them related to real martial arts skills). What I don't do is provide you a mechanism to jack up your DX by several points whenever you draw a sword.

Yes, that sounds good.

The existing options in the original printed rules are not fully fleshed out for all equipment choices. Fencing is only for swords and gives a good-when-it-randomly-kicks-in-but-no-effect-otherwise subtle/passive damage boost. Two Weapons is only for people who want to use two weapons. Nothing for axe or polearm people. So some GMs add Fencing equivalents for other weapon types. Then Unarmed Combat has more levels than anything, which to reach requires ever more and more IQ, and give cool defensive abilities only available to people with those talents fighting in light armor without weapons... some people think that it'd make sense to have something corresponding for non-sword weapon-users, heavy armor users, etc. Of course as you wrote, getting the balance right without unexpected consequences on balance can be tricky.

Lots of great ideas here.   I am reading enthusiastically though I haven't had much time to post a reaction.  mIQ seems a great idea that addresses some of my previously stated concerns about character advancement through stat increase, and how that can tip the delicate balance of the 3 primary stats. The other problem, for me, with RAW ITL stat advancement, is that it adds power without adding flavor.  Talents seem the primary way of defining characters, stats are more indicators of raw power.  I don't find the small number of talents at the beginning of play to be limiting, but I do find the inability to learn new talents without increasing IQ or unlearning something to be kind of silly and quite stifling. The various methods of "memory" slots you both have described here address that quite nicely. I have long felt that character advancement would be better served if talent acquisition was more open-ended.  I am glad to see that I am not alone in this.

 I have also been tempted to break down the granularity of talents (sword +1, sword +2, etc.) but I agree that it is a mistake to do so.  One of the beauties of the game is that characters are easily digestible (and fit on a 3x5 card) focusing on the things that really define that character.  I am less convinced that the mixture of skills and powers or abilities, or even spells, under the same umbrella of talents is a good idea.  Combined with the limited number of talents, it seems to push players into choosing spells and combat abilities over softer skills and things that might have interesting role playing applications but are less useful in combat (TFT is not alone in this) - though it does at least seem to force some hard choices (which is in keeping with tightness of the game overall).

Although I think the list of talents  covers a great deal of ground, I would love to see more, especially if they are designed by veteran players who have already worked out the implications.  We all seem to be in agreement that TFT is an easy (and therefore tempting) game to modify because the rules are light and there are few moving parts,  but that the close way in which the rules interact means that you need to be very careful when doing so.  I am on the fence about increasing levels of mastery (which would really require mIQ or a more open-ended means of acquiring talents.  With the limited pool as per RAW, there just wouldn't be enough slots for it.).  In some ways, such mastery is covered by stats and stat increases, but I think it would be nice to become a better horseman, locksmith, or swordsman without increasing DX and thus becoming better at all 3 at the same time.

Anyway, there is a lot of food for thought here. Thanks for the ideas and keep em coming!

If you like mIQ, you may also like fST, which house rules tend to have work the same way, but only increases fatigue points. This enables wizards to have more magic power without needing to be muscular (or to have a flock of apprentices and/or ST Battery items or use Drain Strength). It also means you can have wizards cast spells without becoming more vulnerable.

If I were to take another shot at TFT house rules, I'd probably develop the Talent system to account for more different levels of ability, which would require more grain and/or capacity, and probably add some rules for how people gain talents through EXP and time spent. I don't have a developed system for that in TFT, though. I would recommend checking out Rick Smith's TFT house rules (http://tft.brainiac.com/RicksTFT/title.html - see Superscripts link, but I don't see his Talent list or active defense rules posted... hmm), with the caution that his character power curve seems to run high and include those trumping melee weapon mastery talents. Apart from that even (snobby) I liked playing with his ruleset.

Quote from: Skarg;908513If you like mIQ, you may also like fST, which house rules tend to have work the same way, but only increases fatigue points. This enables wizards to have more magic power without needing to be muscular (or to have a flock of apprentices and/or ST Battery items or use Drain Strength). It also means you can have wizards cast spells without becoming more vulnerable.

If I were to take another shot at TFT house rules, I'd probably develop the Talent system to account for more different levels of ability, which would require more grain and/or capacity, and probably add some rules for how people gain talents through EXP and time spent. I don't have a developed system for that in TFT, though. I would recommend checking out Rick Smith's TFT house rules (http://tft.brainiac.com/RicksTFT/title.html - see Superscripts link, but I don't see his Talent list or active defense rules posted... hmm), with the caution that his character power curve seems to run high and include those trumping melee weapon mastery talents. Apart from that even (snobby) I liked playing with his ruleset.

I achieve that with a talent, called 'powers beyond the pale' - 1 TP worth of talent buys you 2 points of fatigue ST for spell casting, with the caveate that you only get it back by chanting and meditation once per day.

It is a little weird that TFT wizards tend to be muscle-bound.

With a fST supersrcipt, I might argue that it is only available as HP for fatiguing types of damage like thirst, poison, sleep deprivation, exhaustion, spell use, etc. not for physical blows and damage (meat points).  Of course when you run out of fST, further fatigue would come off of ST. Just a thought.

Rick mentions accuracy as a superscript of IQ, but doesn't explain it (at least not on this site) any idea what he's talking about?

I'm obviously sympathetic to house rules of this general sort (i.e., the Talent Points and 'powers beyond the pale' talent I refer to above), but I don't think a bunch of superscripted stats is a very good way to go, as it complicates the game and can get out of control very easily. Why not another sort of IQ that works like charisma? How about a version of DX that is for fine manipulation? One could make a case for a game that is structurally similar to TFT but has 8-10 stats, covering everything from social standing and education to strength and agility (I know because I've written one!). But its a different game with very different tipping points in its balance. There are ways to shape the margins of TFT without breaking it, but anything more dramatic will more likely than not wreck your game.

Quote from: Madprofessor;908587It is a little weird that TFT wizards tend to be muscle-bound.

With a fST supersrcipt, I might argue that it is only available as HP for fatiguing types of damage like thirst, poison, sleep deprivation, exhaustion, spell use, etc. not for physical blows and damage (meat points).  Of course when you run out of fST, further fatigue would come off of ST. Just a thought.

I think this is how nearly everyone plays it, though the damage type might vary by type of poison. That is, you only die if actual injury (not fatigue) exceeds ST (or ST +3, or STx1.5, or STx2, in some people's house rules).

QuoteRick mentions accuracy as a superscript of IQ, but doesn't explain it (at least not on this site) any idea what he's talking about?

I don't see him mentioning accuracy as a superscript of IQ - he mentions it as the main trait of DX, with Speed as the optional superscript. Though as he says in his mummy example, he sometimes does have Accuracy higher than  Speed.

