Opening Remarks

In the battle of fantasy RPGs, Forward to Adventure scores a lot of hits on its opponents with a simple, easy to play system that puts the spotlight on killing monsters and taking their stuff. Despite it's many strong points, a few key fumbles may hinder the game's ultimate survival with some players.

Forward to Adventure is a fantasy role-playing game that tries to put the focus on adventuring. Pundit makes no bones about the fact the game was inspired in part by older editions of D&D and it shows. This isn't just a rehash of old material, however, there are definitely a lot of new twists like the collective combat system. The game has a lot of the feel and simplicity of the old Dungeons and Dragons boxed sets, but without much of the complexity that came along with advanced editions and the most recent 3.x variations.

The overall layout and presentation could use some refinement, but if you look beneath the game's mildly lackluster layout and appearance, you'll find some shining gems between the covers. Character generation is fairly simple and straightforward, easily providing an archetypal adventurer ready to go. Skills are adequately covered and the introduction of stunts provides a mechanic for characters to go above and beyond the basics. Combat has a lot of good things going for it but gets away from traditional methods with its collective combat system for melee attacks. The magic system nicely implements a degree of risk to spell casting, highlighting a delightfully simple and effective method for spell casting.

Characters

Character generation is one of the strong points in Forward to Adventure, allowing players to quickly create archetypal characters with enough basic options to ensure their uniqueness.

There are six basic ability scores that will be familiar to most gamers: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom and charisma. There are options for both point-buy and random ability score generation. Scores range from -5 to +5 and can be increased as a character advances in level.

Racial options include humans, barbarian humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, halflings and half-mermen. Humans receive bonus skill points while each non-human race has modifiers to ability scores and a few special abilities. Non-human races also have preferred classes; choosing to play something other than a preferred class incurs a hefty penalty to character advancement.

For classes, players can choose from the warrior, rogue, wizard, rogue-wizards and warrior-wizards. Each class has several options available such as choices between a melee focus and a missile focus. Rogues can choose an assassin, thief or loremaster option giving different bonuses. The wizard class covers all forms of spell-caster, including holy priests and traditional western mages.

Alignment in the game has some neat twists. There is no axis of good and evil, only a law and chaos axis. Characters aren't restricted by their alignments, but rather the alignments evolve over time. During the course of play, characters gain alignment points in categories of law, balance and chaos depending on what the player and GM think best fits the character's actions. Over time, as the number of points in a particular category increases, in-game effects start taking place. In this way you aren't necessarily hindered by your alignment, but if you focus yourself on one aspect of it, you can be rewarded. I really liked this take on a subject that hampers many other games.

The skill list is decent, covering most of the major fantasy staples without getting bogged down with overly-length lists of seldom used skills. The basic mechanic uses 3d6 plus modifiers versus a target number that varies with the difficulty of the task. Nothing new here, just a workable skill system.

The stunt mechanic gives players a few more options both in and out of combat. A stunt is basically a skill roll that gives you a special modifier to another task such as a subsequent skill check, a spell casting attempt, or an attack. The combat section provides optional rules regarding the timing of stunts to increase or decrease their usefulness to suit the tastes of GMs and players.

Character generation in Forward to Adventure succeeds admirably in providing enough options for players and at the same time keeping things relatively simple. In no time at all newcomers will be ready to play with an old-school adventurer ready for action.

Combat

The combat system in Forward to Adventure has a lot going for it, but one particular aspect didn't appeal to me, which I'll detail shortly. The good parts of the system are a bit hard to describe in detail, but the beauty of the combat system is its straightforwardness. I found enough information to cover the level of detail I wanted without too many extraneous bits to slow things down.

To start off with, there is no rolling for initiative and instead the order of actions in a phase is determined by dexterity scores. Combat turns are divided into phases for specific types of actions including the movement phase, magic declaration phase, missile phase, melee combat phase, stunt phase, spell completion phase and the morale/intimidation check phase. Characters may act in different phases, such as moving and making a melee attack. With the break up of combat in this way, it becomes a bit trickier to keep track of who is acting when. Instead of just working through an ordered initiative list, the GM needs to call out phases and determine who is acting in what phase, and what order those who are taking actions get to resolve their effects. I like the principles behind the system, but in execution it may slow things down a bit.