Quote from: Larsdangly;908632I'm obviously sympathetic to house rules of this general sort (i.e., the Talent Points and 'powers beyond the pale' talent I refer to above), but I don't think a bunch of superscripted stats is a very good way to go, as it complicates the game and can get out of control very easily. Why not another sort of IQ that works like charisma? How about a version of DX that is for fine manipulation? One could make a case for a game that is structurally similar to TFT but has 8-10 stats, covering everything from social standing and education to strength and agility (I know because I've written one!). But its a different game with very different tipping points in its balance. There are ways to shape the margins of TFT without breaking it, but anything more dramatic will more likely than not wreck your game.

I agree that splitting attributes into superscripts can get messy. GURPS has optional rules for that, and even before it did, I tried breaking it out in all sorts of messy ways, where you could have different values for muscle in different parts of your body, as well as different levels of endurance for physical activity, resistance to disease, and different capacity for taking damage (so you can get the right numbers for, say, a small female professional runner with very strong legs, not as strong arms, high running speed, high base for the Running skill, and high physical endurance, not so high capacity for physical damage, and possibly average (at least, not linked to leg strength) resistance to disease) - there can be _a_ reason for all that, but it can be a giant mess to think about and make into an easily-readable character sheet.

Worse than complexity would be to add superscripts than break the balance, which is why Rick only allows them for what he considers "secondary" uses of the attributes. I might argue that there could be a steep cost point where you could allow the other direction and have it be balanced - say if you paid 80% the EXP cost to raise only the main uses, and didn't gain in the secondary uses. But of course that adds complexity with may not match what you want for just tweaking TFT.

Rick's TFT superscripts reduce the complexity they might otherwise have by being exceptions that are only usually allowed in one direction, and that are common and not particularly unbalancing. So most people are still just 3 numbers, and when there's an exception, it's pretty much always the same type, with the main use of the attribute always listed first, so ST 11/13 is clearly "ST 11, with 13 fatigue", and IQ 10/12 is clearly "IQ 10, with 12 memory".

There are still some balance effects of Rick's superscripts. I'd say they favor wizards, since I think wizards do tend to be most interested in fatigue, not muscle, so for many wizards it's a lot like ST is 50% off. The mIQ is sort of good for everyone except maybe low-IQ types, and I think helps reduce/eliminate characters who have higher IQ than I would really expect them to have conceptually. I think the Speed vs Accuracy DX option seems reasonably balanced - some might argue it makes breaks down for some level of high DX, which has some validity though I I'd say that's at a higher level than I tend to see get reached by anyone, and my preferred way to deal with that is adding defense effects so DX stays useful (though hit location, armor and other DX modifiers seem to make Accuracy always a good thing). What bothers me in TFT more than high-attribute issues is the lack of active defenses and/or defensive effects of high skill and/or high DX, so that can be a natural win-win house rule for what I want.

Quote from: Larsdangly;908632I'm obviously sympathetic to house rules of this general sort (i.e., the Talent Points and 'powers beyond the pale' talent I refer to above), but I don't think a bunch of superscripted stats is a very good way to go, as it complicates the game and can get out of control very easily. Why not another sort of IQ that works like charisma? How about a version of DX that is for fine manipulation? One could make a case for a game that is structurally similar to TFT but has 8-10 stats, covering everything from social standing and education to strength and agility (I know because I've written one!). But its a different game with very different tipping points in its balance. There are ways to shape the margins of TFT without breaking it, but anything more dramatic will more likely than not wreck your game.

I'm kind of loathe to expand the stats or add "superscripts"... which is kind of weird, I suppose, since I'm fine with other major changes to TFT. When GURPS came out, for a long while I thought it was an improvement over TFT because adding the HT stat and separating fatigue from damage seemed like a smart thing to do. But now, I think a single stat is better. My reasoning being: you have to track fatigue and damage separately either way, but why add another actual stat? If I really want more stats, I'd just go with D&D, perhaps borrowing a few rules from TFT.

At one point, when I was interested in Microlite 20, I tried adapting it to emulate TFT instead of D&D. I did make a significant change to acquiring talents: instead of spending IQ points to gain talents, your initial IQ limits the number of talents you can start with. After that, gaining new talents costs experience points, perhaps optionally limited by the number of talents you already have. Another option would be to allow unlimited talents, but require training time and costs, minimum time 1 week per talent point, with a weekly IQ roll modified by number of talents already known. Perhaps not a straight -1 IQ per talent known, but maybe a 3d6 vs. IQ roll, +1 die per five talents known.

Quote from: Skarg;908645I think this is how nearly everyone plays it, though the damage type might vary by type of poison. That is, you only die if actual injury (not fatigue) exceeds ST (or ST +3, or STx1.5, or STx2, in some people's house rules).

I wouldn't ignore fatigue when checking for possible death, myself. One rule I might use (and already use in D&D) is that when the damage and fatigue total exceeds ST, what happens depends on what the last injury type was. Physical injury causes death, fatigue drain causes unconsciousness.

What I would do to reduce the "big, muscular wizard" effect would be to focus more on alternate sources of power for spells. TFT already has the Aid spell, so that wizards who want to cast impressive magic on adventures would bring along a couple apprentices. Wizards who don't need that much power and who prefer to work solo could have a familiar, who casts a single Aid spell for 1 to 3 bonus points of ST, but won't cast again until after a rest.

GURPS added power stones (I thought for sure TFT had them, too, but my memory was playing tricks on me...) I would prefer something more like a material component rule, swapping a costly ingredient for a few temporary points of ST. Maybe something like $100 for (d6/2)-1 points of ST (so, possibly, 0 points.) The ingredients would be uncommon, not easily purchased off the shelf at Mage-O-Mart. You could collect your own from fantastic creatures (at least one magical ability, total ability points 30+) with a 3d6 vs. IQ roll, if you have the Alchemist talent. Rarer ingredients ($1000 for d6-1 points) would require a 4d6 vs. IQ roll to collect from a creature with three magical abilities and 50+ total ability points.

The rarest would be worth $10,000, provide 2d6-2 ST points, and would probably be limited to demon's blood or the like.

Quote from: talysman;908648...My reasoning being: you have to track fatigue and damage separately either way, but why add another actual stat? If I really want more stats, I'd just go with D&D, perhaps borrowing a few rules from TFT.

Seems to me D&D is very different in that the attributes aren't used directly, instead generating side-effects at certain levels, with Level being the main measure of ability. I prefer the attributes to have direct effects.

The thing I mainly like about TFT's 3 attributes is that they still make sense to me as a basic description of many character types. I'd say it's because often the abilities covered by each one are related or similar. The people who are muscular but don't have capacity to take fatigue or damage, seem like exceptions, for example

QuoteAt one point, when I was interested in Microlite 20, I tried adapting it to emulate TFT instead of D&D. I did make a significant change to acquiring talents: instead of spending IQ points to gain talents, your initial IQ limits the number of talents you can start with. After that, gaining new talents costs experience points, perhaps optionally limited by the number of talents you already have. Another option would be to allow unlimited talents, but require training time and costs, minimum time 1 week per talent point, with a weekly IQ roll modified by number of talents already known. Perhaps not a straight -1 IQ per talent known, but maybe a 3d6 vs. IQ roll, +1 die per five talents known.

Yes, I tend to think people tend more to learn skills with experience, more than they just get better at everything, so I too like EXP (and training/study) to go more to skills/talents than to increasing attributes. Again, there is a detail vs. simplicity trade-off.

QuoteI wouldn't ignore fatigue when checking for possible death, myself. One rule I might use (and already use in D&D) is that when the damage and fatigue total exceeds ST, what happens depends on what the last injury type was. Physical injury causes death, fatigue drain causes unconsciousness.

Oh, I was wrong - I was thinking GURPS. I think what many/most TFT players using split ST do is just treat it like if you have ST 11/13, then you've got two fST points that get used by fatigue first, but yeah further fST use does count towards death. But some others do also only have people die from injury not fatigue - otherwise wizards are more in risk of death when they use their fatigue on spells, to a degree that some players don't like. Other players mitigate that (and other deaths) with other house rules for death. Others embrace the death. :D

QuoteWhat I would do to reduce the "big, muscular wizard" effect would be to focus more on alternate sources of power for spells. TFT already has the Aid spell, so that wizards who want to cast impressive magic on adventures would bring along a couple apprentices. Wizards who don't need that much power and who prefer to work solo could have a familiar, who casts a single Aid spell for 1 to 3 bonus points of ST, but won't cast again until after a rest.

Yes.

QuoteGURPS added power stones (I thought for sure TFT had them, too, but my memory was playing tricks on me...)

Nope TFT Advanced Wizard has them too, called Strength Batteries.

QuoteI would prefer something more like a material component rule, swapping a costly ingredient for a few temporary points of ST. Maybe something like $100 for (d6/2)-1 points of ST (so, possibly, 0 points.) The ingredients would be uncommon, not easily purchased off the shelf at Mage-O-Mart. You could collect your own from fantastic creatures (at least one magical ability, total ability points 30+) with a 3d6 vs. IQ roll, if you have the Alchemist talent. Rarer ingredients ($1000 for d6-1 points) would require a 4d6 vs. IQ roll to collect from a creature with three magical abilities and 50+ total ability points.

The rarest would be worth $10,000, provide 2d6-2 ST points, and would probably be limited to demon's blood or the like.

Nice. :)

Quote from: Skarg;908661Nope TFT Advanced Wizard has them too, called Strength Batteries.

Weird, I was looking through Advanced Wizard for them and couldn't find them. I *was* specifically looking for power stones, but thought I was looking close enough to spot alternative names.

I guess I could expand on my relationship with TFT, D&D, and using TFT with D&D.

Quote from: talysman;908648I'm kind of loathe to expand the stats or add "superscripts"... which is kind of weird, I suppose, since I'm fine with other major changes to TFT. When GURPS came out, for a long while I thought it was an improvement over TFT because adding the HT stat and separating fatigue from damage seemed like a smart thing to do. But now, I think a single stat is better. My reasoning being: you have to track fatigue and damage separately either way, but why add another actual stat? If I really want more stats, I'd just go with D&D, perhaps borrowing a few rules from TFT.

Quote from: Skarg;908661Seems to me D&D is very different in that the attributes aren't used directly, instead generating side-effects at certain levels, with Level being the main measure of ability. I prefer the attributes to have direct effects.

I actually prefer D&D. and it's my go-to system, but I went through a TFT phase back when it came out, and thought about changing D&D combat to Melee's combat system and adding the TFT talent system. I'm back to OD&D now, but I still like TFT and occasionally toy with the idea of running an occasional TFT game for a much stronger swords-and-sorcery feel. It's the very minimalist nature of TFT that I like, which is why I wouldn't use the "subscripts" house rule.

For OD&D and even AD&D, using some kind of "roll under stat" system with the attributes for miscellaneous skills was a well-known, popular house rule. The first published version of this was I think the Judges Guild Ready Reference Sheets. Late AD&D 1e added the the non-weapon proficiencies and a 1d20 roll-under system, while one of the classic lines (I forget whether it was Moldvay/Cook or Mentzer) had a skill system that was almost identical to the TFT skill  rolls (3d6 vs. ability score, add more dice for more difficult tasks.)

I have no strong aversion to playing a hybrid D&D/TFT, using TFT skill rolls and talents, and possibly even replacing the D&D combat system. I think I'd keep level relevant by making non-fighters use roll under Dex for all attacks, but fighters would get their choice of roll under Dex or roll under hit points for one weapon type, whichever is better. I'd probably keep D&D's vancian magic, though.

Interesting. I'm sort of the opposite, preferring TFT/GURPS, but dipping into D&D sometimes and occasionally wishing there were a way to do a crossover that would work for me. I've made some attempts. I think the main problem that makes it fail for me is that the balance works in very different ways, so if you import monsters or situations into TFT, the relative power levels are going to be very different. People have made attempts to list most D&D monsters in TFT terms, but it's not going to map because balance doesn't work the same way.

As for the last part, I'd suggest trying adding character level to D&D attribute score, rather than rolling against hitpoints, though either way you're going to get really high scores sooner or later, and I'd think you'd want to add some mechanics to make that more meaningful.

I've got a homebrew game that is basically this sort of thing. It expands the attribute list from TFT to 8 core stats, uses those scores as the basis of pretty much all rolls, has a short-ish list of talents, but uses a level and HP mechanic that at least smells like D&D. I couldn't say whether it is actually any good - it is basically a little personal project I've never had the opportunity to run as an extended campaign. The odds are that it will blow up like most fantasy heartbreakers do once you sit down at the table and subject it to a stress test.

Quote from: Larsdangly;908784I've got a homebrew game that is basically this sort of thing. It expands the attribute list from TFT to 8 core stats, uses those scores as the basis of pretty much all rolls, has a short-ish list of talents, but uses a level and HP mechanic that at least smells like D&D. I couldn't say whether it is actually any good - it is basically a little personal project I've never had the opportunity to run as an extended campaign. The odds are that it will blow up like most fantasy heartbreakers do once you sit down at the table and subject it to a stress test.

Quote from: Skarg;908783Interesting. I'm sort of the opposite, preferring TFT/GURPS, but dipping into D&D sometimes and occasionally wishing there were a way to do a crossover that would work for me. I've made some attempts. I think the main problem that makes it fail for me is that the balance works in very different ways, so if you import monsters or situations into TFT, the relative power levels are going to be very different. People have made attempts to list most D&D monsters in TFT terms, but it's not going to map because balance doesn't work the same way.

I'm going to say the same thing to both of you: balance is overrated.