Most of the rules for various phases of combat are well thought out. There were just enough rules for my taste, covering the important situations but not going overboard with too many details. There are basic rules for shooting a missile weapon into a melee, but thankfully you don't have extensive and complicated mechanics for things like tripping and grappling. A nice feature is the optional rules included that can help GMs tailor their game toward more heroic or gritty play. I was pleased to see basic mechanics included for critical successes and fumbles, with several simple tables covering fumble results depending on the situation.

If a game can hinge around one aspect, I think Forward to Adventure lives and dies by the collective combat system used for melee combat. The short version is that in a melee, all combats are grouped into two sides. Each combatant makes an attack roll (usually 3d6 plus several modifiers) and the totals for each side are added up. The two grand totals are compared and the losing side (lesser of the two totals) suffers damage equal to the difference in the two totals, to be assigned by the GM. What this means is that combats aren't won and loss by individual effort, but through teamwork. All damage is assigned by the GM and there is no "pairing off" in combat. The traditional model of combat in most games with each person making their own separate attacks is a bit of a sacred cow in my opinion, and this group-attack method soured me a bit.

The collective system might work great in a game with just one player and a GM or to capture the feel of a fantasy board game, but feels out of place in a role-playing game. Your mileage may vary, and this style of combat is certainly more acceptable in a light adventure game than a crunchier role-playing system, but for some people this might not be appealing.

Despite my dislike of the collective combat system, there many other touches too numerous to mention that I did appreciate and thought were handled "just right".

Magic

Magic in Forward to Adventure isn't a sure thing for characters. Before a spell can be successfully cast, a casting check roll must be made with a difficulty dependant on the skill of the caster and the level of the spell. My favorite part of the magic system comes in when you fail a casting check and suffer non-lethal damage. If you take enough damage in this way your character may fall unconscious. Also, after failing one check, all subsequent checks are at a penalty until the character is sufficiently rested. I liked this aspect of magic being dangerous to the caster and while it's possible to cast powerful spells at low levels, the likely negative effects of failure serve as a strong deterrent to trying.

There are rules and tables for fumbling spell-casting as well as a mechanic for casting spells quicker than normal.

The various spells themselves are grouped into lists, and characters can only learn a limited number of spells and lists at any point in their career. There are seventeen lists total with ten spells each, although there is some overlap between lists. A starting wizard character knows two spell lists and the first level spell on each list. Higher level spells and different lists can be learned through the character advancement process.

I found the variety of spells adequate, and like the idea of grouping spells into lists. The spell levels seemed odd on occasion, with more powerful spells being available at lower levels than much less useful spells. For the most part things seemed reasonably well balanced.

The gritty feel that is created by the dangers of using magic greatly appealed to me. The design of the magic system with the use of spell lists was fairly well executed and fits the style of the game nicely.

GM Section

The second half of the book is comprised of three sections: monsters, treasure and dungeons. This makes up what is essentially the game master's guide and presents a solid foundation for GMs to create their adventures with.

The monster section includes over seventy different creatures, covering most of the popular beasts in traditional fantasy gaming, including the much maligned bear-owl hybrid. I was pleased with the selection available and couldn't find any important staples missing. In addition to the listed creatures there are brief rules for designing your own monsters if you need them.

The treasure and dungeon sections are comprised almost entirely of charts detailing various loot and magic items and lots of tables for designing random dungeons and encounters. These do a wonderful job of capturing that old-school feel of popular boxed sets of the past and also do an excellent job of facilitating the generation of quick adventures on the fly.

It's hard to spend too much time on a review of this section despite the fact that it compromises half of the book. It should be sufficient to say there is a lot of useable, solid information packed into these pages to provide GMs plenty of ideas, help, and fodder to entertain players.

Presentation and Layout

The soft cover print edition from lulu.com was of excellent quality, with a full color cover and a black and white interior. The artwork was typical and excellent Clash Bowley style and I only wish there was more of it. Overall the layout could definitely use more pizzazz to make it more appealing to look at. Use of boxed text or sidebars could go a long way to give the game more polish. The editing was above average with very few spelling, grammatical or typographical errors.

One thing that I didn't like about the game's presentation was the table and list layouts. There were no lists per se, just sequential descriptions. Skills should have been grouped together in a single list containing only the name of the skill followed later by detailed descriptions of each of the skills. Likewise with tables; each table entry contained the full description spelled out on the table, in some instances creating awkward multi-page tables that only contained 6 entries. It would be much more readable and usable in my opinion to have tables containing just the die roll and result, with an explanation of the result coming afterward, below the table.