Lars, so what if the game "blows up", in someone's estimation? As long as your system doesn't have any obvious contradictions or ambiguous situations, it will work. It just might not work the way everyone wants, or for every style of fantasy.

Skarg, so what if D&D monsters don't map the same way when converted to TFT? Best way to go about it is to translate D&D hit dice into ST/DX based on some consistent assumptions that feel right, then add TFT talents or spells that fit the description of the monster in terms of color rather than mechanics. After conversion, judge how powerful the monster is as if it were an original TFT monster and ignore D&D. Monsters aren't going to be balanced the same as D&D, but so what? TFT doesn't have to feel the same as D&D.

Quote from: Skarg;908783As for the last part, I'd suggest trying adding character level to D&D attribute score, rather than rolling against hitpoints, though either way you're going to get really high scores sooner or later, and I'd think you'd want to add some mechanics to make that more meaningful.

Nope. I'm shifting away from using additive bonuses, myself. Plus, adding level directly to Dex boosts low-level fighters a lot, but high-level fighters get much less of a boost. Making it the higher of hit points or Dex allows level to influence combat ability, but makes higher level characters much better.

I'm thinking clerical Turn Undead ability would work the same way: 3d6 vs. higher of Wisdom or hit points. Religious non-clerics would be able to turn undead, but at 4d6 vs. Wisdom only, no level-based improvement.

Quote from: talysman;908816Lars, so what if the game "blows up", in someone's estimation? As long as your system doesn't have any obvious contradictions or ambiguous situations, it will work. It just might not work the way everyone wants, or for every style of fantasy.

Pretty much.  I've felt for quite a while now that significantly changing the parameters of a game doesn't "ruin" it: it just changes it.

Let's say, for instance, you remove TFT's character classes: allow wizards to take talents without surcharge, allow non-wizards to take spells without surcharge.  What's the result?  Nothing more than a game in which many more characters will know a few spells, and many more wizards will know how to fight.  I expect there are all manner of milieus where that would fit just fine.

Double the cost of spells, to wizards and non-wizards alike?  You still didn't ruin the game; you just made one where magic is significantly rarer, and few PCs will want to be mages.

The kind of thing I mean by blowing up when I talk about roleplaying games is anything about the rules that results in a some small number of 'correct' winning ways to play. As a crude example, imagine that everyone with ST 11 or less does 1d damage and everyone with ST 12 or more does 5d damage, while everyone with DX 11 or less always misses and everyone with DX 12 or greater always hits. You are free to choose any stats you want, but obviously everyone who understands the game will choose to have ST 12 and DX 12. It is fair enough to say that is just an equally valid game that works in a different way, but I think there is such a thing as better and worse designed games, and the one I just described is crap. Lots of games create more subtle but basically equivalent 'attractors' with their rules. The never ending mystery of TFT is that it is a pretty simple game that basically avoids these sorts of pitfalls. Most of the changes people propose for it create them.

On the positive side, I totally agree with you re. spell availability, and my house rule set does something close to that. There are no 'heroes' and 'wizards' - just characters. Any character who wants to learn certain spells has to know one of several enabling talents. Given the IQ levels and talent points involved, it remains ambiguous as to whether you would rather invest the IQ and TP into getting those lowest IQ spells and their enabling talent, or would rather invest those points in ST, DX and maybe one of the helpful fighting talents (e.g., missile weapons). Or maybe you don't buy into any of this combat monkey crap you just want to focus on your stealth and animal handler abilities.

Quote from: talysman;908816Skarg, so what if D&D monsters don't map the same way when converted to TFT? Best way to go about it is to translate D&D hit dice into ST/DX based on some consistent assumptions that feel right, then add TFT talents or spells that fit the description of the monster in terms of color rather than mechanics. After conversion, judge how powerful the monster is as if it were an original TFT monster and ignore D&D. Monsters aren't going to be balanced the same as D&D, but so what? TFT doesn't have to feel the same as D&D.

Well, in the first place, the way D&D monster abilities are represented as levels, AC and hit dice is not something I have a ton of experience with and doesn't give me the same information that I need to know how to represent something in TFT, because D&D is more abstract, while TFT is more specific in terms of movement, ability to hit, armor and ability to absorb wounds. I also need specific attacks and damage, and if the thing is much bigger than a human, a hex diagram showing facings. If it has weird body parts, I may want rules for what it takes to hit & damage them, and what effect that has on the creature. So not only is it a bunch of design work to translate something I didn't even invent and that fits in a D&D-type world, but the result tends to be something rather unlike most things in TFT, because D&D tends to be about super-tough heroes encountering wildly powerful opponents but beating them anyway because the heroes and their magic are even more powerful. There are often various flavored effects and immunities to consider, which tend to be much rarer in TFT. In TFT, you tend to fight many opponents who are other humanoids about like you but with their own specific skill levels and equipment, the details of which are important. In D&D, the abstraction level of combat and humanoid fighters is higher so to make it interesting they have an extreme variety of monster and ability types to worry about. So it's a whole different kind of play concern, which yes I suppose you can just add on top of TFT, but 1) you end up having to invent the details that D&D doesn't provide, which become very significant for whether or how something can be defeated, and 2) you also add all the "can't be hurt by non-magic weapons" and "can only be hurt by cold" type monsters so players now not only have the tactical challenges of TFT but also the rock-paper-scissors damage type immunities to worry about (many TFT parties have no magic weapons and/or no cold or electrical attacks and no one with immunity to anything and no clerics etc.) While all of that could be handled and be really quite interesting to try (and so, I've started to try) what really tends to shoot me down is the relatively low difference between a starting PC (32 points), an average human (30 points) and a hardened veteran (36 points), a very experienced/capable person (40 points) or a top-level PC after years of play (46 points), compared to D&D, where a level-0 NPC is a mook compared to a level-1 PC, and a level-5 PC can mop the floor with a level-1 PC, not to mention a level-10+ character, and the monsters are designed to provide challenges for those power levels - those power levels don't really exist in TFT, so from that perspective, most of the higher-level monsters, if modeled as they are in D&D, are massively deadly, even if they weren't immune to various types of attack etc. If you nerf them down to the TFT power curve, then they're nerfed versions, etc. So, something's got to give, but it's not just a simple balance issue in TFT the way it is in D&D, because combat in TFT has several other layers of detail, so it would be a huge amount of work etc and a project which just doesn't seem to work out & be what I want to do. If I want to do the work to figure out how to make bunches of super-powered monsters be playable against PCs in TFT, I'll probably rather make up the monsters myself in ways that make sense & are interesting to me, because I don't really think the D&D monsters are what I'd want anyway and they don't really do a lot of the work I need to do for me.

The other fundamental balance concern for me is that, what I like about TFT is that even with high-level (40-46 point) TFT characters, combat with basic opponents such as human guards with typical skill (30-34 points) can be interesting, particularly based on the situation. Say 4 high-level characters get ambushed in a crossroads by 12 32-34-point thugs - it can be a tense and interesting battle. But if I introduce D&D monsters that are super-tough by TFT standards and present all sorts of wild challenges, and give PCs things to make them able to take on those monsters, then it will tend to be extremely difficult to find ways to do that _and_ retain the feature that typical mundane humanoid battles are still a challenge. Already in TFT, the balance breakdown I would run into involved strong PCs getting some magic & equipment that made them nearly invulnerable to common human PCs, but it was something that would be considered trivial in D&D, like a basic armor enchantment which wouldn't be nearly enough to deal with a D&D monster designed for D&D PCs.

Also, at this point, if that's really the sort of thing I wanted to do, there's already good published content like that in the form of the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy series. I haven't been interested enough to look into that in detail, but I imagine _that_ might be something that D&D modules could be adapted into pretty well.

QuoteNope. I'm shifting away from using additive bonuses, myself. Plus, adding level directly to Dex boosts low-level fighters a lot, but high-level fighters get much less of a boost. Making it the higher of hit points or Dex allows level to influence combat ability, but makes higher level characters much better.
...

But but but... aren't D&D hitpoints crazy-higher than the typical range for TFT DX, as well as the 3d6 they roll against? Won't that just mean that after a certain fairly low level, fighter types always hit even in the dark on slippery floor making called shots etc, and DX/hitpoint level only affects who goes first?

[ITL] Mapping and stocking the labyrinth

I'm skipping a couple of 2-3 paragraph sections that come after the talent lists because I can't be bothered - they basically cover rules governing study of talents you wish to learn with future IQ increases, and losses of talents if your ability scores decrease through mischance. I've never met anyone who paid much attention to either of these passages, and they have nothing particularly interesting to say.

So, the next major section concerns the mapping, stocking and 'trapping' of labyrinths - or dungeons to the rest of us. The fact that this is the first section of the rule book that has to do with game play (things you do after a character is created) is highly significant: the game designers clearly thought of this primarily as a game to be played in classic ca. 1975-1977 style D&D: one player creates a challenging micro-environment with well defined borders and map (a dungeon), the others create some PC's, and the game involves the PC's exploring the dungeon. Roleplaying games obviously extend beyond this idea (and always have), but this remains a core concept in all table top games I've ever seen. So, the laser-like focus on the primary importance of the labyrinth in TFT is a little unusual, but I find it refreshingly clear. It gets right to the point of what you do to get ready for an evening of play, and what sorts of things are likely to happen.

The rest of the section consists of a discussion of choosing and distributing monsters and traps, and then an explanation of how to physically create a labyrinth map (along with an example). Some interesting points: (1) the monsters in a TFT dungeon are often fewer in number and lower in overall power than a typical D&D dungeon, simply because your PC's get chewed up fast in its deadly combat system. (2) the rules governing design of traps, and examples of types of traps, are unusually clear and inspiring. Most old school D&D books don't really teach you a system for making traps - they teach by example, where every trap works in an idiosyncratic way. TFT's traps are described by a specific set of traits controlling how easy they are to spot, disarm or avoid, and have some well explained examples of how they behave. I find this leads most DM's to follow the creator's example and make labyrinths more trap - heavy than monster-heavy (think start of 'Indiana Jones' rather than the second reel of 'Aliens').

The most distinctive thing about labyrinths in TFT is the hexagonal mapping system. It is weird and many people dislike it on first glance because the lack of straight halls and room perimeters rubs them the wrong way. Actually, this is such a large and complex problem I am going to leave it for another post I'll put up when I have time later today...

One thing I notice in looking at this section again is how well it matches the type of world and game that I like, or rather the type of thinking about all worlds and stories, presented just as a natural advice, e.g.:

QuoteStart  with
your  basic  premise  —  the background  of your world — and go
on  from  there,  working  out  logically  what  should  live  where
.  .  .  men,  monsters,  and  thingies  ...  what kinds  of possessions
and treasures they would have,  and what traps and tricks they
would have  to defend themselves.

QuoteBe  logical here,  too.  A  great
treasure  will  probably  be  well-hidden  or  well-defended,  and  a
powerful magic weapon is likely  to be in  the hands of someone
who can use it effectively!

QuoteAs  you  decide  what  should  go  where  in
your  labyrinth,  keep  notes  in  the  form  of  a  map  key.   You
may  want  to  keep  this  in  pencil  so  you  can  change  it.   If
players  come  through  and  kill  a  monster,  you  will  want  to
mark it off; if a party  of adventurers dies to the last man, you
can  mark  the  spot  on  your  map.    The  next  group  to  come
through  will  find  their  bodies  (if  the  slimes  don't  eat  them)
and their treasure (unless the orcs carry it away).

 It strikes me how this contrasts with the things that put me off about many other games, and what strike me as the weird assumptions of many modern games and players and also people talking about other topics (film, TV, books, real-world news reporting) where some people seem to assume story and genre expectations and "coolness" (i.e. excessiveness that hasn't been done before, usually because it makes little or no sense) are all-important.

Agreed. I personally think large swathes of the hobby are overthinking this whole situation. These are games that provide light entertainment with an unusually social element and several features that promote creative thinking and free expression. That's awesome all by itself and works when it gets no more complicated than exploration, competitive fighting or puzzle solving, etc. This approach to table top gaming is front and center in TFT. It is basically why the game was made. This concept was borrowed whole-cloth from D&D (as is the case for pretty much every other game). The difference here is that the designers really carefully examined the question of how they could best craft a rule set to support this simple game-y side of play.

[ITL] Those crazy hexagonal maps

The meatiest part of the section of ITL devoted to labyrinth design describes how you create maps on a hexagonal grid. This leads them to a really peculiar looking place, so it is worth asking why they did it. The starting point is the system of movement in tactical combat in Melee (also used in Wizard and the rest of the TFT family of games). Any game that tries to describe tactical movement concretely has two choices: Either measured distances through a continuous space (defined either in 'game space' terms - feet, meters, etc. - or 'table top' terms - cm, inches, etc.), or some discrete number of steps or spaces in a gridded space. Many miniature war games (e.g., Chainmail) chose the first approach, and this is the approach adopted by most editions of D&D, Runequest and many other rpgs. The second approach is used by Chess, most marker-chit war games (e.g., squad leader, etc.), and a small number of rpgs: The Fantasy Trip, Dragonquest, 3rd and 4th edition D&D, and perhaps a few other obscure ones, like Boothill, Snapshot (the traveller tactical combat game), Behind Enemy Lines. The advantages of these latter sorts of systems is that they allow for very concrete rules governing movement, nuanced tactical decision making during the movement portion of play, and obviate the need for rulers, tape measures, etc.