Comments

My impression of the game was for the most part very favorable. I thought the author did an excellent job with character generation, providing a means to create traditional characters with options to ensure not every warrior will be created equal. The magic system is easy to use and provides a nice mechanic for making spell-casting a somewhat dangerous endeavor. The majority of the combat system had a very nice balance of simplicity and tactical options, but the collective combat system for melee did not appeal to me. This will come down to a matter of personal taste and you may well find yourself loving this aspect of the game.

The book is remarkably complete. There's a whole game in between the covers with character generation, combat, magic, monsters, treasures and dungeons. It's nice to see a fantasy game whose core rules occupy one book instead of two or three. There are enough creatures and treasures to challenge and reward a group of players for a very long time. There are plenty of options to allow players to design unique characters and several options for GMs to alter the tone of game play to suit their needs.

Forward to Adventure presents an excellent vehicle to run and play old-school adventures, hack and slash stories, and good old-fashioned dungeon crawls. It does a good job of skipping over much of the minutia, instead focusing on those parts of the game that make this style of play fun. Fans of the old D&D boxed sets, traditional fantasy RPG elements, lighter rules and most importantly, adventure, should definitely give this game a look!

Okay.

I have, and still play, my original Brown Box D&D.  It's the only version of D&D I ever played, and it's still my go-to game.

I am asking now to be convinced to get FtA and play it instead.

It sounds good; convince me that it's good ENOUGH to be worth the effort.

I think that the group combat and the uncertainty of the spellcasting would be the biggest selling points to you.  If abstract teamwork mechanics and misfired spells don't pique your interest then I'm not sure the game is for you.

There's also stunts. The ease of integrating stunts into combat fills a hole I kept hitting in the old D&D games. My players love to do unexpected things in combat, and the stunt rules give a sweet framework for it.

-clash

Yes, I think that really one of the best features for people who like old-school games but want a built-in method of resolving all those trickly maneuvres that other systems try to create all kinds of complex subsystems for is actually the Stunt Rules. It creates a simple way of letting your characters make all kinds of special actions, without complicating things.

I mean, the reason I didn't have to include seperate mechanics for things like grappling and tripping and such is that those are all covered by the Stunt rules.

RPGPundit

Hm.  Considering that $12 is only two White Russians, I may have to give this a look.

The only thing that's held be back from buying is that I can either get the .pdf for cheap or buy the paper copy for more. But if I buy the .pdf, and I want the paper version, then I have to spend more. If I buy the paper version, and I don't use it, I'm kind of out money I'd spend on booze, coffee, or booze with coffee in it.

Quote from: Thanatos02The only thing that's held be back from buying is that I can either get the .pdf for cheap or buy the paper copy for more. But if I buy the .pdf, and I want the paper version, then I have to spend more. If I buy the paper version, and I don't use it, I'm kind of out money I'd spend on booze, coffee, or booze with coffee in it.

That's the problem with selling the pdf on one site and the book on another. It's impossible to cross check things. Also, a philosophical difference - some companies give away the pdf if you buy the book, and/or credit the cost of the pdf to the book price with coupons. I won't do that, because that means the pdf is useless if you have the book, which is very much untrue. The pdf is hyperlinked throughout, searchable, and you can print out just a part of it for your players.

-clash

Quote from: Thanatos02The only thing that's held be back from buying is that I can either get the .pdf for cheap or buy the paper copy for more. But if I buy the .pdf, and I want the paper version, then I have to spend more. If I buy the paper version, and I don't use it, I'm kind of out money I'd spend on booze, coffee, or booze with coffee in it.

Personally, I'm a much bigger fan of paper copies, and I must say that the paper copy is pretty and useable.  To me, having grown up on the old palladium books (pre-RIFTS) it seems just the right size for a gaming manual filled with wonder (being about the same size and form on the shelf as my Robotech RPG or TMNT).

RPGPundit

Quote from: flyingmiceThat's the problem with selling the pdf on one site and the book on another. It's impossible to cross check things. Also, a philosophical difference - some companies give away the pdf if you buy the book, and/or credit the cost of the pdf to the book price with coupons. I won't do that, because that means the pdf is useless if you have the book, which is very much untrue. The pdf is hyperlinked throughout, searchable, and you can print out just a part of it for your players.

-clash

And that is way you should sell of your own site...

Bill