If you are going to use a gridded space to resolve combat, you have a limited number of choices regarding your grids: if the gridded space is going to involve tesselation of a single equant shape, you can only do it with triangles, squares and hexagons. Triangles are an irrational choice, as they have to tesselate in a way that effectively amounts to hexagonal gridding subdivided into triangles that point to one another. If you think briefly about how movement and facing would work in such a space you will quickly decide it is stupid. Squares make sense in many respects: they are familiar (see: Chess, Checkers), and it is easy to relate their boundaries to the edges of common landscape features (walls, road edges). On the other hand, motion through a square gridded space is very 'chunky' when moving along diagonals, and most rules for dealing with this result in large changes in speed or effective range depending on the direction of movement or aiming. Also, there are many other landscape features that don't map well onto rectilinear spaces (trees, cave walls, meandering streams, etc.). Hexagons are better when it comes to most of these issues. Given that you have only two choices (square or hexagon), it is therefore unsurprising that many games use a hexagonally gridded space for tactical combat. So, while squares are also an acceptable solution, TFT made a solid, common choice in going with hexagons.

The question is, when you move from the playing field for tactical combat to a map for a dungeon, tower, city, cave, etc., how should you relate the mapped features to the gridded space? You have two basic choices: (1) create the map as if space were not gridded, representing buildings and trees and cave walls and so forth as they really appear, and then overlay onto that map a hexagonal grid. I would say this is the obvious and most functional choice; the only significant question it raises is how you handle cases where some non-hexagonal feature cross cuts your hexagonally gridded space. There are many games that provide the obvious answer to this problem: treat each hex as being composed of whatever landscape feature makes up the most of its area, ignoring the little bits of other things that fall within its boundaries. Or (2) actually represent all mapped features as being composed of one or more hexagons, making the outlines of buildings, paths followed by streams, etc. explicitly follow the outlines of the hexagonal grid lines. This has the advantage of being explicitly clear when it comes to rulings about movement over landscape features, etc. And, it is functionally equivalent to method (1) when you consider how one is likely to rule cases where a wall or other feature cross cuts a hex. But there is one significant disadvantage: it is bat-shit crazy.

TFT takes the second of these approaches to the hexagonal grid system, meaning every room, hallway, road, bridge, etc. looks as if it were assembled from hexagonal tiles purchased at Home Depot. It is difficult to execute, often maddening to sort out how you should best represent things you know should be more rectilinear or smooth, and results in maps that are often hard to read. In practice, I just refuse to do this most of the time, and instead just draw things more naturally and overlay a hexagonal grid when I want to resolve combat.

And yet... there is something charming about the crazy bee-hive effect of TFT's maps. I find myself strangely drawn to them. I can't put my finger on why, but I really enjoy navigating the squirmy tesselated spaces of a hexagonally gridded dungeon, and my OCD side likes that every single space and surface on the map corresponds to a specific place on the combat map, at every scale.

Before we leave this post and open the floor to discussion, I'll point out one last oddity of the ITL mapping system: how you represent labyrinths with multiple levels on a single piece of paper. Generally speaking, this is a solution looking for a problem. I don't think it has ever occurred to me that I would map a 5 level dungeon on any way other than by having 5 sheets of paper. But ITL says you should do it another way: by superimposing all of the levels onto the same piece of paper, using color or patterned filling to distinguish one level from another, and using a dotted line (a sort of mapping elipsis) where one tunnel is directly beneath another, and using a specific set of symbols to show stairs, ramps and shutes connecting levels. It is true that this approach can be used to represent one complex multi-level dungeon on a single piece of paper. And the end result has a certain charm - I actually quite like it for dungeons that have a relatively simple, open floor plan - the end result is a bit like the 3D perspective maps you get in Dungeon Crawl Classics. But in most cases it is an unmitigated disaster - you can't see shit and are constantly losing track of which room or hall belongs to which level.

Hehe.

One thing you didn't mention is the suggestion to photocopy and cut out "megahexes" (clusters of 6 hexes around a central hex, which is itself roughly hex-shaped - and used for weapon range penalty calculations) and groups of megahexes to use as tiles for creating battle maps from maps of a place.  That adds a bit of value to the suggestion to map locations on a hex grid where every hex on the location map corresponds to a megahex of tactical hexes. In fact, it can make it extremely fast to set up a combat map based on the location map, which is rather nice. What's not so nice (besides the aesthetic issues you mentioned) is that if you're using plain paper megahexes (as opposed to glueing them onto cardboard or something), they can get bumped or blown or messed up pretty easily.

The mapping system is described in great detail, and has the advantage of showing how it is possible to develop systems to be able to track lots of detail with a consistent system, which I appreciate because to me it underlines and continues the theme of the value of having things make sense and be like the actual world, and that practical physical details can matter and be interesting and so on.

The six-level sample map is pretty amazing, and not something I ever did quite like that when making my own maps, but it is pretty cool as an example of how you can show six levels of tunnels and how they relate and connect vertically as well as horizontally all on one sheet of paper. It certainly makes the point that 3D connections between levels can be mapped and are relevant to events.

I have actually used the provided tunnel map. I find it unusable in black & white, but more usable if you color-code the levels. And also you need other maps or at least good notes to show what is in each location - the level-shading makes it practically impossible to draw details inside the hexes.

After a few years, I switched to using your method (1), using the hex grid but drawing freehand for many or all things, showing how they actually are (especially square corners and straight things, like many walls). Having used the system from ITL for a while developed some good habits and concepts, even if mostly things don't follow the hexes except during combat. GURPS reinforced the move to (1) by using the same hexes and nearly the same scale, but not using megahexes and using method (1) itself for battle maps, with guidelines for what to do with partial terrain hexes.

I think part of the satisfaction of using strict hexes, though, is that for purposes of deciding what happens, the real game representation ends up being explicit per hex, so when things are clearly labeled (that hex is an officially blocked hex, that other hex is officially rough ground, etc), then you can play with it and know what to expect, and not have potential upsets from disagreements or disappointed expectations - although that can become part of gameplay too in some cases - what's going to happen if I try to move through that hex with the narrow stepping stones and the broken wall?

If you really commit to thinking of TFT as just a game with its own internal logic (rather than as some sort of magical-realism simulator), then the mapping system is fantastic, mostly for the reason you suggest: there is a totally concrete connection between the paper (or screen) map of an adventure setting and the table-top representation where play is resolved. This is particularly true if you construct your table top gaming environment out of little hallway and room modules, as you suggest. This is a very satisfying thing to do, and amounts to a cardboard version of the expensive dungeon-tile gear some groups use.

Not long ago, SJG put out a deluxe giant boxed set version of OGRE. When they did it, I had an extended delusional fantasy about the potential for such an expanded, high-class reproduction of TFT, where you get a really nice set of die cut counters (a'la the ones that come with Melee, Wizard and the boxed set solo adventures), AND a set of cardstock hexagonal map features - hallway segments, rooms, overlays of various kinds. This could probably be done at relatively modest cost and would be amazing. In this case, you would really want your map to be strictly hexagonal so that it could be used as instructions for gradually assembling the table top gaming space as the characters work their way through the dungeon (er, labyrinth).

A couple of comments:

A). Thanks for starting this thread. It's been a great read, and very informative. I don't play much in the way of Fantasy Rpgs these days (dungeon-crawling or otherwise), but if I chose to I would definitely reach for TFT to scratch that itch.

B). A few years ago, I bought a bunch of cheap HeroScape tiles (which Omega mentioned about 5 pages ago) that I intended to use for TFT. I thought that they'd be perfect for TFT - plus I've got quite a lot of 28mm fantasy miniatures stashed in my garage. The varieties of tiles, combined with stacking to create 3D landscapes, and some cool specialty tiles to reflect spell effects (darkness and hexes on fire) really got me excited for the potential. (Unfortunately I didn't get much buy-in from other members of that gaming group so nothing happened).

Quote from: K Peterson;910297A couple of comments:

A). Thanks for starting this thread. It's been a great read, and very informative. I don't play much in the way of Fantasy Rpgs these days (dungeon-crawling or otherwise), but if I chose to I would definitely reach for TFT to scratch that itch.

B). A few years ago, I bought a bunch of cheap HeroScape tiles (which Omega mentioned about 5 pages ago) that I intended to use for TFT. I thought that they'd be perfect for TFT - plus I've got quite a lot of 28mm fantasy miniatures stashed in my garage. The varieties of tiles, combined with stacking to create 3D landscapes, and some cool specialty tiles to reflect spell effects (darkness and hexes on fire) really got me excited for the potential. (Unfortunately I didn't get much buy-in from other members of that gaming group so nothing happened).

My pleasure! I agree that Heroscape tiles are a cool addition to a TFT table top. It is possible that the cost (~1$ per hex) could get prohibitive for many people if you wanted to have enough to basically play through a dungeon by laying it out in sequence on the table top. I suspect you could create a cardstock version of that experience for ~50$, whereas you would end up spending $500 to do it with tiles.

Yeah, there's no way that Heroscape tiles would be anywhere near as affordable as a DIY cardstock version. But the expense is really going to come down to the complexity of the dungeons you create - the overall size of all levels, the width of passages, and how large the chambers will be.

You're probably already familiar, but the HS tiles came in a number of layouts, not just single or double hex formats. There are megahex sized-tiles and larger pieces (an example image (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_CpAXXISsa5g/TIkhfuIlX-I/AAAAAAAADCM/BmLYvMS89Zk/s1600/Hexedterrainstorage01.JPG)) that could go a long way to filling out your needs, if you don't mind some larger passages and rooms. If you do have your heart set, however, on single hex-width passages and small rooms it could certainly get expensive.

With patience you could likely find some affordable eBay lots (http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=heroscape+hex&_osacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p2045573.m570.l1313.TR9.TRC0.A0.H0.Xheroscape+tile+lot.TRS1&_nkw=heroscape+tile+lot&_sacat=0), and buy a varieties of tiles. Primer them all the same grey, dungeon color. Paint-wash them if you want and then seal them. Still not a bargain like cardstock, but I think you could come under that $500 estimate with some work and patience.

Those can look pretty cool and be fun to play with, but using paper & transparencies or dry-erase battlemats or computer & printer and/or photocopier has no limits, is fast, costs very little, and has no issues with physical objects. It's nearly impossible to represent a complex pig/corpse/object pile that results from some dense fights (well even more so in GURPS, where fallen bodies are two hexes and it matters which one is the head end, etc).

The farthest I went with physical figures was to make plasticine figures with tinfoil armor, and indicate bleeding with actual cuts & punctures and red food coloring... oh, and lighter fluid burns for dragonfire... :eek:

[ITL] The World Outside

Following the detailed, quirky discussion of labyrinth design and mapping, we are served a thin, forgettable page of material providing advice to the game master for adventures outside of labyrinths, including topics like mapping villages and towns, sorts of encounters that might happen in such settings, getting lost in the wilderness, and a couple of wilderness encounter tables. There is little to note here, particularly when you can turn the page to one of TFT's more interesting, developed bodies of campaign rules: money, economics and jobs...

[ITL] Economic System

The next section presents something that remains unusual in roleplaying games: a treatment of money, jobs and income that is sufficiently structured that it can easily serve as the foundation for campaign play. Important activities that happen between adventures add enormously to a table-top roleplaying game - one could argue that they are the primary way for players to really influence the world and shape the development of their characters and the arc of the campaign.

There are a number of games that do this well: Traveller is an obvious and excellent early example. En Guard! is a second, less well known game where the week-to-month timescale activities take up most of a player's attention, and are organized into a structured, scheduled calendar of specific things you may do each week. Actually, I think it is fair to say En Guard! is both the best designed and most concise campaign-scale table top roleplaying game ever. D&D encourages campaign play in many ways, and clearly the designers and early players thought that the whole point was for the players to exert control over the lives of their characters rather than just drifting from one DM-dictated adventure to another (unfortunately a good description of the woeful state of 95+ % of our hobby!). But, D&D has struggled to come up with a game structure that promotes this.

Consider: when you play D&D you have pages and pages and pages of rules telling you how to structure the activity of a bar fight, and scads of statistics that govern what happens when one person bops another on the head. But what happens when you ask your boss for a raise? Or you want to buy an estate from an impoverished noble? Or you worm you way toward a promotion in your Arch Bishops Curia? Of course all these things can be done in the game, but you make them all up as you go along, or co-opt vague mechanics intended for some other purpose. There is nothing in the game that tells you how long any such things take or what sort of status you have in the eyes of NPCs or anything else like that.

TFT doesn't present a full treatment of these elements of the campaign game, but it takes a good shot at a slice of them. First, there is a brief but functional and complete description of money, taxes, banking, taking out loans. Missing are rules for investment and property (major gaps for campaign play, as clever players like to do things with their money). Next, there is a nicely detailed set of rules for your job, covering how you get one, what it pays you, possibilities for disaster or reward during each month of campaign play, asking for raises, changing jobs, loosing your job when you miss work because of an adventure or injury, all accompanied by a list of several dozen sort of generic jobs. The length and complexity is just what I like in a game: 2-3 pages that quickly and efficiently lay down instructions for ordering your character's mundane goals and life between adventures, with enough detail that you really have something to think about and decisions to make between adventure sessions. It is no En Guard!, but it is enough to get any gaming group moving in the direction of a rich, nuanced campaign without having to make up every single detail.

Lars - In 2016 the chances of someone deciding to play TFT as a full roleplaying campaign and then getting hung up on the particular details of how to handle cityside shopping has got to be mighty slim, right?

Also..that's spelled En Garde!

Quote from: Kellri;911491Lars - In 2016 the chances of someone deciding to play TFT as a full roleplaying campaign and then getting hung up on the particular details of how to handle cityside shopping has got to be mighty slim, right?

Also..that's spelled En Garde!

Spelling correction noted, but as for the rest of your post I don't know what you are talking about. What does 'cityside shopping' mean? I didn't say anything about whether TFT did or didn't provide price lists for things you might buy in a city. Why would someone in 2016 think any differently about that issue than in 1980? Is there some new trend where people don't use money in roleplaying games anymore?

Quote from: Larsdangly;911482Consider: when you play D&D you have pages and pages and pages of rules telling you how to structure the activity of a bar fight, and scads of statistics that govern what happens when one person bops another on the head. But what happens when you ask your boss for a raise? Or you want to buy an estate from an impoverished noble? Or you worm you way toward a promotion in your Arch Bishops Curia?

1) The reason that TFT has anything on economics, jobs, and down-time activities because that was characteristics of the second wave of fantasy RPGs in the late 70s and early 80s. The audience expanded and likewise what people tried to do also expanded. So depending on what the author wanted to focus they built in support.

2) D&D has downtime activities just not what TFT covered. In OD&D there are notes on building castles, and doing reasearch among other things. The reason for this is because of D&D's birth in the Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaign. The specific items that the rules overs reflect what the players did in those campaign. And from the published stories in books like Playing at the World and Hawk and Moor, I feel comfortable say that those players were not focusing on jobs and advancement in an organization with a hierarchy. While a lot of things were tried and done, for the most part the early players strike me mostly as fiercely independent and competitive freelancers out to make their own mark on the world and not as somebody else flunky.

As tabletop roleplaying expanded we start to see campaigns that revolved around living the life of the setting which of course including things like the campaign being centered on being part of a large organization like a medieval church. So it makes sense that game designer, like Steve Jackson, when faced with a blank page to build in support for those kinds of campaigns.

3) While it nice to have some information and mechanics, the area of downtime mechanics, and the other types of roleplaying you mention work just as well with ad-hock rulings and common sense based on how the referee's setting works. What make this different than combat or magic? Because most of the activities center around social interactions that doesn't lend itself to hard and fast rules. Hence a referee's personal judgment often winds up working just as well.

I think that ITL's jobs etc section provides at least two levels of value over the "referee's personal judgement". It shows that it's possible to have thought-out numbers for various things like risk, wages, and chances of success at various social things (getting a job, winning a court case, bribing the town guard, ...), and offers a set of numbers and chances and so on for all of that as a baseline. From experience using the tables in ITL, and from the experience and math/statistics exercises of others, even with all this work, there can easily be sneaky unwanted side-effects if you get the numbers not quite right, such as the grain of the risks and the rewards given leading to chances that mean too much danger and too much chance of developing too-experienced characters from mundane work. Just using intuition seems unlikely to provide more consistent and unproblematic numbers. The example numbers provide a lot of food for thought. How much should it cost to bribe a town guard? Off-hand, one might think not all that much, but ITL points out that unless the guard is unwise, it should probably take more to bribe them than the risk of losing a big chunk of their salary if they get caught.

One player read that section, and made it his PC's goal to get a job where he would get to take bribes from NPCs. :-)

Oh, and while the travel rules aren't very exciting, they are at least a functional set of rules that require mapping the world on hexes with terrain, possibly getting lost, etc., which many players of other games seem not to do, or to handwave. Even this basic system led to a major focus of our gameplay on maps and exploration and travel, which is another one of those things that seems sorely missing when I play in games without them.

Quote from: Larsdangly;911482[ITL] Economic System
...
Next, there is a nicely detailed set of rules for your job, covering how you get one, what it pays you, possibilities for disaster or reward during each month of campaign play, asking for raises, changing jobs, loosing your job when you miss work because of an adventure or injury, all accompanied by a list of several dozen sort of generic jobs.

I liked the more generic information, like expected spending to maintain a lifestyle if you didn't have a job, and so on. But the job rules with specific chances to increase an ability versus risk of taking a known amount of damage were far too specific for my taste. (Did players ever decide to work for a number of weeks at risky jobs hoping to build up money and abilities without dying, like some sort of Traveller character generation process?)

Quote from: rawma;912193I liked the more generic information, like expected spending to maintain a lifestyle if you didn't have a job, and so on. But the job rules with specific chances to increase an ability versus risk of taking a known amount of damage were far too specific for my taste. (Did players ever decide to work for a number of weeks at risky jobs hoping to build up money and abilities without dying, like some sort of Traveller character generation process?)

Well, when we played TFT, we basically only worked jobs for the money. Couldn't count on the ability increases.

Quote from: rawma;912193I liked the more generic information, like expected spending to maintain a lifestyle if you didn't have a job, and so on. But the job rules with specific chances to increase an ability versus risk of taking a known amount of damage were far too specific for my taste. (Did players ever decide to work for a number of weeks at risky jobs hoping to build up money and abilities without dying, like some sort of Traveller character generation process?)

I and the players I knew tended to fear getting killed by a bad job result too much to risk much time in dangerous jobs. Some players whom I didn't play with have complained at how easy it is to get attribute boosts with the numbers given. After a bit of playing using the job rules as written, we agreed that it was preferable in many cases to adjust the rules to taste. We capped the amount of XP that a job success would give to 100 or maybe 125 or 150, so experienced characters wouldn't get a massive amount of XP from it. We also decided that it was too crude to just have one save and damage roll on a bad job result - that wasn't satisfying, didn't give the player a chance, and didn't match the detail level of the rest of the game (except for NPCs maybe), so we'd play out specific dangerous situations instead, so they'd at least have a context for what happened and get to play it out rather than "whoops you died".

This is a great thread for bringing out the peculiar genius of Steve Jackson as a designer. At his best he really has a sharp focus and solves design problems neatly, pretty much the anti-Gygax. As Lars repeatedly says, you might at first think TFT is limited or dated but its emergent properties have a fascination and almost perfect fit-for-purpose functionality. The icing on the cake is the awesome 70s sword and sorcery vibe.

Along with the Jobs table are some nice sections on other economy-related events. They provide some concise guidelines/framework for some logical things to think about that might happen in various common social/economic situations, with just enough explanation to get players & GM to think about logical issues that can come up.

MONEY
TAXES, BANKS, ETC.
MONEYLENDERS
DISASTERS, WAR, AND OTHER NUISANCES
JOBS
FINDING A JOB
CHANGING JOBS
LEAVING ON AN ADVENTURE
GETTING BACK LATE (OR HURT)
RAISES, BONUSES, ETC.
WILLS
    Local Government
    Looters
    Concealment
    Catastrophe